Mark Lvovich Babad

7 February 1907, Soroca, Bessarabia — 20 January 1938, Kyiv. Aviation engineer. Posthumously rehabilitated, 25 April 1958.

This is a private working site for the research and writing on Mark Lvovich Babad — Soviet aviation engineer, executed at midnight on 20 January 1938 in the basement of the NKVD UkrSSR internal prison on Institutska Street, Kyiv — and the family record around him: his wife Zinaida Lazarevna Finkelshtein, the pianist who wrote Beria in 1940 to ask for her grand piano back; his daughter Lidia Finkelshtein, born five months after the execution, who never met him, who emigrated to the United States in 1976 and died in Glen Cove, New York in 1980; and his grandson Alex Mark Abramovich, who carries his name and is writing the book.

The materials gathered here include the full three-volume NKVD case file (ЦДАГО fond 263, opis 1, file 46736, ~675 pages combined and translated), the family correspondence preserved by Alex through three generations, and Lidia's own published essays from Sion (Tel Aviv, 1976) and Kontinent (Paris, 1977), her unpublished American letters, and the essay on Andrei Sakharov's exile to Gorky written a month before her own death.

The shape of it, in five paragraphs

Mark Babad was born 7 February 1907 in Soroca, a Jewish town on the Dniester River in northern Bessarabia — then within the Russian Empire, part of Romania between 1918 and 1940, today within Moldova. He crossed into Soviet territory in 1925, was briefly investigated by the GPU in 1926 and released under amnesty, and joined a Bessarabian-affiliated communist youth organization, "BELKOM," from 1928 to June 1934. He took higher education at the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), the elite Soviet aerospace school founded in 1930, and went into the defense aviation industry — first to Moscow Aviation Factory No. 1, then to Kyiv Aviation Factory No. 43. By 1937 he was preparing to defend a doctoral dissertation at the USSR Academy of Sciences and held a concurrent academic-administrative position as Academic Secretary of the All-Ukrainian Institute of Structures.

He was arrested on 23 October 1937 — a search and seizure preceded by the founding "Resolution opening investigation" dated 20 October, which already named the charge before any interrogation: espionage on behalf of Romania, jointly with other agents of Romanian intelligence. The arrest was made under NKVD Order No. 00485, the secret August 1937 directive signed by Yezhov authorizing the so-called "Polish Operation": the mass arrest and execution of Soviet citizens of Polish ethnic origin and, by extension, of Bessarabian Jews and other "foreign-element" categories. He was sentenced on 23 December 1937 by the "Two" — the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor of the USSR, signing off on batched defendant lists — under Protocol No. 72.

He was shot at midnight on 20 January 1938 in the basement of the NKVD UkrSSR internal prison on Institutska Street in Kyiv. The building survives as the October Palace, now a cultural center on the Maidan. Zinaida — six months pregnant — was assigned by the All-Union Committee on Arts to teach piano at the Conservatory in Kuybyshev (now Samara), away from Kyiv. Lidia was born in Moscow on 28 June 1938. Through the rest of her childhood, into her adulthood, into the years of the family's emigration in the 1970s, the official line about Mark was the standard fiction: "ten years without right of correspondence."

The case was reopened in 1957–58 under the Khrushchev-era thaw. The Military Tribunal of the Kyiv Military District, on 14 July 1958, formally annulled the 1937 sentence and rehabilitated him posthumously on 25 April 1958. The keystone of the rehabilitation was a deposition by Kachinsky; supporting depositions came from Goldeyev, Bisnovat, and Lazarev. The sealed-record finding declared the espionage charge fabricated.

The book and the article that draw on this material are a generation-spanning family history: Mark in Soroca and Moscow and Kyiv; Zinaida in Moscow and Kuybyshev and Moscow again; Lidia in Moscow and Vienna and Pittsburgh and Glen Cove; Igor Abramovich, Lidia's husband and Alex's father, inside the Sakharov-Bonner inner circle in dissident-era Moscow, then a taxi driver in New York; Alex carrying his grandfather's name as a middle name and finally — almost ninety years on — finding the file. The site is the working environment for that book.

Where to start

Mark — the biography, in narrative form.
The case — arrest, charge, interrogation, sentence, execution, and the 1957–58 rehabilitation.
Family — Zinaida, Lidia, Igor, Alex, in three generations of émigré life.
Chronology — the dated spine of the whole story, 1907 to 2025.
People — flashcards for everyone who shows up in the record. Click a card to expand.
Map — Soroca, Moscow, Kyiv, Pittsburgh, Glen Cove, all the places.
Documents — the source materials, with links to the underlying files.

This site is being maintained alongside the writing. Facts are sourced to the case file or the family correspondence and dated where the source resolves them. When the source is ambiguous, the ambiguity is preserved here rather than hidden — the prose will lean either way as a writer's choice. Where transcription is uncertain it is marked.