Stalinist terror

On 15 July 1937 Régamey, then head of an ensemble that had already begun to perform in public, was arrested by the NKVD and imprisoned in Kyiv. After a rather brief investigation (which lasted till the end of the year) he was sentenced to death. The main line of accusation was based on the ‘Polish link’, that is, Régamey’s regular though infrequent visits to the Polish Consulate, where he received letters from his son in Warsaw (since mail communication between Poland and the Soviet Union was highly unreliable) as well as from his brother and sister living on the Fedorovka estate near Vinnytsa (which was then part of Poland). He also sent his replies via the consulate. Though he had been nominated by the communist party as head of an ensemble, he was now accused of espionage for ‘bourgeois Poland’. Interrogation ended when he denied all accusations. The death sentence was nevertheless passed, and the highest authorities in Moscow refused to lift it. It was carried out by a firing squadron on 20 January 1938, at midnight, in the basement of a Kyiv prison.

Jerzy Stankiewicz, "The Forgotten figure...