Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov

Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov (13 August 1905 - 1 July 1990), was a Chairman of the NKVD and a murderer, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Career

NKVD

Serov was an ethnic Russian but from Ukraine. He was Commissar for the Ukraine for the NKVD from 1939 to 1941. Time magazine accused him of being responsible for the death of "hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian peasants" during this period. When the invading German armies arrived after June 1941 they found the prisons jammed with political prisoners, many waiting for "interrogation" - and death. Serov was also a colleague in Ukraine of Nikita Khrushchev, the Head of State for the fake Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, who himself was nicknamed the "Butcher of the Ukraine".

In 1941, Serov was promoted to become Deputy Commissar of the NKVD as a whole, in Moscow, serving under Lavrentiy Beria as one of his primary lieutenants; in this function, Serov was responsible for the deportation of a variety of Caucasian peoples. He issued the so-called 'Serov Instructions', which detailed procedures for mass deportations from the Baltic States (for some time confused with the NKVD Order No. 001223 by historians). He also co-ordinated the mass expulsion of Crimean Tatars from the Crimean SSR at the end of World War II. Upon Beria's instructions, Serov was the executioner of Nikolai Yezhov.

Serov was active in organizing NKVD activities against anti-Soviet forces during the Soviet Invasion of Poland in September 1939 and during World War II, including the Katyn massacre.

After the death of Stalin in March 1953, Serov was one of the few senior members of the political police to survive the wave of demotions and forced retirements of Stalinist officials. Serov, who had Beria's trust, betrayed him when he conspired with officers of GRU to avoid his own downfall.

In March 1954, Serov was appointed Chairman of the KGB, making him head of the greater part of the Soviet secret police. Serov organized security for the tours of Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev in the United Kingdom, where he was decried by the British newspapers as "Ivan the Terrible" and "the Butcher".

Serov helped establish secret police forces in the Eastern Bloc after the war and played an important role in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

In December 1958, Serov was removed from his post as Chairman of the KGB after hints by Khrushchev, who had said that Western visitors could expect that they "wouldn't see so many policemen around the place" and that the Soviet police force would undergo a restructuring.

GRU

Serov was then appointed as the Director of the GRU, with the official reason being a need to strengthen the agency's leadership. Serov was active in the Cuban Missile Crisis, helping the Soviet leadership with American intelligence. In February 1963, Serov was dismissed as Director of the GRU when it was discovered that Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU colonel, and his protégé, was a double agent spying for the British. The affair was an embarrassment and irreparably damaged his reputation.

The End

He was appointed to the unimportant position as assistant to the commander of the Turkestan Military District. A month later, he was demoted to Major-General. In August, he was transferred to the Volga Military District.

In November 1964, Serov wrote a letter to the Politburo expressing his dismay at his treatment in the aftermath of the Penkovsky affair. Five months later in April 1965, he was dismissed and stripped of his party membership.

Surprisingly, Serov, his career dripping in blood, spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully seeking rehabilitation in the eyes of the public, and the restoration of his party membership, and the return of his rank of full General and Hero of the Soviet Union honours.

Serov died at the Central Military Clinical Hospital in Krasnogorsk north-west of Moscow.

Sources

• Andrew, Christopher, and Gordievsky, Oleg, KGB - The Inside Story, Hodder & Stourton, London, 1990, ISBN: 0-1-340-48561-2
• Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror - a Reassessment, Hutchinson, London, 1990, ISBN:0-09-174293-5
• Andrew, Christopher, and Mitrokhin, Vasili, The Mitrokhin Archive II - The KGB and the World, Allen Lane, London, 2005, ISBN:0-713-99359-6