Ivan Alexandrovich Serov

Ivan Serov (1941)

Ivan Alexandrowitsch Serow , ( Russian Иван Александрович Серов , scientific transliteration Ivan Aleksandrovič Serov ; * August 12th ^July / August 25th  1905 ^greg. In Afimskoje, Kadnikow district , Vologda governorate , Russian Empire ; † July 1, 1990 in Moscow ) was a general of the KGB . Serov was the first chairman of the KGB between 1954 and 1958 and head of the GRU from 1958 to 1962.

Life

Career in the secret service

Serov joined the CPSU (B) in 1926 . He graduated from the Frunze Military Academy of the General Staff in Moscow in 1939 . In February of that year he was accepted into the NKVD and commissioner in the Ukrainian SSR . This made him one of the beneficiaries of the Stalinist purges , which quickly made a career after 1938. He was also one of the few trained military personnel in the NKVD. In the Ukraine he got to know Nikita Khrushchev - at that time first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party - which was to be significant for his further career. After returning from Ukraine, Serov became one of Lavrenti Beria's deputies .

Serov survived the Great Purge (1936-1938) and was commissioned to execute Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky .

As Deputy People's Commissar for the Interior (1939–1941), he organized the deportations from the Baltic States to Siberia in 1939 (instruction 001223 of October 10, 1939).

Second World War

In August 1941 he was involved in the deportation of the Volga Germans . During the Battle of Moscow in the autumn of 1941, Serov became the commander of the Moscow Defense Zone. Later he was responsible for monitoring the partisan movement in the NKVD.

In a leading position in 1943/44, together with his superior Beria, he was involved in the violent mass deportations of the Karachay , Kalmyks , Chechens , Ingush and Crimean Tatars . People who refused to be deported were shot directly. The same happened to people unable to travel, such as the elderly or the disabled. In some cases there were also indiscriminate killings, for example in the village of Chaibach, where over 700 people were burned in a barn under the direction of Georgian Michail Gwischiani. It is estimated that an average of 43% of the deported population died of infectious diseases and malnutrition during the deportations.

On July 15, 1944 Serow was responsible for the disarmament and deportation of the units of the Polish Liberation Army in the area of ​​Vilnius, which had recaptured the city from German troops in the days before. (→ Operation Bagration ) From this point on, Serow directed the suppression and elimination of the Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army), the most important anti-Soviet force in Poland. At the beginning of May 1945 Serow, at that time Commissar for State Security 2nd rank, was one of the three deputies for questions of civil administration among the troops in the Soviet Zone .

At the end of the Great Patriotic War , Serow was present at the surrender of the German Wehrmacht in Berlin. At that time he held the rank of Colonel General and was awarded the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union .

Time after the war

Serow headed the NKVD section in the Soviet occupation zone after the Second World War and, as head of the entire civil administration of the SMAD, was also responsible for security issues: uncovering - from the Stalinist point of view - "spies, divers, terrorists, members of fascist organizations and active hostile elements". This also includes Soviet citizens who were deported to Germany during the war or who collaborated with the Germans, as well as all persons suspected of being critical of the new social order in the Soviet-occupied part of Germany. Serow was officially listed as a member of the SMAD. He set up a network of agents under Major General Melnikov to monitor parties, churches and trade unions. Serov pushed ahead with the expansion of the headquarters of the Soviet troops in Berlin-Karlshorst into the largest base of operations for Soviet agents' activity against the West outside the Soviet Union. Allegedly he stole the Belgian royal crown from German looted property.

Serow prepared with his apparatus the "transfer" of about 2000 German specialists (scientists, engineers and technicians and some of their families) from the Soviet occupation zone to the USSR, ordered by the Soviet Council of Ministers on May 13, 1946 , and headed the as Aktion Ossawakim known kidnapping on October 22, 1946.

From 1947 to 1953 he held the position of First Deputy Minister of the Interior of the USSR . After Stalin's death in 1953, he joined the conspiracy of the new “collective leadership” against Beria - not least because of aversion to the Georgian clique around Beria. He became deputy chairman of the MWD.

After the KGB was hived off from the Ministry of the Interior, Serov became its chairman in 1954. He was Khrushchev's follower who trusted him and had no political ambitions. In 1954 he destroyed the files documenting Khrushchev's involvement in the "Great Terror". Two attacks on defector Nikolai Chochlow failed in 1954, and a third failed in 1957 as well.

After Stalin's death, Serov campaigned vehemently for the preservation of forced labor in the gulag , his opponent on this issue was Interior Minister Nikolai Dudorov .

In 1956 he led the KGB operations against the Hungarian uprising . He visited the country incognito as a Soviet advisor to the Hungarian Interior Ministry.

When Serov visited London in 1956 to make security arrangements for the visit of Khrushchev and Bulganin, he had to leave early because of attacks by the British press. His bad reputation in the West due to his involvement in the Stalinist terror was one of the reasons for his decline.

1958 Serov was increasingly criticized by Alexander Nikolayevich Schelepin , the First Secretary of the Komsomol , and Nikolai Romanovich Mironov , the chairman of the Leningrad KGB. In December, the Central Committee of the CPSU replaced Serov as chairman of the KGB with Schelepin. Serov was transferred to the position of chief of the GRU.

After the CIA agent Oleg W. Penkowski , with whom he was personally friends, was exposed in 1962, Serow was dismissed as head of the GRU. He was demoted to major general and expelled from the CPSU in 1965 "for violating the rule of law while working in Germany". For a long time Serov tried unsuccessfully for his rehabilitation, the restoration of his military ranks and his membership of the CPSU.

personality

British intelligence agency MI5 described Serov as a moderate drinker with good manners. He has a sarcastic sense of humor and likes being an anti-Semite. He is said to have been a good organizer with a quick grasp. Serov is said to have been proud of his abilities as a torturer ; he could break any bone in a man's body without killing him.

literature

in order of appearance

• Michael S. Voslensky : Mortal Gods. The teachers of the nomenklatura. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-548-34807-6 .
• Michael S. Voslensky: The secret is revealed. Langen Müller, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-7844-2536-4 .
• Jan Foitzik:  Serow, Iwan Alexandrowitsch . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Nikita Petrov: General Ivan Serov - the first chairman of the KGB . In: Forum for Eastern European History of Ideas and Contemporary History . Volume 2, Issue 2, pp. 161-208, ISSN (Online) 2194-3672, ISSN (Print) 1433-4887, doi : 10.7788 / frm.1998.2.2.161 , December 1998.
• Włodzimierz Borodziej: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944. University of Wisconsin Press Madison, 2006, ISBN 0-299-20730-7 .
• Anne Applebaum : The Iron Curtain. The oppression of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 . Siedler, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-8275-0030-4 .
• Art. Serov, Ivan Alexandrovich . In: Robert W. Pringle: Historical dictionary of Russian and Soviet intelligence . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2nd ed. 2015, ISBN 978-1-4422-5317-9 , pp. 274-275.
• Peter Erler: The Soviet agent at Obersee in Berlin, Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial Foundation, studies and analyzes, 04/2017 ( online )

Web links

• CV , AZ Library (Russian)
• Biography , Geroi strany (Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Art. Serov, Ivan Alexandrovich . In: Robert W. Pringle: Historical dictionary of Russian and Soviet intelligence . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2nd ed. 2015, ISBN 978-1-4422-5317-9 , pp. 274–275, here p. 274.
2. ↑ Valdis O. Lumans: Latvia in World War II . Fordham University Press, New York City 2006, ISBN 0-8232-2627-1 , p. 135.
3. ↑ General Mikhail Maksimovich Gvishiani
4. ↑ Norman M. Naimark: Flaming Hatred. Ethnic cleansing in the 20th century. Frankfurt a. M. 2008, pp. 125-126.
5. ↑ Table 1B: Soviet Transit, Camp and Deportation Death Rates (GIF) Hawaii.edu. Retrieved February 17, 2015.
6. ^ Borodziej: The Warsaw Uprising of 1944. P. 57.
7. ^ Matthias Uhl : Stalin's V-2. The technology transfer of German radio controlled weapons technology to the USSR and the development of the Soviet missile industry from 1945 to 1959 . Dissertation with reproduction of many original documents. Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Bonn 2001, ISBN 978-3-7637-6214-9 (304 pages).
8. ↑ Christoph Mick: Research for Stalin, German experts in the Soviet armaments industry 1945-1958 . R. Oldenburg Verlag, Munich Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-486-29003-7 , p. 82 .
9. ↑ The odyssey of a briefcase. How valuable are KGB chief Serov's memoirs and what happened to them? (Russian, accessed September 21, 2019)
10. ^ Case full of secrets: Archives of the first chairman of the KGB of the USSR Ivan Serov found. Online newspaper Вести.ру of October 9, 2016. (Russian, accessed September 21, 2019)
11. ↑ ^{a b} When 'Ivan the terrible' visited Britain , accessed April 3, 2018.
12. ^ US News & World Report, The Bone Breaker. The mystery of General Serov's demotion. ( Memento of March 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Tribune , December 18, 1958. Internet Archive (read OCR Text below). Retrieved February 9, 2015.