Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov

Viktor Abakumov ( Russian Виктор Семёнович Абакумов * 11 ^{. Jul} / 24. April  1908 ^greg. In Moscow , Russian Empire ; † 19 December 1954 in Leningrad , Russian SFSR ) was a Soviet functionary of state security and from 1946 to 1951 as Minister for State Security of the Soviet Union Chairman of the MGB , the predecessor organization of the KGB .

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Coming from a working-class family, Abakumov finished only four classes at a city school in Moscow. Between 1920 and 1930 he worked in factories and companies in Moscow, interrupted by deployments in the armed forces: From 1922 to 1925 he served as a common soldier in the Red Army special task force ; from 1927 to 1928 in a military guard unit. He was a member of the Komsomol since 1927. In 1930 he became the executive secretary of the state joint-stock company "Gonez" and since 1930 a member of the CPSU . From 1931 to 1932 he was a member of the bureau and head of the military department of one of the Moscow city districts at the Moscow City Committee of the Komsomol. From 1932 he worked in the KGB predecessor organization OGPU or NKVD . There he first worked as an investigator in the economic department responsible for combating “subversive activity” in the Soviet economy, then as an agent of the economic department of the OGPU for the Moscow region. In 1934 he became an authorized investigator in the third department of the GULAG . In 1937 Abakumov was deputy commander of a unit in the Second Division of the NKVD, which was responsible for arrests and surveillance . From December 1938 he headed the Rostov district of the NKVD. From February 1941 on he was Deputy People's Commissar of the Interior, a position equivalent to that of Deputy Minister of the Interior; there he was responsible for the fire brigade, militia and operational measures among the border and internal troops. From July 1941, in addition to this office, he was head of the special departments of the NKVD, d. H. counter-espionage. From April 1943 on he was Deputy People's Commissar of Defense and Head of the Main Counter- Enlightenment Department SMERSCH of the People's Commissariat for Defense (equivalent to the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union). On July 9, 1945 he became a colonel general . From 1946 to 1951 he was Minister for State Security, a member of the Politburo Committee of the CPSU Central Committee for Justice, and finally from 1950 to 1951 Chairman of the College of the Ministry of State Security.

On July 4, 1951, he was removed from office, arrested a little later, accused by Mikhail Ryumin of having behaved passively towards the doctors' conspiracy and sentenced him to death for that reason . The sentence was passed during Stalin's lifetime and carried out after his death, because Abakumov had caused the deaths of many party functionaries with his purges during the Leningrad affair . According to the verdict of a military court , he was on 19 December 1954 shot .

In December 1997 the Russian Supreme Court overturned the verdict and posthumously converted the death penalty to 25 years in prison.

WS Abakumow near Solzhenitsyn

The Nobel Prize for Literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn lets WS Abakumov appear directly as a person in his works and develops his psychogram. In the novel The First Circle of Hell , Abakumov discusses the arrest of political suspects with his deputy Mikhail Ryumin (1913–1954), a former accountant, examining magistrate and, like his superior Abakumov himself, a SMERSH man . In a subsequent chapter Abakumov has to speak to Josef Stalin about the state security, and Stalin threatens Abakumov, "for fun" as it is called there, with the shooting, but then jovially gives him his orders, friendly dismisses him, while Solzhenitsyn Stalin im Roman is already secretly thinking about the elimination of the corrupt Abakumov. These scenes take place in 1949 and the writer backs up many incidents and details with precise statements from his own friends among the political prisoners who Abakumov had to get to know personally. Solzhenitsyn calls Abakumov " the man who could throw anyone in prison in half the world ".

Web links

• Абакумов Виктор Семенович. In: Хронос. (Russian, short biography in the history project chrono.ru). 
• Абакумов Виктор Семенович. In: persona.rin.ru. (Russian, short biography on the Persona website).