Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov

Merkulov in 1945 as army general

Vsevolod Merkulov ( Russian Всеволод Николаевич Меркулов ; born October 25, ^jul. / 6. November  1895 ^greg. In Sakataly , government Tbilisi ; † 23. December  1953 in Moscow ) was a Soviet intelligence officer in a leading role in the Stalinist purges and the massacre von Katyn involved and held ministerial offices after World War II . He was shot dead in the course of the power struggle after Stalin's death .

Life

Merkulov came from a family of Russian officers, his father came from the Russian nobility , his mother from the Georgian nobility . Until 1913 he attended a high school in Tbilisi , from which he graduated with a gold medal. He then studied physics and mathematics at the University of St. Petersburg . During the First World War , he was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army in 1916 , which prevented him from completing his studies. Merkulow completed a one-year course at a non-commissioned officer school in Orenburg . Promoted to ensign , he served in various units, but did not take part in any combat missions. In 1918 he returned to Tbilisi. There he worked as an administrator at a school for the blind.

From 1921 he was an employee of the Cheka secret police or GPU in the Soviet Republic of Georgia . In 1925 he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU (B)). From 1931 to 1934 he was a close associate of Lavrenti Beria in the apparatus of the Communist Party of Georgia and was responsible for building the GPU in the Transcaucasian SFSR . He became a speechwriter and wrote articles in Beria's name. He also wrote a pamphlet called: Beria - A Faithful Son of the Party . In the mid-1930s Merkulov was head of the trade department of the Transcaucasian Soviet Republic and from 1937 to 1938 head of the department for economics and transport at the Central Committee of the Georgian party organization. Merkulov played a leading role in cleansing operations in Georgia, which killed thousands , especially during the Great Terror .

In September 1938 he was appointed deputy head of the Central State Security Administration in the NKVD and head of the Third Division. On December 17, 1938 he took over the post of head of the Central Administration for State Security (GUGB) and at the same time became Beria's deputy, who at that time was People's Commissar for Internal Affairs. He held this position until February 3, 1941. Then he became head of the newly founded NKGB . Merkulov had to vacate this position after a few months in July 1941, as the structures of the security organs were reorganized after the German attack on the Soviet Union . From July 31, 1941 to April 14, 1943 Merkulov was First Deputy People's Commissar for Internal Affairs and from November 1942 also headed the First Department of the NKVD. On April 14, 1943, he was appointed People's Commissar for State Security of the Soviet Union and, after the end of the Second World War , was promoted to Army General in July 1945 . After the NKGB was renamed MGB, he was its head until October 1946. In 1947 he was appointed head of the Central Administration for Soviet Assets Abroad. After Stalin's death in the spring of 1953, he became Minister of State Control.

On May 22, 1953 Merkulov was given leave of absence in the course of Beria's disempowerment and arrested in September 1953. Attorney General Roman Rudenko led the investigation against him . On December 23, 1953, he was sentenced to death by a special tribunal of the Supreme Court and immediately shot .

Duties in the secret service

Merkulov supervised the laboratory No. 12 of the NKVD near Moscow, in which human experiments were carried out with poison and bacteria.

At the beginning of the Second World War he was responsible for the purges in eastern Poland , which had been occupied by the Red Army in September 1939 in compliance with the Secret Additional Protocol to the Hitler-Stalin Pact and in disregard of the Polish-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1932 . He also directed the deportations of Poles and Ukrainians from the areas annexed by the Soviet Union.

From 1940 onwards he promoted the Russification of the former eastern Poland and the three Baltic republics that were also annexed . In June 1941 he supervised the deportation of around 85,000 members of the military and administrative elite of the annexed areas to Siberia and Kazakhstan .

He was head of the NKVD troika , which sentenced prisoners of war and intellectuals to death in accordance with the decision of the Politburo of March 5, 1940 without any trial and supervised their shooting in Katyn , Smolensk , Kalinin , Kharkov and other places. In autumn 1943 he was in charge of the forgeries and manipulations in Katyn, which led the Soviet investigative commission, headed by Nikolai Burdenko, to the conclusion that the Germans were Katyn's perpetrators. He also had witnesses prepared for the Soviet prosecution at the first of the Nuremberg trials in 1946 through imprisonment and torture .

As People's Commissar, later Minister for State Security , he promoted nuclear espionage in the United States from 1943 onwards, and initially entrusted his Washington resident, Vasily Sarubin , with the recruitment of informants . Under Merkulov's leadership, the NKGB was able to gain numerous informants in US ministries, but also had to accept that the FBI bugged some buildings of the Soviet representations in the USA and their company cars.

Merkulov was also responsible for controlling Soviet writers from 1943 on. For example, he reported to the Politburo about the attacks by the Central Committee's cultural department on the writers Konstantin Fedin and Mikhail Soschtschenko .

Awards

• Order of Lenin 1940
• Order of the Republic of Tuva 1943
• Order of Kutuzov 1st class in 1944
• Order of the Red Banner 1944
• also nine medals

literature

• Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 , p. 294 ff.
• K. Zalesskij: Imperija Stalina. Moscow 2000, pp. 310-311 (German: Stalins Imperium ).
• Nikita Petrov : Palachi. Oni wypolnjali sakasy Stalina. Moscow 2011, pp. 63–83, 94–108. ( Executioner. They carried out Stalin's orders ).

Web links

• CV , Psewdologija (Russian)
• CV on cccp.narod.ru (Russian)
• CV , AZ Library (Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nikita Petrov: Palatschi. Oni wypolnjali sakasy Stalina. Moscow 2011, p. 95.
2. ↑ Nikita Petrov: Palatschi. Oni wypolnjali sakasy Stalina. Moscow 2011, p. 96.
3. ↑ Nikita Petrov: Palatschi. Oni wypolnjali sakasy Stalina. Moscow 2011, p. 100.
4. ↑ Nikita Petrov: Palatschi. Oni wypolnjali sakasy Stalina. Moscow 2011, p. 102.
5. ↑ Nikita Petrov: Palatschi. Oni wypolnjali sakasy Stalina. Moscow 2011, pp. 69–72.
6. ↑ Andrzej Paczkowski, Poland, the “Erbfeind”, in: Black Book of Communism . Ed. Stéphane Courtois u. a. Munich / Zurich 1998, p. 406.
7. ↑ Nicolas Werth , A state against its people, in: Black Book , p. 236.
8. ↑ Zeszyty Katyńskie, 23 (2008), pp. 58-69.
9. ↑ Katynskaja drama: Koselsk, Starobelsk, Ostaschkow. Sudba internirovannych polskich voyennoslushashchich. Moscow 1991, pp. 160-162.
10. ↑ Allen Weinstein / Alexander Vassiliv: The Hauted Wood. Soviet Espionnage in America - The Stalin Era. New York 2000, pp. 182-184, 193 f., 212 f.
11. ↑ Allen Weinstein / Alexander Vassiliv: The Hauted Wood. Soviet Espionnage in America - The Stalin Era. New York 2000, pp. 276-278.
12. ↑ Boris Frezinskij: Pisateli i sovetskie voždi. Moscow 2008, pp. 513, 516, 532.