By September 1947 it was clear that Beria had lost all control over the state security services. Abakumov, on the contrary, continued to amass power, managing to get several MVD directorates incorporated into his MGB. In terms of his control over state security, Abakumov was far more powerful from 1946 to 1951 than Beria had been from 1938 to 1943.
In 1947, Abakumov’s MGB lost responsibility for foreign intelligence (its 1st Main Directorate) when Stalin merged it, along with military intelligence (GRU or the Main Intelligence Directorate) and diplomatic and Party intelligence services, into a new organization called the Committee on Information. Undaunted, in October 1949, Abakumov established a new 1st Directorate, charged with counterintelligence on foreigners and on Soviet personnel abroad. It was headed by Colonel Georgii Utekhin, who had headed departments in SMERSH headquarters that were in charge of capturing enemy agents in the Red Army rear and sending SMERSH agents to the German intelligence schools.
As he had done to so many people before, Stalin decided to purge Abakumov, and on July 12, 1951, he was arrested. Many high-ranking SMERSH officers, including Selivanovsky, Likhachev, Belkin, and Utekhin, were also detained. By the beginning of 1953 Stalin pretended that he had nothing to do with the appointment of Abakumov as MGB minister. Stalin told those investigating Abakumov’s case that in 1946 Beria had insisted on Abakumov’s appointment and that was why he ‘did not like Beria and did not trust him’.74 Apparently, Stalin was preparing to use the Abakumov case as a tool against Beria.
Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as the Soviet leader soon after Stalin’s death in March 1953, played a big part in concealing Abakumov’s real role. During the de-Stalinization campaign that started with Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress in 1956 and continued at the Twenty-second Congress in 1961, as well as in a series of speeches at other Party meetings, Khrushchev repeatedly mentioned Abakumov as ‘an accomplice’ of Beria. Apparently, Khrushchev wanted to make Beria the primary villain of the Stalin period in order to expedite Beria’s speedy trial and execution at the end of 1953. By the way, the text of Khrushchev’s speech of 1956, published in many languages that same year, appeared in press in the Soviet Union only in 1989.
After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Beria was appointed first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Interior Affairs (MVD). This was a new MVD that included both previous ministries, the MGB and the MVD. In other words, Beria restored the monolithic NKVD structure that had been in effect from 1941–43. However, the new MVD was much bigger than the NKVD of 1941–43, and Beria acquired enormous power.
To counter this threat, Georgii Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Khrushchev united, and on June 26, 1953, with the help of Georgii Zhukov, first deputy Defense Minister, Beria was arrested as an alleged spy and enemy of the people. On December 23, 1953, the Special Session of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced Beria to death and he was executed. Beria’s longtime colleagues—Vsevolod Merkulov, Vladimir Dekanozov, Bogdan Kobulov, and Sergei Goglidze, whom he brought from the Caucasus in 1938, as well as Pavel Meshik and Lev Vlodzimersky, who became his trusted men in Moscow—were also convicted and shot.
The investigation of Abakumov continued for a year after Beria’s execution. When Roman Rudenko, the newly appointed Soviet chief prosecutor, was interrogating Abakumov in 1953–54, he tried in vain to connect Abakumov with Beria. Abakumov firmly stated: ‘I’ve never visited Beria’s apartment or his dacha. We had a strictly official, working relationship, and nothing else.’75
Abakumov and his devoted men—Aleksandr Leonov, former head of the SMERSH Investigation Department, and two of his deputies, Likhachev and Vladimir Komarov, as well as Ivan Chernov, former head of SMERSH’s Secretariat, and his deputy Yakov Broverman—were tried by a special session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court in Leningrad from 12–19 December, 1954.76 As ‘a member of Beria’s gang’, Abakumov was accused of treason against the Motherland, terrorism, counter revolutionary acts, and so forth. None of these accusations made any sense. Abakumov pleaded not guilty, stating that ‘Stalin gave instructions, and I only followed them’.77 This was true. As Chernov recalled, during the announcement of the death verdict ‘not a muscle moved in Abakumov’s face, as if the announcement did not concern him’.78 Abakumov, Leonov, Likhachev, and Komarov were executed on December 19, 1954, immediately after the trial. Chernov and Broverman were sentenced to imprisonment in labor camps, for 15 and 25 years respectively.
At that time, Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party and, no doubt, approved the indictments and outcome of the trial. Having been a member of Stalin’s inner circle, Khrushchev had, of course, signed off on many of Stalin’s orders between 1937 and 1953. According to some sources, when Khrushchev came to power, he also ordered the destruction of archival documents pertaining to his role in the Great Terror, during which, as first Party secretary of Moscow and the Moscow Province (oblast), he sanctioned thousands of arrests and executions.
Abakumov was one of the few people who, because of his close relationship with Stalin in 1943–51, knew the intimate details of how decisions were made by Stalin and the Politburo, including Khrushchev. Also, Abakumov and his leading investigators received personal instructions from Stalin and Politburo members regarding whom to arrest and what torture to apply. Obviously, Abakumov was a man who knew too much. After his trial, he was determined to share his knowledge. According to the memoirs of the executioner, he shot Abakumov in the back of the head while Abakumov was screaming, ‘I will write about everything to the Politburo.’ He was dead before he finished pronouncing the word ‘Politburo’.79
But even before Beria was arrested, soon after Stalin’s death political prisoners who had managed to survive the purges began to be released from labor camps and prisons.80 This process continued for a few years. However, in order to receive a residency permit to live in Moscow or Leningrad, or obtain a professional job, former prisoners needed to be ‘rehabilitated’.
Being rehabilitated constituted an official recognition that the political prisoner had been convicted unlawfully and restored the person’s civil rights.81 By April 1, 1954, 448,344 prisoners sentenced for committing ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ were still in the labor camps and prisons.82 In May 1954 the specially created Central Commission for reconsidering the cases of those sentenced for ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ started work, and the Military Collegium also began to reconsider many political cases even before Khrushchev’s historical speech about Stalin’s crimes in February 1956. Soon it appeared that in thousands of cases, including military ones, there was no family member to whom the Military Collegium could report the rehabilitation, since the whole family had perished in purges.83 As for imprisoned foreigners, they were released and repatriated, mostly in 1954–56.
The following statistics cast light on the enormous work of rehabilitation: from 1918 to 1958, 6,100,000 arrestees were convicted in the Soviet Union of committing anti-Soviet (political) crimes, of whom 1,650,000 were executed.84 Of the total number, approximately 1,400,000 political convicts had in fact committed the alleged crimes (for instance, those who joined the Nazi troops and security services during the war), and 4,700,000 were absolutely innocent. Additionally, there were between 2.5 and 7.0 million people, spetspereselentsy (special deportees), sent into exile before and during the war.