However, it seems that Abakumov was fascinated with power politics. While he was still head of SMERSH, Abakumov carefully studied the Nazi hierarchy and relationships between members of Hitler’s entourage. As Daniil Kopelyansky, the investigator whom Abakumov considered to be his personal translator, recalled, in 1945–46 Abakumov used to watch Nazi documentaries about Nazi leaders for hours.16 After the war he also went to the Kremlin for a meeting with Stalin in a trophy limousine that had belonged to Heinrich Himmler. Perhaps Abakumov identified with Himmler.
In the meantime, on May 6, 1946 Abakumov presented the Politburo with a proposal regarding his new deputies:
Top Secret
USSR Council of Ministers
To: Comrade Stalin I. V.
I am sending, for your approval, a list of deputies to the USSR State Security Minister:
Ogoltsov Sergei Ivanovich, Lieutenant General, who until now worked as Deputy State Security Commissar, as [deputy] on general questions [a new title for the first deputy];
Selivanovsky Nikolai Nikolaevich, Lieutenant General, Deputy Head of the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’;
Blinov Afanasii Sergeevich, Lieutenant General, Head of the Moscow Branch Directorate of the State Security Ministry;
Kovalchuk Nikolai Kuzmich, Lieutenant General, Head of the SMERSH Directorate of the Transcarpathian Military Region;
On the Cadres, Svinelupov Mikhail Georgievich, Major General, who until now worked as Deputy State Security Minister.
I am asking for your decision.
May 6, 1946.17
It is clear that Abakumov was ordered, probably at the previous Politburo meeting, to take only two of his future deputies from SMERSH (Selivanovsky and Kovalchuk) and the rest, from Merkulov’s MGB. Abakumov’s new first deputy would not be his SMERSH ‘alter ego’ Selivanovsky, but Ogoltsov, with whom Abakumov had never worked before. Probably Stalin wanted to keep an eye on Abakumov through Ogoltsov, who would be a candidate for Abakumov’s immediate replacement, if it became necessary.
Stalin wrote in the right upper corner of Abakumov’s list of proposed deputies: ‘I agree. J. Stalin,’ and the next day the Politburo formally approved Abakumov’s deputies. Now Selivanovsky supervised military counterintelligence, and Kovalchuk controlled the interior (domestic) counterintelligence. There was no question that Kovalchuk could do his new job. Nikola Sinevirsky, who once translated the interrogation of a Hungarian POW for Kovalchuk (at that time the head of the SMERSH Directorate of the 4th Ukrainian Front), said of Kovalchuk: ‘Loyal SMERSH operatives admired his [Kovalchuk’s] intelligence and lived in deathly fear of his influence in high [C]hekist circles… He was a general whose conscience was stained with blood of hundreds of thousands of Russians and peoples of other countries… I observed for the first time this slim, averagesized man. His most remarkable features were his eyes, smiling, yet alarmingly sharp and piercing.’18
Blinov, former head of the Moscow MGB Branch (which was a very high position in the MGB hierarchy), became responsible for the Investigation Directorate for Especially Important Cases, or OVD. Very soon the OVD was involved in the investigation of all the main political cases of the late 1940s. Finally, on September 7, 1946, Lt. General Pyotr Fedotov, the new head of the 1st MGB Main Directorate (foreign intelligence) and former head of NKGB’s interior counterintelligence, was also appointed Abakumov’s deputy.
With the appointment of Abakumov as MGB Minister, GUKR SMERSH was absorbed into the new MGB structure. Most of it became the 3rd MGB Main Directorate (3rd GU), military counterintelligence, under Selivanovsky’s command.19 The function of the 3rd GU returned to the traditional surveillance of Soviet military forces. It consisted of three directorates controlling the Soviet Army (on February 25, 1946 the Red Army was renamed the Soviet Army), Marine Fleet, and Air Force, correspondingly. The SMERSH directorates of the Soviet troops in Germany, Austria/Hungary, Romania/Bulgaria, and Poland were renamed military counterintelligence directorates of these troops and continued their sinister activity against the civilian populations in those countries, as well as against military authorities and representatives of the secret services of the former Allies in those countries.
During the reorganization, the 6th GUKR SMERSH Department was merged with the former NKGB OVD Department, and Aleksandr Leonov, former head the 6th SMERSH Department, was appointed head of the new MGB OVD Directorate. Two of Leonov’s deputies, Mikhail Likhachev and Vladimir Komarov—Abakumov’s secretary from 1941 to 1946—held on to their posts in the MGB OVD Directorate. During the next five years, all three played a key role in all the major political cases of the time.
Sergei Kartashov’s 2nd GUKR SMERSH Department, which investigated many important foreign prisoners, became the 4th Department of the 3rd Main MGB Directorate. It had a number of functions: (1) Counterintelligence in the zones of Germany occupied by the former allies; (2) Counterintelligence in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary, Finland, Manchuria, and Korea against the enemy agents who had possibly penetrated Soviet offices and occupation troops in those countries; (3) Guidance of the operational activity of the Inspectorates attached to the Allied Control Commissions; (4) Work with and investigation of foreign POWs important in terms of military counterintelligence; (5) Continuation of vetting the Soviet POWs who had been in German captivity in various countries.20 The 4th Department existed until September 1948, when most of its prisoners captured from 1944–45 had been convicted, and then it was merged with the OVD.
In August 1949, former head of the 4th Department Kartashov was sent to Hungary as Senior MGB Adviser to the State Security Directorate of the Hungarian MVD, where he stayed until May 1950. In March 1950, many of Kartashov’s former investigators were transferred to the Investigation Department of the 2nd MGB Main Directorate (interior counterintelligence), where they finished cases of foreigners arrested by SMERSH during and just after the war. Interestingly, although Kartashov was not arrested along with Abakumov and his colleagues in 1951 or persecuted later, he had never been promoted to the rank of general like the other former GUKR SMERSH department heads. Kartashov continued to serve in the KGB until 1967, becoming a consultant of the head of the Foreign Intelligence (1st Main Directorate), but he remained only a colonel—the rank he was promoted to in 1943, during the creation of SMERSH.
In November 1946, Abakumov created his own MGB OSO (Special Board), and until 1953, it sentenced most of the prisoners arrested by the MGB within the country and abroad.21 With the acquisition of the OSO, the MGB became a closed institution: it arrested people on political charges, investigated cases, tried the arrestees, and put the most important convicts into its own special prisons: Vladimir, Verkhne-Uralsk, and Aleksandrovsk.
After coming back to Moscow in May 1946, both Pavel Grishaev and Boris Solovov, watchdogs in Nuremberg, had fast-track careers. Pavel Grishaev participated in the investigation of the most important OVD cases of Andrei Vlasov (1946), the Alliluevs (relatives of Stalin’s wife) (1947), the famous folk singer Lidia Ruslanova and her husband General Vladimir Kryukov (1948), members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (1951–52), and others. He became a ruthless torturer, beating both male and female prisoners.