In mid-1951, Selivanovsky, Korolev, Leonov, Likhachev, Komarov, and many other former SMERSH, then MGB, high-level officers were arrested—sharing the fate of their boss, Abakumov. This was Stalin’s new wave of changes in the Party leadership and government. However, neither Grishaev, nor Solovov were arrested.
In September 1951, 33-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Grishaev was appointed Assistant to the new head of the OVD, Mikhail Ryumin, a former SMERSH investigator. In this capacity, Grishaev became one of the leading and most ruthless investigators of his former boss and patron, Abakumov.22 Grishaev also interrogated his own former superiors, Leonov and Likhachev. In mid-1953, now arrested, Grishaev’s boss Ryumin testified: ‘On November 4 [1952] I, together with the assistant to the head of sledchast’ [OVD] Grishaev, arrived in Lefortovo Prison and ordered the beating of a group of the arrested Chekists [i.e., Abakumov and his accomplices] with rubber truncheons and lashes. However, these measures did not produce any result [i.e., a false confession].’23
After this Grishaev participated in writing a draft proposal of the indictment of Abakumov and his nine accomplices prepared personally for Stalin. However, Stalin died before Abakumov and the other alleged leaders of the ‘MGB Zionist plot’ could be put on trial. Grishaev remained Assistant to the head of the OVD until March 12, 1953, after Ryumin’s dismissal in November 1952 and Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953. On March 17, 1953, Ryumin was arrested, on July 7, 1954 he was sentenced to death and on July 22, he was executed.
In the meantime, in 1952, 32-year-old Boris Solovov reached the peak of his career, being appointed head of an investigation division of foreign prisoners within the 4th Department of the 2nd MGB Main Directorate. There was a lot of work for his division: new foreign prisoners, arrested by MGB counterintelligence directorates of the occupation troops, continued to arrive from the countries of Eastern Europe. Both Boris Solovov and Pavel Grishaev were discharged from the MGB in late 1953 and escaped any punishment. Amazingly, later the torturer Grishaev made a career as a law professor.
After Stalin’s death and the closed trials of Beria (December 1953) and Abakumov (December 1954), many former SMERSH officers were also convicted in separate trials in the 1950s and thousands of former MGB officers were under investigation. In 1957, Ivan Serov, Abakumov’s former enemy and now KGB Chairman (the KGB was created in 1954), reported to Nikita Khrushchev’s Central Committee that overall, from 1954 to 1957, 18,000 former MGB officers were discharged, and of them, 2,300 were discharged due to ‘violation of Soviet law’, which was a KGB euphemism for torture.24 This number included 40 generals, demoted to privates, and among them, there were generals who had served in SMERSH and the MGB and were mentioned in this book: Aleksandr Avseevich, Mikhail Belkin, Afanasii Blinov, Vasilii Blokhin, Grigorii Bolotin-Balyasnyi, Aleksandr Bystrov, Ivan Gorgonov, Nikolai Korolev, Nikolai Kovalchuk, Aleksandr Vadis, Aleksei Voul, Ivan Vradii, and Pavel Zelenin. All these measures were conducted in secrecy and the Soviet population was not aware that the Communist Party leaders of the time admitted de facto that SMERSH and the other Stalin-era secret services were involved in criminal activities.
But all this would happen later. In May 1946, the newly appointed MGB Minister, Abakumov, became one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union and a rare favorite of his Khozyain (Master)—Stalin. For the next five years, Abakumov was in control of the life of almost every Soviet citizen and his MGB could arrest any citizen it chose to—without waiting for an order from Stalin. Through the MGB branches in occupied countries, Abakumov also controlled half of Europe. Those SMERSH officers who joined the MGB along with Abakumov also gained enormous power. I will describe the next five years of MGB glory and Abakumov’s triumph in 1946–51, as well as his downfall, in another book.
Notes
1. Politburo decision P46/232, dated September 4, 1945. Document No. 1 in Politburo TsK VKP(b) i Sovet Ministrov SSSR 1945–1953, edited by O. V. Khlevnyuk et al., 21 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002) (in Russian).
2. Na prieme u Stalina. Tetradi (zhurnaly) zapisei lits, pronyatykh I. V. Stalinym (1924–1953 gg.), edited by A. V. Korotkov, A. D. Chernev, and A. A. Chernobaev, 464 (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2008) (in Russian).
3. Politburo decision P47/111, dated December 29, 1945. Document No. 3, in Politburo TsK VKP(b), 24.
4. Hugh Thomas, Armed Truce: The Beginning of the Cold War, 1945–46 (New York: Atheneum, 1987), 4, 7–15.
5. Ibid., 503–14.
6. Decree of the USSR Supreme Council, dated March 15, 1946. Document No. 5, in Politburo TsK VKP(b), 25–26.
7. Na prieme u Stalina, 472.
8. Politburo decisions P51/V, P52/2, and P52/8, dated May 4, 5, and 7, 1946. Document Nos. 184–186 in Politburo TsK VKP(b), 207–8.
9. A footnote to Document No. 187 in Politburo TsK VKP(b), 208–9.
10. Amy Knight, How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (New York: Carrol & Graf Publishers, 2006).
11. Details in Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
12. Aleksandr Kolpakidi, Likvidatory KGB. Spetsoperatsii sovetskikh spetssluzhb 1941–2004 (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 407–8 (in Russian). A report of Kim Philby on Volkov’s attempted defection to Philby’s handler, the NKGB rezident Boris Krotov, played a key role in capturing Volkov and his wife. See details in Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, 371–2. Supposedly, in 1947 Volkov was sentenced to a 25-year imprisonment.
13. Decision of the Central Committee’s Plenum P9/2, dated August 21–23, 1946. Document No. 187 in Politburo TsK VKP(b), 208–9.
14. Merkulov’s letter, June 1946. Quoted in Nikita Petrov, ‘Samyi obrazovannyi palach,’ Novaya gazeta. ‘Pravda Gulaga,’ No. 12 (33), August 30, 2010 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/gulag12/00.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
15. Merkulov’s letter to Khrushchev, dated August 23, 1953. Document No. 5 in O. Marinin, ‘“Dokladyvayu o soderzhanii razgovorov, kotorye u menya byli s vragom naroda Beria…”,’ in Neizvestnaya Rossiya: XX vek, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledie, 1993), 43–84 (in Russian).
16. In Yevgenii Zhirnov, ‘Na doklady v Kreml’ on ezdil v mashine Gimmlera,’ Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 19 (472), May 21, 2002 (in Russian), http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/322678, retrieved September 9, 2011.
17. The report in Politburo TsK VKP(b), 208.
18. Nicola Sinevirsky, SMERSH (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950), 82.
19. Detailed new MGB structure in N. V. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami bezopasnosti 1941–1954. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya, 2010), 35–64 (in Russian).
20. Ibid., 51.
21. MGB Order No. 00496, dated November 2-4, 1946. Details in O. B. Mozokhin, Pravo na repressii (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2006), 331 (in Russian).