Shreider’s recollection is not quite accurate. In fact, in 1933, Abakumov was transferred to the OGPU Economic Directorate or EKU. Moving from the regional office to the Moscow headquarters after only a few months was a big promotion, which seems to confirm Shreider’s statement that Abakumov had a patron. The information that Abakumov was supposedly Nikolai Podvoisky’s adopted son is interesting since Podvoisky was the commander of Abakumov’s unit until 1921. However, after being blamed for a military disaster in Ukraine during the Civil War, his military career took a nosedive. From September 1921, Podvoisky presided over the Council of Sportsmen (Sportintern) and later held other Party posts. As Boris Bazhanov, one of Stalin’s secretaries and an individual well versed in Party intrigues once wrote, ‘In government circles his [Podvoisky’s] name was usually accompanied by the epithet “old fool.”’14
There is no documentary evidence that Podvoisky adopted Abakumov; in fact, he did adopt two sons, but Abakumov wasn’t one of them. The adoption of children, especially those of other Party colleagues, was common among the Old Bolsheviks. For instance, Mikhail Kedrov, the first head of the OO and Podvoisky’s brother-in-law, raised Iogan (Ivan) Tubala, a son of friends of Kedrov’s wife.15 However, if Abakumov was Podvoisky’s protégé, this would have given him extraordinary opportunities.
Although Podvoisky did not serve in the VCheKa/OGPU, he was connected with the leaders of that organization. Through his marriage to Nina Didrikil, Podvoisky was related to the members of the OGPU/NKVD elite. One of her sisters, Olga, was married to Mikhail Kedrov.16 Another, Augusta, was married to Christian Frauchi. Their son, Artur Artuzov (surname at birth: Frauchi), became one of the most important leaders of the OO, Counterintelligence Department (KRO), Foreign Intelligence (INO), and Military Intelligence (RU).17 Podvoisky was also well acquainted with Genrikh Yagoda, OGPU head, and then the first NKVD Commissar. In 1918–19, before Yagoda was transferred to the OO in the VCheKa, he was Podvoisky’s secretary (upravlyayushchii delami).
The EKU controlled all branches of industry, agriculture, and foreign trade, and it constantly discovered ‘spies and saboteurs’ among the foreign specialists working in the Soviet Union and among members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia.18 While serving in the EKU, Abakumov met Pavel Meshik, who was working as an assistant investigator in the 1st Section of the EKU. Later, from mid-1943, Meshik was one of Abakumov’s three deputies in SMERSH.
In 1934, Abakumov was involved in EKU general operational activities, such as supervising informers. However, his superiors had a problem with his character: ‘Sometimes he does not think over the possible consequences of his [secret] agents’ work. Although he is disciplined, he needs moral guidance.’19 These notes evidently refer to Abakumov’s reputation as a playboy.
Among his colleagues, Viktor Abakumov was known as being quite gregarious and a keen dancer, earning the nickname Vitya-fokstrotochnik (‘Vik-foxtrot dancer’; Vitya is a diminutive of Viktor).20 This detail is interesting because in 1924, OGPU head Yagoda sent an order to all regional OOs and other OGPU departments banning the foxtrot, shimmy, and other new Western dances in public places.21 They were considered ‘bourgeois society’s imitations of a sex act’ and in 1930, the dances were officially prohibited in the Soviet Union. However, big bands became popular again in the Soviet Union in 1944, after the Western Allies opened the Second Front in Europe. Even the Dzerzhinsky NKVD Club in the city of Kuibyshev (currently, Samara), where the main Moscow organizations, including embassies, were evacuated, had its professional ‘NKVD Jazz Orchestra’.22 In 1948, the word ‘jazz’ was prohibited as part of a campaign against the ‘bourgeois culture’ and ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ [a euphemism for the Jewish intelligentsia] and many jazz musicians were persecuted. The NKVD Jazz Orchestra was reduced to a small group called the ‘MVD Variety Orchestra’.
Shreider describes another incident that also sheds light on Abakumov’s character. Showing up one day at a ‘safe’ apartment used by NKVD officers for meetings with their informers (in secret-service jargon, such apartments were called kukushki, or ‘cuckoos’, referring to the fact that a cuckoo leaves its eggs in other birds’ nests), Shreider found Abakumov in the company of a young woman, who was supposedly one of his informers. She did not conceal the fact that she had an intimate relationship with Abakumov and that Abakumov wrote ‘her’ reports to the NKVD by himself, and she only signed them. Later Shreider found out that Abakumov’s other female informers did the same.
Womanizing was very common behavior within the NKVD, especially as the powerful secret service officers could easily blackmail their female informers with threats of arrest. Some NKVD leaders did not bother with seduction and simply raped female informers or women they picked up or arrested.23 The most infamous example was Beria. Every Muscovite (including myself, when I was a child) was aware of the special Beria team headed by Colonel Rafael Sarkisov, head of Beria’s bodyguards, who would simply snatch attractive women and girls off the street and bring them to Beria.24 Beria was also brazen enough to attack women among the nomenklatura. According to Abakumov’s former deputy, Abakumov stopped gathering secret reports on Beria’s affairs after it became clear that ‘the wives of so many high-level functionaries were mentioned in the reports that the leak of this information would have made Abakumov an enemy not only of Beria, but of half of the party and country leaders’.25 The list of hundreds of women whom Beria raped became evidence at his trial in 1953.
Womanizing even ended the successful career of one of the cronies Beria brought from the Caucasus—Vladimir Dekanozov. In contrast with the physically big Abakumov, Dekanozov was ‘short, almost a dwarf, stocky, with a barrel-like chest, nearly bald head and bushy red eyebrows’.26 In 1953, his driver testified: ‘Dekanozov used women in the car. Trips with women occurred almost daily. Sometimes Dekanozov, traveling in the car day and night, picked up several women.’27 On March 19, 1947, the Politburo discharged Dekanozov from the post of deputy foreign minister because of a sex scandaclass="underline" he had seduced a daughter of Molotov’s close co-worker.28
As for Abakumov, after he became MGB Minister in 1946, he ordered the arrest of the popular Soviet movie star, Tatyana Okunevskaya, after she rejected his advances.29 It is possible that Abakumov was particularly interested in her because his rival, Beria, had previously drugged and raped her. In Abakumov’s investigation file there is an undated letter from his common-law wife, Tatyana Smirnova, saying that sometimes Abakumov beat her up and that he had had a love affair with a female co-worker, who later became his legal wife.30
Abakumov’s dalliances were also well known in the NKVD/MGB: ‘Abakumov was a regular nighttime visitor to the [NKVD/MGB] club, playing snooker with his cronies and having sex with his numerous mistresses in a private room, which he kept stocked with a great variety of imported liqueurs and French perfumes.’31 Although prostitution was outlawed in the Soviet Union, Abakumov may also have patronized prostitutes. Ivan Serov, a Beria associate who feuded with Abakumov for years, reported to Stalin in 1948 that ‘during the difficult days of war [Abakumov] used to stroll along the city streets [in Moscow], searching for easy girls [prostitutes] and taking them to the Hotel Moscow’.32 According to Peter Deryabin, a former MGB officer, Abakumov ‘maintained a string of private brothels’.33