However, in 1933, Abakumov was not yet powerful enough to get away with such flagrant womanizing. A furious Shreider wrote a report about Abakumov’s behavior to the EKO head, and the next day Abakumov was fired. Somebody’s ‘strong hand’ (possibly Deich or Podvoisky) helped him again, and he was appointed, as Mikhail Shreider put it, ‘an inspector at the Main Directorate of [Labor] Camps’—that is, the GULAG, the NKVD directorate headed by Matvei Berman that administered the slave labor of convicted prisoners in camps and prisons.34 The 3rd section of the GULAG, where Abakumov worked, managed camp guards. It was reorganized twice (Table 17-1, middle column) and in August 1935, when the section was renamed the Department of Guards, Abakumov was promoted to Operational Investigator. On December 20, 1936, he was also promoted to State Security Junior Lieutenant, which was quite a high rank for a 28-year-old Chekist. It is possible that Deich was instrumental in this promotion because at the time he held the high position of Yezhov’s secretary.35
In the GUGB
On April 15, 1937, while still listed on the organizational chart of the GULAG in the Secret-Operational Section, Abakumov was transferred to a much more prestigious job in the Secret-Political Department (SPO) of the GUGB, the predecessor of the NKGB.36 It’s possible that this promotion, too, was achieved with someone’s protection. The SPO was in charge of fighting anti-Soviet elements and members of political parties, and Abakumov arrived at a very important time. The Great Terror was in full swing and the SPO was investigating the case of Genrikh Yagoda, the first NKVD Commissar, working to connect him to old Chekists and Party functionaries.
Abakumov was personally involved in the investigation of at least three Great Terror cases. On June 21, 1937, Valentin Trifonov, who supervised the activity of foreign concessions in the USSR, was arrested. An Old Bolshevik, from December 1917 to January 1918 Trifonov was a VCheKa member, at a time when the VCheKa consisted of only eleven people.37 Later he worked under Podvoisky, and during the Civil War he commanded a Special Expeditionary Corps that conducted punitive operations against the Don Cossacks. Then from 1924 to 1925, Trifonov was first chairman of the Military Collegium. Abakumov interrogated Trifonov from June to September 1937.38 On March 5, 1938, Stalin and four other Politburo members signed a list of names (a ‘death list’) of individuals, including Trifonov, who the NKVD had suggested should be executed.39 Ten days later the Military Collegium sentenced Trifonov to death and he was shot.
Another case involved Semyon Korytnyi, a secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee, who was arrested on June 26, 1937. His main ‘crime’ was that his wife, Izabella Yakir-Belaya, was Iona Yakir’s sister. A high-ranking military leader, Yakir was arrested a month before Korytnyi, and was tried and executed with Tukhachevsky on June 11, 1937. Nikita Khrushchev recalled the Korytnyi couple in his memoirs: ‘Korytnyi was a Jew, a very efficient man, a good organizer and orator. He was married to Yakir’s sister, who was also a devoted Party member. She spent the whole Civil War at Yakir’s side, and was a Party functionary [in the Red Army].’40 Khrushchev did not mention that, as first Party secretary of Moscow, he was required to approve the arrest of Korytnyi and his wife. He also didn’t mention that after Korytnyi’s daughter Stella was released from a labor camp in 1956, he cried in her presence and repeatedly claimed that he was unable to do anything to help when the Korytnyis were arrested.41
In 1954, Roman Rudenko, the USSR Chief Prosecutor, wrote in his rehabilitation request to the Central Committee:
During the two months after his arrest, Korytnyi did not admit his guilt. On August 21, 1937, Abakumov… received Korytnyi’s personal testimony that, since 1934, Korytnyi had been one of the leaders of the Moscow Regional Center of a counterrevolutionary Trotskyist organization [i.e., supporters of Leon Trotsky]…
During the subsequent interrogations conducted by Abakumov, Korytnyi gave detailed testimony about the counterrevolutionary activity of the Trotskyist organization and its members.
During the session of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, Korytnyi pleaded not guilty and stated that during the preliminary investigation, the investigators had forced him to give invented testimony and to make false statements about other persons.42
Despite his plea, in August 1939 the Military Collegium sentenced Korytnyi to death and on September 1, 1939, he was executed.
The third case Abakumov worked on involved Nathan Margolin, a Moscow City Party functionary arrested in November 1937. In 1955, Rudenko’s successor, Pyotr Baranov, wrote:
After investigation, it was concluded that the accusation against Margolin was falsified by former NKVD workers—Abakumov, Vlodzimersky, and Glebov-Yufa (all of whom have been convicted)…
During the investigation, unlawful methods and force were applied to Margolin. As a result, on November 27, 1937, he attempted to commit suicide in his cell by trying to suffocate himself by pulling with his hands a loop [around his neck] made of two handkerchiefs.43
The expression ‘unlawful methods’ is a euphemism for ‘torture’. In February 1938, the Military Collegium sentenced Margolin to death and two days later he was executed.
An official evaluation of Abakumov’s performance at the time of the three investigations stated: ‘He mercilessly fights spies and wreckers, as well as fascist agents.’44 In March 1938, Abakumov was promoted to assistant head of a section, apparently in recognition of his investigative work. Two months later he also received his first award, the Honored VCheKa-GPU Worker medal.
In September 1938, Abakumov was promoted again, this time to head of the 2nd Section, after Bogdan Kobulov, Beria’s closest man, was appointed head of the SPO (Table 17-1). Abakumov became involved in the even more important case of Yakov Serebryansky, a legendary figure in the OGPU/NKVD, who created NKVD killing squads throughout the whole of Europe. After inspecting the transcript of Serebryansky’s first interrogation on November 12, 1938, Beria wrote on the first page: ‘Comrade Abakumov! He [Serebryansky] should be strenuously interrogated.’45 Then Abakumov, Kobulov, and Beria himself interrogated Serebryansky on November 16. As Serebryansky later stated, he was mercilessly beaten and, as usual, forced to sign testimony that the interrogators had prepared for him.
In his memoir Pavel Sudoplatov mentions one more arrested foreign intelligence officer, Pyotr Zubov, in whose investigation Abakumov participated.46 As a result of torture, Zubov became an invalid. Like Serebryansky, at the beginning of the war, on Sudoplatov’s request to Beria, Zubov was released from imprisonment and became part of Sudoplatov’s terrorist department.
In the Rostov Province NKVD
In December 1938, as Abakumov wrote in his biography, ‘the leaders of the NKVD promoted me to the high Chekist post of UNKVD Head of the Rostov Province’.47 Interestingly, a year before that, Abakumov’s protector Yakov Deich had been appointed to that post, which he held for five months. For Deich, contrary to Abakumov, this appointment was not a promotion, but rather the beginning of his downfall after his career had peaked as head of Yezhov’s NKVD Secretariat. Deich was arrested in March 1938 and six months later he died in prison while still under investigation; most probably, he was killed during an interrogation. Abakumov’s appointment was perhaps the first time Stalin became aware of the capable young Chekist, since this level of appointment was approved by the Politburo. The Rostov Province, populated by Don Cossacks, was so politically important that before Abakumov’s appointment, Stalin sent one of his own secretaries, Boris Dvinsky, to head the Party organization there. The Don Cossacks were one of the main anti-Bolshevik forces during the Civil War, and they strongly resisted collectivization (the organization of collective farms called kolkhozy) in the 1930s.