On the eve of the 49th anniversary of the Khrushchev coup, his son Rem Vsevolodovich Merkulov talks about little-known pages of the biography of the head of one of the security departments of the Soviet Union
During the Khrushchev Thaw, this man was put on a par with Lavrenty Beria and called an executioner. At the same time, Andrei Sakharov claimed in his memoirs that Merkulov was not an executioner. Friends, who jokingly called Vsevolod Nikolaevich an “intellectual,” said that he accidentally fell under the guillotine of Khrushchev’s repressions. According to his son, if not for a fatal coincidence of circumstances, then perhaps Merkulov would have been recognized as a talented playwright, film director or inventor
“After the First World War, my father taught at a school for blind children.”
How could it happen that the hereditary nobleman Vsevolod Merkulov became the People's Commissar of State Security?
This is one of the amazing and mysterious pages in my father’s biography,” says Rem Vsevolodovich Merkulov. “Unfortunately, I learned about a lot of things after his death. In Stalin's times, even within the family circle, it was unsafe to remember noble roots. Many people knew about this fact, but no one spoke about it. Therefore, now the origin of the father is surprising to many. The Minister of State Security of a noble family is a paradox!
My paternal grandfather was a captain in the tsarist army, a hereditary nobleman who descended from Count Miloradovich, governor of St. Petersburg, hero of the Patriotic War of 1812, who died during the Decembrist uprising in 1825. The grandmother was of princely blood, from a very respected Georgian family. After the October Revolution, my grandfather emigrated to the USA, but was on the side of the Bolsheviks and helped immigrants from Russia. And his son, my father, maintained a wonderful relationship with him. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, my grandfather wanted to return to the Soviet Union, but he was asked to stay: “In the USA you will be more useful to the Motherland.” Now I can assume that he was connected with intelligence, because my father was already the head of the People's Commissariat of State Security (NKGB). This is evidenced by another fact: when, after the end of the war, my grandfather returned to the Soviet Union, he was accepted as one of their own - he was given a company car, an apartment, service was provided at the level of the country's top leaders, and he was assigned to the Kremlin. Not every nobleman who returned from emigration was provided with such benefits. Later he wrote his memoirs, “The Epic of General Yahontov,” but there is not a word about intelligence there.
Over the years of living in America, grandfather learned the American way of life and was extremely punctual. One day he came to visit us four minutes earlier than the agreed time. I remember how my grandfather apologized for a long time for not calculating the route
Nevertheless, his noble origin did not prevent Vsevolod Nikolaevich from gaining the trust of the Bolsheviks and successfully advancing in his career?
Bolshevik sentiments appeared in him back in 1914, when he, a young promising student at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University, was sent to accelerated officer courses in Orenburg. They even interrogated my father there, having learned about his views. It’s interesting that almost forty years later I taught within the walls of this school, but then I still didn’t know that my father studied there. Only after his death, going through correspondence with my mother, we found letters from Orenburg, from the officer school. Then his mother told about this episode of his biography. My father never mentioned him.
When he graduated from the officer school with the rank of ensign (at that time the lowest officer rank), the First World War ended, and dad returned safely to his native Tbilisi. His mother worked as the director of a local school for blind children. And my father taught at this school until 1921, teaching blind children mathematics, physics and other exact sciences. He was already a member of the Communist Party and met Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, who soon invited him to work for the local Cheka.
“The romantic plays that my father wrote were staged in almost all Moscow theaters”
Before meeting Beria, did Vsevolod Nikolaevich not think about working in the security agencies or party structures?
Hard to tell. My father never talked about this. Perhaps, if the situation in the country had been different, my father would have been known as an excellent director or playwright. He was a very versatile and talented person. While still studying at the university, he wrote several romantic stories, which were published in literary magazines and received positive reviews. Later he gave them to me to read. These are truly worthy works.
While working in Tbilisi in the mid-twenties, my father became friends with filmmakers. He was very interested in cinema, because at that time it was a novelty. He was well versed in technology, even in his youth he was interested in electronics and even set up a small laboratory at home, where he conducted all kinds of experiments, testing certain scientific discoveries. Over time, dad bought a movie camera and started filming at home. I still have several reels of film. In one of them I am six months old, and my mother is giving me a bath, in the second I am playing football as a teenager. How grateful I am to my father for such a memory! Soon he began serious filming and made a wonderful visual film “Batumi Day” about the resorts and health resorts of the city. By today's standards, this is a very modest work, but then the film was received with a bang and was shown in almost all cinemas in the country.
What about dramaturgy?
In the mid-30s, my father wrote his first play about the struggle of American revolutionaries. The play was approved and staged in one of the Moscow theaters. My father wrote his next work, “Engineer Sergeev,” already in the position of People’s Commissar of State Security in 1941, when the war was raging with might and main. The play describes the feat of a worker who went to the front. During the war years, my father wrote several more plays, more romantic ones. But one absurd accident interrupted my father’s passion.
He recalled how at the end of the war a reception was held in the Kremlin, which was attended by Stalin, members of the Politburo, military personnel, writers, and artists. As the head of state security, my father tried to stay close to Joseph Vissarionovich. At some point, Stalin approached a group of artists and started a conversation with them. And then one artist exclaimed with admiration, saying, what wonderful plays your minister writes (by that time the People's Commissariat of State Security had been renamed the ministry). The leader was very surprised: he really did not know that his father wrote plays that were shown in theaters. However, Stalin was not delighted with this discovery. On the contrary, turning to his father, he sternly said: “The Minister of State Security should do his job - catch spies, and not write plays.” Since then, dad never wrote: like no one else, he knew that the words of Joseph Vissarionovich were not discussed.
Did Vsevolod Nikolaevich talk about his relationship with Stalin?
Before answering this question, I will tell you one episode. Since 1942, I also began working under my father in the state security system, in a department that was developing new equipment for intelligence and military needs. Then my father told me: “Remember, son, we have such a job that we shouldn’t think about it either at home or among friends. We shouldn’t even tell each other anything, and we shouldn’t ask each other anything. “This became the rule in our house, and only in very rare cases could my father say something about official matters. After his death, my mother recalled how my father spoke about Stalin: “Today he can hug you by the shoulder in a friendly way, and tomorrow, banging his fist on the table, shout: “I’ll crush you like a bug!”
One day, my mother witnessed an episode that perfectly shows that Joseph Vissarionovich kept even the most faithful and devoted people at a distance. This incident occurred at Stalin's birthday. The feast took place at the dacha. Only Stalin's closest associates gathered - about fifteen people. On the left hand of the leader sat Vyacheslav Molotov. The celebration had been going on for several hours, the guests were tipsy. At some point, Molotov said another toast in honor of the leader and bent down to Joseph Vissarionovich to kiss him in a friendly way. Stalin was indignant: “What are you, a woman, or what?” Molotov was embarrassed and very scared. He sat very quietly for the rest of the evening.
How did you get into your father's department?
My father offered me a job with him, but I was not against it, since by that time I had already chosen a military career for myself. True, at first I dreamed of becoming a scout. My father, who knew the ins and outs of this profession very well, told me the following: “Imagine, son, this situation: you are a resident in a foreign, hostile country. Apart from your comrade, contact or partner, with whom you live and work together, endure all the hardships and hardships, you have no one there. And then at one fine moment an order comes from the center: to immediately eliminate the partner, since he is a double agent. And you must carry out this order. How will you feel? But this is not the worst thing. Tomorrow they tell you: the order is cancelled, it was a mistake, your partner is clear. But he’s no longer there, and you did it. Are you capable of surviving something like this? But an erroneous order may come about your liquidation.” My father’s words cooled my zeal.
What, if it’s not a secret, did the technical intelligence department in which you worked?
Then a lot of attention was paid to communications and listening devices. For example, we made all the radio transmitters for our residents abroad, especially in Germany, from American parts and in the American manner. So, in case of failure, all the equipment seized from the resident indicated that he was supposedly an American and not a Soviet spy. I remember one funny incident. My first know-how was the use of condoms in radios. The fact is that when the radio transmitter was operating, problems very often arose with the batteries - the batteries began to leak and ruined the entire device. The development and production of special rubber devices for batteries was then expensive and troublesome, since the equipment was piecemeal. And I came up with the idea of putting batteries in a condom. My proposal was accepted. And then one day my colleague and I came to one of the central pharmacies in Moscow with a letter from the People's Commissariat of State Security, which stated a request to transfer fifty condoms to the ministry with payment by bank transfer.
“Lavrentiy Beria forbade his father to fly airplanes in the flying club”
How did Vsevolod Nikolayevich perceive Stalin’s disdainful attitude towards the intelligence information he received about the start of the war?
The father was at a loss. Stalin did not believe a single intelligence report about the impending German attack on June 22, 1941. His father, who headed such a powerful intelligence structure as the NKGB, knew better than others that an attack was inevitable. But the leader remained unconvinced. A week before that tragic day, my father personally sent a letter to Joseph Vissarionovich, where, citing a very reliable informant in Berlin, he warned about the attack. Stalin was furious and wrote a resolution: “Your informant is a disinformer. Send him to his mother. “Later, this letter and Stalin’s remark began to be quoted by the authors of many books. My father was very upset by this mistrust. I recalled how three days before the attack I visited our western border. He did not give orders, but stood for a long time and peered into the distance on the other side of the border. As if he was waiting for something
Many argue that Merkulov and Beria were friends.
They were never friends, although their meeting, which turned out to be fatal for the father, took place a very long time ago. Their relationship is that of a superior and a subordinate. When one day my father fell ill, Lavrenty Pavlovich called home, inquired about his health, and said hello. And no more. He never visited us, although our families lived in the same house. Sometimes I ran into him in the yard. One such meeting influenced the fact that my father was forbidden to fly - it was his passion. Already in the position of People's Commissar of State Security, dad began to attend the flying club. Soon he learned to fly an airplane, and over time mastered aerobatic maneuvers. One day in the yard I met Beria, he greeted me and asked where my father was. I, suspecting nothing, answered: “At the flying club. “Surprised Beria asked: “What is he doing there?” “Like what,” I was already surprised, “flies on an airplane.” This is his passion." - “What if it breaks? - Lavrenty Pavlovich was indignant, “he’s a minister.” A couple of days later, my father reported that he was banned from flying.
What did Vsevolod Nikolaevich say about Beria?
Maybe he had some grievances, but he never expressed them. Neither my position nor my upbringing allowed it. Unlike Beria, my father was a very gentle person, the only one of all the heads of law enforcement agencies who had a higher education. He was even given the nickname "Intellectual". He was so different from the others. After his resignation, my father admitted that he never beat people during interrogations, although the government legalized such actions with a special letter. The letter stated that “foreign intelligence services use illegal methods in dealing with our citizens who have fallen into their clutches - torture, beatings, torture. Our requests to respect humanity have gone unanswered, and so we need to respond in kind.” The wording was fabricated to give the executioners a free hand.
About Beria, I remember only one episode told by my father, which touched him to the depths of his soul. Once he and Lavrenty Pavlovich had a conflict: during one of the interrogations, where they were both present, the father refused to beat the interrogated. Beria then exploded and called his father a soft-hearted coward. The situation became tense, Beria threatened his father, saying that if he didn’t hit him, they would talk to him differently. The father obeyed and struck. This never happened again.
Of course, his position was very difficult and required incredible stress. It was impossible to stay away from what was happening in the country. Sometimes they called my father in the middle of the night, reporting that such and such an order had been carried out. It happened that such a conversation ended with his order: “Arrest. “In the morning he was always very gloomy.
True, even in such serious work, my father was not without oddities. One day, the ministry received a strange package addressed to him, containing some kind of powder. Of course, everyone, like professional intelligence officers, was wary. Isn't this some kind of sabotage? Maybe the powder is poisonous. They sent it to chemists for examination. They established that the powder was harmless, gave its chemical formula, but could not establish what kind of substance it was. By a lucky coincidence, my father told me at home about an extraordinary package of powder. And then it dawned on my mother: “They probably sent me henna for my hair.” It turned out that at one of the receptions in the Kremlin, where my mother accompanied her father, she got into a conversation with the Iranian ambassador and asked to send her henna. We had a shortage of it back then. And, apparently, the ambassador, not knowing our home address, sent the parcel to the address of the Ministry of State Security.
Why, after all, Vsevolod Nikolaevich was released from the post of Minister of State Security, because Stalin valued his experience and education?
According to his father, he was fired from his position as a minister because of his softness. After the war, when a new wave of repression began, Stalin needed a tough and straightforward person in this position. Therefore, after his father, the MGB was headed by Abakumov, a cruel man who had only four classes of education. I remember my father came home and calmly said: “That’s it, I’m no longer a minister.” When my mother asked what next, he replied: “I don’t know.” It is interesting that under Stalin, my father was the first of the people's commissars who headed the security departments who remained alive after his dismissal from office. The former people's commissars - Menzhinsky, Yagoda, and Yezhov - were liquidated.
“Khrushchev demanded that his father sign a letter in which Beria was exposed as an English spy”
After his dismissal from the post of Minister of State Security, Vsevolod Nikolaevich was left out of work?
Stalin quickly found use for his organizational skills and appointed him head of Soviet property abroad. Before the war, many enterprises in Europe had dual ownership: German-Polish, German-Romanian, and so on. After the war, the German part of these possessions passed to the Soviet side. The largest enterprises in Eastern Europe came under the control of his father. But his father did not remain in this position for long, and in 1950 Stalin appointed him Minister of State Control. True, by this time my father began to have health problems. In 1952 he had his first heart attack, and four months later his second. My father was in the hospital for a long time. I often visited him, and in one of these meetings he said: “If something happens to me, there is a letter in the safe at home for you. Open it after my death." But I never read the letter. In March 1953, Joseph Vissarionovich died, and a struggle for power began between Beria and Khrushchev. Unwittingly, the father was drawn into behind-the-scenes intrigue.
Soon a message appeared in the newspapers that Lavrentiy Beria and a number of high-ranking officials from his entourage had been arrested. My father knew that such a turn of events could also result in unpredictable consequences for him, but he reacted very restrainedly, even with humor: “Well, now I won’t be able to write memoirs.” After all, he worked all his life next to Beria. My father really didn’t write any memoirs.
Did he imagine that he could suffer the same fate as Beria?
He knew that they would not leave him alone. Some time after the first arrests, my father was summoned several times to the prosecutor's office for questioning. Then there were not very pleasant meetings with Khrushchev, which my father managed to talk about. At the first meeting, Nikita Sergeevich demanded to sign a letter drawn up in advance, in which his father exposed Lavrentiy Beria as an English spy. Dad refused. At the next audience, Khrushchev demanded that his father tell him where the documents on Beria were, which contained information about Lavrenty Pavlovich’s collaboration with the Socialist Revolutionaries in the first post-revolutionary years. Dad confirmed that there are some, but does not know where they are. And at the next meeting with Khrushchev, my father was shown these documents, which had somehow been obtained. They bore his signature and the note “Keep Forever.” It was the wording “Keep forever” that served as the reason for accusing the father of concealing documents. The next visit to the prosecutor's office was the last for my father. He was arrested. By that time he was very weak. Heart attacks and nervous tension broke my father. I remember that there were ten steps leading up to the entrance of our house. Dad overcame them in three stages.
The father was in prison for about three months. Only years later we learned that he was kept in solitary confinement in Butyrka. All my father's papers kept at home and the letter with his will were confiscated. We have not received any news from him himself. Once a month a courier from the prosecutor’s office came to us. Through him we kept in touch with my father. They were not allowed to give him any things. Only money - 200 rubles per month.
Oddly enough, I was spared the repression. I remained in my current position and in my previous rank. This was surprising, since Beria’s family was sent to Sverdlovsk, Abakumov’s son to Kazakhstan. From my father’s surviving colleagues, I learned that he was accused of collaborating with Beria, although everyone was sure that his father was not involved in the crimes. Khrushchev simply eliminated everyone who could threaten his power. Nikita Sergeevich knew that his father was aware of his participation in repressions in Ukraine.
The hardest thing for our family was that we learned about our father’s death from the newspapers. It was reported that he was executed for his complicity in a number of atrocities against the country and people. His body was burned and his ashes were scattered.
The Khrushchev Thaw turned into a family tragedy for you
The Khrushchev Thaw is nothing more than a slogan. Under Nikita Sergeevich, a lot of people also suffered. A few years after the events described, I had the opportunity to meet General Serov. He was in favor with Khrushchev for some time, headed the state security service, but then fell out of favor, was demoted and demoted. Serov was sure that everything connected with my father’s case was unlikely to ever become public. Khrushchev knows how to cover his tracks. The general admitted that he personally supervised the destruction of documents in Ukraine and the arrest of witnesses who could expose Khrushchev’s crimes. Several thousand people, including communists, were imprisoned. But now there is not a single seditious document left that bears Nikita Khrushchev’s signature.
At one time, Sergo Beria published a book in which he tried to mitigate his father’s guilt. There are also references to Vsevolod Nikolaevich. What do you think of what he wrote?
I knew Sergo well, and before my eyes he began to work. Of course, I read his book. Frankly, most of what is written in it is a lie. Still, I believe that one must prove one’s rightness not by deception and distortion of facts. Some things especially surprise me. For example, he wrote that Lavrenty Beria was friends with Marshal Georgy Zhukov. This is absurd! Everyone knows Zhukov’s hostility towards state security workers and Beria personally.
Sergo Lavrentievich became a rocket designer. But he does not talk about the fact that 80% of his dissertation on missiles was written by captured German military specialists who created missile technology for the needs of the Third Reich and were taken to the USSR after the war.
By the way, since we touched on the topic of military secrets, I would like to remember our family friend, intelligence officer Lev Vasilevsky. He headed the department involved in obtaining information about nuclear developments in the world. Then they watched everyone: both friends - the Americans and the British, and enemies - the Germans. They were working on obtaining atomic secrets even before the start of the war. And already in wartime, several prominent European nuclear scientists who made a great contribution to the development of nuclear weapons in the USSR were secretly taken to the Soviet Union. If it weren't for intelligence, it would have taken us much longer to create an atomic bomb. Intelligence at that time was very powerful. One story comes to mind to confirm this. Lev Vasilevsky remained with our family even after the death of his father. Once we were at an international air exhibition (by that time I had acquired a hobby - design), and I liked a small American-made pleasure helicopter. I turned to Vasilevsky with a request to get the drawings. And a month later he brought them to me - that’s how intelligence worked. For several years I assembled a helicopter, successfully tested it and still fly it.
From motorists I heard about a unique pre-war car that belonged to Vsevolod Nikolaevich, which you carefully preserve
Apparently, we are talking about a 1938 Tatra, but it did not belong to my father. After the war, many captured cars were brought to the Soviet Union, and an acquaintance of mine, a famous pilot, gave me a Tatra. At that time it was a luxury fast car with an unusual design. I once took Stalin’s daughter Svetlana for a ride on it. She liked the car so much that she wanted one for herself. At the request of the leader, exactly the same car was delivered from the Czech Republic, only black (mine was silver).
My car turned out to be very reliable. I have been driving it for 50 years now, and during this time there has not been a single serious breakdown. My wife and I used to often go on vacation to Crimea. We stopped right on the seashore and spent the night in the car. And then one day we saw a border guard with a machine gun walking around the car. I began to find out what was the matter. It turned out that the vigilant head of the outpost had assigned a sentry to us. He seemed suspicious of our unusual car - streamlined shape, tail at the back, flat bottom. Shouldn’t we sail away to Turkey in such a strange car, the border guard thought?
Of all those brought to criminal responsibility along with Beria, and there were, as we have already said, six more people - V. Merkulov, V. Dekanozov, B. Kobulov, S. Goglidze, P. Meshik and JI. Vlodzimirsky, - the most, so to speak, titled and high-ranking in 1953 was the Minister of State Control of the USSR, Army General Vsevolod Nikolaevich Merkulov. His fate is quite interesting. All his life he was closely associated with Beria, working under his leadership both in Transcaucasia and in Moscow, in the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, and in party work, and at one time (on the eve of the war and during its period) he even headed independent People's Commissariat of State Security (NKGB) - the predecessor of the KGB. The figure is solid. Beria was selflessly devoted. We worked together, were friends with our families, lived in the same house in Tbilisi, and spent our whole lives almost side by side. When the people's commissariats were divided, the building on Lubyanka was “divided” in half in a friendly manner. And everything else was common: sanatoriums, a clinic, a hospital, the Dynamo sports society, etc.
From Merkulov's personal file.
Born in 1895, in the city of Zagatala, Zagatala district of the Caucasian governorship. Russian. At the checkpoint from 09.25. Member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (b) (18
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Personal” signature (arrest veto)
Document from the criminal case of V. Merkulov
congress). 08.46 transferred to candidates. (Candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee 08.23.46-18 11.53.) Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR 1-2 convocations.
Education: men's gymnasium, Tiflis, 1913; three courses of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Petrograd University 09.13-10 16; Orenburg school of warrant officers 11.16-03.17.
In the army: private student battalion, Petrograd 10.16-16; reserve warrant officer infantry regiment, Novocherkassk 04.17-08.17; ensign of the marching company, Rivne 09.17-10.17; ensign of the 331st Orsk Regiment 10.17-01.18; Due to illness, he was evacuated to Tiflis on 01/18.
Unemployed, Tiflis 03.18-08.18; clerk, teacher at a school for the blind, Tiflis 09.18-09.21.
In the bodies of the Cheka-OGPU: office. completed Georgian Cheka 1921; completed IVF of the Georgian Cheka 1921-1923; Art. completed ECO Georgian Cheka 1923; beginning 1st department of ECO PP OGPU for the Transcaucasian Soviet Socialist Republic - Transcaucasian Cheka 1925; beginning INFAGO PP OGPU for the Transcaucasian Soviet Socialist Republic - Transcaucasian Cheka 1925; beginning IVF Georgian Cheka 1925-20 07.26; beginning ECO GPU Gruz SSR 1926-1927; beginning INFAGO and PP GPU Gruz. USSR 1927-1929; deputy prev GPU of the Adjara Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, beginning. SOCH 02.29-05.31; vrid prev. GPU of the Adjara Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic 05.30-07.30; beginning SPO PP OGPU for the ZSFSR and the GPU ZSFSR 05.31-01.32.
At party work: assistant. Secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia 11.31-02.34; head owl department trade of the Transcaucasian regional committee of the CPSU (b) 03.34-11.36; head special sector of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) 07-11.36; head special sector of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Georgia 11.11.36-09.09.37; head industrial-transport dept. Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Georgia 07.37-10.38.
In the bodies of the NKVD-NKGB-MGB: deputy. beginning GUGB NKVD USSR 09/29/38-12/17/38; beginning 3rd department GUGB NKVD USSR 10.26.38-12.17.38; 1st deputy People's Commissar internal affairs of the USSR 17 12.38-03.02.41; beginning GUGB NKVD USSR 12/17/38-02/03/41; People's Commissar of the State Security Service of the USSR 02/03/41-07/20/41; 1st deputy People's Commissar internal Affairs of the USSR 07/31/41-04/14/43; beginning 1st department NKVD of the USSR 11/17/42-04/14/43; People's Commissar (Minister) of the State Security Service of the USSR 04/14/43 - 05/04/46.
At Soviet work: deputy. beginning GUSIMZ at the Ministry of Foreign Trade of the USSR 02.47-25.04.47; beginning GUSIMZ under the Council of Ministers of the USSR 04.25.47-50, Minister of State Control of the USSR 10.27.50-17.09.53.
Arrested 09/18/53; sentenced by the Special Judicial Presence of the Supreme Court of the USSR on December 23, 1953 to VMN. Shot.
Ranks: 3rd rank GB commissar 09/11/38, 1st rank GB commissar 02/04/43; General of the Army 07/09/45.
Awards: badge “Honorary Worker of the Cheka-GPU (V)” No. 649/1931; Order of Lenin No. 583/04.26.40, Order of the Republic of Tuva No. 134/08.18.43; Order of Kutuzov, 1st degree No. 160/08.03.44; Order of the Red Banner No. 142627/03.11.44; 9 medals.
Here in the file is a prison photo of Merkulov. Looking ahead, I will say that such photos - full face and profile - are also available on the rest of those arrested. (Except for Beria. He was clumsily photographed in the bunker of the Moscow Military District headquarters only from the frontal view.)
Oddly enough, Merkulov came from the nobility and was married to the daughter of a tsarist general. His father, Nikolai Alexandrovich, also served in the tsarist army and had the rank of captain. Later he was a teacher in Tbilisi, giving private lessons. Died in 1908. Mother is Georgian and also taught. She was 23 years younger than her husband. There were five more children in the family. Vsevolod was the youngest. In 1913 he entered the university in St. Petersburg. I studied for three years at physics and mathematics. In 1916 he was drafted into the army. Sent to Tsaritsyn, then to Orenburg to ensign school. After graduating from school, he served in Novocherkassk. In 1917 at the front in Ukraine. Got sick. Was transported from Kyiv to Tbilisi. Committed. He worked as a teacher at a school for the blind and published a private magazine. In 1921 he joined the Cheka. There he met Beria. In 25 years he rose to the rank of army general. All this is reflected in the following materials
statement, numerous documents, certificates, excerpts from his personal file and, in addition, confirmed by interrogation records.
In 1946, Stalin replaced the already ill Minister of State Security Merkulov with the 40-year-old Abakumov. On August 30, 1946, by decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Merkulov was appointed deputy head of the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad at the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the management of Soviet enterprises in Romania, Hungary and Austria and went to work abroad. And on the eve of this decision, a resolution was passed by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, adopted by “poll” on August 21-23, 1946.
The resolution stated: “From the act of acceptance and delivery of cases of the Ministry of State Security, it is established that the security work in the Ministry was carried out unsatisfactorily, that the former Minister of State Security, Comrade V.N. Merkulov. hid from the Central Committee the facts about the major shortcomings in the work of the Ministry and the fact that in a number of foreign countries the work of the Ministry was a failure. In view of this, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decides: Withdraw comrade. Merkulova V.N. from the membership of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and transferred to candidate membership of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
In short, they got rid of Merkulov.
During the investigation, Merkulov was “assigned” to Colonel of Justice V. Uspensky from the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office. But the first interrogations were carried out personally by Rudenko: according to the unwritten laws of the investigation, the minister must be interrogated at the first stage as a witness by the leadership of the prosecutor's office. Then how it goes.
Naturally, clouds began to gather over Merkulov immediately after Beria’s arrest. Goglidze and Kobulov were arrested on June 27, 1953, almost together with Beria, Dekanozov and Meshik - on June 30, Vlodzimirsky a little later - on July 17. Merkulov was not touched. He worked in his ministry. He lived on Gorky Street, house 41. Hands never reached him. Yes, this is understandable: after all, he is the current Minister of State Control of the USSR (the former Ministry of State Control of the USSR is something like the current Accounts Chamber). It is not difficult to guess by what
8. Do not relax your work with agents, carefully check the received materials, identifying double-dealers and traitors within the intelligence network.
Instruct the agents: in the event of a withdrawal of our troops, remain in place, penetrate deep into the location of enemy troops, and carry out subversive sabotage work. At least twice a day, inform the NKGB of the USSR by all available means about the state of affairs on the ground. Resolutely suppress the slightest manifestations of panic and confusion among the operational staff of the NKGB, arrest alarmists and cowards.
Every NKGB employee must be imbued with a sense of enormous responsibility for the work entrusted to him by the party and government of the Soviet Union.
I am confident that the NKGB will honorably fulfill its duty to the Motherland.
People's Commissar
state security of the USSR
Extract from the order of the People's Commissar of State Security of the USSR. 1941 Beginning of the war
people were selected for arrest based on the principle of personal loyalty to the boss. If we analyze the career path of each of those arrested, we can safely say: they were especially close to Beria and enjoyed his personal patronage for a long time. And in Transcaucasia, and in Moscow.
Merkulov stood out from this entire company with his education and intelligence. He was fond of sports, literature, even wrote something himself (under the pseudonym Vsevolod Rokk, his play “Engineer Sergeev” was staged at the branch of the Maly Theater), he drew well, before the revolution, as we remember, he studied for several years at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University , taught. The phenomenon, as you understand, is rare for this category of people. For example, Abakumov, who replaced Merkulov as Minister of State Security in 1946, had a 4-year education. The head of the Main Security Directorate of the MGB, General N. Vlasik, is even less - 3rd class.
Did the smart and cunning Merkulov guess about the impending disaster? Undoubtedly. And he takes an unprecedented step. According to the principle: attack is the best defense. On July 21 and 23, 1953, on his own initiative, he wrote two large statements to the CPSU Central Committee, in which he “drowns” Beria and reports that he did not recognize him as an enemy of the people. Repents of his sins. True, in general phrases, without specific facts. However, it's too late. Did not work.
During a search in Beria's secretariat, two personal letters were found in which he, Merkulov, looks like Beria's closest friend. One letter was written back in 1938, the other in 1953. Essentially, both letters are about the same thing: in connection with his promotion, Beria Merkulov asks “under his wing” to work in the NKVD-MVD.
The letter dated March 11, 1953 is especially characteristic. Merkulov, the Minister of State Control of the USSR, asks Beria to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in other words, for a demotion. But to Beria. Isn’t this an indicator of boundless devotion (I’m even ready to part with my ministerial portfolio)?
Here are the contents of these letters. (Spelling and stylistic features have been preserved.)
Letter one
Only in person
Dear Lavrentiy!
Here rumors spread about your supposed impending departure from Tiflis.
I did not go into assessing the correctness of these rumors, their likelihood, etc., but in connection with them I have a deep request to you: do not forget me.
If you really decide to leave Transcaucasia, I kindly ask you to take me with you to where you will work.
The city and position do not interest me: I agree to work anywhere.
Without overestimating myself, I still believe that if I work hard (and I can do this if I want), I can cope with any work that you entrust to me.
In any case, I will never let you down in anything. I guarantee you this with all the mistakes of the past, which are very difficult for me to remember again.
I hope you will keep me in mind. This is my biggest request I have ever made of you.
I don’t want to write a lot and I don’t know how, but I’m sure you will understand and believe me completely.
I shake your hand tightly!
Always yours.
November 21
Merkulov's letter to Beria is an example of devotion, friendship and complete mutual understanding in 1938
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Same thing in 1953
Dear Lavrentiy!
I want to offer you my services: if I can be useful to you anywhere in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, I ask you to use me as you deem more appropriate. Position doesn’t matter to me, you know that. Lately I've learned a thing or two about leading people and leading institutions and... I think now I can work better than before.
True, I am now semi-disabled, but I hope that in a few months (maximum six months) I will be able to work at full capacity, as usual.
I will wait for your instructions.
Your Merkulov 3.53
The conclusion is clear: Beria and Merkulov walked all these years in the same “harness”, headed the most “scandalous” bodies, committed lawlessness together, and therefore the place of 58-year-old Merkulov, despite all his illnesses and belated repentance, is in the same place as Beria , - on a bunk, or rather on a hard bed in Lefortovo prison. On September 18, 1953, Rudenko authorizes the arrest of Merkulov, and he is placed first in the Butyrskaya prison of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and then in Lefortovo. To where Kobulov, Dekanozov, Meshik, Goglidze and Vlodzimirsky are already located. Beria is kept separately - under military guard in the bunker of the Moscow Military District headquarters.
It must be said that the relationship between Merkulov and Beria was clarified extremely thoroughly during the investigation: several separate interrogations of other arrested persons, witnesses, and Beria’s wife and son were conducted. The facts, as they say, have been confirmed. Here, for example, is what Beria’s son showed about this.
“Since childhood, I had the impression that L. Beria and Vsevolod Nikolaevich Merkulov were in close relations with each other. Our family kept photographs of Merkulov, Be-
RiyaL and Beria N., when they were photographed in their youth. From stories I knew that Merkulov worked subordinate to Beria L. in the Cheka, and then, when Beria L. went to work in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, Merkulov followed him to work in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia.
I remember that when Beria L. left Tbilisi on a business trip to Moscow, Merkulov was with him in Moscow. Merkulov drew well and taught me drawing lessons. After Beria L. was transferred to work in Moscow, Merkulov was also assigned to work in Moscow. All this gave me reason to believe that Beria L. and Merkulov have been in a close relationship for a long time. Living in Tbilisi, we knew each other as families. Around 1933-1936. our family lived in a house on Karganovskaya Street, on the 5th floor, and Merkulov and his family lived on the 3rd floor. Merkulov’s son, Rem Merkulov, my age, and I spent our childhood together: we visited each other every day, and in the summer we always vacationed together. In 1936-1937 our family moved to a house on the street. Machabeli and, since we began to live geographically far from the Merkulovs, I began to meet with him very rarely. I can’t remember that Merkulov V.N. in Tbilisi he visited our apartment and dacha, but personally I often saw him in their apartment or on the street. I know that my mother is Beria N.T. and Merkulov’s wife, Lida (I don’t remember her middle name), were not on friendly terms, perhaps they visited each other, which I don’t remember. In Tbilisi, Merkulov’s mother, Ketovana Nikolaevna, was friends with Beria L.’s mother, Marta Ivanovna.”
On the eve of the arrest, Merkulov's family consisted of his wife Lydia Dmitrievna, born in 1902, son Rem, born in 1924, and mother Ketovana Nikolaevna, born in 1868.
From the first days of the investigation, Merkulov, like the rest of the group members, was charged with committing counter-revolutionary crimes, which were then included in Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
In the decision to bring Merkulov as an accused, and then in the indictment and sentence, it was written that he “being an active participant in the anti-Soviet treasonous group of conspirators, committed state crimes under Art. Art. 58-1 "b"; 58-8; 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR."
The same wording of the accusation was written down for the other accused - Kobulov, Goglidze, Dekanozov, Meshik and Vlodzimirsky.
Beria added two more crimes - Article 58-13:
“Active actions or active struggle against the working class and the revolutionary movement, shown in a responsible or secret (agency) position under the tsarist regime or among counter-revolutionary governments during the civil war.”
And part II of the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of January 4, 1949 “On strengthening criminal liability for rape.”
What do the dry numbers of the articles of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, under which, in particular, Merkulov fell, actually look like? And all the other defendants.
First, let's look at Article 58-1 “b” of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. It must be read in conjunction with Article 58-1a. Why? Now you will understand.
Art. 58-1 "a"
“Treason to the motherland, i.e. actions committed by citizens of the USSR to the detriment of the military power of the USSR, its state independence or the inviolability of its territory, such as espionage, betrayal of military or state secrets, defection to the enemy, flight or flight abroad border are punishable by the highest degree of criminal punishment - execution with confiscation of all property, and in mitigating circumstances - imprisonment for a term of ten years with confiscation of all property.”
Art. 58-1 "b"
“The same crimes committed by military personnel are punishable by capital punishment - execution with confiscation of all property.”
Merkulov, like all the other defendants, was a general, that is, a military serviceman. That is why all of them were charged with Article 58-1 “b” of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR.
Which of the four qualifying features in this article of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (espionage, betrayal of military or state secrets, defection to the enemy, defection or
flight abroad), Merkulov is charged, like other members of the group, but is not specified in the indictment. It is not right. I had to write. That's how it's supposed to be by law.
Now about the rest of the accusation.
Art. 58-8 Criminal Code of the RSFSR
“The commission of terrorist acts directed against representatives of the Soviet government or leaders of revolutionary workers and peasant organizations, and participation in the implementation of such acts, even by persons who do not belong to a counter-revolutionary organization, entails the social protection measures specified in Art. 58-2 of this Code."
From Art. 58-2 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR: “the highest measure of social protection is the shooting or declaring the enemy of workers with confiscation of property and deprivation of citizenship of the union republic and, thereby, citizenship of the USSR and expulsion from the USSR forever, with the assumption, in extenuating circumstances, of demotion to imprisonment for a term of at least three years, with confiscation of all or part of the property.”
By the way, terror in modern Russia dates back to the resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of September 5, 1918. This resolution was then called “On Red Terror.” It provided for such measures of influence as “sending class enemies to concentration camps (as written in the document. - Author), execution of persons involved in White Guard organizations, conspiracies and rebellions, as well as publication of the names of all those executed and the grounds for applying this measure to them "
So the Soviet government itself was the “discoverer” of terror in Russia, so to speak, in legislative form. Although it should be noted that the “Red Terror” was launched in response to the “White Terror”: on August 30, 1918, an attempt was made on V.I. Lenin and was killed by M.S. Uritsky is the chairman of the St. Petersburg Cheka. (True, in old Russia, terror was held in even greater esteem. No matter how you remember Alexander II here. In 15 years, there were as many as 8 attempts on his life. The eighth, predicted by fortune
which turned out to be fatal: in 1881, the tsar was torn to pieces by the explosion of a homemade bomb thrown at him by a terrorist.)
Let's move on.
Art. 58-11 Criminal Code of the RSFSR
“Any kind of organizational activity aimed at the preparation or commission of crimes provided for in this chapter, as well as participation in an organization formed for the preparation or commission of one of the crimes provided for in this chapter, entails social protection measures specified in the relevant articles of this chapter "
It must be said that, according to legal scholars dealing with this problem, Article 58-11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR was introduced into the legislation in force at that time incorrectly, it was superfluous.
This was the accusation formula for Merkulov and the others. But what actual actions were the subject of proof in the Merkulov case? There are several of them. One of the main ones is the activity of the same special laboratory of the NKVD (NKGB) of Professor G. Mayranovsky.
Let's look at this in more detail.
The fact is that from time immemorial this laboratory existed at the main security department. She was located in a separate building on Lubyanka in Varsonofevsky Lane and was engaged in extremely important work - checking the quality of food for top officials of the state and distinguished guests. Subordinated “vertically” to the leadership of state security, i.e. Merkulov. There were no special issues or emergencies. In all the years, right up to today, no one from the country’s leadership or guests has been poisoned. At least, according to official versions. Officers-doctors and chemists of the NKVD, and later the NKGB, worked in the laboratory. Since 1938, experiments on people began in the laboratory. This was led by the head of the laboratory, Professor G. Mayranovsky.
As you understand, the activities of Mairanovsky and his death laboratory are not jokes and not general “theoretical”
accusations. I immediately recall the information that in Hitler’s Dachau concentration camp, if I may say so, “Doctor” Rascher ran approximately the same death laboratory, where savage experiments were carried out on prisoners. This needs to be investigated. Rudenko and his assistant Smirnov began interrogating Merkulov on this issue even before his arrest, as a witness. Here are excerpts from the protocol.
“Question: What do you know about the experiments that were carried out on persons under investigation during the development of the so-called “candor problem”?
Answer: I know nothing about these experiments.
Question: Mayranovsky shows that on the issue of conducting these experiments, he approached you in 1942, that you became interested in these data and gave instructions to conduct these studies on persons under investigation. Is it correct?
Answer: I can’t remember anything about this.
Question: Mairanovsky shows that, in accordance with your instructions, three types of defendants were identified: those who confessed, those who did not confess, and those who partially confessed. Mairanovsky and the investigators carried out experiments on them. Do you know this?
Answer: No, I don’t know anything about this.
Question: Mairanovsky shows that he reported to you about the results of the experiments carried out on those under investigation to obtain frank testimony from them, that you approved this work, and told Mairanovsky that you would nominate him for the Stalin Prize. Is this correct?
Answer: I can’t remember anything about it. But I want to supplement my previous testimony. I remembered, thinking about issues related to Mayranovsky; once he asked me to go with him to see the cell in which there was a prisoner sentenced to heavy punishment. This convict was given poison by Mairanovsky. I can’t remember where this cell was located in the main NKVD building or in any other one. I remember that, approaching the cell door, I looked through a small glass window and saw a man lying on the bed. After that I left. I don’t remember whether there was anyone else with me then, except Mairanovsky.”
After Merkulov’s arrest, further work with him was entrusted to a member of the investigative team, Colonel of Justice Uspensky from the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office.
At Uspensky's, Merkulov spoke in more detail. Here are extracts from the new protocols.
“Question: Tell us about the experiments that Mayranovsky conducted with persons under investigation when developing the so-called “problem of frankness”?
Answer: I remember that Mayranovsky conducted experiments of this kind on those under investigation and arrest, but I don’t remember the details of these experiments, apparently because they did not give positive results.
Question: An extract from Mairanovsky’s testimony dated September 2, 1953 is being read to you:
“As far as I remember, it was in 1942, when I turned to the deputy on this issue. People's Commissar of Internal Affairs V.N. Merkulov. He became interested in these data received and gave instructions to the head of the 2nd Directorate, P.V. Fedotov. about the need to conduct these studies on persons under investigation.
These experiments continued in 1942 and 1943.
Of course, both Merkulov, who authorized their conduct, and Beria knew about these experiments.”
Did Mairanovsky show it correctly?
Answer: I have no reason not to believe this testimony of Mairanovsky. Apparently that was the case. I just can’t say whether these experiments took place in 1943.
I probably reported to Beria about these experiments, since it could not have been otherwise, since in 1942 I was his deputy, and they could not be carried out without his permission.
Maybe it was stupid, but I believed then that if this method turned out to be effective, it would be of great benefit in the conduct of the investigation, in particular, it would make it unnecessary to beat those arrested, who especially stubbornly resist admitting their guilt.
However, as I have already shown, these experiments did not give positive results and they were stopped
Question: You sent a letter to the Chairman of the Higher Attestation Commission Kaftanov with a request to award Mairanovsky the academic degree of Doctor of Medical Sciences and the title of Professor
without defending a dissertation?
Answer: Yes, I did.
Question: You are presented with the original of your letter to Kaftanov No. 52/2765 dated February 12, 1943. Is this the letter you sent?
Answer: Yes, this letter is signed by me.
QUESTION: Why did you need to intervene in the matter of awarding Mairanovsky an academic degree and title?
Answer: Mayranovsky turned to me and told me that he had prepared a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Medical Sciences, but his dissertation was rejected. As far as I remember, Mayranovsky told me that his dissertation was rejected because he was an NKVD employee and that he had done a lot of scientific work. In addition, he said that in his dissertation he did not have the opportunity to present all the secret work that he carried out in the NKVD. At the same time, as can be seen from the letter, he presented me with reviews of his work from Academician Speransky, corresponding member Grashchenkov and professors Gavrilov, Muromtsev, Tarusov and Frank. After reading these reviews, I considered it possible to write a letter to Kaftanov asking that Mayranovsky be awarded an academic degree and the title of professor without defending a dissertation, given the secrecy of some of his works.
Question: Since when did you begin to manage the activities of specialists? Mairanovsky's laboratory? />Answer: I don’t remember when Mairanovsky first approached me for permission to test some of the poisons he had developed on those sentenced to death. Perhaps this was a few months before the start of the war. Or maybe it was in the first days of the war. I did not know about the existence of this kind of laboratory before. Mairanovsky told me that Beria had previously given him permission to conduct experiments on those sentenced to death. I checked this statement with Blokhin or Gertsovsky and received confirmation that such permission was indeed given by Beria. When I allowed Mairanovsky to conduct experiments on the use of poison on convicts
me to be shot and subsequently several times at Mayranovsky’s request gave such permission, I did not consider that I was doing anything illegal, since we were talking about enemies of the Soviet state sentenced to death, and experiments were carried out on them in order to ensure Soviet intelligence reliable toxic substances for sabotage."
Frankly speaking, V. Merkulov’s position on this issue makes us think about it seriously. Combat operations by special services using poisonous and other potent agents have been and are being carried out all over the world. And how, and especially on whom to test these remedies, is not a simple question. Moreover, it is impossible to answer it unequivocally. But by and large, how to destroy Hitler, bin Laden, Dudayev or Basayev is no longer the main thing. The main thing here is the end result! So this type of weapon is also needed.
By the way, according to unverified data leaked to the media, our modern security officers also destroyed Khattab “by chemical and toxicological means.” They sent him an envelope with a report on financial flows for the quarter, and this envelope was not a simple one, but with special stuffing... (According to other sources, Khattab had poison mixed into his food - this was also a successful FSB operation.)
Let me remind you that the KGB also destroyed the ardent nationalist S. Bandera in 1959 during a special operation: they sprayed the bandit (may some representatives of Western Ukraine forgive me for this word) with potassium cyanide powder when he went up to his apartment in Munich, where he was hiding after war.
And before the war, in 1938, in Holland, our security officers destroyed his predecessor E. Konovalets. This one was “treated” to a box of chocolates... filled with TNT.
The next episode to be investigated in the Merkulov case was the operation to kidnap and murder his wife
Marshal G.I. Kulika - Simonich-Kulik Kira Ivanovna. But first, let's remember the commander himself.
The fate of Marshal of the Soviet Union G.I. Kulika's life was tragic. Kulik served in the 1st Cavalry, where he showed examples of bravery and courage. At Tsaritsyn he was with Stalin and from that time on he enjoyed his respect. He was generously presented with awards. In 1940, he was awarded the rank of marshal and was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. However, in 1942, for the unsuccessful defense of Kerch, he was convicted by a special judicial presence of the Supreme Court of the USSR and stripped of these ranks, demoted to the rank of major general, but remained in the ranks. (Kerch changed hands twice within six months of 1942, and our losses there amounted to about 150 thousand people.) In 1944, Kulik’s rights were restored only to orders and medals. After the war, he served in Kuibyshev as deputy commander of the district troops. In 1947, together with the commander Colonel General V.N. Gordov and the chief of staff of the district, Major General F.T. Rybalchenko was arrested by the MGB for “treasonous intentions and terrorist threats.” On August 24, 1950, all three were sentenced to capital punishment by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and shot.
The accusation against Kulik and Gordov was based on an undercover tape recording compiled by the MGB, when both commanders, having arrived in Moscow from Kuibyshev for a meeting, one evening, heavily drunk in the Moscow Hotel room where they were staying, began to remember “the days gone by.” ”, analyze their military operations and decline the name of Stalin in all cases, while decorating their army speech with all the features of the Russian language with its profanity. The generals did not even know that this hotel, built back in 1935, had long been equipped by the NKVD with listening devices in accordance with all the rules of science and technology of that time.
At the suggestion of Abakumov, the film was reported to Stalin, after which the fate of the generals was sealed. Here's how to join this company
General Rybalchenko, chief of staff of the Military Military District, was hit, it is not clear from the case. However, Rybalchenko received the same charges and was shot along with Kulik and Gordov.”
On the issue of the kidnapping of Kulik’s wife, Merkulov gave more confessional testimony, however, placing all the blame on Beria.
He, in particular, said that Beria ordered the discreet abduction of Simonich-Kulik; because, according to intelligence reports, she was exposed as an espionage. Marshal Kulik at that time was the head of the Main Artillery Directorate of the Red Army. He, Merkulov, got acquainted with the intelligence report on Simonich-Kulik, but did not find anything serious there. Beria reported this, but he told him that there was a decision of the “authority” on this and Simonich-Kulik was subject to “seizure.” He entrusted this operation to an employee of the security department Gulst and a group of his employees. Wlodzimirski also participated. He, Merkulov, personally led this operation and reported its progress to Beria. He himself went to the supposed place of capture. Simonich-Kulik was “filmed” near her apartment near the house on the street. Vorovsky in the center of Moscow, secretly taken to Sukhanovskaya prison, where Merkulov and Beria came and where she was interrogated several times. She denied the spying charges. They managed to persuade her to “undercover work.” Further, Merkulov testified that Beria unexpectedly announced the decision of the “authority” to shoot Simonich-Kulik, which was done by the commandant of the NKVD of the USSR Blokhin. To “disguise”, Beria ordered him, Merkulov, to announce an all-Union search for Simonich-Kulik, draw up the necessary documents and report this to her husband, who showed great concern about the disappearance of his wife, who was only 18 years old. She was his daughter's friend. Merkulov did all this after receiving from the marshal a photograph of his wife, allegedly necessary to organize the search.
In one of the interrogation reports, Merkulov shows:
“...I do not consider the seizure and execution of Simonich-Kulik to be illegal, since there was an order from the authority in this regard, and I would have carried out any order from the authority unconditionally. But I admit that this case made an extremely difficult, terrible impression on me and I worried about this incident for a long time. In my opinion, there was no operational need to destroy this woman.”
But that's not all. Colonel of Justice Uspensky absolutely correctly began to investigate Merkulov’s atrocities related to the disclosure of the so-called anti-Soviet military conspiracy on the eve of the war.
Let me remind you that even before Beria and Merkulov arrived in Moscow in 1938, on the orders of their predecessor Yezhov, 1 People's Commissar of the Navy, 3 Deputy People's Commissars of Defense, 16 district commanders, 25 their deputies, 5 flotilla commanders, 8 heads of military academies, 33 commanders were repressed corps, 76 division commanders, 40 brigade commanders, 291 regiment commanders. This is an official certificate from the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, which, apparently, the writer Viktor Suvorov did not see when, under the dictation of British intelligence, he worked on his new opus of 2000, “Purification,” where he justified the actions of Stalin and Yezhov to exterminate the commanders.
In addition, in 1940-1941, more than 100 generals and admirals of the Red Army were arrested, 76 of whom were convicted by the Military Collegium, 5 by a Special Meeting of the NKVD, 12 died while in custody.
Extrajudicial reprisals were also actively used. So, without any trial in October 1941 in Kuibyshev, Samara and
In Tambov, 25 people were shot according to the list, many of whom were among the command staff of the Red Army. Among these “enemies of the people” there were several Heroes of the Soviet Union, and Y. Smushkevich was twice a Hero.
All of them were arrested on the eve of the war and accused of “anti-Soviet military conspiracy”, espionage, treasonous activities in favor of foreign intelligence services. They were under arrest with the knowledge of Stalin, Beria and Merkulov, and were subjected to inhuman torture and torture. With the beginning of the war, all of them were transported to Kuibyshev, some to Saratov and Tambov. On the eve of the imposition of a state of siege in Moscow on October 18, 1941, Beria signed an order for their execution, ordering “the execution of the sentence - capital punishment.” And in parentheses he clarified - “shoot.” And then followed the list of those to be shot - 25 people. The execution of this action was entrusted to the employee for special assignments of the NKVD special group D. Semenikhin, which was carried out by him.
Beria knew very well that there were no “sentences” against these individuals, and they were all supposed to be shot without trial and even without meetings of “troikas” or special meetings.
Later, covering their tracks, Kobulov and Vlodzimirsky committed a forgery and drew up “conclusions” about everyone’s involvement in espionage and endorsed this list from the USSR Prosecutor Bochkov. All this was done with the knowledge of Beria and Merkulov.
After the execution, an unknown author wrote a certificate on April 12, 1942 with the following content: “Deputy. People's Commissar Comrade Merkulov ordered the confiscation of property from all listed convicts.” And then - an illegible signature. The word “convicted” here, as you understand, is inappropriate, and Merkulov had no right to give orders for the confiscation of property: this is the prerogative of the court.
K. Meretskov, a famous commander and no less famous, was miraculously not included in the list of those subject to execution
a renowned specialist in the field of weapons, scientist B. Vannikov. They were also arrested, subjected to inhuman torture, but unexpectedly, on Stalin’s orders, they were released.
Merkulov was dealt with separately on this matter.
“Question: An extract from Beria’s testimony dated September 1953 is being read to you:
“I know that Merkulov, conducting an investigation into the case of Meretskov, Vannikov and others, obtained through the use of illegal methods, beating those arrested and torturing them, fictitious testimony about their belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization.”
Do you confirm this testimony of Beria?
Answer: I did not use torture against Meretskov, Vannikov and others, but indeed, during interrogations, those arrested were beaten, since this was a sanction. The arrests of Vannikov, Meretskov and a number of other persons were carried out by me at the direction of the authorities. I reported in great detail on the progress of the investigation personally to the authorities, where I was sometimes called several times a day.
Question: You claim that the arrest of Vannikov, Meretskov and a number of other persons was carried out on the instructions of the authorities. But this was preceded by your, as People's Commissar of State Security, information to the authorities regarding Vannikov, Meretskov and others?
Answer: I remember that there was this information regarding Vannikov. It must be said that during this period, successive arrests were made of a group of workers, including military personnel. The interrogation protocols of these arrested persons were submitted to the authorities, and I also often provided information orally and by telephone. In relation to Vannikov, a protocol of interrogation of Mirzakhanov, an employee of the People's Commissariat of Armaments, was presented. I don’t remember whether the interrogation protocols regarding Meretskov were presented.
Question: An extract from Beria’s testimony dated October 7, 1953 is being read to you:
“Merkulov played the main role and I have no doubt that he personally tortured both Meretskov and Vannikov and others.” Do you confirm that you personally used torture on these arrested people?
Answer: I do not confirm Beria’s testimony; I personally never used torture on Meretskov, Vannikov or any other arrested persons. As I have already shown above, during interrogations carried out with
With my participation and without me, Meretskov and Vannikov were beaten with a hand in the face and with a rubber truncheon on the back and soft parts of the body, but the delivery of these blows did not turn into torture in my presence. I personally also beat Meretskov, Vannikov and some other arrested people, but I did not use torture on them.
Question: Do you admit that as a result of beatings and other violations of the law during the investigation, false, fictitious testimony was obtained from Meretskov, Vannikov and other arrested people?
Answer: Yes, indeed, their testimony regarding themselves and others was fictitious, and I myself began to notice with horror that as a result of beating those arrested, fictitious testimony was obtained, as a result of which unfounded arrests of innocent people could be made. This became especially clear to me when I saw that the number of arrests was growing. I did not know how to get out of this situation, but fortunately, soon, on the orders of the authorities, Mirzakhanov, Vannikov and Meretskov were released and after that the beating of those arrested and further arrests based on their testimony stopped.
Although those arrested were released and, therefore, their cases were conducted incorrectly, not a single reproach was made to me in the authorities. I explained this by the fact that I reported the entire progress of the investigation in these cases to the authorities in all details.
Question: You are hiding your role in these cases from the investigation. An extract from Beria’s testimony dated October 7, 1953 is read to you:
“I remember that, speaking to me about the case of Meretskov, Vannikov and others, Merkulov presented it from the standpoint of his achievements, that he uncovered an underground government, almost organized by Hitler. “I believe that the main culprit in the fabrication of this case is Merkulov and he should bear full responsibility for this.” Do you admit it?
Answer: Beria is not telling the truth. I don’t remember such a conversation with him. Perhaps I simply reported to him the contents of the cases of Meretskov, Vannikov and others, but I did not boast about these cases, since boastfulness is not characteristic of me at all. How could I boast about this case when, on the contrary, I had doubts about the veracity of the testimony of those arrested.”
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Investigator Merkulov also “pressed” on the episode about the execution of these 25 arrested in Kuibyshev, Saratov and Tambov.
“Question: During the interrogation on October 3, you stubbornly denied your involvement in the illegal execution of 25 arrestees, carried out according to a written order from Beria dated October 18, 1941. Do you now remember the circumstances under which the written order was drawn up, including 25 arrestees?
Answer: Although I thought about this for a long time, I could not remember, but, obviously, judging by the testimony of Kobulov, Vlodzimirsky and Gertsovsky, I have some connection to this list. One must assume that Beria can say what happened with the compilation of this list.
Question: I am reading to you an extract from Beria’s testimony dated October 7, 1953, and his answer to this question: who personally designated the names of the persons subject to execution. Here are Beria's words:
“This list was prepared by Merkulov and Kobulov. I affirm this categorically.”
Now do you admit that you were a direct accomplice of Beria in the illegal execution without trial, without legally passed sentences of 25 arrested?
Answer: No, I cannot admit this, because if I took part, as Beria says, together with Kobulov in compiling this list, I could only do this on the direct instructions of Beria. But I cannot imagine that Beria would not explain to me and Kobulov the need and expediency of drawing up such a list. Therefore, I could not then consider this order of Beria illegal and consider myself an accomplice of Beria in the execution of 25 arrested people.”
Speaking about Merkulov’s activities in his post, one cannot help but mention the blatant lawlessness that was happening in those years in the country’s state security agencies and related to the procedure for investigating so-called counter-revolutionary crimes. This is especially true for violations of the terms established by the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR for keeping arrested persons in custody before trial. There were no such deadlines at all. Thus, the head of the Smolensk Artillery School, Major General Petrov E.S. was kept in custody before trial and was registered with the NKVD-NKGB for nine years; Chief of Staff of the 4th Shock Army of the Northwestern
Front Major General Romanov F.N. - ten years; Chief of Staff of the Air Force of the Siberian Military District, Major General Teplinsky B.L. - nine years; teacher at the Military Academy. Frunze Major General A.G. Schirmacher - ten years. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such examples. The blame for this lies with Merkulov, since with his knowledge and with his connivance, and sometimes even on his instructions, all this arbitrariness was happening.
So, V. Merkulov must be responsible for everything that happened in the state security agencies from 1938 to 1946. He answered for this.
It is appropriate to cite another interesting fact concerning the now military prosecutor Uspensky, who investigated the Merkulov case.
Colonel of Justice Uspensky was involved, albeit indirectly, in one scandalous story related to the Beria case. Immediately after the latter’s arrest, in July 1953, searches authorized by Rudenko were carried out in the apartments, dachas and offices of Beria himself and those close to him. Conducting the searches was entrusted to Uspensky, who was part of the investigation team. There is nothing complicated here. A group of junior-level operatives arrives and, under the leadership of the person responsible for this operation, turns everything upside down. All property is confiscated and sent for “temporary” storage in accordance with the protocol and its inventory. Then this property, as a rule, was confiscated by court decision and transferred to the then Moscow City Council, and then went into retail trade for next to nothing. The “feeder,” by the way, is good. When I was a prosecutor, Prosecutor General A. Rekunkov issued a special order on this issue, prohibiting prosecutors from using these stores. I do not know whether similar orders were issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB. So, during the search in the office of the responsible employee of the Secretariat of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G.A. Ordyntsev, who was also involved in the Beria case, the head was also present. special sector of the CPSU Central Committee Sukhanov D.M. Taking advantage of Uspensky's inattention, Sukhanov stole from Ordyntsev's safe
bonds in the amount of 106 thousand rubles, a gold brooch, a watch. This was later discovered, and Sukhanov was sentenced to 10 years. The apparatus of the CPSU Central Committee has probably never known a greater shame in its entire history.
We continue to publish a series of biographies of the leaders of the USSR state security*. This time, a columnist for "Power" Evgeny Zhirnov restored the history of the life and service of the hereditary nobleman, People's Commissar of the State Security and playwright Vsevolod Merkulov.
A man with quirks
The fate of Vsevolod Merkulov could have been typical for a Russian nobleman born at the end of the nineteenth century into the family of an officer: cadet corps, military school, promotion to officer, world war, heroic death or the White Army and emigration. It turned out differently. In 1903, Captain Nikolai Merkulov died, and his widow and eight-year-old Seva moved from the Azerbaijani town of Zakatala to the capital of Transcaucasia, Tiflis.
Thanks to her solid connections (after all, she came from a Georgian princely family), brilliant education and remarkable strong-willed qualities, the young widow was soon able to get a position as director at the Tiflis school for blind children. Seva Merkulov was assigned to the Third Tiflis Men's Gymnasium. He studied successfully, but it was at this time that he developed a trait that determined his entire future life. Tendency to make unexpected, contradictory moves.
At the humanitarian gymnasium, he became so interested in electrical engineering that his articles were published in a special magazine in Odessa. And when in 1913 he entered the physics and mathematics department of St. Petersburg University, he began to write and publish stories about student life.
But he did not feel any desire for military service. Unlike many of his fellow university students in 1914, he did not succumb to a patriotic impulse and did not volunteer for the trenches of what was then called the Second Patriotic War. Vsevolod Merkulov calmly continued to study, earning a living by giving private lessons. In the fall of 1916, when the situation on the Russian-German front became catastrophic, he was, however, drafted into the army. But after a month of serving as a private in the St. Petersburg student battalion, he entered an accelerated officer course and, after completing it, almost ended up as part of a marching company at the front. Luckily for him, a revolution occurred in October of the seventeenth. Ensign Merkulov returned to Tiflis.
Vsevolod Merkulov waited out the season of independence that began in 1918 in Georgia, working as a teacher in a school for the blind, which was still headed by his mother. The government of the Georgian Mensheviks invited German, Turkish, and English troops for its defense, and the nobleman Merkulov, despite his origin, sided with the Bolsheviks. He joined a group of sympathizers. It is possible that it was then that he met Lavrentiy Beria, who worked at the permanent mission of the RSFSR under the name Lakerbaya and carried out special intelligence tasks for the Red Army. In 1921, shortly after the Bolsheviks arrived in Georgia, Vsevolod Merkulov became a clerk in the Georgian Cheka.
For a person with socially alien roots, Merkulov’s career in the Cheka developed simply rapidly. In 1925, he became the head of first the information and intelligence department and then the economic department of the Georgian GPU. He is accepted into the party. But even here a spirit of contradiction emerged. Vsevolod Merkulov married the daughter of the Tsarist General Yakhontov, who emigrated overseas, a fellow Minister of War in the Provisional Government of Kerensky. While leading the investigation in the Adjara GPU for some time, he allowed himself from time to time liberal antics - he dropped cases against people who did not seem to him personally to be enemies of the proletarian government. Thus, he released film director Lev Kuleshov from prison, who, according to Merkulov’s son, was grateful to his father for this for the rest of his life. Although, perhaps, he did this with a long-range view: already in 1927, Merkulov wrote his first play, which was shown in Georgian theaters, and, perhaps, was thinking about cinema.
But despite all the "quirks", the security officer Merkulov continued to receive promotions - in 1931 he was appointed head of the secret political department of the GPU throughout Transcaucasia, and also became the owner of the main departmental award - the badge "Honorary Worker of the Cheka-GPU". The secret of its unsinkability was then widely known in narrow KGB circles. Merkulov became a speechwriter for his boss, who knew little Russian, the Chairman of the Transcaucasian GPU Lavrentiy Beria.
Member of "Beria's gang"
Since the early 30s, speechwriter Merkulov has been following Beria everywhere and everywhere. At the end of 1931, Beria was elected first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, and Merkulov immediately became his assistant, and then alternately managed several departments of the Georgian Central Committee. They say he was happy to be freed from his burdensome job in state security. He navigates the Black Sea on a yacht, shoots a documentary about Batumi as a cameraman and director. And on top of everything else, he signs up for the flying club. Beria put an end to this hobby of his. He learned that Merkulov had gone on a plane ride and gave the personal writer a beating: responsible employees should not endanger their lives.
Surely Merkulov, together with other associates of Beria, participated in the great purge in Georgia. But unlike his colleagues, he was not seen as being petty. The Kobulov brothers in 1937, on legal and not entirely grounds, received a lot of valuable property of those arrested and executed. The youngest of them, Hmayak, chose richer people as enemies of the people. People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Georgia Sergei Goglidze specialized in the accumulation of jewelry. But regarding Merkulov, no such information remains in the archival documents. Apparently, Merkulov followed orders, trying to get as dirty as possible. Perhaps he consoled himself and his loved ones with the thought that his current situation was temporary, that he was about to return to literary work. But I had to return to the GB apparatus.
The next turn in the party line took Beria and his team by surprise. In August 1938, the Kremlin was deciding what to do with the presumptuous People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov. And on August 20, a new first deputy was imposed on the “iron commissar” - Lavrenty Beria. And after him, a third of the apparatus of the Georgian Central Committee moved to Moscow, to the NKVD. The Merkulov family left Tbilisi without much joy. As Merkulov’s son recalled, they did not want to leave their home and relatives.
In October 1938, he headed the counterintelligence department of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD (GUGB), and in December, when Yezhov was finally removed, he became the head of the GUGB and Beria’s first deputy. Why, of all the members of his team, did Beria appoint Merkulov as first deputy? Education? But most of Beria’s associates also studied at universities or graduated from gymnasiums. Merkulov could hardly be called a friend of Beria. Their sons were friends, but Beria and Merkulov, who lived in the same Tskov house in Tbilisi, never visited each other. Over the many years of work, their relationship never went beyond the subordinate-chief framework. And, apparently, this strict subordination of Merkulov to the boss was the main reason for choosing Beria.
And judging by the documents, he basically put the decisions made by Beria in the form of orders of the NKVD of the USSR. He was also involved in organizing the management process. For example, he took part in the creation of a system for the continuous production of dossiers on external and internal enemies (see “Power” #42 for 2000).
True, the purely clerical functions he assumed did not exempt him from participating in obvious atrocities. Merkulov’s son recalled that his father somehow did not sleep for several days. And he told his mother that Stalin had given him an assignment that he didn’t want to carry out, but would have to. Most likely, it was about subordinating to him, as the first deputy people's commissar, a special laboratory involved in the development of poisons, in which experiments were carried out on prisoners. And Merkulov personally approved the regulations on this laboratory. He, judging by the documents on the Katyn case, in 1940 was a member of the “troika”, which determined which of the Polish officers captured by the Soviets should be shot as potential enemies.
According to KGB sources, Beria more than once scolded Merkulov, a “soft-bodied intellectual”, for refusing to beat those under investigation. However, in the literature on repression there are references to the fact that Merkulov interrogated those arrested using intimidating means. Most likely, both are true. At home he said that “work is work and you can’t talk about it.” And only after Stalin’s death did he somehow mention that the leader treated him very differently. “Almost hugged him, then almost shot him.”
Apparently, this fear never left him. During the war, in 1942, when Merkulov was returning from the Far East, he unexpectedly asked to land the plane in Sverdlovsk, where his son was serving at that time, and also to bring Lieutenant Merkulov to the airfield. In fact, he didn’t say anything special to his son. Some general words. But then it turned out that on that day on Red Square, a Red Army soldier from the Execution Ground shot at Mikoyan’s car. And Merkulov made an unplanned stop to say goodbye to his son, just in case. But the leader decided not to punish Merkulov. On the contrary, it was he who was entrusted with the duties of the head of the First Department of the NKVD - government security.
To calm himself down, Merkulov used the usual technique, telling himself and those around him that all this was temporary and that soon he would be able to work in the field of art. He hosted many famous actors, directors, and musicians in his house. His guests were Lyubov Orlova and Grigory Alexandrov, the conductor of the Bolshoi Theater Melik-Pashayev, and film directors Kalatozov and Kuleshov. During the war, the play “Engineer Sergeev” by Vsevolod Rokk, first-rank state security commissioner Merkulov, appeared on the country’s stages. How he could write anything at all given his workload at Lubyanka remains a mystery. And there are different versions on this matter (see interview with Gennady Sergeev). But many theaters staged the play. And after Merkulov’s appointment in 1943 as the head of the People’s Commissariat of State Security, separated from the NKVD, “Engineer Sergeev” appeared on the stage of Maly.
The play's wild success and constant sell-outs were not only due to the wonderful acting of the actors. As state security veterans told me, there was an unspoken recommendation for all security officers to visit the Maly Theater. And comrades from the periphery who came to Moscow were provided with tickets to Maly for “Sergeev” in a centralized manner. Merkulov even began to think about film adaptation of the play and began writing the script together with Lev Kuleshov. But the People's Commissar's cinematic dreams were not destined to come true. At a reception in the Kremlin, one of the famous actresses said to Stalin, pointing to Merkulov who was nearby: they say, our people's commissars write wonderful plays. To which the leader reasonably noted that until all the spies are caught, the People's Commissar had better mind his own business. Merkulov wrote nothing more than reports.
Before sunset
By the end of the war, as veterans recalled, Merkulov somehow wilted. No, outwardly he remained the same. Always extremely polite and attentive to subordinates. By the way, he was the only GB chief who paid for books and goods that employees bought at his request. Another deputy of Beria, Bogdan Kobulov, in such cases looked at the performer, said: “Put it in the corner,” and forgot about his existence. Merkulov always took out his wallet and very carefully, penny for penny, returned the money.
The reason for his bad mood was fatigue not so much from the Patriotic War, but from the endless apparatus war. The Father of Nations divided the intelligence services, forcing them to solve the same problems, endlessly and viciously competing with each other. And if Beria’s NKVD and Merkulov’s NKGB could always agree for a simple reason - Merkulov still unquestioningly obeyed Beria, the NKGB and Smersh were at enmity to the death. And the soft-bodied intellectual Merkulov time after time, on points and outright, began to lose to the rude and uneducated chief of Smersh, Viktor Abakumov.
But for Merkulov, one failure followed another. For example, according to the data available to the NKGB, a branched nationalist organization operated in Uzbekistan, headed by the first secretary of the Uzbek Central Committee, Usman Yusupov. And a state security general was sent to Tashkent to check Merkulov. But he managed to establish that Yusupov’s only vice was intemperance in the female department, which was not considered a special vice in the Kremlin. As this general told me, Merkulov winced after his report, but did not draw any organizational conclusions.
Merkulov continued to work diligently at his post, but, as they say, without a spark. If anyone showed ingenuity, it was most likely his subordinates. For example, during the next Soviet elections in Crimea, a ballot was found in a ballot box on which the voter wrote that all this Soviet power was nonsense and even his son did not believe in it. Somehow we managed to find out that vacationers voted there, that the “limber” was most likely from Leningrad, and in the cradle of the revolution, in all schools, students wrote essays “How I spent the summer,” which were checked by GB employees. Finding the culprit from a sharply narrowed circle of suspects turned out to be an easy task.
But still, Merkulov’s successes or failures played a secondary role in his removal from office. After the war, Stalin needed to reduce Beria's greatly increased political weight. First, he himself was removed from the leadership of the NKVD, and then it was Merkulov’s turn. Stalin accused him of being unable to correctly formulate state security tasks for the post-war period. The Central Committee commission for inspection of the Ministry of State Security found a lot of shortcomings in Merkulov’s work.
For almost a year, like many of Beria’s other associates expelled from the Lubyanka, he was unemployed. And in 1947, having slightly restored the positions lost after Stalin’s attacks, Beria assigned him to the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad (GUSIMZ) assigned to the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Merkulov lived in Budapest, led the work of joint stock companies in Eastern Europe and Austria and was involved in the supply of goods from defeated countries to the USSR for reparations. And he tried to be remembered in the Kremlin as little as possible.
He returned to Moscow in 1950, when he was appointed Minister of State Control. And here he tried to behave as inconspicuously as possible. I was sick and suffered two heart attacks. In a word, he was a politically played card.
So they couldn’t immediately recognize Merkulov as Beria’s accomplice after the arrest of Lavrenty Pavlovich. Khrushchev summoned him and asked him to write a statement that Beria was an agent of foreign intelligence services. But this was tantamount to signing one’s own death warrant. Merkulov refused. He was handed over to the prosecutor's office. But here, too, he agreed to write only that he regretted working with Beria. There was nothing in the Lubyanka archives that could be blamed on him without casting a shadow on the members of the Politburo. Finally, someone remembered the head of the special laboratory, Mairanovsky, who was in prison. Merkulov signed the regulations on the laboratory. This means he participated in a conspiracy to poison the country's leaders.
Merkulov felt that the clouds were gathering. And he asked his son to repair his pistol. Apparently, he wanted to commit suicide as a last resort. But either I didn’t dare, or I didn’t have time. He did not return from the next interrogation at the prosecutor's office - September 18, 1953. The apartment was searched, and Merkulov’s family was soon evicted from their house on Gorky Street to a tiny room in a communal apartment on Sukharevka. From time to time, a representative of the prosecutor's office appeared there and announced that the family was allowed to give Merkulov two hundred rubles for shopping at the prison kiosk. And in December 1953, Merkulov’s son, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, was suddenly placed under surveillance, which was also suddenly removed. After some time, the household of Army General Merkulov learned that he, along with other members of the “Beria gang,” had been sentenced to capital punishment and the sentence had been carried out.
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*For an essay about A. Shelepin, see #40 for 1999; about L. Beria - in #22 for 2000; about F. Bobkov - in #48 for 2000; about I. Serov - in #49 for 2000; about Yu. Andropov - in #5 for 2001; about V. Chebrikov - in #7 for 2001; about V. Semichastny - in #14 for 2001.
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With the assistance of the publishing house VAGRIUS "Vlast" presents a series of historical materials in the ARCHIVE section
All photos are published for the first time.
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| Head of the government | Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov |
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| Predecessor | Lev Zakharovich Mehlis | |||||
| Successor | Alexander Semenovich Pavelev | |||||
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| Head of the government | Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin | |||||
| Predecessor | position established, he himself is like the People's Commissar of GB | |||||
| Successor | Victor Semenovich Abakumov | |||||
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| Head of the government | Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin | |||||
| Predecessor | position established | |||||
| Successor | position abolished, he himself is like the Minister of State Security | |||||
| Birth |
October 25 (November 6)
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| Death |
December 23(1953-12-23
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(58 years old)
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| The consignment | CPSU(b) (since 1925) | |||||
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Biography
Born into the family of a hereditary nobleman, captain of the tsarist army. Mother Ketovana Nikolaevna, nee Tsinamdzgvrishvili, a noblewoman from a Georgian princely family.
Since childhood, Vsevolod has been fond of literary creativity.
In 1913 he graduated from the Tiflis Third Men's Gymnasium with a gold medal. At the humanitarian gymnasium, he became so interested in electrical engineering that his articles were published in a special magazine in Odessa. He continued his studies by entering the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. There he began writing and publishing stories about student life: “While still at the university, he wrote several romantic stories, which were published in literary magazines and received positive reviews,” his son recalled. From September 1913 to October 1916 he gave private lessons.
In July 1918, he married Lydia Dmitrievna Yakhontova and moved to live with her.
In the organs of the OGPU
In contrast to the version of Merkulov’s voluntary, on his own initiative, joining the Cheka, there is also information indicating that he began working there under coercion by the Chekists (as an officer) to be an informant for the white officers.
- From September 1921 to May 1923 - assistant commissioner, commissioner, senior commissioner of the Economic Department of the Cheka under the Council of People's Commissars of the SSR Georgia.
- As an employee of the Cheka, Merkulov twice, in 1922 and 1923, submitted an application to the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Only the second time, in May 1923, he was accepted as a candidate with a two-year probationary period. In 1925, he applied for admission to the party, it was as if he was accepted, but the party card was never issued. Only Beria's intervention saved the situation. In 1927, Merkulov was given a party card as a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) indicating his party experience since 1925.
- From 1923 to January 23, 1925 - head of the 1st department of the Economic Department of the Plenipotentiary Representation of the OGPU for the Trans-SFSR - Cheka under the Council of People's Commissars of the Trans-SFSR.
- In 1925 - head of the Information and Agents Department of the Plenipotentiary Representation of the OGPU for the Trans-SFSR - Cheka under the Council of People's Commissars of the Trans-SFSR.
- In 1925-1926 - Head of the Economic Department of the Cheka - GPU under the Council of People's Commissars of the SSR Georgia.
- In 1926-1927 - Head of the Economic Department of the GPU under the Council of People's Commissars of the SSR Georgia.
- In 1927-1929 - Head of the Department of Information, Agitation and Political Control of the GPU under the Council of People's Commissars of the SSR of Georgia.
- In 1929-1931 - Head of the Secret Operations Unit and Deputy Chairman of the GPU of the Adjara Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. From May 4 to July 1930 And. O. head of the Adjarian regional department of the GPU.
- From May 1931 to January 29, 1932 - Head of the Secret Political Department of the Plenipotentiary Representation of the OGPU for the Trans-SFSR and the GPU under the Council of People's Commissars of the Trans-SFSR
At party work
- From November 12, 1931 to February 1934 - assistant secretary of the Transcaucasian regional committee of the CPSU (b) and 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the CP (b) of Georgia.
- In March 1934 - November 1936 - head of the Department of Soviet Trade of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
- Until November 1936 - head of the Special Sector of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the CPSU (b)
- From November 11, 1936 to September 9, 1937 - head of the Special Sector of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia (Bolsheviks).
- From July 22, 1937 to October 1938 - head of the Industrial and Transport Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Georgia.
- Since November 23, 1937 - member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia (Bolsheviks).
In the NKVD and NKGB
In September 1938 he returned to work in the state security agencies. Merkulov recalled: “The first month after Beria arrived in Moscow, he forced me every day from morning until evening to sit in his office and watch how he, Beria, worked.” On September 11, 1938, he was awarded the special title of Commissioner of State Security of the 3rd Rank (on the same day, Beria was awarded the special title of Commissioner of State Security of the 1st Rank).
With the appointment of Beria as head of the GUGB, Merkulov is appointed to the position of his deputy.
- From September 29 to December 17, 1938 - Deputy Chief of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR.
- From October 26 to December 17, 1938 - head of the III department of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR.
- From December 17, 1938 to February 3, 1941 - First Deputy People's Commissar of the NKVD - Head of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB).
- From March 21, 1939 to August 23, 1946 - member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
In 1940, Merkulov was part of the “troika” that led the execution of Polish officers (Katyn execution).
In October 1940, Beria and Merkulov met with surviving Polish prisoners of war at a dacha near Moscow with the aim of creating Polish military units in the USSR.
In November 1940, Merkulov, as part of a delegation headed by Molotov, went to Berlin for negotiations with the leaders of the German Empire. He attended a breakfast given by Hitler at the Imperial Chancellery on November 13, 1940 in honor of the Soviet delegation. And in the evening of the same day, Molotov gave a return dinner at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, to which, in addition to Ribbentrop, Reichsführer SS Himmler also arrived.
In the period from February 3, 1941 to July 20, 1941 and from April 14, 1943 to May 7, 1946 - People's Commissar (from March 1946 - Minister) of State Security of the USSR.
- From July 31, 1941 to April 16, 1943 - First Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs.
- From November 17, 1942 to April 14, 1943 - head of the 1st department of the NKVD of the USSR.
- On February 4, 1943, he was awarded the special rank of State Security Commissioner of the 1st rank (special ranks of employees of state security agencies were abolished by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of July 6, 1945).
In 1943-1944. - headed the “Commission for the preliminary investigation of the so-called Katyn case”.
On July 9, 1945, he was awarded the military rank of Army General. (Resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR No. 1664).
“Smartly using the well-known provocative Shakhurin case against me, Abakumov became the Minister of State Security of the USSR in May 1946,” Merkulov believed.As the son of Vsevolod Merkulov recalled: “According to his father, he was fired from the post of minister because of his softness. After the war, when a new wave of repression began, Stalin needed a tough and straightforward person in this position. Therefore, after his father, the MGB was headed by Abakumov...”
By a resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, adopted by poll on August 21-23, 1946, he was transferred from member to candidate member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
| “From the act of acceptance and delivery of cases of the Ministry of State Security, it is established that the security work in the Ministry was carried out unsatisfactorily, that the former Minister of State Security, Comrade V.N. Merkulov, hid from the Central Committee facts about the largest shortcomings in the work of the Ministry and that in a number of foreign countries the work The ministry turned out to be a failure. In view of this, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decides: Withdraw comrade. Merkulov V.N. from the members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and transferred to candidate members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of August 23, 1946 |
- From February 1947 to April 25, 1947 - Deputy Head of the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad under the USSR Ministry of Foreign Trade.
- From April 25, 1947 to October 27, 1950 - Head of the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad under the USSR Council of Ministers for Austria.
At the Ministry of State Control
“In 1950, it was Comrade Stalin who named me as a candidate for the post of Minister of State Control of the USSR... I felt almost rehabilitated after being released from work in the MGB in 1946,” Merkulov recalled.- From October 27, 1950 to December 16, 1953 - Minister of State Control of the USSR.
Merkulov began to have health problems. In 1952 he had his first heart attack, and four months later his second. He was in the hospital for a long time. On May 22, 1953, by decision of the USSR Council of Ministers, Merkulov was granted leave for four months for health reasons.
Arrest, trial, execution
Merkulov noted that some time after Stalin’s death “he considered it his duty to offer Beria his services to work in the Ministry of Internal Affairs... However, Beria rejected my offer, obviously, as I now believe, believing that I would not be useful for the purposes that he intended for himself.” then, taking control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. That day I saw Beria for the last time.”
Literary activity
V. N. Merkulov wrote 2 plays. The first play was written in 1927 about the struggle of American revolutionaries. The second, “Engineer Sergeev,” in 1941 under the pseudonym Vsevolod Rokk, is about the heroism of a worker who went to the front. The play was performed in many theaters.
| He recalled how at the end of the war a reception was held in the Kremlin, which was attended by Stalin, members of the Politburo, military personnel, writers, and artists. As the head of state security, my father tried to stay close to Joseph Vissarionovich. At some point, Stalin approached a group of artists and started a conversation with them. And then one artist exclaimed with admiration, saying, what wonderful plays your minister writes (by that time the People's Commissariat of State Security had been renamed the ministry). The leader was very surprised: he really did not know that his father wrote plays that were shown in theaters. However, Stalin was not delighted with this discovery. On the contrary, turning to his father, he sternly said: “The Minister of State Security should mind his own business - catch spies, and not write plays.” Since then, dad never wrote: like no one else, he knew that the words of Joseph Vissarionovich were not discussed. Rem Vsevolodovich Merkulov |
- Merkulov participated in editing the report “On the Question of the History of Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia,” which L.P. Beria delivered in 1935.
- Merkulov prepared an article about L.P. Beria for the Small Soviet Encyclopedia.
- “The faithful son of the Lenin-Stalin party” (biographical essay about L.P. Beria, 64 pages in volume and with a circulation of 15 thousand copies), 1940.
Awards
- Order of Lenin No. 5837 (April 26, 1940, for the successful completion of Government tasks to protect state security and in connection with the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin)
- Order of the Red Banner No. 142627 (November 3, 1944, for long service)
- Order of Kutuzov, 1st degree No. 160 (March 18, 1944, for the eviction of Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens and Ingush). The decree was canceled by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council on April 4, 1962.
- 9 medals
- Order of the Republic (Tuva) No. 134 (August 18, 1943)
- Badge “Honorary Worker of the Cheka-OGPU (V)” No. 649 (1931)
By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of December 31, 1953, he was stripped of the military rank of army general and state awards.
VSEVOLOD NIKOLAEVICH MERKULOV
In 1941, in the city of Krasnodar, at the height of the war, one playwright with the pompous name Vsevolod Rokk completed a play with the simple title “Engineer Sergeev.” He didn’t have to spend a long time knocking around the theater thresholds, like his colleagues in the creative workshop, and persuading the managers and directors. There was always a hunger for modern drama, and already in 1942 the play began to be staged in one theater or another.
“Engineer Sergeev” was staged in Tbilisi (in Russian and Georgian), in Baku and Yerevan, in Riga (after the liberation of Latvia), in Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk, Vologda, Syzran, Arkhangelsk, Kostroma. Every year the number of productions grew. In February 1944, the play was staged on the stage of the Maly Theater.
It was noted by the entire Soviet press.
Theater critics, who often sharply criticized the weaknesses of modern playwrights, greeted the play with a bang.
There were laudatory reviews in Pravda, Izvestia, and in the then official propaganda department of the Central Committee, Literature and Art.
“Literature and Art” especially praised the Maly Theater’s performance: “It is a great task to play the image of a patriotic engineer who has devoted himself entirely to the service of the party and the people. Vsevolod Rokk’s play, staged at the Maly Theater branch, provides rich and rewarding material for the manifestation of acting skills... Selflessly devoted to the cause of his people, the Soviet man boldly looks death in the eyes and fulfills the task of the Motherland, sacrificing his life.”
Perhaps the reviewers really liked the play. Or maybe they just knew who was hiding under the pseudonym Vsevolod Rokk. The amateur playwright was Vsevolod Nikolaevich Merkulov. When the Maly Theater turned to his work, Merkulov held the post of People's Commissar of State Security of the USSR.
"WE WILL SHOOT YOU"
Merkulov, who spent half his life working as a security officer, was fond of literary creativity. He wrote plays. “Engineer Sergeev” was the most successful. Merkulov spoke about what was close to him.
The play takes place in July - September 1941. The plot is simple: Soviet troops are retreating, and the director of the power plant, Sergeev, must blow up his creation - the station that he himself built. The Germans are trying to stop him - they need a power plant - and send their agents to him: the son of a kulak, who was dispossessed and thrown into prison, where he died, and an engineer with pre-revolutionary experience who agreed to work for the Germans back in 1918, when they were in Ukraine.
One agent is caught by the NKVD, another is hit twice in the head by engineer Sergeev with a sledgehammer. He falls dead, as the author's remark says.
The German officers in the play also speak Russian. One of them comes from Riga: his father owned an estate in the Tula province, and the general recalls how every morning he went to inspect the barnyard, kennel and mill...
The author also featured a colleague in the play - the head of the regional department of the NKVD, a senior lieutenant of state security. He tells the main character that German agents are spreading rumors, and ours stupidly pick them up.
As a result, another completely Soviet person becomes, in fact, an involuntary enemy, sowing panic and uncertainty. Quite often such talkers are brought to my department.
Of course, things cannot happen without some oddities.
In the sense that they grab those who could still be kept free.
But mostly the real enemies come across:
We'll put you in jail, we'll sort it out, look, he's a German agent. Bastards!
Here Merkulov is precise in the details, he knows his colleagues: first they put them in prison, then they start to sort it out, and here very few people do not admit that they are spies.
Along the way, a senior state security lieutenant detains a suspicious man named Soykin, but there is no evidence of his guilt. The security officer himself says:
Our district prosecutor kept pestering me: release Soykin, you don’t have sufficient grounds to keep him under arrest. So I sent him to the disposal of the regional administration, to the city. I would like to gain time... I feel in my gut that he is doing something dirty.
Of course, the senior lieutenant of state security turns out to be right: he caught a traitor who defected to the Germans. But the ideas of those years about how and who could be arrested are conveyed accurately...
The hero of the play, engineer Sergeev, despite the fact that he feels sorry for the power plant he built to tears, blows it up together with the German occupiers and in the process dies himself.
The newspaper “Literature and Art” wrote: “Sergeev is ready to sacrifice, if the Motherland needs it, his life and children. He did not immediately understand why it was necessary, in the name of the Motherland, to destroy such a magnificent structure as his hydroelectric power station so that it would not fall to the enemy. But in the first, most difficult moment, when the thought of the possibility of destruction first entered his consciousness, he says in thought: “If necessary, we will blow it up.”
Merkulov knew not only how state security works. He knew how power plants, factories and oil rigs exploded during the retreat.
Nikolai Konstantinovich Baibakov, who headed the State Planning Committee for many years, and at the beginning of the war was the commissioner of the State Defense Committee for the destruction of oil wells and oil refineries in the Caucasus region, described how he received this kind of assignment.
Stalin called him:
Comrade Baibakov, Hitler is rushing to the Caucasus. Everything must be done to ensure that not a single drop of oil goes to the Germans.
Keep in mind, if you leave even one ton of oil to the Germans, we will shoot you.
But if you destroy the fields prematurely, and the Germans never capture them and we are left without fuel, we will shoot you too.
It is amazing that half a century later, Baibakov recalls Stalin’s eerie words with admiration.
Security officer Merkulov came to Baibakov’s aid. He even brought English specialists to Baibakova, who shared their experience of how they destroyed wells on the island of Borneo so that the oil would not go to the Japanese. Baibakov rejected English methods, our specialists came up with their own.
German agents did not scare Baibakov. If he was afraid of anything, it was not to carry out Stalin’s orders. Indeed, in this case, he would have been at the disposal of Merkulov, but not the playwright, but at that moment Beria’s first deputy at the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Therefore, Baibakov recalls, they blew up oil fields and power plants when the Germans were already nearby and machine gun fire was heard.
NARCOM THEORIST
Vsevolod Nikolaevich Merkulov was four years older than Beria, but in their relationship Lavrenty Pavlovich was always older. And not only by position. Merkulov lacked the determination and ruthlessness of Beria, and his organizational talents too.
Merkulov was born in 1895 in the small town of Zagatala in Azerbaijan. His father served in the tsarist army, after retiring, he became a teacher. Vsevolod Nikolaevich graduated from a men's gymnasium in Tiflis and, unlike Beria and his entourage, continued his education. He went to the capital and in 1913 entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. So he was the most educated in Beria’s entourage, if not in the entire state security leadership.
Merkulov stood out greatly among his illiterate comrades. Viktor Semenovich Abakumov, who replaced him as Minister of State Security, graduated from four classes. But Merkulov joined the party later than others - only in 1925.
He managed to serve in the tsarist army - in October 1916 he was drafted into a student battalion in Petrograd and almost immediately sent to the Orenburg school of warrant officers. He served in the 331st Orsk Regiment, and in January 1918, due to illness, he was sent home to Tiflis. He was unemployed for several months, then became a teacher at a school for the blind.
In October 1921, he was accepted into the Georgian Cheka as an assistant commissioner. He worked in this department for ten years. He headed the economic department, was the head of the department of information, agitation and political control of the GPU of Georgia, chairman of the GPU of Adjara, and head of the secret political department of the GPU of Transcaucasia.
In November 1931, Beria, elected second secretary of the Transcaucasian regional committee and first secretary of the Central Committee of Georgia, transferred Merkulov to his assistant, then put him in charge of a special sector.
Beria liked Merkulov not only for his education and diligence. Merkulov wrote a brochure about Beria entitled “The Faithful Son of the Lenin-Stalin Party.”
In 1937, Merkulov became head of the industrial and transport department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia. The next year, Beria took him with him to Moscow and entrusted him with the most important post. Myself? Lavrentiy Pavlovich, while still in the role of first deputy people's commissar, also headed the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD. And he made Merkulov his deputy. He was immediately given the high rank of state security commissioner of the third rank: in the army hierarchy this is a lieutenant general.
After Beria's appointment as People's Commissar on December 17, 1938, Merkulov became first deputy People's Commissar and head of the Main Directorate of State Security. Intelligence, counterintelligence, and Politburo security were subordinate to him.
At the time of the annexation of the Baltic states, Merkulov secretly came to Riga to lead the process of Sovietization of Latvia.
After the division of Poland in the fall of 1939, Merkulov went to Lviv and personally led the operation to identify and isolate hostile elements, in other words, he carried out a massive cleansing of Western Ukraine. In the spring of 1940, the intelligent commissar of the third rank, Merkulov, was directly involved in preparing the execution of captured Polish officers in Katyn, approved and signed all the execution lists and personally supervised the liquidation.
With the outbreak of war, a new stream of prisoners poured into the camps. A special meeting, for example, gave ten years for failure to comply with a government decree on handing over personal radios, which had to be taken to the district executive committee. Another wave of prisoners are those who spread “false rumors” about the German offensive and German victories, as well as those arrested for “praising German technology.”
By the decision of the State Defense Committee, a special meeting was now given the right to determine any measure of punishment, up to and including execution.
At the same time, Merkulov was not the worst in his circle. He was polite, spoke calmly, without shouting. And he tried to be reasonable if it did not conflict with his official duties.
Academician Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov recalls that when Beria was arrested, party members were given a closed letter from the PC of the CPSU to read. Sakharov, although not a party member, got acquainted with it. It said, among other things, that Beria forced his subordinates to beat those arrested with his own hands. Only Merkulov flatly refused. Beria mocked him: a theorist!
Merkulov could at least be convinced of something. When the future academician and Nobel Prize winner, the brilliant physicist Lev Davidovich Landau, was arrested, academician Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa rushed to help him out. Merkulov received him and showed Kapitsa the investigative file. Landau was accused of all anti-Soviet sins.
“I guarantee that Landau will no longer engage in counter-revolutionary activities,” Kapitsa said.
Is he a very prominent scientist? - asked Merkulov.
Yes, on a global scale,” Kapitsa answered with conviction. Landau was released.
On February 3, 1941, the day the NKVD was divided into two people's commissariats, Merkulov was appointed people's commissar of state security. His first deputy was Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov. Merkulov was assigned to intelligence and counterintelligence, secret political management, and the investigative unit. Beria was left with the police, firefighters, border guards, the Gulag and all the work in industry.
Six months later, on July 20, when the war began, the NKVD and NKGB were hastily merged into one People's Commissariat. Merkulov again became Beria's first deputy. In February 1943, he received the rank of Commissar of State Security of the first rank (Army General). And two months later, on April 14, 1943, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs was again divided, and Merkulov again headed the People's Commissariat of State Security.
DID STIRLITZ WORK FOR MERKULOV?
Perhaps this is just a legend, a myth, a beautiful fairy tale, but many even very competent people believe in it and consider it true.
It was told to me by the famous Germanist, professor, doctor of historical sciences Vsevolod Dmitrievich Yezhov:
Somewhere on the shores of the Gulf of Riga, in Jurmala, not far from the capital of Latvia, until recently there lived a Soviet intelligence officer who was hiding not only from strangers, but also from his own. In the 1920s he was infiltrated into the Nazi Party. He made a great career, participated in everything that the SS did. At the end of the war, the Americans arrested him and were going to try him as a war criminal, and ours barely scratched him out.
The story of this man seemed to form the basis of Yulian Semenov’s famous novel “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” on which an even more famous film was made.
In any case, this beautiful legend is told by the chief scientific consultant of the film, Professor Yezhov. And the main consultant of the film was a certain Colonel General S.K. Mishin. In fact, this is the pseudonym of the first deputy chairman of the KGB of the USSR Semyon Kuzmich Tsvigun, a person very close to Brezhnev. In the presence of Tsvigun, Yuri Andropov himself did not feel very confident.
Was it Stirlitz?
The late Yulian Semenovich Semenov, whom I knew and loved well, wrote a series of novels about the Soviet intelligence officer Stirlitz-Isaev. Semyonov wrote so convincingly that Stirlitz is perceived by many almost as a real figure.
Yulian Semenov himself said that one of Stirlitz’s prototypes was the famous intelligence officer Norman Borodin, the son of Mikhail Markovich Borodin, who was the main political adviser in China in the 20s.
Lieutenant General Sergei Aleksandrovich Kondratov, who worked all his life in the German direction, believes that the prototype was the creator of illegal intelligence, Alexander Mikhailovich Korotkov.
So was Stirlitz real? Or rather, did this literary and film hero have a prototype? Did a Soviet intelligence officer, a Russian man, one of the subordinates of the first rank state security commissioner Vsevolod Merkulov, work in a high position in Nazi Germany?
The opinion of experts is clear: Stirlitz did not exist and could not exist. A Russian person or a Russified German could, of course, try to pass himself off as a native resident of Germany, but for a very short time and before the first check: the Germans also had personnel departments, and no less vigilant. Hero of the Soviet Union Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov operated quite successfully in the German rear, but he was not so much a scout as a saboteur. He appeared in different places, took on the Germans, as they say, on a blackamoor, and disappeared before they had time to become interested in him.
A Soviet citizen intelligence officer could not take a prominent place in Nazi Germany, because he would inevitably be exposed. Intelligence did not strive for this. The task was different: to recruit Germans ready to work for the Soviet Union.
In the late 20s - early 30s, Germany had one of the largest Soviet intelligence residencies with a large number of agents. Why then was the Soviet Union taken by surprise on June 22, 1941?
In 1936, a massive purge of Soviet intelligence began. Intelligence officers working abroad were called to Moscow, arrested and either shot or sent to camps. The same thing happened in military intelligence.
In December 1938, the leadership of the Army Intelligence Directorate, writes historian Valery Yakovlevich Kochik, reported to the People's Commissar of Defense: “The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army was actually left without intelligence. The illegal network of agents, which is the basis of intelligence, has been almost completely eliminated.”
Major General Vitaly Nikolsky, who on the eve of the war served in the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army, told me:
The repressions that unfolded after the “Tukhachevsky case” dealt the army such a blow from which it did not have time to recover by the beginning of the war. By 1940, there was not a single experienced employee left in the central apparatus of military intelligence. All were destroyed. Our bosses were hastily mobilized nominees, who in turn changed, as if in a kaleidoscope.
When an officer of the central apparatus was arrested in Moscow, the intelligence officers who relied on him - legal and illegal - automatically fell under suspicion. At first, their information was no longer trusted. Then they were recalled to Moscow and destroyed.
It happened that our intelligence officer was recalled so quickly that he did not have time to transfer his agency to his replacement...
Thus, the main damage to intelligence was caused not by enemy counterintelligence, but by our own superiors.
“We were better informed about the plans of the leaders of European countries than about the intentions of our own government,” said General Nikolsky. - The conclusion of a pact with Germany and the entry of Soviet troops into Polish territory was a surprise for military intelligence. We did not have time to redeploy all the agents from the eastern regions of Poland further to the West, and all our valuable informants, during the rapid advance of the Red Army to the Bug, ended up in Soviet captivity. This was a great loss for human intelligence on the eve of a terrible war.
We started the war with very low technical equipment,” continued General Nikolsky. - The radio stations were stationary, heavy, and could only be used by agents constantly working in a certain area. And marshrutniks - agents who, under a plausible pretext, were moving along a route of interest to intelligence - were deprived of operational radio communications. However, this saved them from inevitable failure.
After the war began, so much information was demanded from the permanent agents that they had to sit on the key for hours. As a result, they were detected by direction finders, and they became prey for counterintelligence...
In February 1941, there was a meeting at the intelligence department in Moscow, at which officers from the districts frankly said: the country is on the brink of war, and the intelligence service is completely unprepared for it. There are no radio stations, no parachutes, no automatic weapons suitable for sabotage and reconnaissance groups. In the first months of the war, groups armed only with pistols were sent behind enemy lines: there were no machine guns.
The summer retreat of the first year of the war was disastrous for intelligence. All reconnaissance points, personnel of intelligence officers, and radio operators were lost. In a word, everything had to be created anew: to find people, to train radio operators.
At first, we didn’t even know how to find the owners of this scarce specialty: before the war, such records did not exist,” Nikolsky recalled. “It takes four months to train a radio operator, but we had to send groups to the German rear every day. There was no record of those who knew German. They were looking all over the country for amateur radio operators, graduates of philological and pedagogical faculties who had studied German.
The intelligence service also did not have its own aircraft, suitable for sending reconnaissance and sabotage groups. 105th Squadron; created only in 1943. And before that, they dropped groups from the first plane they came across. There were many failures and tragedies. The paratroopers were destroyed right in the air.
Nevertheless, how do you generally assess the activities of military intelligence in the first period of the war? - I asked General Nikolsky.
We coped with our task because we were able to take advantage of the confusion and turmoil among the Germans. The occupation command had not yet managed to introduce population registration or create a local police force. But we still acted on our own land. In nine cases out of ten, our agent in the occupied territory could count on the help of any local person. They always gave us a piece of bread, if we had it, of course. It became difficult to work when the German field gendarmerie and the Gestapo deployed in the occupied territories, when the police created by the Germans appeared and repressions began for helping the partisans.
The losses of the reconnaissance groups were so great that questions inevitably arise: are these losses justified? Was the information brought by army intelligence worth sending people to almost certain death?
It was worth it. Otherwise we would not be able to fight. Sometimes the means to achieve the goal were terrible, but you can’t win a battle without intelligence...
During these decisive years, Stalin constantly changed the structure of the special services. The People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs was then divided into two institutions, one of which became an independent People's Commissariat of State Security, and then again it was recreated as a single organization.
Army counterintelligence was subordinated either to the People's Commissariat of Defense, then to the NKVD, then again to the People's Commissariat of Defense. Reorganizations did not bypass military intelligence either.
In October 1942, Stalin signed an order to reorganize military intelligence:
"1. Remove the GRU from the General Staff of the Red Army and subordinate it to the People's Commissar of Defense.
2. The GRU of the Red Army is entrusted with conducting human intelligence of foreign armies both abroad and in the territory of the USSR temporarily occupied by the enemy.
3. Military intelligence should be removed from the jurisdiction of the GRU.
4. To direct and organize the work of military intelligence, create a military intelligence department within the General Staff, subordinating the intelligence departments of the fronts and armies to it.”
This order fragmented and virtually paralyzed military intelligence. But the worst thing was that Stalin ordered that operational intelligence intelligence in the “army-front” link be disbanded, since it was clogged with “doubles”, provocateurs and was led by illiterate commanders. All intelligence officers should be handed over to the NKVD. Junior officers should be sent to replenish the troops.
The order found me in Stalingrad, where a new front had been created, for which we had just established a reconnaissance apparatus with great effort,” Nikolsky recalled. - And then it turns out that all our work is in vain. Commanders of armies and fronts wrote entire petitions to Stalin asking him to restore intelligence. In the end, an order was issued to restore military intelligence and create an intelligence department of the general staff...
The consequences of the blow that was dealt to intelligence in the fall of 1942 were felt for a long time. Professionals sent to the troops have already died in battle. While new officers were gaining experience, agents were dying, and the army was not receiving vital information.
But Stalin loved intelligence and at the same time, through the hands of Yezhov, he almost completely destroyed it. In 1938, only three employees remained in the Berlin station. One of them did not speak German.
The Berlin residency began to be restored only in 1939, when the Main Directorate of State Security was headed by Merkulov, but the new generation of intelligence officers was no longer able to achieve previous successes.
An extensive network of agents was formed, but the agents were of low level. Such an agent knows only what is happening in the department in which he serves. But he is unable to penetrate the thoughts and intentions of government leaders, and in fact, that’s all that matters.
Soviet agents did not have first-hand information from Hitler's entourage. Moscow did not know what the German leaders were really thinking and saying. We made assumptions and were wrong.
In addition, Amayak Zakharovich Kobulov, the brother of Bogdan Kobulov, Merkulov’s deputy in the People’s Commissariat of State Security, was appointed head of the station in Berlin.
According to Valentin Berezhkov, if the elder Kobulov was repulsively ugly, short, fat, then Amayak was tall, slender, handsome, with a mustache, courteous and charming, the soul of society and a wonderful toastmaster. But this was the end of Amayak Kobulov’s merits.
Resident Kobulov, who began his career as a cashier-accountant in Borjomi, knew neither the German language nor the situation in Germany. He grew up in the KGB department thanks to his older brother. Before his appointment to Berlin, he was the first deputy people's commissar of internal affairs of Ukraine.
German counterintelligence successfully slipped Amayak Kobulov Russian-speaking double agents who actually worked for the Main Directorate of Imperial Security. Kobulov easily swallowed the bait. Hitler took part in this big game. He himself looked through the information intended for Kobulov.
Through him, the Germans slipped Stalin reassuring information: Germany was not going to attack the Soviet Union. And in Moscow, Merkulov reported Kobulov’s encryption to Stalin.
On May 25, 1941, Merkulov sent a note to Stalin, Molotov and Beria based on reports from a Soviet intelligence agent in Berlin, a native of Latvia, Orestes Berlings, who in reality was a German counterintelligence agent nicknamed Peter. But Amayak Kobulov believed him.
So, Merkulov’s note said: “War between the Soviet Union and Germany is unlikely... German military forces assembled on the border must show the Soviet Union determination to act if forced to do so. Hitler hopes that Stalin will become more accommodating and stop all intrigues against Germany, and most importantly, give more goods, especially oil.”
Many Soviet intelligence agents were people of left-wing convictions, anti-fascists who considered the Soviet Union an ally in the fight against Hitler. Others asked for money for information. It's a piece of work - the more you bring, the more you get. And it turned out that they paid more for disinformation.
Another problem was that the information received in Moscow could not be correctly comprehended. Stalin did not trust the analytical abilities of his security officers, preferred to draw conclusions himself and demanded that Merkulov put the original intelligence reports on his desk. Therefore, Merkulov did not need to create an information and analytical service in intelligence. Such a service appeared only in 1943.
The film "Seventeen Moments of Spring" paints a funny picture: intelligence officers tell politicians what to do. In the real world, everything is different: politicians make decisions, and intelligence officers look for justification for these decisions.
Until June 22, 1941, Stalin and his circle believed in the possibility of long-term cooperation with Hitler. Therefore, in the special intelligence reports that Merkulov brought, Stalin saw only what he wanted to see.
Several years ago, the Foreign Intelligence Service suddenly announced that the real prototype of Stirlitz was a German named Willy Lehmann, a Gestapo employee who, under the pseudonym Breitenbach, had worked for Soviet intelligence since 1929. It’s as if Yulian Semenov was given the Breitenbach case, but they were advised to turn the German into a Russian.
This is wrong. At that time, the Breitenbach case was classified, and it was only recently revealed. Yulian Semenov had no idea about Breitenbach.
Gestapo officer Willy Lehmann, alias Breitenbach, was indeed the highest-ranking Soviet agent. His fate is tragic. In 1938, when the Soviet station in Germany was destroyed by Stalin, communication with Willy Lehmann ceased.
For two years he could do nothing to help the Soviet Union, because no one came to him. Communication was restored at the beginning of 1941 and was interrupted with the German attack on the Soviet Union.
In 1942, either from despair or stupidity, Willie Lehman was killed. The password to contact him was given to an inept and unprepared paratrooper who was thrown across the front line. The Gestapo immediately caught him. He betrayed Willy Lehmann, whom fate had deprived of the luck that invariably accompanied Standartenführer Stirlitz...
By the beginning of the war, the Soviet Union had an extensive intelligence network in Germany, including agents in the air force, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economics, the Gestapo and defense plants.
The People's Commissariat of State Security had a powerful illegal organization in Berlin, which was led by the anti-fascists Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack, who later became famous. Possessing extensive connections, they supplied Moscow with comprehensive information that Merkulov could be proud of.
Military intelligence had illegal groups in Belgium, Holland and France.
Soviet agents provided a lot of information, especially in the first months of the war. But they quickly began to be caught, quite often due to mistakes by the center, which the Gestapo took advantage of.
The People's Commissariat of State Security, as well as the intelligence department of the Red Army, demanded the latest information, and immediately. But the connection was a weak point. The radio operators sat on the air for hours, the radios were detected, and the intelligence officers were arrested one after another.
The Gestapo was headed by the same Heinrich Muller, who was brilliantly played by Leonid Bronevoy in the film “Seventeen Moments of Spring”. In life, Muller was not such a bright and interesting person. He was simply a skilled policeman who acted methodically and thoroughly.
In Berlin, I walked along the street where Standartenführer Stirlitz allegedly worked.
There was little left of the building of the Main Directorate of Imperial Security in the German capital - only a destroyed bunker in which the SS guards were sitting. The building itself was demolished to the ground and a museum dedicated to the victims of the Gestapo was installed there, with underground chambers and many horrifying photographs.
Now it is even difficult to imagine that once there was German counterintelligence here, which acted very effectively, despite the fact that the German state secret police were small - especially in comparison with the gigantic apparatus of the NKVD, NKGB and military counterintelligence SMERSH.
In 1944, the Gestapo had 32 thousand employees. Before the war there were even fewer Gestapo men. For example, in 1937 in Düsseldorf, a city with a population of four million, 291 people served in the local Gestapo office. In the city of Essen, which had a population of about a million people, there were 43 Gestapo men.
The Gestapo did not have many informants: usually there are several dozen people in a big city. There were, of course, also voluntary assistants who, with the help of denunciations to the Gestapo, settled personal scores with enemies and stroked their pride.
The strength of the Gestapo lay not in the number of men in black uniforms, but in the frightening sense of their omnipotence and omnipresence. The Germans were convinced that no one and nothing could hide from the eyes of the Gestapo.
Like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany had military intelligence (Abwehr), counterintelligence (Gestapo) and political intelligence, which was part of the Reich Security Main Office. The Abwehr was headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and political intelligence was headed by the young SS General Walter Schellenberg, who is played by Oleg Tabakov in the film “Seventeen Moments of Spring.” There is even a superficial resemblance between Schellenberg and Tabakov...
The military and political intelligence apparatuses in Germany were significantly smaller than in the Soviet Union. German intelligence could not boast of any particular successes both in the pre-war years and during the war. The Germans had almost no agents on the territory of the Soviet Union. The Germans tried to compensate for this by sending in paratroopers, but to no avail: they were caught almost immediately.
Counterintelligence in this war turned out to be stronger than intelligence, and only towards the end of the war the situation became equal. The Gestapo tracked down all illegal Soviet intelligence stations, and the intelligence network in Germany was lost. But Soviet intelligence continued to provide valuable information: Merkulov’s people, who in April 1943 again headed the People’s Commissariat of State Security, found it out not from the enemy, but from the allies.
For that matter, Stirlitz was neither German nor Russian, but rather English. Moreover, there were a lot of English Stirlitzes. There were five of the most skillful and successful. The name of one of them is known to everyone - this is Kim Philby.
For a long time it was believed that three more people worked for Soviet intelligence with Philby: his friends Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, who fled to the Soviet Union after being exposed in 1951, and Anthony Blunt, who nevertheless decided to remain in England. So they all together replaced the never-existent Stirlitz.
Foreign intelligence colonel Yuri Ivanovich Modin told me about the collective Stirlitz. He himself worked in intelligence for forty-five years. He was taken into reconnaissance during the war after learning that he knew a little English. He spent a total of about ten years in England: from 1947 to 1953 and from 1955 to 1958.
I worked with Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess,” says Modine. - Less with Philby: during my business trip he was not in London. All of them were highly qualified politicians. Without our or my instructions, they knew what was relevant and what was not, which foreign policy problem required additional coverage and which did not. My intervention was sometimes even harmful...
One day an order was received from the center to provide information on some issue in Anglo-French relations. Burgess told Modin that the matter was complicated and it would be better if he himself wrote a short and clear summary. Modin refused and asked to bring all the documents. Burgess did it.
Neither Modin nor the specialists at the center were able to figure it out and ultimately were forced to ask Burgess to explain the situation and clarify things...
During the war, the flow of information from Soviet agents in England was so great that the station did not have time to process it. Secret documents were brought literally in suitcases. And then a decision was made in Moscow: materials received from the five most valuable agents should be processed first. This is how the famous five appeared.
And yet, due to lack of time, the residency was not able to master them all; whole piles of papers remained unsorted.
It was a good security system if a lot of classified materials could be easily removed from the building of the British Foreign Office,” I told Yuri Ivanovich Modin.
In England they trust their officials, and in principle, in my opinion, they do the right thing,” he answered. - The fact that the five worked for us was a historical accident. Trust is the key to effective work...
Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt agreed not to work for Soviet intelligence, but to take part in the fight against fascism. In the 30s, they looked at Russia as an outpost of the world revolution. They came from aristocratic families, but studied under teachers known for their Marxist views. It was considered fashionable back then.
Philby was a left-wing socialist. A university teacher introduced him to the communists.
Burgess openly declared his affiliation with the Communist Party and studied Marx. He, according to Modin, knew the history of the CPSU brilliantly.
Blunt did not advertise his leftist views, but came to Marxism through his subject - art history. He believed that art in our era is dying due to the lack of patrons of the arts, such as existed in the Renaissance. Market relations are the death of art. Only subsidies from the socialist state can save him...
Maclean, the son of a British minister, came to communism through a complex combination of sensitivity to the plight of working-class Scots, nationalism and a personal penchant for preaching and charitable work.
Before the war, they helped Russia because they believed that our country was the only bastion against fascism. When the war began, they considered it their duty to help us. At the same time, they were by no means delighted with what was happening in the Soviet Union; in particular, they considered our foreign policy completely worthless.
Philby had the ability to accurately analyze any problem and propose the only correct solution, said Yuri Modin. With this, he made a career for himself in intelligence: no matter what task he is assigned, everything works out.
I think,” says Colonel Modin, “Philby never made a single mistake in his entire life.” He was actually caught and still got out!
Why did the top five fail?
The Americans managed to decipher Soviet intelligence telegrams. By analyzing them, they established the identity of the Soviet agent. This was Donald Maclean, head of the American department of the British Foreign Office, and before that an employee of the British embassy in Washington, who was also involved in Anglo-American cooperation in the creation of the atomic bomb...
How did the Americans manage to decipher Soviet radio telegrams?
In 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services acquired a half-burnt Soviet code book from the Finns, which they had picked up on the battlefield. United States Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who considered it impossible to spy against the Allies, ordered the code book to be returned to the Russians, but American intelligence officers naturally copied it. People's Commissar of State Security Merkulov had no idea what blow would soon be dealt to his department.
After the war, this book helped decipher the telegrams exchanged between the People's Commissariat of State Security and the station in Washington and New York. It is believed that the Soviet station in New York, in turn, made an unforgivable mistake by using one-time encryption tables twice. One way or another, decoding the telegrams soon led to major failures.
The first to be exposed was Donald MacLean, who was very successful in his career. He was appointed head of a department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In London they treated him well, because his father had once been a minister.
So what happened? - I asked Yuri Modin.
Philby, who at that moment was in the United States as a liaison officer with the CIA, by virtue of his official position found out about this and sent Burgess to London to warn both the Soviet station and Donald Maclean himself about the failure.
And then the decision was made to take McLean to the Soviet Union?
McLean immediately warned Burgess: "If I get arrested, I'll split." Nervous tension took its toll on McLean. He was forced to undergo treatment for alcoholism. This means that McLean had to be taken out. But they didn’t dare send him alone. He had to travel through Paris. He had the most romantic memories associated with this city. They were afraid that if he got to Paris, he would get drunk. And if he gets drunk, he will be caught. In short, Burgess went with him.
But the disappearance of the uncontrollable and extravagant Burgess and the unstable and suffering Maclean ruined Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. Everyone knew that they were close friends, and the first thing they did was suspect them of espionage.
Philby was forced to leave intelligence, but he remained in England for several more years. Blunt refused to flee to Moscow. He admitted to authorities that he worked for Soviet intelligence, but revealed the details only after the death of Burgess, whom he loved very much.
And how did puritanical Moscow treat Burgess with his homosexual inclinations?
They explained to him that we have strict laws on this matter and they will have to be followed. Nevertheless, he somehow got out of the situation. But in reality he could only live in London. He desperately needed to go to the pub in the evening, at about seven o’clock. Burgess - he was a groovy, hooligan. I remember that in Ireland, while on vacation, he crushed a man to death. But he got out of it: he was everywhere full of friends, he opened any door with his foot. In England they forgave him everything. No, he couldn’t live in Moscow...
The names of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, who fled to Moscow in 1951, were the first to be named in the Soviet press by the magazine “New Time”.
In issue 40 of 1953, an anonymous article published in the magazine under the heading “Against disinformation and slander” branded “Cold War knights and swindlers of the capitalist press” who had the audacity to claim that some Burgess and Maclean had moved to Moscow and that Donald MacLean was even followed by his wife Melinda.
This message, wrote Novoye Vremya, “caused cheerful excitement in our editorial office, where they know about Burgess and Maclean only from the shrill stories of the Western press.”
In England they decided that the Soviet leadership had staged another propaganda game, they wondered what its meaning was, and they were mistaken. The article about Burgess and Maclean was an editorial initiative: after all, no one in the magazine had any idea who they were talking about. The habit of rebuffing the West on every occasion has failed the journalists this time. The day after the publication of the magazine, the editor-in-chief received a call from an angry Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, who had been returned to the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs after Stalin’s death:
Who instructed you to make such statements?
Only in 1956 did Moscow officially admit that Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had received asylum in the Soviet Union, but for a long time denied their work for Soviet intelligence.
Guy Burgess was the unluckiest of the top Soviet intelligence agents in the British Isles. In Moscow, he received a passport in the name of Jim Andreevich Eliot. He could not stand Soviet life and asked the KGB for permission to return to England, but no one wanted this. He did not live long in Moscow and died, one might say, of melancholy.
Donald Donaldovich MacLean, who was calmer in character, did not approach the KGB leadership with such naive requests. He worked at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences until his death, wrote books and was quietly indignant at socialist reality.
Harold (Kim) Philby was a born intelligence officer. Since 1939, he served in British intelligence, making a successful career. Unlike his comrades, he was not homosexual and hid his communist beliefs, if he had them. He undoubtedly enjoyed the role of a man who leads the world's largest intelligence services (British and American) by the nose, and valued the praise given to him by the KGB.
He reached the pinnacle of his career in 1945, heading the department of the British Secret Service working against the Soviet Union. Philby conveyed to Moscow the names of all the agents who in those years, with the knowledge of British intelligence, were trying to be sent to socialist countries. We are probably talking about hundreds of people who were caught and shot. When Philby was told about this, he casually waved it off: in war it’s like in war.
However, he knew that he himself was not threatened with the death penalty even if he was exposed: in England spies are not executed in peacetime.
The first real threat to him arose at the moment when an employee of the Soviet station in Turkey, Konstantin Volkov, met with the British consul and asked for political asylum, promising in return to name the names of three high-ranking Soviet agents, two of whom work in the British Foreign Office, and the third in intelligence.
The slow and dependent consul sent a request to London: what should he do?
A telegram from Istanbul landed on Kim Philby's desk, and he reported it to his Soviet contact. KGB officers immediately took Volkov to Moscow. You can imagine his fate.
The British government, loyal to its compatriots, even after the escape of Burgess and Maclean, defended Philby's innocence. The special services, of course, understood that Philby was a spy, but counterintelligence did not find evidence of his work for Soviet intelligence. And in England they don’t judge without evidence.
Philby's courage, composure, intelligence and professional talents inspire respect. But it is curious that he refused to serve a country where individual rights are so respected, and all his life he served a country where they were shot, without bothering to look for evidence of guilt.
After a lengthy investigation in the autumn of 1955, Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, a true gentleman, told the House of Commons that Philby had carried out his duties with integrity and skill and there was no evidence that he had betrayed the interests of England.
Philby was allowed to go to Lebanon as a correspondent. And in 1962, when counterintelligence again became interested in him, he finally fled to Moscow. Here he was greeted wonderfully, presented with orders, but was not allowed to get to real business. His dream of sitting at the headquarters of Soviet intelligence and being the chief consultant disappeared like smoke. Like all defectors, no one needed him anymore. In addition, not everyone at Lubyanka trusted him: especially vigilant security officers believed that he was deceiving the KGB and was loyal to England.
In any case, his every move was watched, and listening equipment was installed in his apartment. Idleness and the inability to play his favorite spy games were the most difficult test for Philby. In a fit of despair, he tried to commit suicide.
Only in recent years did he find something to do: he began to study with intelligence school students who were preparing to work in England. In 1977, he was allowed to come to the headquarters of Soviet intelligence in Yasenevo so that he could speak at a ceremonial meeting of the apparatus of the First Main Directorate of the KGB.
His third wife Eleanor, who followed him to Moscow, wrote in her memoirs that Philby drank heavily and “took the wife of Donald Maclean, who suffered from impotence.” Philby also broke up with Eleanor and married again. This fourth marriage turned out to be successful and brightened up his last years of life.
The fourth Soviet agent, Anthony Blunt, one of the most famous British art historians, curator of the Royal Gallery, arranged his life somewhat better. He cooperated with British counterintelligence, told a lot, thanks to which he remained in his homeland and preserved his freedom.
“It gave me great pleasure to tell the Russians the name of every English counterintelligence officer,” admitted Anthony Blunt. Since 1940, he served in counterintelligence and at one time was a liaison officer at the headquarters of the Allied forces. In 1945, in defeated Germany, he carried out a special assignment for the royal family, after which he became the curator of the Royal Gallery.
Anthony Blunt was an elegant, charming and highly educated man. He knew five languages. He was not only involved in art - he received his first academic degree at Cambridge in mathematics.