Ivan Alexandrovich Serov (; 13 August 1905 – 1 July 1990) was a Soviet intelligence officer who served as Chairman of the KGB from March 1954 to December 1958 and Director of the GRU from December 1958 to February 1963. Serov was NKVD Commissar of the Ukrainian SSR from 1939 to 1941 and Deputy Commissar of the NKVD under Lavrentiy Beria from 1941 to 1954.
Serov was active in organizing NKVD activities against anti-Soviet forces during the Soviet Invasion of Poland and World War II, including the Katyn massacre. Serov issued the Serov Instructions and helped organize the mass deportations of people from Poland, Baltic states and the Caucasus. Serov helped establish secret police forces in the Eastern Bloc after the war and played an important role in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Serov was removed from power in 1963 when his protégé Oleg Penkovsky was exposed as a double agent. Serov was stripped of his position, Communist Party membership and Hero of the Soviet Union award in 1965, and lived in obscurity until his death in 1990.
Early life and military career
Ivan Alexandrovich Serov was born on 13 August 1905 in Afimskoe, a village in the Vologda Governorate of the Russian Empire, into a Russian peasant family. In 1923, when he was 18-years-old, Serov joined the Red Army shortly after the end of the Russian Civil War. In 1926, he became a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and in 1928 graduated from the Artillery Officers' School of Leningrad. A major step in his career as a Red Army officer was his attendance in the mid-1930s of Higher Academic Courses in the prestigious Frunze Military Academy. He married during these years and had two children: a son, Vladimir, who became an engineering officer in the USSR Air Force followed by a daughter, Svetlana.
Commissar of Ukraine
In 1939, Serov joined the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the main security agency and secret police of the Soviet Union. He was appointed to the high-ranking position of NKVD Commissar of the Ukrainian SSR in 1940. As well as performing his duties in this post, Serov was also responsible for the co-ordination of deportation from the Baltic States and Poland. He was one of the top ranked officials responsible for the Katyn massacre of Polish officer POWs.
In 1956, an article in Time magazine accused Serov of being responsible for the death of "hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian peasants" during this period. Serov was also a colleague in Ukraine of Nikita Khrushchev, the local Head of State.
Deputy Commissar of the NKVD
In 1941, Serov was promoted to Deputy Commissar of the NKVD as a whole, becoming one of the primary lieutenants of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria. In this function, Serov was responsible for the mass deportation of a variety of Caucasian peoples, including the deportation of the Chechens. He issued the so-called Serov Instructions, which detailed procedures for mass deportations from the Baltic States, which was for some time confused with the NKVD Order No. 001223 by historians. He also coordinated the mass expulsion of Crimean Tatars from the Crimean ASSR at the end of World War II. Viktor Suvorov claims that in 1946, Serov had oversight of the execution of Andrey Vlasov and the rest of the command of the Russian Liberation Army, an organization that had co-operated with the Nazis in World War II.
Serov was one of the senior figures in SMERSH, the wartime counterintelligence department of the Red Army, Soviet Navy and NKVD troops, serving as a deputy to Viktor Abakumov. It was in this function that he founded the Ministry of Public Security, the secret police of the Soviet-backed Polish People's Republic until 1956, acting as its main Soviet adviser and organizer. Serov organized the persecution of the anti-Soviet Home Army and helped to establish Stalinism in Poland.
In 1945, Serov was transferred to the 2nd Belorussian Front and went to Berlin in May that year. He stayed there until 1947 and helped to organise a security agency that would become the Stasi, the secret police of the German Democratic Republic. Serov was also there to monitor and spy on Marshall Georgy Zhukov (who Stalin was personally suspicious of) while acting as his political advisor.
Chairman of the KGB
After the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, Serov was one of the few senior members of the political police to survive the wave of demotions and forced retirements of Stalinist officials. Serov, who had Beria's trust, betrayed him when he conspired with officers of GRU to avoid his own downfall.