Ivan Serov

Serov's award of the Gold's Cross of the Virtuti Militari was posthumously deprived in 1995 by the decision of the President of Poland Lech Wałęsa.

Serov died in 1990 at the Central Military Clinical Hospital in Krasnogorsk. He was buried at the cemetery in the village of Ilyinskoye in Krasnogorsky District, Moscow Oblast.

After the failure of the Soviet Union to gain the upper hand in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Serov was dismissed. In 1965, he was stripped of his party membership. Serov's downfall from power has been linked to Oleg Penkovsky, his protégé, being an officer who became a double agent.

Serov was removed from his post as head of the KGB in 1958 after hints by Nikita Khrushchev, who had said that Western visitors could expect that they "wouldn't see so many policemen around the place" and that the Soviet police force would undergo a restructuring. Serov became the director of the GRU.

Serov makes a brief appearance at the beginning of Ian Fleming's 1957 James Bond novel From Russia, With Love. Fleming writes that he "was in every respect a bigger man than Beria" and that "he, with Bulganin and Khrushchev, now ruled Russia. One day, he might even stand on the peak, alone."

Serov was one of the senior figures in SMERSH, the wartime counterintelligence department of the Red Army, Navy and NKVD troops, a deputy to Viktor Abakumov. It was in this function that Serov established the Polish Ministry of Public Security, the Polish secret police until 1956, acting as its main Soviet adviser and organizer.

In 1956, the Hungarian Revolution overthrew the incumbent communist Hungarian government, and in response, János Kádár formed a new government that was more loyal to Moscow, which received little popular support. Serov was responsible for arresting the supporters of Imre Nagy who were trying to negotiate with Soviet military officials.

In 1954, Serov became Chairman of the KGB and so was the head of the greater part of the Soviet secret police. Serov organized security for the tours of Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev in Britain and he was decried by the British media as "Ivan the Terrible" and "the Butcher".

Serov also briefly features in the 1950s novel Berlin by the German anti-Nazi writer Theodor Plievier, who lived in the USSR throughout the Hitler years. Plievier says Serov was nicknamed chramoi (which he translates as "Old Cripple Foot"), a reference to a supposed deformity (presumably a club foot).

Viktor Suvorov claims that in 1946, Serov personally took part in the execution of Andrey Vlasov, along with the rest of the command of the Russian Liberation Army, an organization that had co-operated with the Nazis in World War II.

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 the building of the Stasi, the East German secret police. Serov was also there to monitor and spy on Marshall Zhukov, while acting as his political advisor.

In 1941, Serov was promoted to become Deputy Commissar of the NKVD as a whole, serving under Beria as one of his primary lieutenants; in this function, Serov was responsible for the deportation of a variety of Caucasian peoples. He issued the so-called Serov Instructions, which detailed procedures for mass deportations from the Baltic States (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.

Serov became the Ukrainian Commissar of the NKVD in 1939, and from this point onwards he played a major role in many of the actions of the Soviet secret police in World War II, helping to organize the deportation of the Chechens and people from the Baltic States, becoming Beria's primary lieutenant in 1941.

Serov was the Ukrainian commissar of the NKVD from 1939 to 1941. Time magazine has accused him 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, who himself was nicknamed the "Butcher of the Ukraine".

Ivan Alexandrovich Serov (Russian: Ива́н Алекса́ндрович Серóв; 13 August 1905 – 1 July 1990) was a Russian Soviet intelligence officer who served as the head of the KGB between March 1954 and December 1958, as well as head of the GRU between 1958 and 1963. He was Deputy Commissar of the NKVD under Lavrentiy Beria, and played a major role in the political intrigues after Joseph Stalin's death. Serov helped establish a variety of secret police forces in Central and Eastern Europe after the creation of the Iron Curtain, and played an important role in crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Serov was born on 13 August 1905, in Afimskoe, a village in the Vologda Governorate of the Russian Empire, in a Russian family. Major changes in Russia occurred during his childhood, culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. In 1923, when he was 18, he joined the Red Army shortly after the end of the Russian Civil War; in 1926, he became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and graduated from the Artillery Officers' School of Leningrad in 1928. A major step in his career as a Red Army officer was the attendance in the mid-1930s of Higher Academic Courses in the prestigious Frunze Military Academy. In 1939, Serov entered the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), in a major capacity.