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GUGB
The Main Directorate of State Security (, Главное управление государственной безопасности, ГУГБ, GUGB) was the name of the Soviet Union's most important security body within the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) USSR. At the time of its existence, which was from July 10, 1934 to February 3, 1941, the GUGB reflected exactly the Secret Operational Directorate within OGPU under the Council of People's Commissars, which operated within OGPU structure from 1923 to 1931/32. An intelligence service and secret police from July 1934 to February 1941, it was run under the auspices of the Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Its first head was first deputy of People's Commissar of Internal Affairs (then Genrikh Yagoda), Commissioner 1st rank of State Security Yakov Agranov. History The Main Directorate of State Security evolved from the Joint State Political Directorate (or OGPU). On February 3, 1941, the Spec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
People's Commissar Of Internal Affairs
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) secret police organization, and thus had a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. The NKVD is known for carrying out political repression and the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin, as well as counterintelligence and other operations on the Eastern Front of World War II. The head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Yezhov from 1936 to 1938, Lavrentiy Beria from 1938 to 1946, and Sergei Kruglov in 1946. First established in 1917 as the NKVD of the Russian SFSR, the ministry was tasked with regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, and its functions dispersed among other agencies before being reinstated as a commissariat of the Soviet Union ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SMERSH
SMERSH () was an umbrella organization for three independent counter-intelligence agencies in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially announced only on 14 April 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph Stalin. The formal justification for its creation was to subvert the attempts by Nazi German forces to infiltrate the Red Army on the Eastern Front."The Soviet Army: SMERSH" SpetsNaz Psychology The official statute of SMERSH listed the following tasks to be performed by the organisation: counter-intelligence, , preventing any other activity of foreign intelligence in the Red Army; fighting " |
NKGB
The People's Commissariat for State Security () or NKGB, was the name of the Soviet secret police, intelligence and counter-intelligence force that existed from 3 February 1941 to 20 July 1941, and again from 1943 to 1946, before being renamed the Ministry for State Security ( MGB). Separate administration Changes in Soviet apparatus began in February 1941 with the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decision. It started with Military Counterintelligence. On 3 February 1941, the 4th Department (Special Section, OO) of GUGB within the NKVD security service responsible for the Red Army military counter-intelligence, consisting of 12 Sections and one Investigation Unit, was separated from the GUGB NKVD. The official liquidation of the OO GUGB and GUGB as organized units within the NKVD was announced on 12 February 1941 by a joint order № 00151/003 of the NKVD and NKGB USSR. The rest of the GUGB was abolished and staff were moved to the newly created People's Commissariat for St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Viktor Abakumov
Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov (; 24 April 1908 – 19 December 1954) was a high-level Soviet security official who from 1943 to 1946 was the head of SMERSH in the USSR People's Commissariat of Defense, and from 1946 to 1951 of the Minister of State Security or MGB (ex- NKGB). He was removed from office and arrested in 1951 on charges of failing to investigate the Doctors' Plot. After the death of Joseph Stalin, Abakumov was tried for fabricating the Leningrad Affair, sentenced to death and executed in 1954. Early life and career Abakumov was an ethnic Russian. Recent scholarship suggests that he was born in Moscow, though he was previously said to be from the Don Cossack region of south Russia. His father was an unskilled labourer and his mother a nurse. At the age of 14, Abakumov joined the Soviet Red Army in spring 1922 and served with the 2nd Special Task Moscow Brigade in the Russian Civil War until demobilization in December 1923.Parrish, 1996, He then joined the Ko ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Military Counterintelligence Of The Soviet Army
Military counterintelligence within the Soviet Armed Forces was controlled by the nonmilitary Soviet secret police throughout the history of the USSR (1922 to 1991). Military counterintelligence departments of the Soviet Armed Forces existed in all larger military formations, each called a ''Special Department'' () or third department/section. The staff of the Special Department would usually establish a secret network of informants. ''TGU'' (ТГУ КГБ СССР, 3 ГУ КГБ СССР ('third')) functionaries were responsible for protection of the military units and of important servicemen (e.g. commanding officers) against activities of foreign military attaché offices/diplomats. Timeline Source: *Initially there was no common counterintelligence directorate. Various armies and fronts had their "Special Departments". * Vecheka, ВЧК, founded on 20 December 1917 *Military Department of Vecheka, Военный отдел ВЧК, established on 27 July 1918 *Special D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
OGPU
The Joint State Political Directorate ( rus, Объединённое государственное политическое управление, p=ɐbjɪdʲɪˈnʲɵn(ː)əjə ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əjə pəlʲɪˈtʲitɕɪskəjə ʊprɐˈvlʲenʲɪje), abbreviated as OGPU (), was the secret police of the Soviet Union from November 1923 to July 1934, succeeding the State Political Directorate (GPU). Responsible to the Council of People's Commissars, the OGPU was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky until 1926, then by Vyacheslav Menzhinsky until replaced by the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) within the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). The OGPU played an important role in the Soviet Union's forced collectivization of agriculture under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, crushing resistance and deporting millions of peasants to the growing network of Gulag forced labor camps. The OGPU operated both inside and outside the country, persecuting political cri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lavrenty Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria ka, ლავრენტი პავლეს ძე ბერია} ''Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria'' ( – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph Stalin's secret police chiefs, serving as head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1938 to 1946, during the country's involvement in the Second World War. An ethnic Georgian, Beria enlisted in the Cheka in 1920, and quickly rose through its ranks. He transferred to Communist Party work in the Caucasus in the 1930s, and in 1938 was appointed head of the NKVD by Stalin. His ascent marked the end of the Stalinist Great Purge carried out by Nikolai Yezhov, whom Beria purged. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, Beria organized the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia, and after the occupation of the Baltic states and parts of Romania in 1940, he oversaw the deportations of hundreds ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artur Artuzov
Artur Khristyanovich Artuzov (name at birth: Artur Eugene Leonard Fraucci) ( (); 18 February 1891 – 21 August 1937) was a leading figure in the Soviet international intelligence and counter-intelligence and security officer and spymaster of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Early life Artuzov's father was Italian-Swiss and employed as a cheesemaker; his mother was Estonian-Latvian. Artuzov studied metallurgy at St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute. Since childhood he was familiar with the Bolshevik revolutionaries Nikolai Podvoisky and Mikhail Kedrov, who were the husbands of his mother's sisters. He started distributing illegal revolutionary literature as a teenager in 1906. In May 1909 he graduated with a gold medal from the Novgorod classical men's gymnasium and entered the metallurgical department of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, from which he graduated with honors in February 1917, after which he worked as a design engineer in the Metallurgical Bureau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vsevolod Merkulov
Vsevolod Nikolayevich (Boris) Merkulov (; – 23 December 1953) was the head of NKGB from February to July 1941, and again from April 1943 to March 1946. He was a leading member of what was later derisively described as the " Beria gang". Early life Merkulov was born in 1895 in Zagatala in present-day Azerbaijan. His Russian father and Georgian mother were both minor members of the nobility. His father, an army captain, was convicted of embezzlement around the year 1900, and died in 1908. In 1913, Vsevolod Merkulov graduated from the Tiflis Gymnasium with a gold medal and became a student at Saint Petersburg University, Department of Physics and Mathematics, but did not graduate. In 1916, he was drafted into the Russian Army. In 1918, he left the army and moved to Tiflis (Tbilisi), where for a time he was unemployed, then worked as a teacher. From September 1921, after the Red Army invasion of Georgia, he was enlisted in Cheka, and its successor, the GPU. Merkulov first met ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vladimir Kishkin
Vladimir (, , pre-1918 orthography: ) is a masculine given name of Slavic origin, widespread throughout all Slavic nations in different forms and spellings. The earliest record of a person with the name is Vladimir of Bulgaria (). Etymology The Old East Slavic form of the name is Володимѣръ ''Volodiměr'', while the Old Church Slavonic form is ''Vladiměr''. According to Max Vasmer, the name is composed of Slavic владь ''vladĭ'' "to rule" and ''*mēri'' "great", "famous" (related to Gothic element ''mērs'', ''-mir'', cf. Theode''mir'', Vala''mir''). The modern ( pre-1918) Russian forms Владимиръ and Владиміръ are based on the Church Slavonic one, with the replacement of мѣръ by миръ or міръ resulting from a folk etymological association with миръ "peace" or міръ "world". Max Vasmer, ''Etymological Dictionary of Russian Language'' s.v. "Владимир"starling.rinet.ru [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abram Slutsky
Abram Aronovich Slutsky (; July 1898 – 17 February 1938) was a Soviet intelligence officer who headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service ( INO), then part of the NKVD, from May 1935 to 17 February 1938, when he was allegedly poisoned. Biography Slutsky was born in 1898 into the family of a Jewish railroad worker in a Ukrainian village, Parafiivka, currently in Chernihiv Oblast. As a youth he worked as an apprentice to a metal craftsman, then as clerk at a cotton plant. In the First World War he served in the Imperial Russian Army as a volunteer in the 7th Siberian Rifle Regiment. In 1917, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). During the Civil War he fought for the Red Army and afterward, in 1920, moved to the organs of the GPU/OGPU, where by dint of his affable personality he rose rapidly through the ranks. Originally, Slutsky worked in the OGPU's Economic Department engaged in industrial espionage. He received the first of two Orders o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
