Word: abakumov
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...NKVD had become such a huge, unwieldy organization that Stalin split it into two parts: the MGB (Security, under Abakumov) and the MVD (Slave Labor, under Kruglov). Having swelled the ranks of slave labor by several millions, Serov was a natural for the MVD. He was made Kruglov's deputy, got a third Order of Lenin for whipping his slaves into completing the Volga-Don canal. But after Stalin's death, his membership in MVD and not in MGB probably saved his life. The Beria liquidation process carried off the entire top level of the security forces...
What shook Vidali was to hear "Beria, Abakumov and others" named as being responsible for a job he had done himself. Tough Vidali, who lost his right thumb in the Spanish Civil War, was a longtime hatchet man for Stalin's secret police. In Mexico in 1940 he had a hand in the organizational work behind the assassination of Leon Trotsky, and, later, in the New York shooting of exiled Italian anti-Communist Carlo Tresca...
...regret what happened, and resolutely reject the things which occurred, one after the other, during that period." He produced a scapegoat. The trouble, he said, all came because of "the provocative role which was played in the relations between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. by enemies of the people-Beria, Abakumov and others-who have been unmasked." (Beria and Abakumov, tidily removed by execution, are always useful on such occasions...
...what Malenkov called "panic and disarray." Some executions were inevitable. But significantly, they were all among the secret police: first Lavrenty Beria, Minister for the Interior, pulled down from his high place and shot; then Mikhail Ryumin, Deputy Minister of State Security. Last Christmas Eve it was Viktor Abakumov, former Minister of State Security, and three of his aides. All were identified with the "Beria plot" and the equally mysterious and never explained "doctors' plot" against the army (Vasilevsky, Shtemenko, Konev). Even the now deposed Malenkov can be described as a former police official, for as clerk...
...official communique said that Abakumov, "having been placed in the post of Minister of State Security by Beria, was a direct participant in the criminal subversive group that carried out Beria's orders." Abakumov, onetime chief of SMERSH, Russia's World War II counterespionage organization, was tried in Leningrad a fortnight ago before the military tribunal of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. The indictment accused Viktor Abakumov of having: 1) "framed up and falsified charges against individual workers of the party and Soviet government and representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia"; 2) "using methods of investigation prohibited...