Word: smersh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Kruglov was a natural for the next big job of Soviet industry: helping to organize the sprawling GULAG prison camps into a source of slave labor. He carried out the job with impersonal ruthlessness. During World War II he moved on into SMERSH, the Soviet counterespionage outfit, and at war's end he was so much in Stalin's trust that he was made top security man in the Kremlin. In this role Comrade Kruglov appeared at the Teheran Conference, where he kept close to Stalin's side. He was Molotov's personal bodyguard...
...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...