Dropping the Cop

A terse little paragraph on the back page of Pravda disclosed last week that "Army General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov has been released from his duties as chairman of the State Security Committee in connection with his transfer to other duties." The announcement, which was not even repeated on the Soviet radio, was as brusque as it was brief. Just as in the case of the disgraced war hero, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, it failed to say what the general's new duties would be--and Zhukov has yet to turn up in another post.

Thus Nikita Khrushchev fired his secret police chief, one of the last and most bloodstained survivors of the Stalin tyranny--a shadowy, trim little man and a gumshoe general who won his highest promotions and decorations in the "Great Patriotic War" leading grisly campaigns not against the Germans but against his own Soviet people.

Bloody Past. Trained at Moscow's Frunze Military Academy to be a professional soldier, Serov was assigned on graduation to the NKVD. He first caught the Kremlin's approving eye in the '30s as chief Chekist in the Ukraine (where Nikita Khrushchev also served as Stalin's troubleshooter). shooting and deporting to certain death in Siberian slave camps hundreds of thousands of peasants who resisted collectivization. When World War II began, Serov, an equal in bloodstained iniquity to Nazi Germany's Himmler, specialized in genocide and in exterminating "anti-Soviet elements" in the new Soviet Polish and Baltic lands.

He supervised the Katyn Forest massacre of 4,000 Polish officers. The monstrous secret order No. 001223, outlining procedures to be followed for executions and deportations in the Baltic states (an estimated 1,420,000), was signed by him. He shot or shipped away whole Soviet nationalities--the Crimean Tartars (200,000), the Volga Germans (500,000), the Chechen-Ingush (410,000) of the Caucasus. When the Red army rolled back the Germans, Serov crushed resisters behind the lines. Appointed Stalin's top cop in Berlin, he kidnaped German rocket scientists, dragooned slave labor for the East German uranium mines. It was at about that time that he bragged of knowing how to break every bone in a man's body without killing him.

Almost the only ranking police official to survive Stalin's death and Beria's liquidation, Serov slid into the top security job in 1954. The "collective leadership" of the day wanted to downgrade the police, and Serov knew how to make himself inconspicuous. But Western eyes saw the sandy-haired little man snapping his fingers to summon a Soviet ambassador during B. and K.'s visit to India (TIME, Dec. 19, 1955). When he appeared in Britain in 1956 to prepare security measures there for the touring pair, the British press denounced him so vehemently as "Ivan the Terrible" and "Butcher Serov" that he was left behind on the actual tour.

In the Hungarian revolution, it was Serov who broke into a peace parley between Red army generals and Hungarian freedom fighters, to treacherously seize the Hungarian commander, General Pal Maleter, who was later executed. It was Serov who masterminded the kidnaping of the late Premier Imre Nagy after he had been given a safe-conduct to leave Budapest's Yugoslav embassy.

Cloudy Future. A sharp-faced Communist with piercing, grey-blue eyes, this shadowy policeman probably has more blood on his hands than anybody else alive. He wears inconspicuous grey-blue suits and thick-soled cops' shoes whether escorting commissars, bowing to ladies at diplomatic receptions, or going to soccer games and tennis matches. Proud of his own tennis game at 53, he boasts that he has licked the best man Russia sent to Wimbledon this year (who may only have been playing customer's tennis).

The last two late and loathed secret police chiefs had gone to their deaths in the month of December. Would Serov share their fate, or be allowed a peaceful retirement to think about all his old victims? Even though Serov is an old collaborator of Khrushchev's, Nikita is said to have little liking for him. Serov's removal was generally regarded as a show of liberalization by Khrushchev before next month's 21st Party Congress. Other more complex motivations may be involved, but dictators cannot be blamed, for their own safety, for not wanting to have the same secret police boss in power too long.

In his recent talkathon with U.S. Senator Humphrey, Khrushchev had hinted of impending police changes. "Come back next year," he had said, "and you won't see so many policemen around the place." This particular cop would be neither missed nor mourned.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.