Lavrenty Beria’s efforts to purge the service and establish his own
power base. In September 1938, Serov was appointed NKVD chief
in Ukraine, where he worked closely with Nikita Khrushchev. He
inherited a security service deeply traumatized by 18 months of
purges, arrests, and killings. His immediate predecessor, Aleksandr
Uspenskiy, had gone so far as to fake his own suicide and disappear.
In 1939–1941, Serov supervised the sovietization of the western
Ukraine and the Baltic states, directing the mass deportationof
Poles, Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians to Siberia. Serov was
also implicated in the murder of thousands of Polish officers and
civilians in 1940. DuringWorld War II, Serov, serving as the deputy
chief of state security, supervised the deportation of more than 1.5
million Soviet citizens—Volga Germans, peoples of the Caucasus,
and Crimean Tatars–of whom approximately one-third perished of
cold, sickness, and hunger. For carrying out these deportations,
Joseph Stalinapproved 413 medals for Serov’s team.
During the last days of the war, Serov served as Stalin’s security
chief in Poland and eastern Germany. Serov was instrumental in the
arrest of anti-Soviet Polish patriots, members of the AK (the Polish
Home Army) in 1944 and 1945. He also acted as the Soviet leader’s
watchdog on the Red Army and its popular commander Marshal
Georgi Zhukovin Germany. In July 1945 Serov was rewarded by
promotion to colonel general.
Following the war, Serov became one of the most important fig-
ures in the security service. Among his responsibilities was oversight
of “special prisons,” where especially important people were interro-
gated and executed. Following Stalin’s death, Serov successfully
plotted against Beria, and he maintained his rank and authority in the
security service. In March 1954 he was made chief of the newly
minted KGB, in part because of his close relationship with
Khrushchev. As KGB chair, Serov was involved in putting down the
Hungarian revolutionand supporting Khrushchev against the plot-
ting of the Antiparty Group, which had sought to remove
Khrushchev from the party leadership. In 1958 Khrushchev moved
Serov to the GRU, where his career was ended by the exposure of
Oleg Penkovskiyas a spy for the Americans and British. Serov was
demoted, stripped of many of his decorations, and sent to a military
post in the provinces.SEROV, IVAN ALEKSANDROVICH (1900–1990)• 23506-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 235