spies and Jewish nationalists, acting under the cover of the Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee.”
After his arrest, Abakumov was interrogated and tortured by teams
of his former colleagues. He remained in jail for the next three years
and was not rehabilitated by the post-Stalinist leadership. Rather, he
was tried and shot in December 1954 for treason. At his trial, Abaku-
mov had argued that he acted under Stalin’s direction and that he
“was responsible only to Stalin.” Abakumov apparently had not been
informed that he was to be shot immediately following the trial. His
last words, spoken before a bullet took his life, were: “I am going to
write the Politburo.. .”
Abakumov was both a sensationally successful counterintelligence
chief and a major coconspirator in Stalin’s crimes against the Soviet
people. Unlike Beria, he was never personally close to Stalin, but in
the years he served as minister of state security he briefed Stalin al-
most daily. Abakumov was partially posthumously rehabilitated in
1990 by a Leningrad court, which found his sentence and execution
to have been decided illegally.ABEL, COLONEL RUDOLPH IVANOVICH. KGB-created alias
for illegal William Genrykhovich Fisher.ACTIVE MEASURES.Aktiviniie meropriatia(active measures) in
the jargon of the Soviet intelligence services meant political ma-
nipulation and propaganda to influence international opinion. From
the beginning of its existence, the Soviet Union sought to use prop-
aganda to defend its legitimacy and malign its enemies on the right
and the left. A special bureau was created in the GPUin January
1923 for disinformation “to break up the counterrevolutionary
schemes of the enemy.” The Soviet security service became more
active in the 1930s in financing campaigns to explain the Moscow
Trialsand demonize former party leader Leon Trotsky. The Soviet
party and security service used contacts with foreign communist
parties and Soviet sympathizers—once referred to as “useful idiots”
by Vladimir Lenin—to legitimatize these campaigns.
After World War II, the Soviet intelligence service used the term
“active measures” to describe covert political action designed to af-
fect the political opinion of unfriendly and neutral countries. From2•ABEL, COLONEL RUDOLPH IVANOVICH06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:54 AM Page 2