1. Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov was a high-level Soviet security official who from 1943 to 1946 was the head of SMERSH in the USSR People's Commissariat of Defense, and from 1946 to 1951 of the Minister of State Security or MGB.
15 Facts About Viktor Abakumov
1. 2.
Viktor Abakumov was removed from office and arrested in 1951 on charges of failing to investigate the Doctors' Plot.
3.
Viktor Abakumov's father was an unskilled labourer and his mother a nurse.
4.
At the age of 14, Viktor Abakumov joined the Soviet Red Army in spring 1922 and served with the 2nd Special Task Moscow Brigade in the Russian Civil War until demobilization in December 1923.
5.
Viktor Abakumov became a candidate member of the Communist Party in 1930, and worked in the People's Commissariat of Supplies until 1932, while being responsible for the Military Section of the Communist Youth League in the Moscow area.
6.
In 1934, after the reorganization of the security apparatus, Viktor Abakumov started his work in a 1st Section of Economics Department by the Main Directorate of State Security of NKVD.
7.
Viktor Abakumov executed each order without scruple, probably saving him from facing an execution squad himself.
8.
Viktor Abakumov returned to Moscow HQ on 12 February 1941 as a Captain of State Security and, after the reorganization and creation of the new NKGB, he became one of the deputies of Lavrentiy Beria, who was the People's Commissar for Internal Affairs.
9.
In 1943, from 19 April to 20 May 1943, Viktor Abakumov was one of Stalin's deputies, when he held the post of People's Commissar of Defence of the USSR.
10.
Viktor Abakumov claimed that Stalin "thought he had found in Abakumov a bright young man who was dutifully carrying out his orders, but actually Abakumov was reporting to Stalin what Beria had told him Stalin wanted to hear".
11.
Beria was said by Vsevolod Merkulov to be "scared to death of Viktor Abakumov" and tried to "have good relations" with him.
12.
Viktor Abakumov carried out the early stages of the anti-semitic campaign that Stalin ordered, as the second pro-Arab phase of Stalin's Middle East plans following the enormous military support he had given to help establish the state of Israel, involving the arrest and torture of numerous prominent Jews, including an Old Bolshevik, Solomon Lozovsky.
13.
On 12 May, Beria sent another note, accusing Viktor Abakumov of having fabricated the case against Polina Zhemchuzhina, Jewish wife of the Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who had been arrested as a suspected Zionist in 1948.
14.
Viktor Abakumov was deprived of all titles and awards on November 14,1955.
15.
Viktor Abakumov is portrayed as a cunning courtier, not altogether trusted by Stalin, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel, The First Circle.