1. Vsevolod Merkulov was a leading member of what was later derisively described as the "Beria gang".
17 Facts About Vsevolod Merkulov
1. 2.
In 1913, Vsevolod Merkulov graduated from the Tiflis Gymnasium with a gold medal and became a student at Saint Petersburg University, Department of Physics and Mathematics, but did not graduate.
3.
Vsevolod Merkulov first met Lavrentiy Beria in 1923, when Beria was 24 and had been made deputy chairman of the Georgian GPU.
4.
Vsevolod Merkulov was transferred to Moscow in August 1938, shortly after Beria had been chosen by Stalin to take over control of the NKVD from Nikolai Yezhov.
5.
Vsevolod Merkulov interrogated Yefim Yevdokimov, an associate of Yezhov who had been under arrest for five months but had refused to cooperate.
6.
In February 1941, the NKVD was divided in two, and Vsevolod Merkulov was appointed Chairman of the NKGB.
7.
On 21 July 1941, his department was merged again with the NKVD, with Vsevolod Merkulov was Deputy People's Commissar, under Beria.
8.
On 20 July 1943, two departments were separated again, and Vsevolod Merkulov was again head of the NKGB.
9.
In September 1939, following the pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany, Vsevolod Merkulov was sent to Ukraine to supervise the incorporation of territory seized from Poland.
10.
In May 1941, Vsevolod Merkulov was in charge of the pacification of the Baltic states, which were being forcibly incorporated in the USSR.
11.
Vsevolod Merkulov beat the arrested Red Army officers Kirill Meretskov and Boris Vannikov with a rubber truncheon, though when charged with this offence 12 years later, he claimed that the beatings did not amount to 'torture'.
12.
Vsevolod Merkulov was involved with a plan to build up a network of spies inside the Manhattan Project.
13.
The author Nikolai Tolstoy, in his Victims of Yalta, recounts Vsevolod Merkulov speaking to the imprisoned Cossack general Pyotr Krasnov in the Lubyanka in 1945.
14.
On 4 May 1946, Vsevolod Merkulov was removed from his post as head of what was now the renamed Ministry of State Security.
15.
In July 1953, after Beria was arrested, Vsevolod Merkulov was summoned by Nikita Khrushchev, the new head of the communist party, and ordered to write a report on his links with Beria.
16.
Vsevolod Merkulov wrote a long letter denouncing Beria as an ambitious schemer, but claiming that despite having known him for 30 years, Merkulov had only now realised that he was a criminal.
17.
Vsevolod Merkulov was tried in secret, with Beria and six others, in December 1953.