Bogdan Zakharovich Kobulov

Beria affectionately called Kobulov "Kobulich" and kept him closer than anyone else in the NKVD. Kobulov was a man of massive physique (one witness estimated over 400 pounds) who enjoyed beating prisoners with his fists and a rubber truncheon, then crushing them with his full body weight. The physicist Yakov Terletsky, who saw the "egg-shaped" Kobulov in an anteroom at the Lubyanka in 1945, estimated his weight at above 400 pounds. Beria's son Sergo recalled Kobulov's "large hairy hands and short crooked legs" and described him as essentially "a machine for torture and murder."

Kobulov's brutality went beyond mere violence. He carried out Beria's orders to beat prisoners with zeal, and by his own admission personally beat the arrested former Georgian Commissar of Agriculture Matikashvili on Beria's instructions in late-1930s Tbilisi. In his August 1953 interrogation, Kobulov testified: "On Beria's instruction I personally took part in beating the arrested Matikashvili." According to a Novaya Gazeta investigation, he "beat victims with his fists… jumped on them and crushed them with his enormous weight. His favorite instrument of torture was a truncheon." During one interrogation, when a prisoner lunged at Beria, Kobulov reacted instantly and broke the man's neck with his bare hands.

According to British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, Kobulov was among those who tortured Marshal Vasily Blyukher, the commander of the Far Eastern Army, joining Merkulov, Rodos, and Beria himself. He allegedly participated in gouging out Blyukher's eyes. A Spanish Republican exile code-named Geronimo, interrogated by Kobulov for eighteen months, testified that he was "tied to a chair and beaten with a rubber truncheon."

Paradoxically, Kobulov knew his deeds would one day catch up with him. Colleagues reported that he would come home and weep after "work," gripped by the premonition that he and his comrades would one day have to answer for everything they had done. That premonition was fulfilled on December 23, 1953, when he was shot, the very fate he had meted out to countless victims himself.

When the MVD was reorganised under Beria after Stalin's death in March 1953, Kobulov became first deputy minister of internal affairs; on 26 June Beria was arrested at the Presidium session in the Kremlin. Three days later, a Presidium decree of 29 June 1953 directed investigator R. A. Rudenko to expose hostile anti-party activity through Beria's entourage, naming among others Kobulov B., Kobulov A., Meshik, Sarkisov, Goglidze and Shariya.

The Beria case investigation lasted six months. A Rudenko note of 12 October 1953 listed the accused as Beria, Merkulov, Dekanozov, Kobulov B. Z., Goglidze, Vlodzimirsky and Meshik, with 44 further accomplices prosecuted separately. Six of them stood before the Special Judicial Presence of the USSR Supreme Court, presided over by Marshal I. S. Konev, which sat from 18 to 23 December 1953: Merkulov, Dekanozov, Kobulov, Goglidze, Vlodzimirsky and Meshik. Kobulov was described there as a former first deputy people's commissar of internal affairs of the Georgian SSR, later deputy minister of state security of the USSR and, before his arrest, deputy minister of internal affairs of the USSR.

The verdict found that the defendants, intending to use the MVD to seize power, set the Ministry of Internal Affairs against the Communist Party and the Soviet government. It further found that, "concealing and masking their criminal activity", Beria and his accomplices carried out terrorist reprisals against people whose exposure they feared, personally beating and torturing arrested innocent people and ordering mass beatings and tortures by their subordinate NKVD-MVD officers.

All the accused were sentenced to death and shot on the day of the verdict, 23 December 1953, at 21:20; Beria himself had been killed somewhat earlier by Colonel-General P. F. Batitsky with a personal weapon. In the case materials the two Kobulovs are described as possibly Beria's most loyal henchmen. On 8 July 1953 Beria's former secretariat chief B. A. Lyudvigov testified that Bogdan Kobulov, "Beria's protege, was most devoted to him, unquestioningly carried out all his demands and orders", and that Beria trusted him without doubting his loyalty. Kobulov himself told interrogators that Beria was "a careerist, an adventurer and a Bonapartist", while Dekanozov called Beria a careerist, a domineering and malicious man marked by perfidy and vindictiveness.