Beria's closest deputy, executor of Katyn and the mass deportations
Merkulov recalled: "After late-night work, Beria always took Kobulov — only Kobulov — home or to his dacha." No one else in the Lubyanka was that close.
Born the son of an Armenian tailor, he was spotted by Beria and became a core architect of Stalin's terror. As head of the NKVD Investigative Directorate (1938–1939) he directed interrogations and executions during the Great Purge, and in 1940 he sat on the three-man panel that carried out the Katyn massacre. During the war, as deputy head of the NKVD and NKGB, he personally commanded the mass deportation of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and other nations. Feared as Beria's personal torture specialist, he was brought back as First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs after Stalin's death, only to be arrested with Beria in June 1953 and shot with him that December.
Career Timeline
- 1922–1931Junior security officer in the Georgian Cheka and GPU
- 1931–1937Spotted by Beria and moved into the Secret-Political Department of the Georgian OGPU/NKVD
- 1937–1938Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Georgian SSR, directing local purges
- 1938–1939Head of NKVD Investigative Directorate — directs the Yezhov case and major political investigations
- 1939–1941Head of Main Economic Directorate NKVD; sits on the troika that orders the Katyn massacre
- 1941–1945Deputy People's Commissar of NKVD and NKGB — commands the mass deportation of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars and other nations
- 1953.3–1953.6First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs under Beria
- 1953.6–1953.12Arrested with Beria; sentenced to death and shot
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationDeputy Head of Georgian NKVD
- 1937–1938The Great Purgeled purges in Georgia as NKVD deputy during the Great Terror
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarDeputy NKVD commissar involved in economic directorate and partisan operations
- 1953The Fall of BeriaTargetBeria’s closest deputy, executed with him.
Beria's Personal Torturer — "Kobulich"
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.