Vladimir Georgiyevich Dekanozov

When Lavrentiy Beria was appointed head of the NKVD in November 1938, Dekanozov was immediately summoned to Moscow and named deputy chief of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB). He simultaneously headed both the 5th Department (foreign intelligence) and the 3rd Department (counterintelligence): an extraordinary concentration of power. His primary mission was to purge Nikolai Yezhov's remaining loyalists from the NKVD and to direct the continuing purges of the Red Army. Over roughly six months from December 1938 to May 1939, he served as Beria's most trusted executor, a key director of the final wave of the Great Purge. He left the NKVD in May 1939 to become Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, but his state security career had been decisive in consolidating Beria's rise as Stalin's closest lieutenant. He received the rank of Commissar of State Security 3rd Class in December 1938 and was later promoted to lieutenant general in 1945. In 2000, the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court refused his rehabilitation, citing 'systematic abuse of power including the arrest of innocent people, fabrication of criminal cases, and use of torture.' Yet in 2020, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) placed him on its official list of heroic Soviet intelligence figures.

On 24 November 1940 Dekanozov was appointed plenipotentiary representative of the USSR in Germany while keeping his post as deputy people's commissar of foreign affairs; from 9 May 1941 he held the rank of ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary and remained in the post until the German attack. He presented his credentials to Hitler on 19 December 1940. According to his own dispatch to Moscow, a guard of honour was drawn up in the courtyard of the Imperial Chancellery, and Hitler asked whether he came from the same locality where Stalin was born and whether he had long known Stalin from joint revolutionary work. Dekanozov replied that his parents came from the Gori area of Georgia but that he himself was born in Baku and had never worked with Stalin. In the days before 22 June 1941 he made last attempts in Berlin to reopen dialogue with the German leadership and obtain an audience with Hitler, which never came. Instead he sent a verbal note to Ribbentrop citing 180 German aircraft incursions into Soviet airspace between 19 April and 19 June 1941, penetrating up to 150 kilometres. The Russian-language accounts date the delivery of the declaration of war at 4 a.m. on 22 June 1941, when Ribbentrop summoned Dekanozov and read him the note declaring war; Dekanozov argued that the German claims were unfounded. He later recalled Ribbentrop's hypocritical reply that he personally grieved and had personally done everything to stabilize relations with Russia. One English-language biography dates the same presentation of the declaration of war to 21 June 1941. After the German attack, Germany and the USSR agreed on reciprocal treatment of diplomats; Dekanozov was interned with the embassy staff and exchanged on the Soviet-Turkish border for the German ambassador to the USSR, Werner von der Schulenburg, and German diplomats. After the war he was deputy minister of foreign affairs from March 1946 to March 1947, was placed in March 1947 as deputy head of the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad (GUSIMZ) under Merkulov, and was freed of that post in 1949.