Stepan Solomonovich Mamulov
Степан Соломонович Мамулов
1902–1976
○ Served fifteen years, died of natural causes
The gatekeeper who held the NKVD secretariat
Summoned from Tbilisi by Beria in December 1938. A month later he was first deputy chief of the NKVD Secretariat; for the next fourteen years, every document of the secret police crossed his desk.
Beria loyalist and party functionary. As NKVD Secretariat chief from 1939 he controlled the commissariat's entire document flow; later deputy interior minister overseeing the camp system. Tried separately from Beria, served a full fifteen-year term and was released in 1968.
Career Timeline
- 1923–1938Party work in Abkhazia, Georgia and Kazakhstan; secretary of the Tbilisi city committee
- 1939–1946Head of the Secretariat of the NKVD and MVD
- 1946–1953Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, supervising camp and supply administrations
- 1953Department head, Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia
- 1953–1968Arrested; served a fifteen-year sentence
Related historical events
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeHead of NKVD Secretariat
- 1953The Fall of BeriaFifteen yearsHis power was procedural and derivative, so he was tried not with the December 1953 group but in September 1954, alongside Ludvigov who had run Beria's Council of Ministers secretariat. He received fifteen years and served the full term.
Overseeing the Camp-Industrial System (1946–1953)
Appointed deputy minister of internal affairs in April 1946, Mamulov directly supervised the most productive sectors of the Soviet forced-labour economy. His purview included the Main Directorate of Camps for Mining and Metallurgical Enterprises (the Gulag's mining arm), the Directorate of Forest Industry Camps, and Dalstroy (the vast camp complex in the Kolyma region of the Far East). These institutions mobilised hundreds of thousands of prisoners to extract strategic minerals including gold, tin, and uranium, and to build railways and roads. Mamulov also oversaw the supply and technical-procurement directorate, the planning department, the Main Archive Directorate, the transport department, and the MVD's 2nd Special Department (operational technology) and 3rd Special Department (the state precious-metals fund, Gokhran). By 1951 his responsibilities had concentrated almost entirely on the camp directorates, making him the de facto day-to-day operator of the MVD's camp economy. If Beria as minister set the overall direction, Mamulov was the executive who carried out camp production plans and allocated the material resources that sustained them.