Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov

On 5 March 1940, Beria proposed to Stalin that 14,700 Polish POWs and 11,000 Polish prisoners from western Ukraine and Belarus be shot without trial. The Politburo approved, and an NKVD troika was formed to expedite the death sentences. Merkulov, as Beria's first deputy, sat on this troika alongside Bogdan Kobulov and Leonid Bashtakov. The three men sentenced all 22,000 in absentia, reviewing nothing but name lists. No summons, no charges, no defence. The operation included the mass shootings in the Katyn Forest and remains one of the largest single state crimes of the Stalin era.

In spring 1943, when Nazi Germany discovered the mass graves at Katyn and exposed the atrocity internationally, Merkulov was put in charge of the Soviet cover-up. He headed the 'Commission for the Preliminary Investigation of the Katyn Case' (the Burdenko Commission), fabricating forensic evidence, coercing witnesses, and issuing a report in January 1944 that pinned the massacre on the German army. The Soviet Union maintained this forged narrative until 1990. Merkulov was the architect of the lie, just as he had overseen the killing.

On 4 May 1946 the MGB was restructured and Abakumov replaced Merkulov as Minister of State Security. The handover was humiliating, and Abakumov worked to discredit his record. A party act noted failures in investigative and agent work: state security had pursued "anti-Soviet elements" more than spies. The 1945 failure of a Soviet spy network in the United States also counted against him. In August 1946, as a party punishment, he was demoted from full member to candidate member of the Central Committee.

In a June 1946 letter to Stalin, Merkulov accepted Stalin's earlier description of him as "timid" and traced his own errors to reticence before Stalin: he was embarrassed to phone or write him, and in several cases failed to inform him or reported "in softened form" matters he was obliged to report immediately. This is an attributed self-assessment on the record.

After losing the MGB post, he was appointed in August 1946 deputy head of the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad (GUSIMZ) under the Ministry of Foreign Trade; when GUSIMZ became a separate main directorate under the Council of Ministers in April 1947 he became its head. He worked there until October 1950. The body handled removal of trophy property, largely for the top leadership: railway cars of cars, paintings, antiques and furniture brought into the USSR from defeated Germany. Merkulov later said that Stalin had initiated the foreign posting and that he read it as a sign of trust, having been sent abroad after removal from a post as senior as Minister of State Security.

In October 1950 Stalin named him Minister of State Control of the USSR. He recounted that he "felt almost rehabilitated after being released from work in the MGB in 1946," and he kept his position as candidate member of the Central Committee at the 19th Party Congress in October 1952. Sources date the State Control post 27 October 1950 – 22 May 1953 in one version and to 16 December 1953 in another; this discrepancy is flagged here rather than resolved. From 1946 until Stalin's death Merkulov did not meet Beria: he twice went to be received by him at the Council of Ministers and was not admitted, and did not resent it, understanding that Beria no longer needed him.

There were also health problems. In 1952 he suffered a first heart attack, and four months later a second; he spent a long time in hospital, and on 22 May 1953 the USSR Council of Ministers granted him four months' leave on health grounds. On the eve of Stalin's funeral Beria summoned him to help edit his funeral speech; Merkulov was struck that Beria was cheerful, joking and laughing and seemed elated, while he himself was crushed by Stalin's death. He rationalised it as a statesman's self-control. On 11 March 1953 he wrote Beria offering to give up the ministerial post and take any position in the MVD.

On 18 September 1953, however, he was arrested, the last of those who would sit alongside Beria. He was held in a solitary cell in Butyrka, and his interrogation protocols are dated 19 and 21 September and 8 and 23 October 1953. On 18 November 1953 he was removed by poll from candidate membership of the CPSU Central Committee, and on 16 December 1953 formally dismissed as minister "because the USSR Prosecutor's Office had uncovered criminal, anti-state actions by Merkulov during his work in the MGB and MVD." This is an evidenced arrest and detention phase distinct from the existing Katyn section.

In Beria's own interrogation protocol of 23 July 1953, the investigator read out Merkulov's witness statement of 21 July 1953 about the authorship of a book, and Beria denied the plagiarism. In that statement Merkulov said of Beria putting his signature to another man's work that it was "not even plagiarism, it is something more." The testimony belongs to the documentary prehistory of this late phase.

In his final statement Merkulov asked that the "counter-revolutionary articles" be dropped and that he be tried under other articles of the criminal code, and regretted the closeness to Beria that ruined him: "I did much for him, helped him, but I thought Beria was an honest man." His family was punished after him: in 1954, following his arrest and execution, his wife Lydia Dmitrievna and mother Ketevan Nikolaevna were exiled to special settlement in the Kazakh SSR.