Sergey Nikiforovich Kruglov

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Stalin signed GKO Resolution No. 9887 launching a crash nuclear program and established a Special Committee under Lavrentiy Beria. The operational muscle behind the project was the NKVD (later MVD). Kruglov, who became NKVD chief in December 1945, was identified alongside Beria and Ivan Tkachenko as one of the three chief officers of the Soviet nuclear weapons program. His agency supplied the Gulag prison labor that built the plutonium production complex at Chelyabinsk-40 (Combine 817, now known as Mayak) in the Southern Urals, the heart of the Soviet nuclear weapons complex and its answer to the Manhattan Project. Tens of thousands of prisoners and special settlers were deployed at the construction sites. Kruglov's MVD organized the forced-labor infrastructure across the entire nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to reactor construction to plutonium separation plants. After the first successful Soviet nuclear test (RDS-1) on 29 August 1949, Kruglov was awarded the Order of Lenin 'in connection with the successful test of the first Soviet atomic bomb.' He received a second Order of Lenin in 1951 for further successful nuclear tests, and a third in 1952 for the construction of the Volga-Don Canal. The scale and brutality of the Gulag labor mobilized for the nuclear program led to lasting radioactive contamination and environmental disaster, and remains one of the most consequential institutional legacies of Kruglov's tenure.

Kruglov's central historical significance lies in his administration of the internal-affairs apparatus as a system of coercive mobilization and population control after the war. He was one of the principal officials who organized the deportation of Chechens and Ingush in 1944–1945, and received the Order of Suvorov, First Class, an honor usually associated with front-line command. His responsibility extended beyond wartime operations. In 1948 he organized the mass removal of the German population from Kaliningrad Oblast, annexed by the Soviet Union after the war, and in the same period joined Viktor Abakumov in submitting to Stalin a memorandum that hardened Gulag practices by allowing political prisoners to be held or sent into administrative exile after their nominal sentences ended. Kruglov was therefore not simply Beria's personal subordinate, but a senior administrator who connected policing, camps, and deportation within a single state apparatus directed by the party leadership. Kate Brown's research shows that this apparatus also underpinned nuclear production, while radiation risks were distributed unevenly onto non-Russian populations and forced laborers.