Ivan Alexandrovich Serov

Serov kept diaries secretly from 1939, when he first appeared at the Lubyanka; after retirement he continued writing and completed memoirs which he hid at his dacha in Arkhangelskoye near Moscow. Then-KGB chairman Yuri Andropov testified in 1971 that Serov was writing memoirs, and given the specifics of his activity publication in the USSR was then out of the question.

In 2012, during demolition of a garage wall at Serov's dacha in Krasnogorsky District, Moscow Oblast, his granddaughter Vera Vladimirovna Serova said she found two walled-up suitcases containing typewritten general's materials and manuscripts, presented as the long-missing memoirs. The originals were never shown to independent researchers and never underwent state forensic examination of the paper, which raised doubts about their authenticity; access to the originals for scholars and experts is not provided, and their current location is classified.

In 2016 the Russian Military-Historical Society published the diaries as a separate 700-page book, "Notes from a Suitcase" (Записки из чемодана), edited with commentary by journalist and State Duma deputy Aleksandr Khinshtein; it contained about one third of the total volume of Serov's recollections, and by expert assessments basic rules of scholarly publication were not observed.

The publication's authenticity was disputed: in July 2016 on Ekho Moskvy's program "Dilettantes", historian Boris Sokolov argued the materials were fabricated, prompting a libel suit; in December 2016 the Presnensky District Court of Moscow found that Sokolov had not made statements defaming the general's honour and dignity, and Khinshtein's appeal to the Moscow City Court was also rejected.

On 9 November 2016 the Presnensky District Court of Moscow began hearing a civil suit by State Duma deputy Aleksandr Khinshtein and Vera Serova against Ekho Moskvy and historian Boris Sokolov, seeking a retraction of statements that the memoir was falsified; the claim stemmed from Sokolov's July 2016 remarks that the memoirs and diary entries were a fabrication manufactured by editor Khinshtein to rehabilitate the "executioner" Serov. Claimants initially sought 1 million rubles each from the radio station and 500,000 from Sokolov (about 3 million total), later raising the claim against Sokolov to 1.5 million; on 23 December 2016 the court rejected the suit.

At the 7 December 2016 hearing Vera Serova brought old suitcases with yellowed notebooks, asserting a handwriting expert examination confirmed one hand and that her grandfather wrote the material over his life and confused dates in old age; the court declined to admit the notebooks into the case file but allowed the defence two hours to examine them. Sokolov conceded some text may be Serov's but argued it was not a diary, calling it scattered fragments of recollections, and cited a factual mismatch (the book places Serov as eyewitness to Major Arshava's death at the Klukhor Pass on 18 August 1942 while Serov was also in Stalingrad; Sokolov dated Arshava's death to 3 September).

Sokolov's detailed forgery objections, submitted to the court, cited anachronisms in passages presented as diary entries: mention of Red Army armored personnel carriers in Lvov in September 1939 (APCs entered the Red Army only at the end of 1941 via Lend-Lease), submachine-gunner companies in the Baltic in June 1941 (such companies established only by NKO Order no. 0406 of 12 October 1941), Molotov titled "Minister of Foreign Affairs" in a May 1941 entry (the title until 1946 was People's Commissar), and figures and designations in the spring 1942 Crimea passage; on these grounds he argued the published material in large part was not written by Serov or at the time claimed.

The reliability of the memoir also bears on the Raoul Wallenberg case: the published recollections contain Serov's claims about a 1947 cremation certificate for Wallenberg's remains and about Abakumov's alleged 1953-54 confirmation that Wallenberg was "liquidated" on Stalin's and Molotov's direct orders, but researchers noted that the original Wallenberg diary notes were not reproduced, parts of the recollections appear prompted by 1987 telephone calls to Serov's home, and the notes contain factual errors that cast doubt on at least part of his recollections.

Serov served as a key executor across the full spectrum of Soviet state security's mass ethnic deportation operations. In autumn 1939, as NKVD chief for western Ukraine, he drafted instructions detailing procedures for arresting and deporting populations from annexed eastern Poland. Known as the 'Serov Instructions' (Instruktsiya Serova), this document was subsequently adopted as the standard template for deportation operations throughout the USSR. On 21 January 1941, Serov, now Deputy People's Commissar of State Security, signed the order, and on the night of 13–14 June 1941 he coordinated the forcible removal of approximately 40,000 people from the Baltic states to Siberia and Central Asia.

In February 1944, Serov served on Beria's four-man operational headquarters that commanded Operation Lentil, the wholesale deportation of the Chechen and Ingush peoples to Central Asia. The operation deployed some 120,000 NKVD troops and transported roughly 500,000 Chechens and Ingush in cattle cars. Serov was also involved in the same year's deportations of Crimean Tatars, Balkars, and Kalmyks; tens of thousands of these 'punished peoples' perished in transit. For this work he received the Order of Suvorov, 1st class, in March 1944, an award revoked in April 1962. The deportation procedure Serov refined, in which families were roused at night, given under an hour to pack, and household heads separated into the Gulag, became the administrative blueprint for Stalin-era state violence against whole nationalities.

When the Hungarian Uprising broke out in October 1956, KGB Chairman Serov was dispatched to Budapest to direct Soviet armed intervention on the ground. His task was not only to crush the revolt but to neutralize the Hungarian leadership. At midnight on November 3, Serov personally appeared before the Hungarian delegation, led by Defense Minister Pál Maléter and assembled at the Tököl military airfield on Csepel Island for what they believed were negotiations on Soviet troop withdrawal, and declared, "You are under arrest." The talks had been a trap. The arrest broke the Nagy government's capacity for military resistance, and the full-scale Soviet assault began the next day, November 4. Serov then oversaw the arrest of uprising participants and supervised the reorganization of pro-Soviet security organs. For this, he received the Order of Kutuzov, 1st class, in December 1956. Maléter and Nagy were tried and executed in 1958.