Ivan Serov, the Forgotten Butcher of the 20th Century: One of the Best Experts on Deportation.

An unknown and forgotten figure in the history of Ukraine and the world, he committed atrocities not only against Ukrainians but also against Poles, Lithuanians, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and over 12 other nations. He is known as “the expert on deportation”. Quite recently, the person of Ivan Serov began to be popularized, however, in Russian historiography. In the whirlpool of propaganda of the ideal Soviet world, Russian television began to make documentaries about him, completely ignoring his crimes against humanity. But in Ukraine and the world, the opposite is the case: we know perfectly well the crimes of the Bolsheviks, but we do not know who was behind them. Today we will shed light on the personality of the forgotten general and tell about his crimes.

Ivan was born near Tsaritsyn in modern Russia in an ordinary peasant family. During the “socialist revolution,” he was a schoolboy, and after graduating from school in 1923, he joined the Komsomol. Serov began his career as a Soviet soldier by joining the ranks of the Red Army in 1925. From August 1925 to August 1928, he was a cadet at the Leningrad Infantry School; at the time, it was still an elite institution for young cadets’ training. In June 1926, Ivan joined the Bolshevik Communist Party and began to work his way up the career ladder. For example, from 1928 to January 1931, he became the commander of the artillery platoon of the 66th Rifle Regiment, of the artillery regiment of the 22nd Rifle Division in the North Caucasus Military District. In 1935, he became the chief of staff of the Regiment of the 24th rifle division.

Between 1935 and 1939, he underwent military training at various academies. As a result of political repressions and the great terror of 1936–1938, and the purge of personnel in the NKVD, on September 2, 1939, Ivan Serov was appointed the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR: this period of work in Ukraine turned out to be fateful and defining for him, in every sense of the word. Here, for the first time, he demonstrated his efficiency and harshness, which Beria and Stalin highly appreciated, and ensured his further promotion and warm relations with the leadership. Secondly, he got close to Georgy Zhukov and the 1st Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the future Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. It is no accident that, after coming to power, Khrushchev appointed Serov to the KGB.

Immediately after being appointed to his new position, Ivan Serov decided to study the history of Ukraine from the NKVD textbooks.

With the beginning of the Second World War, having studied Soviet methodology, Ivan Serov was appointed responsible for the occupation of Western Ukrainian lands by Soviet troops. He actively traveled to captured places, carried out Soviet propaganda, and dealt with “revolutionary elements”. For example, Ivan described an interesting situation that occurred near Ternopil:

In one of the villages, I noticed the yellow-red-black flags hung on the houses. I stopped to talk with the villagers. I asked: “Did the Red Army troops pass here?” They replied: “No, you are the first.” I was confused […] I heard shooting, and we encountered wounded Red Army soldiers. I then asked, “What are these flags?” They told me, smiling, that it was the national flag of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN, headed by Bandera. Only then I understood. The entire village supports the OUN, whose slogan is “Independent Ukraine”. I thought that later we would have lots of trouble with these independents. And so it turned out to be.

Serov mentions that the Soviet occupation did not occur quickly and victoriously. During the western regions’ takeover, the soldiers started panicking from the first days. The panic possessed them because of numerous Polish and Ukrainian partisan actions. From Ivan’s memoirs: “They shoot at our people from the roofs and attics of houses. During the entire subsequent operation to capture the city, this “psychosis” haunted everyone.”

With the completion of the Soviet annexation and elections to the People’s Assembly of Western Ukraine, Ivan developed a plan to deport the civilian population of Western Ukraine: between 1940–1941, about a million people were deported because of his actions. At the same time, he was one of the initiators of the executions of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn Forest. Repression also affected their relatives. On March 7, 1940, Beria signed a directive for Serov: by April 15, “to carry out the eviction to the regions of the Kazakh SSR for a period of 10 years” of all family members of previously arrested Polish officers, jailers, gendarmes, landlords, manufacturers, government officials.

Crimes were also committed against the Baltic states, which were recently annexed in 1941. Ivan Serov actively participated in the deportations of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. Since then, Ivan had been called an “expert on deportation”; but that’s not all. During the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Ivan Serov was responsible for the repression and deportation of residents. It is what one of the newspapers wrote about the situation in Chernivtsi: “All the Bolsheviks did was loot the city, they took everything, even unhooked the lamps, took the latches from the houses where entire families were arrested, or from where people had fled. Within a month or two, they created an entire network, and the GPU had about 300,000 Ukrainians in their lists.”

With the onset of the German-Soviet war, Ivan relocated to Moscow and became Stalin’s trusted person who carried out his orders. Commenting on the war in his diary, Ivan believed that the rapid advance of “the Hitlerites” was caused by the joint preparation for an attack on the USSR with the OUN members and the collaborationism of the local “Banderites”. During the war, Serov’s biography was associated with the mass deportation of nations whom Stalin accused of treason. Twelve nationalities underwent total deportation at that time. In the shortest possible time, within a few days, hundreds of thousands of people, escorted by the NKVD troops, were sent in echelons to the other end of the country, usually to Siberia or Central Asia. Serov was directly involved in most of these operations. He supervised the deportation of Germans from the Volga region, Kalmyks, and Crimean Tatars and participated in the eviction of the Chechen and Ingush people. He inspected the Polish security service creation, which carried out post-war repressions against the civilian population. At the same time, from 1945 to 1947, Ivan was the deputy head of the SMERSH in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany.

And it is doubtful that Serov had any remorse. It is impossible to find any emotions about this in his notes. However, that’s not even the point. Being a military man, Serov was not used to discussing but to carrying out any orders he received, even the most extreme ones. It is worth saying that he carried his orders out very effectively, becoming one of the best experts on deportation in his commanders’ eyes.

In 1944, within four months, he was decorated with two military orders: the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Suvorov 1st Class. After the war, he was appointed to the post of deputy head of the NKVD of the USSR; a member of the Soviet special services; and an army general since 1955. After achieving the highest honors, General Serov still commanded the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. However, in 1963, Ivan was fired from the post of head of GRU of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR, demoted, and stripped of all awards. Ivan lived peacefully until 1990 when he died in his Moscow dacha.