Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov ( 1905-1990)
Serov was a village mayor in 1924- 5 and then studied at the Military Technical College in Leningrad in 1925-8. He joined the Soviet communist party in 1926. From 1928 to 1935, he held various commands in the Red Army. He graduated from the Frunze Military Academy in 1939. At the end of that year, he became commissar (minister) of the interior in Ukraine. He was appointed All-Union deputy commissar for state security in 1941 and deputy commissar of the interior from later that year until 1954. Serov was president of the KGB from 1954 to 1958, and in that capacity directed the operation of the state-security organizations in Hungary during October and November 1956. From December 1958 to the end of 1962, Serov headed the intelligence division of the Soviet Army General Staff. Serov, who became a trusted assistant of Khrushchev, was a CPSU Central Committee member from 1956 to 1961 and a member of the Supreme Soviet from 1946 to 1962. At the beginning of 1963, he was dismissed from all his positions and demoted from field marshal to major general after one of his subordinates, O.V. Penkovsky, was exposed as a spy for the Americans and the British. In 1965, he was expelled from the party and sent into retirement.
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