Pavel Sudoplatov
Encyclopedia
Lieutenant General
Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov (Пáвел Aнатóльевич Cудоплáтов) (July 7, 1907 – September 26, 1996) was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union
who rose to the rank of lieutenant general
. He was involved in several famous incidents of the early Cold War
, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky
, the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project
, and Operation Scherhorn
, a Soviet deception operation against the Germans in 1944. His autobiography, Special Tasks
, made him well-known outside the USSR, and provided a detailed look at Soviet intelligence and Soviet internal politics during his years at the top.
, in Eastern Ukraine
, to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father. He joined Cheka
in 1921, at the age of fourteen, and was promoted to the Secret Political Department of the Ukrainian State Political Directorate
(OGPU) in 1927.
In 1928 he married Emma Kaganova, a Jewish girl from Gomel, Belarus who had been recruited by and worked for the OGPU.
He transferred to the Soviet OGPU in 1933, moving to Moscow
, and soon after became an "illegal", operating under cover in a number of European countries. In May, 1938, on Joseph Stalin
's direct order, he personally assassinated the Ukrainian nationalist leader Yevhen Konovalets
by giving him a booby-trapped box of chocolates.
In the fall of 1938, he was made acting director of the Foreign Department of the NKVD
(as the OGPU had by then become) after the purging of the previous head, in a set of purges which later culminated in the fall of Nikolai Yezhov
(who was eventually replaced by Lavrentii Beria). Shortly afterward, Sudoplatov narrowly escaped being purged himself.
In March, 1939, Stalin rehabilitated Sudoplatov, promoting him to deputy director of the Foreign Department, and placed him in charge of the assassination of Trotsky, which was carried out in August, 1940.
In June, 1941, Sudoplatov was placed in charge of the NKVD's Administration for Special Tasks, the principal task of which was to carry out sabotage
operations behind enemy lines in wartime (both it and the Foreign Department had also been used to carry out assassinations abroad). During World War II
, his unit helped organize guerrilla
bands, and other secret behind-the-lines units for sabotage and assassinations, to fight the Nazis.
In late July 1941, under the orders of Lavrenti Beria, he met (in a Georgian restaurant in the centre of Moscow) with the Bulgarian ambassador, who was the representative of Germany in USSR, at the time. Sudoplatov asked the ambassador if Hitler would stop penetration of the USSR, in exchange for giving Germany, a large part of USSR. (No one knows if this proposition was true or if it was an attempt of USSR to gain time).
In February, 1944, Beria named Sudoplatov to also head the newly-formed Department S, which united both GRU
and NKVD intelligence work on the atomic bomb; he was also given a management role in the Soviet atomic effort
, to help with coordination.
In the summer of 1946, he was removed from both posts, and in September he was placed in charge of another group at the newly-renamed MGB, one which was supposed to plan sabotage actions in Western countries. In November, 1949, he was given a temporary job helping suppress a guerilla movement in Ukraine that was a relic of WWII.
In the spring of 1953, around the time of Stalin's death, Sudoplatov was appointed to head the yet-again renamed MVD's Bureau of Special Tasks, which was responsible for sabotage operations abroad, and ran networks of "illegals" who were given the task of preparing attacks on military establishments in NATO countries, in the event that NATO attacked the Soviet Union.
's laboratory of death
:
He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. After serving the full term (during which time he was housed with a number of Stalin's top assistants, also imprisoned), he was duly released in August, 1968.
and Ukrainian
, and wrote a novel as well as historical items about his work during WWII.
After an extensive campaign, including a publicity effort during the glasnost
era, he was finally re-habilitated and cleared of wrong-doing in 1992.
In 1994, his autobiography, Special Tasks
, based in large part on Sudoplatov's memory, and written with the help of his son Anatoli and two American writers, was published; it caused a considerable uproar. In addition to extensive details of many Soviet intelligence operations during Sudoplatov's career, and a similarly extensive discussion of the political machinations inside the intelligence services and the Soviet government, it claimed that a number of Western scientists who had worked on the atomic bomb project, while not agents for the Soviets, had provided useful atomic information; this has been heavily disputed. He was buried in the New Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow
.
Lieutenant General
Lieutenant General is a military rank used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages where the title of Lieutenant General was held by the second in command on the battlefield, who was normally subordinate to a Captain General....
Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov (Пáвел Aнатóльевич Cудоплáтов) (July 7, 1907 – September 26, 1996) was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
who rose to the rank of lieutenant general
Lieutenant General
Lieutenant General is a military rank used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages where the title of Lieutenant General was held by the second in command on the battlefield, who was normally subordinate to a Captain General....
. He was involved in several famous incidents of the early Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
, the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...
, and Operation Scherhorn
Operation Scherhorn
Operation Scherhorn or Operation Berezino , Operation Beresino was a secret deception operation performed by the NKVD against the Nazi secret services in August 1944 – May 1945...
, a Soviet deception operation against the Germans in 1944. His autobiography, Special Tasks
Special Tasks
Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster is the autobiography of Pavel Sudoplatov, who was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of major general; when it was published in 1994, it caused a considerable uproar, for a number of...
, made him well-known outside the USSR, and provided a detailed look at Soviet intelligence and Soviet internal politics during his years at the top.
Early life and career
He was born in MelitopolMelitopol
Melitopol is a city in the Zaporizhia Oblast of the southeastern Ukraine. It is situated on the Molochna River that flows through the eastern edge of the city and into the Molochnyi Liman, which eventually joins the Sea of Azov....
, in Eastern Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father. He joined Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
in 1921, at the age of fourteen, and was promoted to the Secret Political Department of the Ukrainian State Political Directorate
State Political Directorate
The State Political Directorate was the secret police of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1934...
(OGPU) in 1927.
In 1928 he married Emma Kaganova, a Jewish girl from Gomel, Belarus who had been recruited by and worked for the OGPU.
He transferred to the Soviet OGPU in 1933, moving to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, and soon after became an "illegal", operating under cover in a number of European countries. In May, 1938, on Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's direct order, he personally assassinated the Ukrainian nationalist leader Yevhen Konovalets
Yevhen Konovalets
Yevhen Konovalets was a military commander of the UNR army and political leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement...
by giving him a booby-trapped box of chocolates.
In the fall of 1938, he was made acting director of the Foreign Department of the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
(as the OGPU had by then become) after the purging of the previous head, in a set of purges which later culminated in the fall of Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...
(who was eventually replaced by Lavrentii Beria). Shortly afterward, Sudoplatov narrowly escaped being purged himself.
In March, 1939, Stalin rehabilitated Sudoplatov, promoting him to deputy director of the Foreign Department, and placed him in charge of the assassination of Trotsky, which was carried out in August, 1940.
In June, 1941, Sudoplatov was placed in charge of the NKVD's Administration for Special Tasks, the principal task of which was to carry out sabotage
Sabotage
Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening another entity through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction. In a workplace setting, sabotage is the conscious withdrawal of efficiency generally directed at causing some change in workplace conditions. One who engages in sabotage is...
operations behind enemy lines in wartime (both it and the Foreign Department had also been used to carry out assassinations abroad). During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, his unit helped organize guerrilla
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
bands, and other secret behind-the-lines units for sabotage and assassinations, to fight the Nazis.
In late July 1941, under the orders of Lavrenti Beria, he met (in a Georgian restaurant in the centre of Moscow) with the Bulgarian ambassador, who was the representative of Germany in USSR, at the time. Sudoplatov asked the ambassador if Hitler would stop penetration of the USSR, in exchange for giving Germany, a large part of USSR. (No one knows if this proposition was true or if it was an attempt of USSR to gain time).
In February, 1944, Beria named Sudoplatov to also head the newly-formed Department S, which united both GRU
GRU
GRU or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye is the foreign military intelligence directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation...
and NKVD intelligence work on the atomic bomb; he was also given a management role in the Soviet atomic effort
Soviet atomic bomb project
The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb , was a clandestine research and development program began during and post-World War II, in the wake of the Soviet Union's discovery of the United States' nuclear project...
, to help with coordination.
In the summer of 1946, he was removed from both posts, and in September he was placed in charge of another group at the newly-renamed MGB, one which was supposed to plan sabotage actions in Western countries. In November, 1949, he was given a temporary job helping suppress a guerilla movement in Ukraine that was a relic of WWII.
In the spring of 1953, around the time of Stalin's death, Sudoplatov was appointed to head the yet-again renamed MVD's Bureau of Special Tasks, which was responsible for sabotage operations abroad, and ran networks of "illegals" who were given the task of preparing attacks on military establishments in NATO countries, in the event that NATO attacked the Soviet Union.
Arrest, trial and imprisonment
After the fall of Lavrenty Beria, Sudoplatov was arrested on August 21, 1953. He simulated madness to avoid being executed with Beria, and therefore he was tried only in 1958. He was accused, among other things, of involvement with the MairanovskyGrigory Mairanovsky
Grigory Mairanovsky was a Soviet biochemist and poison developer.He was head of secret laboratories in the Bach Institute of Biochemistry in Moscow . As the head of Laboratory No. 1 of the NKVD , he initiated the secret "scientific" poison program conducted by the Soviet secret police services...
's laboratory of death
Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services
Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, alternatively known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera which means "The Chamber" in Russian, was a covert research and development facility of the Soviet secret police agencies,which notably also developed antidotes and internal...
:
- "As established [during the court trial], Beria and his accomplices committed terrible crimes against humanity: they tested deadly poisons, which caused agonizing death, on live humans. A special laboratory, which was established for experiments on the action of poisons on living humans, worked under the supervision of Sudoplatov and his deputy Eitington from 1942 to 1946. They demanded he provide them only with poisons that had been tested on humans...".
He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. After serving the full term (during which time he was housed with a number of Stalin's top assistants, also imprisoned), he was duly released in August, 1968.
Later life
He thereafter worked for some time as a translator, working in GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and Ukrainian
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
, and wrote a novel as well as historical items about his work during WWII.
After an extensive campaign, including a publicity effort during the glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
era, he was finally re-habilitated and cleared of wrong-doing in 1992.
In 1994, his autobiography, Special Tasks
Special Tasks
Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster is the autobiography of Pavel Sudoplatov, who was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of major general; when it was published in 1994, it caused a considerable uproar, for a number of...
, based in large part on Sudoplatov's memory, and written with the help of his son Anatoli and two American writers, was published; it caused a considerable uproar. In addition to extensive details of many Soviet intelligence operations during Sudoplatov's career, and a similarly extensive discussion of the political machinations inside the intelligence services and the Soviet government, it claimed that a number of Western scientists who had worked on the atomic bomb project, while not agents for the Soviets, had provided useful atomic information; this has been heavily disputed. He was buried in the New Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
.
Further reading
- Pavel Sudoplatov, Anatoli Sudoplatov, Jerrold L. Schecter, Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness -- A Soviet Spymaster (Little Brown, Boston, 1994)