Ivan Serov

State Security General Ivan Alexandrovich Serov (Russian: Ивáн Алексáндрович Серóв, 13 August 1905 – 1 July 1990) was a prominent leader of Soviet security and intelligence agencies, head of the KGB between March 1954 and December 1958, as well as head of the GRU between 1958 and 1963. He was Deputy Commissar of the NKVD under Lavrentiy Beria, and was to play a major role in the political intrigues after Joseph Stalin's death. Serov helped establish a variety of secret police forces in Central and Eastern Europe after the rise of the Iron Curtain, and played an important role in crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Serov headed both the political intelligence agency (KGB) and the military intelligence agency (GRU), making him unique in Soviet/Russian history. Inside the Soviet security forces, Serov was widely known for boasting to his colleagues that he could "break every bone in a man's body without killing him".

Early life and military career

Serov was born on 13 August 1905, in Afimskoe, a village in the Vologda Governorate of the Russian Empire in a family of Russian ethnicity. Major changes in Russia occurred during his childhood, culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. In 1923 (when he was 18) he joined the Red Army, shortly after the end of the Russian Civil War; in 1926, he became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and graduated from the Artillery Officers' School of Leningrad in 1928. A major step in his career as a Red Army officer was the attendance in the mid-1930s of Higher Academic Courses in the prestigious Frunze Military Academy. In 1939, Serov entered the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), in a major capacity.