1 Data from Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, pp. 22—25, 55, 60, 73, 128; Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, pp. 380 and 421. Also see the text.
The head of the newly created Fourth Special Department, Mikhail Petrovich Filimonov, was a chemist, and it seems that he had a Candidate of Science scientific degree. At least, he was a graduate student at the Moscow Institute of Precise Chemical Technologies.100 He joined the NKVD in December 1938. At first, Filimonov was deputy head of the Eleventh Division of the GUGB Fifth (Foreign Intelligence) Department.
The reorganization was finalized on March 9, 1939.101 From this time and until mid-1946, Filimonov’s department, including Mairanovsky’s laboratory, was located in a nice-looking building behind the main NKVD headquarters, known as Lubyanka, on the corner of Bol’shaya Lubyanka Street and Varsonofyevsky Lane. The previous location of the experimental laboratory had been in two different NKVD buildings: in Kuchino, a town outside Moscow, and on Fourth Meshchanskaya Street, then in a distant part of Moscow not far from Butyrka Prison.102 The official address of the new building, No. 11 Varsonofyevsky Lane, had a bad reputation among Muscovites. The basement of the inner part of this building, with an entrance from the yard, was known since the 1920s as “the execution garage,” where special VCheKa executioners shot victims condemned to death. This building still exists; however, the entrance into the yard is blocked.103
In 1939, another part of the building, also with an entrance from the yard, was given to Filimonov’s department. Vasilii Blokhin, who was both the commandant of Lubyanka Prison and the chief executioner, became a close collaborator of Mairanovsky’s: Blokhin was in charge of providing prisoners for experiments. One can imagine that this work did not bother Blokhin much, since he executed innumerable NKVD victims. Here is a description of his work: “He [Blokhin] put on a special uniform: a brown leather apron, a leather cap, a pair of long leather gloves… A person was ordered to enter a soundproof room and was shot [by Blokhin] in the head from behind…”104
That same March in 1939, Stalin personally, in the presence of Beria, ordered Sudoplatov to develop an efficient plan to kill Trotsky.105 Eitingon, who had just returned from Spain, where he was an NKVD rezident, joined the operation and later became the main organizer of Trotsky’s murder in Mexico. The details of the operation were discussed with the new head (formerly deputy head) of the GUGB Fifth (Foreign Intelligence) Department, Pavel Fitin. Chemicals from Filimonov’s secret NKVD toxicological laboratory were considered among possible tools for use in Trotsky’s assassination. Stalin approved the plan in early August 1939.106 The plan included the following possible means of assassination: “Poisoning of food [or] water; an explosion in the house; an explosion of the car using T.N.T.; smothering; an attack with a knife; a hit on the head; firing a gun. An armed group attack is also possible.”107 Poisoning was considered to be the easiest method.
In the end, Trotsky was attacked by a member of Eitingon’s team (Eitingon’s alias for the operation was “Tom”), the Spanish Communist Ramon Mercader, with an ice pick.108 The day after the assassination attempt, on August 21, 1941, Trotsky died in a hospital.109 In May 1944, the Mexican Federal Court condemned the killer Ramon Mercader (under his alias name “Jacques Mornard”) to twenty years’ imprisonment. After his release in May 1960, Mercader went to Moscow, where he was immediately secretly awarded the highest Soviet order, the Hero of the Soviet Union. In 1974, Mercader left Moscow for Cuba, where he died in 1978.
Filimonov was the supervisor of the experimental laboratories from 1939 during all the reorganizations (see Table 2.1). On January 18, 1942, as a result of the new reorganization, the NKVD Fourth Department was promoted to a directorate and combined with the NKVD Second Department, with Sudoplatov as its head.110 Eitingon became Sudoplatov’s deputy on August 20, 1942.111 In the new Fourth Directorate, Filimonov headed the Fourth Department,112 and Yakov Serebryansky became head of the Special (Terrorist) Group. In May 1943, after the division of the NKVD into the NKVD and NKGB, the Fourth Directorate became the NKGB Fourth Directorate. Sudoplatov headed it until the beginning of 1944.113 In February 1944, Sudoplatov left to head the NKGB Department “S,” created to supervise the analysis of atomic intelligence collected by both the NKGB and the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU).
Within the NKVD Fourth Directorate, Mairanovsky and Muromtsev each had a laboratory. Both laboratories were under the direct supervision of Commissar Beria and his first deputy, Merkulov (Table 2.1). In 1943–1945, when Merkulov was NKGB commissar, his first deputy, Bogdan Kobulov, whom Beria brought to Moscow from Georgia in 1938, was also in charge of the laboratory. Sudoplatov and his deputy, Eitingon, were well informed about experiments in Mairanovsky’s lab. When Sudoplatov was tried in 1958, his involvement with Mairanovsky’s “laboratory of death” was one of the charges against him:
…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 Eitingon from 1942 till 1946. They demanded he provide them only with poisons that had been tested on humans…114
On March 22, 1946, the NKGB was renamed MGB,115 and on May 4, 1946, the new minister, Viktor Abakumov, replaced Merkulov.116 Sergei Ogol’tsov, who was appointed the NKGB/MGB first deputy commissar/minister on December 4, 1945, retained his position. Filimonov remained head of the Fourth Department of the MGB Fourth Directorate until June 1946, when the Fourth Department was disbanded.117 In October 1946, the entire MGB Fourth Directorate was dissolved.118 Sudoplatov, Eitingon, and their main staff were transferred to the newly organized Department “DR” (Special Service for Diversions and Intelligence) and then, in 1950, to Bureau No. 1 (Terrorist Acts Abroad).119 The creation of this bureau and Bureau No. 2 (Special Actions Within the Soviet Union) were approved by Stalin himself and then the Politburo (Document 10, Appendix II). Later, in Beria’s MVD, on May 30, 1953, Bureau No. 1 became the MVD Ninth Department (Acts of Individual Terror and Diversions) and after Beria’s arrest, on July 31, 1953, this department was merged with the MVD Second Main (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate.120 On August 21, 1953, Sudoplatov was arrested. On November 20, 1953, the Presidium (former Politburo) ordered the creation of a new Special Department 12 within the MVD Second Main Directorate with the same functions as Sudoplatov’s former Bureau No. 1: “for terrorist acts at the important military-strategic objects and communications at the territories of the main aggressive states, USA and England, as well as the territories of other capitalist countries.”121