Generał NKWD z ziemi polskiej do niemieckiej
An NKVD General: from Poland to the German Land

Summary/Abstract: After Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky and Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov was the number one figure in Soviet security. Serov was the only official in the Soviet Union to be the head of both the “civilian” Committee for State Security (KGB) and the military Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). He is the author of diaries, which he kept — on an ongoing basis and in secret — for almost a quarter of a century. Shortly after the release of the Russian version (Записки из чемодана. Тайные дневники первого председатёля КГБ, найденные черёз 25 лет после его снерти, 2016), Serov’s diaries were published in Polish, under the title Tajemnice walizki generała Sierowa. Dzienniki pierwszego szefa KGB. 1939—1963 [Secrets out of General Serov’s Suitcase. Diaries of the First Head of the KGB, 1939—1963] (ed. A. Hinsztejn, tr. A. Janowski, J. Cichocki, published by REA-SJ, Konstancin-Jeziorna 2019, pp. 863). For historians, this is an invaluable source of knowledge. Adam Lityński has supported his arguments in this article primarily on this document. Serov conducted the forced resettlement (“pacification”) of the eastern half of Poland and the Baltic states when, in 1939, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (Ribbentrop-Molotov), they had fallen under Soviet occupation. Then, after 1944, he went on to conduct a bloody resettlement of the whole of Poland when Soviet troops had entered there. Next, he was sent to Germany when Berlin was being stormed in April 1945. His tasks included: finding the living or dead leaders of the Third Reich, capturing German experts in charge of the construction of modern weapons and bringing them to the Soviet Union, and supervising the dismantling of important factories and transporting them to the USSR. He performed all these tasks perfectly.

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