Those closest to power are those who serve and protect it. The leaders of the Bolsheviks, positioning themselves as "the power of the people", at first were going to give up both guards and servants altogether. And it all ended with the fact that the VIP-protection in the form of the Ninth Directorate of the KGB became a state within a state.
In the first residence of the Bolshevik government - Smolny - the Baltic sailor Pavel Malkov was in charge of security issues. It was he who established the access control in Smolny; at first not too strict, but in order to get to Lenin or other members of the Bolshevik government (Council of People's Commissars), it was required to overcome at least two security lines - at the entrance to the building and directly at the office. Guard duty was carried out by Latvian riflemen, Baltic sailors, Red Guard workers.
Part-time bodyguards
The first attempt on Lenin's life took place on the first day of 1918. The country then still lived according to the old style, and the capital was not in Moscow, but in Petrograd.
The full composition of the conspiracy participants is unknown, but the perpetrators were members of the Union of St. George's Cavaliers. The militants fired pistols at the car in which Lenin was returning to Smolny after a rally in the Mikhailovsky arena. The driver Taras Gorokhovik managed to turn on the gas, and the Swiss communist Franz Platten saved Ilyich by bending his head and getting a bullet tangentially.
The conclusions from what happened were not made by Lenin, but by the legal head of state, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, Yakov Sverdlov, who ordered on February 24, 1918 to form the 1st auto-combat detachment of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. It consisted of 30 soldiers, including Latvians, as well as former German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. The vehicle fleet included several cars and motorcycles with light machine guns, four Fiat trucks with coaxial Maxim machine guns installed in their bodies, and two Austin armored cars.
This auto-fighting detachment in March 1918 moved with the Bolshevik leadership to Moscow, providing security both during the move and in the new Kremlin government residence.
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Sverdlov and other leaders of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee constantly used the services of an auto-combat detachment, but they did not particularly care about Lenin's safety.
As a result, on August 30, 1918, a new assassination attempt was made on the head of the Council of People's Commissars, which ended with his severe injury. At the scene of the assassination attempt by the chauffeur Stepan Gil and conscientious citizens, the Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan was captured. It is difficult to understand why the Socialist-Revolutionaries entrusted such a responsible mission to a half-blind and sick woman, but it was she who was declared the main perpetrator of the terrorist attack, sentenced to death.
The execution was carried out personally by Malkov in the presence of the poet Demyan Bedny, who asked to "see". The Kremlin commandant doused the body of the terrorist with gasoline and burned it in an iron barrel.
New threats to the life of the Bolshevik leaders constantly arose (Volodarsky was shot dead in Petrograd on June 20, and Uritsky was killed on August 30, the same day as the attempt on Lenin's life), and something had to be done about it.
In addition to the driver Gil, they began to attach another security guard to Lenin, but there was little sense, on January 6, 1919, the car of the Soviet prime minister, in which he was traveling with his sister Maria Ilyinichna, security guard Chabanov and the constant Gil, was stopped by the bandit Yakov Koshelkov and five of his accomplices. Although Gil, and Chabanov, and Ilyich himself had a pistol, they did not put up resistance, realizing that they were dealing not with terrorists, but with simple "gop-stoppers". Indeed, taking the car and cash, the hijackers went further on their criminal cases. Within half a year, they were all shot.
At the beginning of 1920, due to the conflict with Trotsky, Malkov was replaced by one of the commanders of the Latvian riflemen Rudolf Peterson. But since most of the riflemen began to return to their bourgeois homeland, by 1922 their place was gradually taken by "red cadets" who studied in Moscow at the commander's school at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
In November 1923, the chief security officer, Dzerzhinsky, created at the OGPU Collegium a special department to ensure the security of the top leadership of the USSR, headed by Abram Belenky. Twenty Chekists went to Gorki to guard Lenin, but in January 1924 Ilyich died, and the special department was reoriented to other tasks.
Peterson served as commandant of the Kremlin until 1935, when he was removed from office in connection with the so-called Kremlin affair. It was about a conspiracy allegedly uncovered by the Chekists with the participation of employees of the commandant's office and the Kremlin's library, who decided to kill Stalin himself. By the way, there were an order of magnitude more librarians in business than guards. But Peterson was not Stalin's man.
But Stalin's man was Nikolai Vlasik, who guarded the leader since 1927, first personally, then with his subordinates, and then as the head of a special structure in charge of the security of all top officials of the state. Peterson, as usual, was shot during the "Great Purge". Malkov, who did not get along with Trotsky, was condemned as a "Trotskyist", and after Stalin's death he was rehabilitated. And not even posthumously.
Vlasik and his legacy
The structure created by Vlasik was first called the department, then the Department, the department and, finally, the General Directorate of Security. She entered the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, then the state security, but retained autonomy and little depended on Lavrenty Beria, who oversaw the special services.
This did not suit Beria, and in May T952, during the "case of doctors" Vlasik was removed from his post. He was charged with not putting the “killers in white coats” off to the other side of the world Kalinin, Zhdanov, Shcherbakov.
Without a loyal head of security, the Generalissimo lived for less than a year.
With the arrest of Vlasik, the status of the Main Directorate of Security was downgraded to just management, and the security issues of the leader turned out to be closed to two state security officers - Ivan Khrustalev and Mikhail Starostin. On the day of Stalin's death, Vlasik's successor Nikolai Novik was in the hospital with an attack of purulent appendicitis. The day after the Generalissimo's funeral, his unit was disbanded altogether as an independent unit.
Beria, who became the new Minister of Internal Affairs, included the state security bodies in his department, in which the Ninth Directorate was created, which was entrusted with the protection of the top leaders of the party and state. There is a version that the serial number "nine" was chosen because every day Stalin's immediate protection was carried out by a change of nine officers. So the number "nine" became associated with a team of Soviet VIP bodyguards.
Beria's personal problem was that the reorganized Ministry of Internal Affairs consisted not only of his people, but also of people who locked themselves in on his competitors.
Until now, historians have not been able to understand how on June 27, 1953, Khrushchev and Malenkov managed to organize the arrest of Beria, to whom all the internal Kremlin guards staffed with the Ministry of Internal Affairs were subordinate. Was there a betrayal, or was the marshal rolled into the carpet dragged past his rotozei subordinates? It is a fact that after the historic meeting at which the arrest took place, the Kremlin was flooded with alarmed "red cadets" under the command of General Andrei Vedenin. He became the new Kremlin commandant.
However, the new leadership was not going to entrust their fate to the army team. On March 13, 1954, Nikita Khrushchev, who had confidently chosen the first positions, made the decision to create the State Security Committee (KGB), headed by his old ally Ivan Serov.
The new department consisted of ten departments, and the department responsible for the security of top management retained the same ninth number.
"Theaters" and "athletes"
At first, the "nine" was housed in the KGB building on Lubyanka, and later moved closer to the "wards" - in the 14th Kremlin building.
The list of the most important persons included at that time 17 people, for whose lives the 1st Department of the Ninth Directorate was directly responsible. Each of these 17 people was assigned a security department - that is, there were 17 such departments in total, and by the end of the Soviet era their number was close to three dozen. Created in November 1960 and retaining the same number 18, the so-called reserve department performed coordinating functions, being responsible for all VIPs at once, if it was about any mass event, be it a parade on Red Square or a concert in the Palace of Congresses. It is clear that the staff of this department was impressive - 180-200 employees.
His responsibilities included organizing foreign visits.
Stalin, while in power, traveled outside the USSR only twice - to the Tehran (1943) and Potsdam conferences (1945). In both cases, it was about the territories under the control of the Red Army, so that to ensure the safety of the leader, entire military units could be freely used.
Khrushchev turned foreign visits into a common practice, and it was about visiting both friendly countries and not very friendly ones. And in any case, these were sovereign states, where it was required to reckon with the rules established by the masters.
The preparations for the visit began with the dispatch of an "advance group" of four or five people abroad, making a general assessment of the situation, establishing contact with the special services of the "hosts", developing routes and assessing potential risks.
Two or three days before the visit, a transport plane from Moscow brought drivers and cars from the special garage.
If necessary, specialists from other units of the KGB and even other special services could be involved in the protection.
For example, in 1956, during a trip to England, Khrushchev was placed on the Ordzhonikidze cruiser, stationed in the harbor of Portsmouth. For safety, the cruiser was guarded by combat swimmers.
MI6, in turn, recruited scuba diving master Lionelle Crabbe. Our swimmer Eduard Koltsov, during an underwater patrol, caught Crabbe when he was spinning around the hull of a Soviet ship, and cut his throat. The parties did not begin to make problems out of what had happened and to enter into altercations on this matter.
In June 1959, under the "nine" created a department of government communications, reorganized 10 years later into the Office of Government Communications (UPS), but worked in constant contact with the "parent" structure.
Inside the 18th department, there were special groups responsible for the security of VIPs when visiting the theater, sports events, organizing photo and television filming.
For example, "athletes" not only knew sports venues thoroughly, but were also athletes without any quotes. Some of them participated in the Olympic torch relay in 1980 at the Moscow Olympics. Nikolai Kalashnikov, an employee of the "nine" and at the same time a player of the Soviet national water polo team, saved the life of the head of the Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin when a kayak overturned at the Soviet prime minister during a boat trip along the Moscow River.
My home is my castle
Of course, there was also a subdivision for the protection of places of residence in the structure of the Nine.
After Stalin's death, Khrushchev and Malenkov settled in adjacent mansions on Ostozhenka. A little later, a whole suite of mansions was built on the Lenin Hills for other top leaders, in one of which Nikita Sergeevich moved with his family.
Several more cottages located there were intended for distinguished foreign guests. On Kutuzovsky Prospekt, for members of the Politburo and the Central Committee, ministers and deputies of the Supreme Council, houses with expanded area and improved planning were allocated. Plus, it was required to protect state dachas in the Moscow region, in Valdai, in the Crimea, in the Caucasus, and hunting farms located there.
Maintenance of all these complexes required the involvement of electricians, plumbers, cooks, maids, who were also employees of the Ninth Directorate. Subdivisions-branches of the "nine" had to be created in Valdai, in the Crimea and the Caucasus, as well as in the union republics.
He was not part of the KGB structures, but was under the constant control of the special services based in Vnukovo, the Special Purpose Aviation Detachment (UNO), which was responsible for transporting not only Soviet leaders, but also friendly foreign political leaders.
Until the fall of the USSR, the Ninth Directorate reliably ensured the safety of its wards. Unlike the wards themselves, who could not save the state.
Failed arrest
Amazing events of their kind took place on September 10, 1982, when Interior Minister Shchelokov obtained Brezhnev's sanction for the arrest of Yuri Andropov. Three groups of militia special forces went to arrest the chief security officer, two of which were blocked on distant approaches. The third was neutralized by officers of the "nine" at the entrance of the house of IA Kutuzovsky, 26, where Brezhnev, Shchelokov, and Andropov lived.
Dmitry MSHYURIN