Sokolov, Boris/Harrison, Richard W. Soviet Secret Police Chiefs 1917-1953

Commissar of Fear

The book is a collected edition of two works by Boris V. Sokolov, which describe in detail the lives and careers of six Soviet secret service chiefs from Dzerzhinsky to Abakumov. The book combines The People's Commissars of Fear and its expanded version The People's Commissars of Terror and offers a comprehensive overview of the men who ran Stalin's apparatus of oppression. This reflection on the Soviet era, particularly the 1920s to 1950s under Stalin, challenges romanticised views of the past by portraying it as a dark and tragic period. The fate of the six Soviet secret service chiefs once powerful figures of state repression serves as a poignant example of this. These men, responsible for countless deaths during the Great Terror, ultimately shared the fate of their victims and were executed by the same regime they had served. The author emphasises that they were not monstrous by nature, but ordinary people who were shaped and corrupted by a criminal system. Had historical circumstances been different, they might have led quiet lives. The positions they held sealed their fate, as the blood on their hands, mirroring that of the top party leadership, made them too dangerous for the regime to allow them to live. Their tragic end shows how power not only corrupted its own representatives, but also consumed them. The author concludes that it was not personal evil, but the systemic, criminal nature of Soviet power that turned these otherwise mediocre men into enduring symbols of terror.