Pavel Fitin - biography, photographs. From deputy editor of an agricultural newspaper to head of Soviet intelligence in just one year

He was born in 1907 in the village of Ozhogino, Yalutovsky district, Tobolsk province, into a peasant family. In his native village he worked in the agricultural artel "Zvezda", at the age of twenty he became chairman of the bureau of young pioneers, deputy secretary of the Shatrovsky district committee of the Komsomol. In 1928 he entered the Institute of Mechanization and Electrification of Agriculture in Moscow. In 1932, having received his diploma, he did not go to the village, but began to manage the editorial office of industrial literature at the State Publishing House of Agricultural Literature.

In October 1924, Fitin was drafted into the army. He served for a year and returned to work at the publishing house, where he became deputy editor-in-chief.

In March 1938, Pavel Fitin was recruited by the party into the state security agencies and sent to study at the NKVD Central School, created by decision of the Politburo in 1930. The usual period of training in special cycle disciplines was set at two years - even for people with higher education. But the NKVD felt such a shortage of personnel that all terms were reduced. Fitin studied for only five months.

In August 1938, he was enrolled in the staff of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD. Endless purges led to the fact that after more than two months, on November 1, Fitin, who had no experience, immediately became deputy chief of intelligence. On February 1, 1939, he was awarded the special rank of state security major. A year later he became senior major.

In reconnaissance, he inherited only ruins. Fitin reported to his superiors:

“By the beginning of 1939, almost all the residents behind the cordon were recalled and suspended from work. Most of them were then arrested, and the rest were subject to verification.

There could be no talk of any reconnaissance work behind the cordon in this situation.”

The same thing happened in military intelligence.

At a meeting of the army's commanding staff in April 1940, the commander of the Leningrad Military District, Army Commander 2nd Rank Kirill Afanasyevich Meretskov, said that officers refused to travel abroad on reconnaissance missions:

Commanders are afraid to go on such reconnaissance, because they say that later they will write down that they were abroad. The commanders are cowards.

The head of the 5th (intelligence) directorate of the General Staff, Hero of the Soviet Union, Ivan Iosifovich Proskurov, agreed with him:

The commanders say that if it is written down in your personal file that you were abroad, then this will remain for life. Sometimes you call wonderful people, good people, and they say - do whatever you want, just so that in your personal file it is not written down that you were abroad.

Stalin pretended to be surprised:

We have several thousand people who have been abroad. There's nothing to it. This is a credit.

Proskurov spread his hands:

But in practice it is not perceived that way.

Stalin, of course, understood perfectly well what the officers were afraid of. Almost everyone who went to study in Germany was arrested as German spies. Stalin preferred to make fun of the repressions, never missing an opportunity to show that he had nothing to do with it...

Newcomers were feverishly recruited into intelligence. First of all, they had to be given language and regional studies education and explained the basics of operational work.

By order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs on October 3, 1938, an educational institution for intelligence officers appeared - the School of Special Purposes. It was located in Balashikha.

In 1939, the famous intelligence officer Hero of the Soviet Union, Colonel Alexander Semenovich Feklisov, studied at the school, who eventually headed the 1st (American) department of the First Main Directorate of the KGB.

“The school was located in the forest in a good-quality wooden two-story house,” Feklisov recalled, “its territory was fenced. On the upper floor there were five bedrooms, a shower room, a lounge and games room, and on the lower floor there were two classrooms and a dining room. The bedrooms were large, containing two study tables, two luxurious beds with nice warm blankets, and two wardrobes. There are rugs in front of the beds.”

Each cadet was given a coat, suit, hat, and boots. There were only ten people studying at the school; these were graduates of technical universities sent to the NKVD. We studied for a year - a foreign language, regional studies, special disciplines and, of course, the history of the All-Union Communist Party. In one group they trained radio operators for overseas residencies, the other group was taught to obtain and produce the documents necessary for an illegal intelligence officer - passports, metric certificates, diplomas...

The school of future intelligence officers has changed its name more than once.

In 1943, it became known as the Intelligence School of the First Directorate of the People's Commissariat of State Security.

In September 1948, by order of the Information Committee under the Council of Ministers, it was renamed the Higher Intelligence School. The candidacies of the school's students were approved by the Central Committee, and workers of the party and Soviet apparatus were sent to “study to become intelligence officers.”

In official correspondence, for secret purposes, it was called the 101st school. It was located on the twenty-fifth kilometer of the Gorky Highway, so the listeners said: “twenty-fifth kilometer” or “forest.” A large tract of forest, surrounded by a high fence, was indeed cut off for the school. There were classrooms, a dormitory and sports facilities there.

The greatest interest was generated by special disciplines, that is, the study of intelligence art, and practical exercises - organizing a meeting with an agent, laying hiding places, avoiding external surveillance. Those who knew foreign languages ​​well found it easy to learn. The rest had to use their tongues.

General Oleg Danilovich Kalugin, admitted to School 101 in 1956, recalled it with great pleasure:

“Wooden, neatly painted two-story houses, asphalt paths, well-groomed paths, tops of fir and pine trees swaying rhythmically overhead, clear air saturated with the smell of resin - all this has a beneficial effect and evokes a feeling of serene peace.

The premises are clean and cozy, double rooms with small rugs and wall lamps. The classrooms are spacious and sunny. An excellent library with files of foreign newspapers in different languages.

In a spacious hall with palm trees, waitresses in white aprons serve us a menu with a rich selection of dishes..."

One of the quite successful intelligence officers, recalling his years at intelligence school, told me:

The opportunity to read TASS official newsletters made the strongest impression on me. The right to read in Russian something that others are not entitled to immediately created the impression of belonging to a special caste. Special disciplines were incredibly interesting. You studied counterintelligence methods because you had to know how they would work against you there. Ability to behave, skills to obtain information. We were taught to assume that any person with whom you communicate, even if he is not registered as an agent, is a source of important information. And if it’s impossible to learn anything from him, then you shouldn’t waste time on him...

In November 1968, the school was renamed the Red Banner Institute of the KGB of the USSR with the rights of a higher educational institution. There were more than enough people who wanted to study at the institute.

“When I came to the KGB,” Andropov told the famous diplomat Valentin Mikhailovich Falin, “I established a procedure that boys and girls were accepted into the committee’s educational institutions only from the age of nineteen. It helped. After all, there was no end to calls from moms and dads. All children are born security officers, and after high school, when they were seventeen or eighteen years old, they were assigned to our system...

Over time, the Red Banner Institute received the name Yu.V. Andropova. In October 1994, the institute, as was fashionable in those years, was renamed the Foreign Intelligence Academy...

In 1940, six hundred and ninety-five people worked in the 5th department of the GUGB NKVD under the leadership of Senior Major Pavel Fitin.

The 1st department dealt with Germany, Hungary, Denmark;

2nd - Poland;

3rd - France, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland;

4th - England;

5th - Italy;

6th - Spain;

7th - Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece;

8th - Finland, Sweden, Norway, Spitsbergen;

9th - Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania;

10th - USA, Canada, South America, Mexico;

11th - Japan, Manchuria;

12th - China, Xinjiang;

13th - Mongolia, Tuva;

14th - Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan;

The 15th department was responsible for scientific and technical intelligence;

16th - supplied the intelligence officers with operational equipment, which was still quite primitive at that time;

17th - dealt with visas.

Intelligence had forty residencies abroad. The largest were in the United States - eighteen people, in Finland - seventeen, in Germany - thirteen.

Pavel Fitin, as the head of intelligence, led the entire operation to kill the former member of the Politburo, chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs Lev Davidovich Trotsky.

All intelligence capabilities were mobilized to fulfill this personal task of Stalin.

At the end of May 1940 there was the first attempt on Trotsky's life. Two dozen people in police uniforms disarmed the guards at his home in Coyoacan (near Mexico City), threw explosives into the house and fired machine guns.

Trotsky miraculously survived, but from that day he lived in an atmosphere of doom. Every morning he told his wife:

You see, they didn’t kill us this night, and you’re still dissatisfied with something.

Preparations for Trotsky’s murder were carried out by Fitin’s deputy, the future general Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov. The Spaniard Ramon Mercader was found to play the role. A graduate of culinary school, he worked at the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona, ​​where he was recruited by Soviet intelligence officers. His mother Maria Caridad was also an NKVD agent.

Just five days after the first attempt, the future killer entered Trotsky’s house. He called himself Jacques Mornard, the son of a Belgian diplomat, and used a false Canadian passport in the name of Frank Jackson.

On August 20, 1940, Mercader came to Trotsky, despite the heat, in a raincoat and hat, and asked to read his article. When Trotsky began to read, Mercader took out an ice pick (he also had a hammer and a pistol with him) and, closing his eyes, brought it down on Trotsky’s head with all his might. He hoped to kill Trotsky with one blow and escape. But Trotsky entered into a fight with him. And out of confusion, Mercader didn’t even manage to use the pistol. Hearing the noise, the guards ran in and grabbed the killer.

The next day Trotsky died in hospital. Three hundred thousand people came to say goodbye to him. Six Soviet intelligence leaders received orders for this.

Mercader did not admit at trial that he was working for the Soviet Union. I liked it in Moscow. Soviet intelligence tried to rescue him from prison, but failed.

Trotsky's killer served his twenty years from start to finish. He was released only in 1960. He was brought to the Soviet Union. A closed decree awarding him the title of Hero of the Soviet Union was signed on May 31, 1960. On June 8, Mercader was presented with the Gold Star in the Kremlin by the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.

In Moscow, Trotsky's killer was given a Soviet passport in the name of Ramon Ivanovich Lopez. Got a job at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee. They gave me an apartment. He did not live alone - he married a woman who carried him parcels to prison. He did not take root in Moscow and in the mid-seventies he left Moscow for Cuba, where there was no snow and dreary apparatchiks, where they spoke Spanish and where they found him a job in the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

In Cuba, Mercader died of sarcoma in 1978. One of the most famous militants of the twentieth century lived only fifty-nine years, of which twenty years - a third of his life - he spent in prison. He was buried in Moscow, at the Kuntsevo cemetery, secretly. For most of his life, he pretended to be someone else. And they buried him under a false name too.

The Chekists destroyed Trotsky's entire family. True, the story of the death of his second son, Lev Sedov, remains a mystery. Lev Sedov inherited his father's fighting character. He took his mother’s surname, left the Kremlin and settled in the workers’ faculty dormitory so that no one would accuse him of using his father’s big name. Lev Sedov followed his parents into exile and became his father's faithful assistant. He lived in Paris and tried to rally like-minded people, not suspecting that he was surrounded by informants of Soviet intelligence.

Next to him was constantly a Soviet intelligence agent, Mark Zborovsky, (operational pseudonym Tulip), recruited in 1933. Tulip's reports were reported personally to Stalin.

At the beginning of 1938, Lev Sedov was operated on for appendicitis. The operation went well, but four days later his condition worsened and he had to undergo a second operation. On February 16, Trotsky’s son died in a Paris clinic. Few doubted that this was the work of Soviet intelligence.

But the forensic medical examination concluded that his death was natural. Zborovsky, who later broke with the NKVD and fled to the United States, argued that Moscow asked him not to kill Sedov, but to lure him into a trap so that Trotsky’s son could be delivered to the territory of the Soviet Union.

The already arrested Sergei Shpigelglas, the former deputy chief of intelligence, said during interrogation that when the message about Sedov’s death in Paris arrived, he reported to the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Yezhov. He said:

Come in.

Spiegelglass brought him a telegram from Paris. Yezhov read it and said with satisfaction:

Good operation. That's great, aren't we?

Yezhov reported to the Central Committee that his people had put an end to yet another enemy of Soviet power. And fellow security officers asked Spiegelglas with a bit of envy:

How did you deal with Sedov?

However, it must be borne in mind that Spiegelglass began to testify after they began to beat him. Judging by the interrogation records, this happened on May 31, 1939. At this time, the investigation into the case of Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, who was arrested on April 10, was in full swing. Yezhov was accused of all mortal sins, including homosexuality. Perhaps the investigators, with the help of Spiegelglas, also wanted to attribute to Yezhov the deception of the party leadership...

On February 3, 1941, the NKVD was divided into two people's commissariats - internal affairs and state security. Intelligence abroad received the status of the first department of the People's Commissariat of State Security.

Historians have come to the conclusion that Soviet intelligence fulfilled its duty and reported to the country's leadership in advance about the impending aggression from Germany.

On June 17, 1941, Fitin sent a special message to the Kremlin from Berlin from the Sergeant Major and the Corsican: “All German military measures to prepare an armed offensive against the USSR have been completely completed, a strike can be expected at any time.”

But Stalin and his entourage believed in the possibility of long-term cooperation with Hitler. Therefore, in the special intelligence reports that Fitin signed, Stalin saw only what he wanted to see. Intelligence reports about the concentration of German troops on the Soviet borders and about the expected date of the attack on the Soviet Union were in vain.

Stalin did not like it when intelligence officers trusted their informants. He once scolded the head of military intelligence, Proskurov:

You do not have the soul of an intelligence officer, but the soul of a very naive person in the good sense of the word. A scout must be completely saturated with poison, bile, and must not trust anyone...

By the beginning of the war, the Soviet Union had an extensive intelligence network in Germany, including agents in the air force, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economics, the Gestapo and defense plants.

The People's Commissariat of State Security had an illegal organization in Berlin, which was led by the anti-fascists Harro Schulze-Boysen (chief lieutenant of the Luftwaffe, operational pseudonym Sergeant Major) and Arvid Harnack (employee of the Reich Ministry of Economics, Corsican) who later became famous. Possessing the widest connections, they supplied Moscow with complete information that Fitin could be proud of. This group included more than a hundred people who collected information for Soviet intelligence.

Military intelligence did not lag behind political intelligence and had illegal groups in Belgium, Holland and France.

Radio transmitters and encryption systems were delivered to the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen group at the end of May 1941. But when the war began, the transmitters did not work.

Moscow demanded the latest information, and immediately. Encrypted communication with overseas residencies was carried out by the 13th department of the 5th special department of the NKVD. There were enormous difficulties in organizing communications with illegal immigrants. The radio stations that the agents had in Europe were low-power. The signal barely reached Brest, but the advancing German troops occupied it in the first days of the war.

Radio operators in Soviet stations in London and Stockholm sat for hours at the receivers in vain. Then Fitin was forced to turn to military intelligence for help, whose illegal stations in Europe continued to operate.

Military intelligence officers visited Berlin. It turned out that the transmitters did not work and it was impossible to fix them. Illegal stations took upon themselves the transmission of the information received. In the first months of the war they worked very hard. Radio operators sat on the air for hours, radios were detected, and the scouts were arrested one after another.

The Gestapo tracked down illegal military intelligence stations and captured radio operators along with their transmitters. The Gestapo began a clever radio game with Moscow, supplying it with disinformation, and the security officers did not soon discover that they were being led by the nose.

Fitin's appeal to military intelligence for help turned out to be fatal for political intelligence agents. During interrogations, captured military intelligence officers also named Berlin addresses. The tragedy was completed by sending two messengers to Germany.

In the summer of 1942, at night, two radio operators were dropped from an airplane near Bryansk, occupied by German troops - Albert Hessler, a former member of the German Communist Party who fought in Spain, and the Russian German Robert Barth, who had long worked for the NKVD. In a few days they reached Germany. Hessler found members of the underground group and tried to help them set up the transmitter, but to no avail. Neither he nor the people who sheltered him suspected that their house was under surveillance. The arrest was a matter of time.

Soon the entire group of Harnack and Schulze-Boysen was also arrested. The Gestapo put one hundred and twenty-nine people on trial. Hessler refused to work for the Gestapo. He was shot.

Robert Barth was entrusted with an even more responsible task - to become a liaison for Willy Lehmann, a Gestapo employee who, since 1929, under the operational pseudonym Breitenbach, had worked for Soviet intelligence.

In 1938, when the Soviet station in Germany was destroyed by Stalin, communication with Willy Lehmann ceased. For two years he could do nothing to help the Soviet Union, because no one came to him. Communication was restored in early 1941 and was interrupted with the German attack on the Soviet Union.

Robert Barth was immediately arrested by the Gestapo. He not only betrayed Willy Lehmann, but also agreed to transfer to Moscow what the Germans needed. In 1945, Bart ended up in American hands. They handed him over to Soviet representatives. Bart was shot.

The Soviet intelligence network in Germany was lost. But Soviet intelligence continued to provide valuable information: they found it out not from the enemy, but from the allies. During the war, the flow of information from Soviet agents in England was so great that the station did not have time to process it. Secret documents were brought literally in suitcases.

On July 20, 1941, the NKVD and NKGB were united. Intelligence under the leadership of Fitin became the first department of the NKVD. But its numbers have seriously declined. During the war, another department, the fourth, worked directly against Nazi Germany. It was led by Pavel Sudoplatov. And Fitin was left with long-range reconnaissance. In August 1941, there were two hundred and forty-eight people under his command, in May 1942 - one hundred thirty-five, in May 1943 - one hundred and ninety-seven.

During the war, a department was formed within the intelligence service for interaction with British and American intelligence. The famous intelligence officer George Hill came to Moscow as a representative of the British Special Operations Executive, which carried out reconnaissance and sabotage work against the Germans. In the first years of the war, with the help of British aviation, twenty Soviet paratrooper agents were transferred to the territory of German-occupied Europe.

The Americans and British demonstratively did not work against the USSR, an ally in the fight against Nazi Germany. Soviet intelligence, in contrast, exploited the favorable attitudes of the Allies to penetrate deeply into both countries, especially the United States.

Before leaving for the United States at the end of 1941, the new intelligence resident in Washington, Vasily Zarubin, was received by Stalin, who, listing the tasks facing him, emphasized that the most important thing was “to obtain information about the latest secret technology created in the USA, England and Canada.”

Vasily Mikhailovich Zarubin is one of the most respected Soviet intelligence officers. Nobody likes to remember that he took part in the shameful extermination of Polish soldiers taken prisoner in the fall of 1939, when Hitler and Stalin divided Poland. State Security Major Zarubin, who later participated in the theft of atomic secrets in the United States, was sent to one of the three main camps, Kozelsky, and led a team of investigators. They sorted Polish prisoners of war, deciding who would live and who would die...

The composition of the Soviet embassy in Washington increased - not only due to diplomats, but also intelligence officers. In the United States, where military and strategic intelligence residencies already operated, a separate residency of the First (Intelligence) Directorate of the People's Commissariat of the Navy appeared. The Naval Intelligence Department was headed by Rear Admiral Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vorontsov, who before the war was a naval attaché at the USSR Embassy in Germany. Moreover, Molotov created the Bureau of Technical Information at the embassy in Washington - it was engaged in industrial espionage.

The staff of legal stations in Washington, New York and San Francisco were relatively small - more than ten people (military intelligence had the same apparatus). But intelligence officers were sent to help them, who operated under the roof of the Soviet Purchasing Commission and Amtorg. During the war years, in the American capital alone, there were almost five thousand Soviet citizens sent by various departments (see “Stalin's Decade of the Cold War,” M., 1999). How many of them were career intelligence officers and how many carried out one-time assignments from the People's Commissariat of State Security and the Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff is unknown due to the closed nature of the archives.

In 1943, a separate residency was formed in the United States to collect scientific and technical information under the leadership of Leonid Romanovich Kvasnikov (in 1996, posthumously, he received the title of Hero of Russia). He was a mechanical engineer, graduated from graduate school, and took conspiracy especially seriously: he demanded that his subordinates speak only in a whisper, even in secure premises of the station, and write the agents’ nicknames on pieces of paper, which he immediately destroyed.

On February 14, 1943, Pavel Fitin received the rank of state security commissioner of the 3rd rank, and in July 1945, when state security officers were transferred to general army ranks, he became lieutenant general.

On November 5, 1944, eighty-seven foreign intelligence officers received state awards. Fitin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

On April 14, 1943, Stalin again divided the NKVD into two people's commissariats. Intelligence was included in the People's Commissariat of State Security, which three years later became a ministry.

Pavel Fitin could report one achievement after another. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was not interested in the Russians. American counterintelligence dealt only with enemies - the Germans and Japanese, so Soviet intelligence officers could work completely freely. In addition to political information, they obtained huge quantities of blueprints and technologies necessary for the production of new weapons. Sometimes they came across. But President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation not to touch Soviet intelligence officers, or at least not to bring the matter to scandal.

Two assistant Soviet air attachés were declared persona non grata on June 10, 1941, but were allowed to remain in the United States after the German attack on the Soviet Union.

The resident of the NKGB in New York, Gaik Badalovich Ovakimyan (he was a well-educated man, a candidate of chemical sciences and was engaged in scientific and technical intelligence), was caught red-handed by FBI officers in April 1941. He was released on bail and was about to be tried. But after the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Americans’ attitude towards the Russians changed, and Hovakimyan was allowed to leave quietly in July.

The NKGB resident in Washington, Vasily Zarubin, who worked under the roof of the third secretary of the embassy, ​​was also caught red-handed by the FBI in 1944, but he was also able to leave without a scandal.

After Zarubin, Stepan Zakharovich Apresyan became a resident, whose older brother, Derenik Apresyan, was also a security officer. Apresyan Sr. made a great career in the economic department of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD. In December 1936, he received the rank of state security major, and in August 1937 he was appointed People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan and at the same time head of the Special Department of the Central Asian Military District.

On November 21, 1938, Derenik Apresyan was arrested, on February 22, 1939, he was sentenced to capital punishment and executed. His younger brother, who worked in the foreign department, was arrested, but a year later he was released and even sent to Washington.

“The shooting of his brother,” recalled Alexander Feklisov, who worked in the station, “the months spent in prison, apparently, did not pass without a trace for Stepan. He became painfully indecisive, a few days before meeting with the agent he began to get nervous, and did not listen attentively to his interlocutor. During the check before the meeting, he looked around restlessly, moved quickly, almost running, along the street ... "

In 1945, Stepan Apresyan was returned to Moscow.

Towards the end of the war and immediately after it, the efforts of the intelligence apparatus in the United States were concentrated on atomic affairs, and this work was crowned with tremendous success. Soviet scientists engaged in the creation of a nuclear explosive device gained access to the results of American research, which made it possible to acquire their own bomb in the shortest possible time.

One of the former Soviet intelligence officers told me that during the war and in the first post-war years they freely entered the American War Department and, if the owner of the office was not there, opened his desk and calmly studied any papers. Soviet officers were greeted everywhere as allies and friends. And from the very beginning they convinced themselves that the United States and England were open and dangerous enemies, and not at all allies in a common struggle.

The turning point came after the codebreaker of the USSR Embassy in Canada, Lieutenant Igor Sergeevich Guzenko, fled on September 5, 1945. He was a military intelligence officer who spent a long time preparing for his escape and handed over a lot of classified materials to the Canadian police. Canadians were shocked that the USSR was spying on its allies.

Colonel Konstantin Volkov, who worked under the roof of the vice-consul in Turkey, was the first to tell about the scale of Soviet intelligence activities. He invited the British to name the names of Soviet agents in Great Britain in exchange for political asylum. British intelligence officers in Turkey did not know what to do and asked London. The message from Istanbul fell into the hands of Kim Philby, who, realizing that exposure threatened himself first of all, immediately contacted the Soviet station.

Istanbul resident Colonel Mikhail Matveevich Baturin, father of Yuri Baturin, Yeltsin's assistant and cosmonaut, was ordered to urgently evacuate Volkov to the Soviet Union. Volkov was executed...

Guzenko spoke about Soviet penetration of the American atomic project. Security measures in nuclear laboratories have been strengthened. But it took the Federal Bureau of Investigation several years to discover the Soviet intelligence network. And American counterintelligence officials are still not confident that they have identified all the agents.

Gouzenko's escape and his revelations forced the intelligence leadership to freeze contacts with many agents in the United States. Information about atomic affairs came mainly from England. But the Soviet leaders were not embarrassed by Guzenko’s escape. In the summer of 1946, at a closed meeting, the new Secretary of the Central Committee, who oversaw state security, Alexey Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov, said indignantly:

Canadians organized a trial of Gouzenko. We are defending ourselves by saying that we did not steal any projects, that is, we are defending ourselves, but there is an indication that we, based on the results of the war, when we became a very strong power, must pursue our own independent, active foreign policy anywhere and everywhere. And the ambassadors were given instructions not to grovel, but to behave more boldly...

The second blow for Soviet intelligence was the decipherment by American cryptographers of radiograms sent in 1944 - 1945 from the center to the residency in New York, which worked under the roof of the Consulate General. The reason for this failure was the mistake of Soviet cryptographers, who deviated from the iron rule: use only one-time pads. This rule was established after British police raided the Anglo-Soviet trading company Arcos in 1927 and seized secret correspondence.

The radiogram texts, expanded after World War II, allowed American counterintelligence to identify several important Soviet agents. The trials against them and the scandal that arose narrowed the recruiting capabilities of Soviet intelligence in the United States. The Americans were no longer so willing to make contacts with Soviet representatives. In addition, two legal residencies ceased their activities due to the fact that the United States authorities closed the Soviet consulates general in New York and San Francisco.

On June 15, 1946, Pavel Fitin was relieved of his post. For three months he was at the disposal of the personnel department of the Ministry of State Security. In September 1946, he was sent as deputy commissioner of the MGB in occupied Germany. But he was not kept in this position for long.

On April 1, 1947, Fitin was approved as deputy head of the MGB department for the Sverdlovsk region, and on September 27, 1951, as the Minister of State Security of Kazakhstan.

After Stalin’s death, Beria remembered him; on March 15, 1953, Fitin was appointed head of the department of the unified Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Sverdlovsk region. Beria's signature on the order of his appointment cost Fitin dearly. He was considered a Beria man. After the arrest of Lavrenty Pavlovich, the career of the former intelligence chief ended. On July 16, he was relieved of duty, and on November 29, 1953, he was dismissed from the Ministry of Internal Affairs due to official inconsistency.

For several years Pavel Mikhailovich worked in the Ministry of State Control, then in the Commission of Soviet Control under the Council of Ministers. In 1959 - 1963, General Fitin was the director of the photo factory of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. He left memories that only employees of the First Main Directorate were allowed to read. He died in 1971.

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“At the head of the intelligence service was Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, a slender, calm, impressive blond. He was distinguished by taciturnity and restraint,” notes Hero of Russia, Colonel Alexander Semenovich Feklisov. As in the case of Nikolai Kuznetsov, again a bright Aryan appearance, a calm Nordic character. And this is not surprising: Pavel Fitin is also from Western Siberia, from a peasant family. He was born in the village of Ozhogino, Yalutorovsky district, Tobolsk province, and in 1926-1927 he even studied with Nikolai Kuznetsov on the same street in Tyumen: Kuznetsov at the Agricultural College, and Fitin at preparatory courses for a university.

Having graduated from the Faculty of Engineering of the Agricultural Academy in 1932. Timiryazev in Moscow, Pavel Fitin rises to deputy editor-in-chief of the Selkhozgiz publishing house. And then he made a dizzying career: having arrived in March 1938 as an intern at the 5th department of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR (foreign intelligence), on November 1 (i.e. six months later) he became deputy chief, and in May 1939 at 31 years old age and with the rank of major, GB - head of foreign intelligence of the NKVD of the USSR.

The secret of such a takeoff, around which, of course, there are many rumors and fictions in the spirit of “promoted man,” “shortage of personnel,” “big purge,” etc. , is actually simple. Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin became the first Russian to hold this post.

On December 20, 1920, the Chairman of the Cheka, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, signed the historical order No. 169 on the creation of the Foreign Department (INO) in order to strengthen intelligence work abroad. The Armenian revolutionary Yakov Khristoforovich Davtyan (Davydov) was appointed its first head. On behalf of Dzerzhinsky, he developed regulations on the Foreign Department, its staffing table, and structure. In 1921, Davtyan was replaced for some time by his classmate at the 1st Tiflis Gymnasium, Ruben Katanyan. Further, the position of head of foreign intelligence was successively occupied by Solomon Mogilevsky, Meer Abramovich Trilisser, Stanislav Adamovich Messing, Arthur Khristianovich Artuzov (Frauchi), Abram Aronovich Slutsky, Sergei Mikhailovich Shpigelglas, Zelman Isaevich Passov and Vladimir Georgievich Dekanozov (Dekanozishvili) - another classmate of Davtyan and Katanyan at the 1st Tiflis gymnasium.

All these years, the selection of personnel to work in the INO was carried out mainly through the Comintern, conceived by Lenin as the headquarters of the “world revolution”. But when Stalin took a course towards building socialism in a single country, which was actively opposed by Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other representatives of not so much the anti-Stalinist as the anti-Russian opposition, and then further transformed this course into the task of recreating a powerful Russian state, then oriented Representatives of the Comintern responded to the “world revolution” with betrayal. Moreover, this began before 1937-1938. Back in 1935, one of the traitors, a high-ranking INO employee Walter Krivitsky, aka Samuel Ginzburg, in a conversation with his friend and fellow traitor Nathan Poretsky (Reiss), said: “They don’t trust us... they can’t trust internationalist communists. They will replace us with Russians, for whom the revolutionary movement in Europe means nothing.” That’s right: it’s one thing to use Russia as “brushwood” to fan a global fire and work for who knows who, and quite another thing to build a powerful Russian state, including to repel external aggression. That is why Stalin’s bet on the Russian people caused such a negative reaction among the adherents of the “world revolution”. The escapes of the now praised “fighters against Stalinism” to the West began, accompanied by the surrender of agents.

Moscow's response measures were not long in coming. On May 13, 1939, GB Major Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin was appointed to the post of head of foreign intelligence of the NKVD of the USSR. His deputies were Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov and Vasily Mikhailovich Zarubin, also Russians. This was a genuine personnel revolution, which marked the beginning of the creation of a powerful national intelligence service, which brilliantly proved itself during the Great Patriotic War in clashes with the most experienced intelligence services of the Third Reich, as well as during operations to obtain American atomic secrets. It is not without reason that on October 5, 2017, at the building of the Press Bureau of the Foreign Intelligence Service in Moscow, the grand opening of a monument to the creator of the national intelligence service, Lieutenant General Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, will take place. The initiative to install the monument belongs to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, “ Military -sports fund – Ural ", Coordination Bureau of the Council of Veterans of Security Agencies in the Urals Federal District and dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the security agencies.

“In the person of Fitin, Soviet foreign intelligence found the necessary, capable, decent and completely dedicated security officer to his duty,” notes Colonel Yuri Kolesnikov, an employee of the OMSBON 4th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR, Hero of Russia, in his book “Among the Gods.” - People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria treated him with some degree of sympathy and understanding. I had confidence in him."

Pavel Mikhailovich knew how to foresee circumstances and firmly adhere to his position. “Knowing Stalin’s wary attitude towards intelligence information coming from abroad,” writes Kolesnikov, “Fitin nevertheless continued to report it to the country’s leadership without delay. Neither Fitin, nor Merkulov, nor even Beria could predict the Secretary General’s reaction to the message received from Berlin... Life was at stake here.”

On January 18, 1942, by the decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, on the basis of the Special Group under the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria, the 4th (reconnaissance and sabotage) Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR was created, which was separated from the 1st Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR. The 4th Directorate was headed by Senior State Security Major Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov. The remaining foreign intelligence staff, under the leadership of senior state security major Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin, was focused on covering the politics of the United States and England and conducting scientific and technical intelligence.

On the initiative of Pavel Mikhailovich, the deputy resident in New York, GB Major Leonid Romanovich Kvasnikov, was appointed responsible for obtaining atomic secrets (Operation Enormous). As Pavel Mikhailovich writes in his recently declassified memoirs, “a great merit of foreign intelligence during this period, especially the First Directorate residencies in the USA, Canada, and England, was the receipt of scientific and technical information in the field of atomic energy, which greatly helped to speed up the resolution of the issue of creation of the atomic bomb in the Soviet Union. I often had occasion to meet with Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov, who expressed great gratitude for the materials he received from our intelligence on atomic energy issues.”

On August 20, 1945, a Special Committee was created, which was entrusted with “the management of all work on the use of intra-atomic energy of uranium.” The Chairman of the Special Committee was Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, who, on the one hand, supervised the receipt of all necessary intelligence information, and on the other hand, provided general management of the entire project.

On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, becoming an exact copy of the American one dropped on Nagasaki. Pavel Mikhailovich writes: “In the post-war years, for almost five years I had to deal with issues related to the special production and commissioning of uranium plants, and in this regard, I again repeatedly met with Igor Vasilyevich, a talented scientist and a wonderful person. In conversations, he again emphasized the invaluable service that materials obtained by Soviet intelligence played in solving the atomic problem in the USSR.”

In 1951-1953, Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin was the Minister of State Security of the Kazakh SSR, and from March 16, 1953, after Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria again headed the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, which included state security, he was the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Sverdlovsk Region.

Literally a few days after Beria was killed during the coup d'etat carried out on June 26, 1953 by Khrushchev with the support of a military group, Pavel Mikhailovich was removed from office, and on November 29, 1953, he was finally dismissed from the authorities “due to official inconsistency” - without a pension , since he did not have the necessary length of service...

In the last years of his life, he worked as director of the photo factory of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. On December 24, 1971, Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin died in Moscow on the operating table. He was 63 years old and looked great. According to relatives, there were no indications for surgery for a perforated ulcer...

But the following is noteworthy: shortly before his death, in May 1971, on the initiative of the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, the legendary leader of illegal intelligence and special forces, Yakov Serebryansky, who was involved in the “Beria case” and died in 1956 during interrogation by an investigator, was rehabilitated in Butyrka prison. Apparently, the beginning of the process of rehabilitation of victims of Khrushchev’s repressions and restoration of historical justice was not part of anyone’s plans.

Fitin Pavel Mikhailovich(December 15 (28), 1907, Ozhogino village, Shatrovsk volost, Yalutorovsky district, Tobolsk province (now Shatrovsky district, Kurgan region) - December 24, 1971, Moscow) - head of Soviet political intelligence (INO GUGB NKVD-NKGB) in 1939-1946, Lieutenant General (1945).

Pre-war period

Born into a peasant family. After graduating from high school, he worked at the Zvezda agricultural enterprise.

• Since March 1927 - member of the CPSU (b), since 1952 - CPSU.
• From May 1927 to June 1928 - Chairman of the Bureau of Young Pioneers, Deputy Executive Secretary of the Shatrovsky District Committee of the Komsomol (Tyumen District).
• In 1932 he graduated from the Faculty of Engineering of the Agricultural Academy. Timiryazev.
• From July to October 1932 - engineer at the laboratory of agricultural machines at the Moscow Institute of Mechanization and Electrification of Agriculture.
• From October 1932 to October 1934 he worked at the Selkhozgiz publishing house as head of the editorial office of industrial literature.
• From October 1934 to November 1935 he served in the Red Army, private in military unit 1266 Moscow Military District.
• In November 1935 he returned to the publishing house, and from November 1936 he became deputy editor-in-chief.

In March 1938, at the height of mass repressions, due to the lack of qualified personnel, it was decided to carry out “partner recruitment” into the NKVD bodies. Fitin was sent to study at special accelerated courses at the School of Special Purposes, along with other civilian specialists.

In November 1938, he became an intern in the 5th department of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR (foreign intelligence) and at the end of the same year was appointed deputy head of the department, and in 1939 he headed all foreign intelligence of the state security agencies and served in this position until 1946.

Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin held positions:

• Detective officer, head of the 9th department of the 5th department of the GUGB NKVD (August - October 1938)
• Deputy Head of the 5th Department of the GUGB NKVD USSR (November 1, 1938 - May 13, 1939)
• Head of the 5th Department of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR (May 13, 1939 - February 26, 1941)
• Head of the 1st Directorate of the NKGB of the USSR (February 26 - July 31, 1941)
• Head of the 1st Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR (July 31, 1941 - May 12, 1943)
• Head of the 1st Directorate of the NKGB - MGB of the USSR (May 12, 1943 - June 15, 1946)
• Until September 1946 - at the disposal of the personnel department of the USSR Ministry of State Security

Head of intelligence during the war

The outstanding organizational abilities of P. M. Fitin manifested themselves during the Great Patriotic War. Heading foreign intelligence, he made great efforts to provide the country's leadership with information about the plans of the German command, information about the possibility of opening a “second front.”

Intelligence received a plan for the German offensive on the Kursk Bulge, information was received about separate negotiations between the Americans and the Nazis in Switzerland, “radio games” were conducted, and assistance was provided to the partisan movement.

The service led by Fitin made an invaluable contribution to the creation of nuclear weapons in the USSR.

Post-war period

It is believed that Lavrentiy Beria, who had a bad attitude towards Fitin since pre-war times, achieved his release from his post in June 1946 and his assignment to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany as deputy commissioner of the MGB in Germany (September 1946 - April 1, 1947).

On April 1, 1947, P. M. Fitin was appointed to the position of deputy head of the state security department for the Sverdlovsk region, and on September 27, 1951 he was transferred to the minister of state security of the Kazakh SSR. From March 16 to July 16, 1953, he was the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Sverdlovsk region.

On November 29, 1953, after the arrest of L.P. Beria, P.M. Fitin was dismissed from the security agencies due to official inconsistency without a pension, since he did not have the necessary length of service.

After retirement, he worked as the Chief Controller of the USSR Ministry of State Control (April 1954 - April 1958), senior controller of the Soviet Control Commission of the USSR Council of Ministers (April 1958 - August 1959).

In the last years of his life, P. M. Fitin worked as director of the photo factory of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (since August 1959, last mentioned in July 1963).

Thanks to the film “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” everyone knows that Schellenberg commanded foreign intelligence for the Germans. But few people know who headed our intelligence service, who was our “Eustace” at that time. And this was the head of the first (intelligence) department of the NKGB of the USSR, lieutenant general Pavel Fitin, who headed foreign intelligence from 1941 to 1947.

His career was rapid: in October 1938 he joined the authorities as an intern after short-term courses in the so-called “Komsomol recruitment”, and in February 1941 he headed an entire department. His biography is full of sharp turns, there was also a Ural period in it, in fact, it fell into disgrace, just like the marshal Zhukova.

Error with residents. The repressions of the 1930s hit the security forces like a heavy roller. The situation in Europe before the war was heating up, and the station was silent; in fact, it was gone. Moscow needed to know the real plans of Hitler and his European partners, so Fitin began his leadership activities by restoring the residency.

With the loss of intelligence capabilities in Germany, he relied on intensifying activities in England, the USA, Bulgaria, Turkey, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Sweden, and Japan. Foreign intelligence achieved the most significant results in England, where the famous “Cambridge Five” were active. Thanks to this, our country’s foreign intelligence during the war had access to secret documents of the British Cabinet and War Department, to the correspondence of Prime Minister Churchill with US President Roosevelt and other heads of state, as well as Foreign Minister Eden with ambassadors England abroad, received secret documents on the latest defense developments.

During 1939, experienced intelligence officers were sent abroad to restore contact with mothballed agents and managed to restore 40 residences, send more than 200 intelligence officers to them, and also activate many illegal immigrants.

In May 1939, Pavel Fitin reported to Stalin about the Weiss plan approved by Hitler, according to which Germany was supposed to occupy Poland. However, the collapse of foreign intelligence was still too noticeable. Despite the active measures taken by Fitin to recreate foreign apparatuses, intelligence was unable to warn of Germany’s attack on France on May 10, 1940 and its simultaneous occupation of the Benelux countries.

But soon the information that began to arrive became so detailed that the leadership of foreign intelligence became aware of the locations of divisions, the location of battalions, individual barracks, headquarters and units. In April-May, intelligence reported to the country's leadership the latest information about Germany's preparations for the strike. June 17, 1941 in the Kremlin in the presence of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Merkulova Fitin reported personally Stalin about Germany's full readiness to attack the USSR.

Stalin, as you know, did not believe it. To be fair, it must be said that intelligence officers have already reported an attack on the USSR twice - in mid-May and early June. It didn't happen. On the night of June 22, Fitin did not sleep. Had his men missed again? But in the morning they reported to him: it had begun.

Atomic project. The undoubted merit of foreign intelligence is the timely discovery of the atomic project from the allies. Data that Great Britain launched the Tube Alloys project, the formation of the Uranium Committee, the start of work on the creation of an atomic bomb, and the cooperation of England and the United States in this area were received already on September 16, 1941.

In September of the same year, a meeting was held in the Kremlin with the participation of academicians Ioffe, Semenov, Khlopin, Kapitsa, after which the State Defense Committee of the USSR adopted a resolution “On the organization of work on uranium” and special laboratory No. 2 was created, headed by Kurchatov.

The intensification of work on the “atomic project” was covered up by the initiative of scientists so that the allies, who at that time were counting on an atomic monopoly, could not understand that they were leaking information. In March 1943, Kurchatov wrote to Beria that the information received was of enormous, invaluable importance and provided very important guidelines for scientific research, allowing us to bypass many labor-intensive phases. As a result, we had an atomic charge and it was tested in 1949, and not in 1955-1956, as yesterday’s allies expected.

Foreign intelligence closely followed Germany's attempts at separate negotiations. In May 1942, the station in Stockholm reported that a German diplomat had secretly flown to London to negotiate with the British side on the terms of Germany's withdrawal from the war. Fitin reported to Stalin that this time England rejected the German proposals and interned the envoy. Subsequently, intelligence regularly informed about attempts by the German side to establish contacts with the British in Ankara, Bern and the Vatican. Separate contacts between the British and the Germans took place in 1943 in Madrid and Lisbon.

During the war, intelligence sent 566 officers abroad to work illegally, recruited 1,240 agents and informants, and received 41,718 different materials, including a significant number of documentary materials. Of the 1,167 documents received through scientific and technical intelligence, 616 were used by our industry.

Link to the Urals. As a result of another reorganization in the authorities, Fitin finds himself out of work. A strange business trip to Germany, an incomprehensible appointment to the Urals - first as deputy head of the MGB department for the Sverdlovsk region, and then as chief. How did the Ural security officers remember him? Because he was a professional of the highest standard, a strict but fair boss.

On topic

At the initiative of the Coordination Bureau of the Councils of Veterans of the Security Agencies of the Ural Federal District, on June 21, 2016, a memorial plaque in memory of Pavel Fitin was installed on the building of the Federal Security Service of Russia for the Sverdlovsk Region on Vainera Street.

Being an athlete, he did a lot for the development of the Dynamo sports society, willingly participated in cross-country skiing and cross-country racing and succeeded a lot in urban sports. He introduced compulsory sports activities for department employees twice a week, and this tradition has been preserved to this day.

Such a case is known. Served as secretary of the Komsomol management organization Yuri Dementyev , front-line soldier, order bearer. During the war, he was a cryptographer at the headquarters of the 4th Tank Army for General Lelyushenko, then he entered the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute, but two years later he was invited to join the security forces. At that time it was an offer that could not be refused. Dementiev seemed to be in the right place - cheerful, sociable, energetic, and sang well. He established a friendly and trusting relationship with Pavel Fitin, but one day the general told the Komsomol organizer: “I don’t need you! You have nothing to do here! Quit!” Then such a step could ruin not only a career, but also life itself.

And Dementyev quit, went to Moscow, submitted documents to the Bolshoi Theater. And soon, through a competition, he became an opera soloist. Fitin was not mistaken - Yuri Dementyev served at the Bolshoi Theater for a quarter of a century, became an Honored Artist of the RSFSR, then the creator and first director of the Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet Theater. And when we met Fitin’s son, he said: “Can you imagine, my life has completely changed! Who would I be? Well, at best, I would have risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel... And so - I got to know the world, I traveled to thirty-six countries, the world got to know me, I became established as an artist and as a person!”

Everything seemed to be getting better, and suddenly in November 1953 he (at 46 years old!) was fired from the authorities with the wording “official inconsistency” - and then until his retirement he worked as director of the photo factory of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Clear injustice. Or maybe it's the other way around? After all, it is known that there are no former security officers, and perhaps he continued to remain an intelligence officer?

Dossier "OG"

Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin born in December 1907 in the village of Ozhogino, Yalutorovsky district, Tobolsk province, into a peasant family. After primary school I went to work in an agricultural commune. He was accepted into the Komsomol and sent to study. He graduated from the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in 1932 and began working as the head of the editorial office of the Agricultural State Publishing House. He served in the Red Army, and after demobilization until 1938, he was deputy editor-in-chief at the same publishing house. Then - service in the security agencies. He died on December 24, 1971 in Moscow, and was buried at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery.

• Published in No. 31 of 02/20/2018

Plot

To the 100th anniversary of the security agencies in the Urals
A series of materials about the activities of the Ural security officers in different years.

Head of USSR foreign intelligence Pavel Fitin and head of German foreign intelligence Walter Schellenberg

He led Soviet intelligence during the most difficult and dramatic period of our history and worked much more successfully and efficiently than the well-known Walter Schellenberg. And although many intelligence officers were subsequently declassified and awarded well-deserved awards, the name of Fitin sank into oblivion for many years...

Largely thanks to the series “Seventeen Moments of Spring” and the excellent performance of O. Tabakov, many remember the head of foreign intelligence of the security service of the SS Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg.

At the same time, Alex, to whom Stirlitz sent his encrypted reports in this film (Eustace to Alex...), remained completely unknown, appearing in the credits of this series only as “the head of Soviet intelligence.”

And although some time after the war it became known who was hiding under the pseudonym “Alex,” how much do we know about Pavel Fitin?

An agrarian from a poor peasant family, who was sent to work at a publishing house, did not think that he would have to serve in the NKVD. I didn’t think so, but I had to.
At the end of the 30s, the Great Terror destroyed almost all intelligence, affecting both agents within the country and foreign residents. There was no one left to work.

And in the context of an impending world war, reconnaissance was simply necessary. Then the massive recruitment of Komsomol members to serve in the NKVD began, regardless of their specialties.
In 1938, Pavel Fitin, who was then 31 years old, was also drafted.
Starting as a junior lieutenant, a year later he became the head of foreign intelligence. Amazing takeoff!

Fitin had to not only virtually re-create the intelligence structure, but also learn to establish relationships both with the most experienced security officers, in whose eyes he was just a boy, and with newcomers just like himself. Quickly becoming an experienced leader, he managed to do both, winning the respect of both ordinary employees and marshals.

Reports for Stalin

Fitin's scouts worked efficiently; one after another, their alarming messages about Hitler's intentions to attack the USSR were sent to Moscow. In the first half of 1941 alone, 120 such encryptions were transmitted.

Fitin had to personally report intelligence data to Stalin about the threat of an attack, but Stalin did not believe him, became irritated, and called them disinformation. But Pavel Mikhailovich stubbornly continued to study the reports and again reported on them, claiming that the source of the information received was verified and reliable.
And although the Germans changed the date of the attack several times, in the latest encryption the date was exact - June 22, 4 am.

During the war, intelligence officers provided the command with important information both about upcoming operations on the Eastern Front, and about what was happening in Germany and about the plans of the Allies. Thanks to intelligence, it was possible to prevent negotiations between Germany and the Allies on a separate peace.

Our diplomacy also owed its brilliant successes at the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences to intelligence officers who supplied mountains of invaluable information. All plans of Churchill and Roosevelt were known to Stalin in advance.

Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, admired the work of Soviet intelligence officers, calling the information they obtained “the ultimate dream of any intelligence service in the world.”

Creation of a nuclear shield

The brilliant work of both Fitin himself and his intelligence was an operation called “Enormoz”, the purpose of which was to obtain top-secret materials relating to nuclear weapons.

In September 1941, information was received from London agents about a meeting of the Uranium Committee dedicated to the development of new weapons:
“a uranium bomb can be created within two years”, “The Chiefs of Staff Committee decided to immediately begin construction of a plant for the production of uranium atomic bombs in Great Britain.”

And although at that time almost no one knew technologies using uranium, Fitin paid special attention to this report and reported it to Beria. At first, management did not support Fitin’s concerns.

Fitin, realizing that the matter was serious, sent out serious assignments to all the heads of the stations - to urgently transmit to the Center any information regarding atomic weapons, which the intelligence officers themselves had no idea about at that time.

In the spring of 1942, intelligence leaders presented Stalin with the state of affairs and prospects for the creation of atomic weapons by the Allies, and proposed to do this in our country. In the fall, after consulting with famous physicists A. Ioffe, N. Semenov, V. Khlopin and P. Kapitsa, Stalin issued a decree “On the organization of work on uranium.”

Soviet nuclear physicists got to work, and intelligence officers supplied them with invaluable materials obtained abroad.

Academician Igor Kurchatov wrote:
“My examination of the materials showed that their receipt is of enormous, invaluable importance for our state and science... The material made it possible to obtain very important guidelines for our scientific research, bypassing many very labor-intensive phases of developing the problem, and to learn about new scientific and technical ways to resolve it."

“Management of all work on the use of intra-atomic energy of uranium” was entrusted to Beria.

For a long time, Western intelligence services did not even suspect that Soviet intelligence officers were aware of new developments. And when, at the Potsdam Conference, US President Truman announced the testing of “a fundamentally new weapon of enormous destructive power,” he was surprised by Stalin’s calm reaction.

On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested in Semipalatinsk, which was an exact copy of the American one, and this is a huge credit to Fitin’s intelligence officers and himself.

Pavel Fitin remained in his post until June 1946, and then was transferred to another job.

In his memoirs, he wrote: “In the post-war years, for almost five years I had to deal with issues related to the special production and commissioning of uranium plants...”.
And since 1951 he has been the Minister of State Security in Kazakhstan.

After Beria's arrest, Fitin's career collapsed. Considering that he was part of Beria’s inner circle, although this was not the case, they also tried to present him as an “enemy of the people,” but nothing came of this.
However, he was fired “due to official inconsistency.”

Pavel Mikhailovich’s grandson, Andrei Fitin, recalls: “It was a regret that I spent so much effort and had to leave everything behind. But the grandfather did not harbor any grudges. Once he just said: “The truth will find its way.”

At the end of 1971, Pavel Fitin died, and his name disappeared for several decades.

But gradually the name of Pavel Fitin returns from oblivion.
A documentary film was made about him, a book was written, and on October 10, 2017, a monument to the legendary Alex was solemnly opened in Moscow.


Monument to Pavel Mikhailovich Fitin near the building of the press bureau of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service