A terse little paragraph on the back page of Pravda disclosed last week that "Army General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov has been released from his duties as chairman of the State Security Committee in connection with his transfer to other duties." The announcement, which was not even repeated on the Soviet radio, was as brusque as it was brief. Just as in the case of the disgraced war hero, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, it failed to say what the general's new duties would be—and Zhukov has yet to turn up in another post.
Thus Nikita Khrushchev fired his secret police chief, one of...
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