Sergei Kruglov’s route into the security services stood out as unusually long and distinct when compared with other leaders who shaped the era. The founders of the security services like Felix Dzerzhinsky and Lavrentiy Beria were all veterans of the 1917 revolution and had been Bolsheviks. Kruglov, born in 1907 in the Tver province into a peasant family, could not participate in revolutionary events due to his youth. He began working at the age of 12 as a shepherd and pursued education in several workers’ schools. There he first became a pro-Soviet youth activist and joined the Komsomol at 16.
So if the old Bolsheviks began their journeys as opponents who became revolutionaries, Kruglov’s path showed that Soviet power was a given from the start. He quickly joined the pro-government mainstream, serving as secretary and then chairman of the village council and acting as an authorized ambassador of the volost executive committee on a regular basis.
Kruglov then led the local reading room, headed the Komsomol cell, and ran the local consumer society, climbing through a series of lower party roles in pursuit of higher responsibilities.
In 1931, the young man moved to Moscow to study at the Moscow Industrial Pedagogical Institute named after Karl Liebknecht, pursuing engineering and teaching. From his first year, Komosomolets gave lectures on social sciences to workers at the Geophysical plant, prompting the factory’s director to remark that he showed maximum Bolshevik energy and that the social science program had no political mistakes. Translated into modern terms, Kruglov was a steadfast loyalist to the party line and supported it with full commitment.
After a series of small and mid-level roles, Kruglov was drawn into the NKVD. This followed Lavrentiy Beria’s arrival in November 1938 and the rapid turnover of two previous heads of departments. In the pre-war years Kruglov rose to Beria’s deputy, and during the Great Patriotic War he undertook tasks for the party, including leading the sapper army, organizing security for the Yalta Peace Conference, and accompanying Molotov to the first UN meeting in New York. He evolved from a minor Komsomol activist into a major party functionary.
To betray in time is to foresee
Kruglov became head of the NKVD in 1946 when the postwar political climate had eased. Beria was deeply involved with the atomic project, yet it is believed he left a loyal deputy in charge. The People’s Commissariats were transformed into ministries, and the NKVD split into the police Ministry of Internal Affairs and the intelligence-political Ministry of State Security. Officially, the change aimed to reduce the workload, but the move likely reflected fear of a powerful service by Stalin. Kruglov led the police portion of the former People’s Commissariat and remained minister of Internal Affairs until Stalin’s death in 1953. He was not renowned for bold, decisive actions, but his role became uniquely influential as events unfolded.
When Stalin died, Beria took charge of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and, after a spring 1953 departmental reorganization, rejoined the state security institutions. The new party leadership soon distrusted him; fearing his potential for plots, they accused him of planning a coup. In June 1953 Beria was arrested by troops led by Marshal Zhukov, and six months later his once-powerful security apparatus was eliminated. Kruglov responded to the crisis by joining the ranks opposing the so-called coup and played an active role in the arrest and interrogation of Beria.
Consequently, Kruglov became the new head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, yet found himself in a precarious position. While he needed to investigate Beria’s crimes, the scope of his inquiry was constrained by Khrushchev’s boundaries, and Kruglov acted as a technical executor within those limits.
Then a turning point arrived on February 4, 1954, when Kruglov presented a plan to the Central Committee to create the KGB. His proposal envisioned splitting operational security units from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, trimming staff by about 20 percent, and placing the new department in a separate structure that would lack ministerial status. The KGB, established on March 13, would be tightly aligned with the party elite and would not possess an independent political weight. This blueprint set the stage for the organization that later became renowned with figures like Yuri Andropov and Vladimir Kryuchkov. The broader public, however, mostly remembers Beria, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Dzerzhinsky as the heads of earlier security bodies.
Beria’s Shadow
Kruglov did not welcome the demotion and continued serving as Minister of Internal Affairs, yet Khrushchev and the party leadership never fully trusted him. His sympathy for Beria after the arrest created lingering mistrust, and in the 1950s Kruglov faced a series of demotions. He shifted to the role of Deputy Minister of Construction of Power Plants of the USSR, then to a less flattering position as deputy chairman of the National Economic Council of the Kirov Region, and finally to a disability-related discharge from public service.
The political elite saw this as insufficient punishment for a former official, and Kruglov’s life saw further humiliation as he was stripped of his general’s apartment and pension. He was officially accused of involvement in evacuations in 1944, arbitrary actions against evacuees, and executions of innocents, the elderly, and women with children. The record cited a party report from the period between the XXth and XXII Congresses of the CPSU (1956–1961). The general drift of those evacuations under Stalin’s rule remains debated, and Kruglov’s personal guilt is not clear, though it was deemed irrelevant to remove Beria’s shadow. The party aimed to reshuffle power away from Beria’s influence, and Kruglov—one of the last remaining NKVD veterans—was allowed to reach old age as a pensioner.
The end of Kruglov’s life remains shrouded in mystery. On the evening of July 6, 1977, he did not return home from his Moscow dacha as planned. His wife and grandson found the house open, and soon it became evident that the former head of the state security establishment had died after being struck by a train at a nearby crossing. One version suggests suicide amid rumors of renewed investigations into deportations; historians, relying on documents, favor the simpler explanation that a misstep at night led to the fatal accident. The events closed a long, controversial career that left behind a complicated legacy and a reputation intertwined with Beria’s era.