The Soviets Abroad: The NKVD, Intelligence, and State Building in East-Central Europe after World War II

By the time Nikolai Kovalchuk was removed from service in 1954, he had worked in the Soviet secret police for over 20 years. He had served not only in Soviet Russia and Ukraine but also in the Baltic states soon after they were annexed to the Soviet Union and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) adviser apparatus in Poland and Germany after World War II. Born in Kiev in 1902, Kovalchuk had completed only two years of high school before joining a local militia. He served in the Red Army between November 1926 and April 1932. While in the Red Army, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in November 1927 at the age of 25, after the defeat of Lev Trotskii had cemented Iosif Stalin as sole dictator of the Soviet Union. He was one of the hundreds of thousands of new, young recruits who entered the party between 1924 and 1928, when it expanded from 472,000 to 1,304,471 members.1 He was recruited to the NKVD from the Red Army in April 1932; there, from 1936, he was promoted rapidly in the ranks during the campaigns of mass violence known as the Great Terror. During World War II, he served in military intelligence on the Fourth Ukrainian Front and attained the rank of lieutenant general. From 1945, he was moved from country to country to oversee security operations in territories newly annexed to, or increasingly under the influence of, the Soviet Union. He served as chief NKVD adviser in Soviet-occupied Germany (August 1946–August 1949) and Poland (June