Serov helped establish secret police forces in the Eastern Bloc after the war and played an important role in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

[1] Serov was removed from power in 1963 after his protégé, GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, was exposed as a mole passing classified documents to both British and American intelligence.

[5] In 1939, Serov joined the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the main security agency and secret police of the Soviet Union.

Viktor Suvorov claims that in 1946, Serov had oversight of the execution of Andrey Vlasov and the rest of the command of the Russian Liberation Army, an organisation that had co-operated with the Nazis in World War II.

[6] Serov was one of the senior figures in SMERSH, the wartime counterintelligence department of the Red Army, Soviet Navy and NKVD troops, serving as a deputy to Viktor Abakumov.

It was in this function that he founded the Ministry of Public Security, the secret police of the Soviet-backed Polish People's Republic until 1956, acting as its main Soviet advisor and organiser.

After the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, Serov was one of the few senior members of the political police to survive the wave of demotions and forced retirements of Stalinist officials.

Serov organised security for the tours of Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev in the United Kingdom, where he was decried by the British media as "Ivan the Terrible" and "the Butcher".

[5] In December 1958, Serov was removed from his post as Chairman of the KGB after hints by Khrushchev, who had said that Western visitors could expect that they "wouldn't see so many policemen around the place" and that the Soviet police force would undergo a restructuring.

Serov spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully seeking rehabilitation in the eyes of the public, restoration of his party membership, and the return of his rank of general and Hero of the Soviet Union to him.

[14] In MI5 files about Serov, British agents who had met him called him "something of a ladies' man," good mannered, carefully dressed and a moderate drinker.

[15] Serov, although generally considered less significant than Beria in modern literature, helped to bring Stalinism to Europe and to Stalinise the Soviet Union.

Serov's consolidation of Soviet power in Eastern Europe was helped by his organisation of both the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (Polish Intelligence Service) in Poland and the Stasi in East Germany.