The official explanation was that he accidentally shot himself, though it is more likely that he had killed himself, having failed to convince the international court that the massacre of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn forest had been perpetrated by the Germans, not the NKVD.
A fellow officer, Lev Sheinin later claimed that Likhachev had forced a young interpreter to cohabit, and when she became pregnant, made her have an abortion.
[2] Despite this temporary disgrace, he returned to his former position as Deputy Head of the investigative unit, and assisted Abakumov in fabricating a case against the former Minister for Aviation, Aleksey Shakhurin and the former Chief Marshal of Aviation Alexander Novikov, and three others who were arrested in April 1946, subjected to round the clock interrogation, and forced to confess to supplying the Soviet air force with sub-standard equipment.
[4] In 1948, he was assigned to the investigation of the former members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist committee, who were suspected of sympathising with the newly created state of Israel.
Within days of his arrival, a dozen middle ranking communists had been arrested, and their Czech interrogators had been instructed to force confessions out of them.
On 18 November 1950, the MGB arrested an elderly Jewish doctor, Yakov Etinger, who was accused of being a Zionist agent and enemy of the Soviet government.
Ryumin claimed to have extracted a confession from Etinger that he had poisoned the former Moscow party boss, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, who had died of natural causes in 1945.
In particular, I interrogated the arrested Shakhurin, Novikov, Fefer, Zhemchuzhina and others, always reacted sharply to the testimony of those under investigation and, as it seemed to me, correctly and completely exposed their criminal activities and connections.
[7]On 11 July, the Commission came down in Ryumin's favour, and ruled that Akabumov, Likhachev and another senior MGB officer, Aleksandr Leonov, should be dismissed, and expelled from the communist party.
The announcement in Pravda on 24 December said that he had been convicted of forcing innocent victims to make false confessions, and had been sentenced to death and shot.