{{Short description|Soviet politician (1904-1983)}} {{Infobox officeholder | name = Semyon Ignatiev | image = | image_size = 190px | office = [[Ministry of State Security (Soviet Union)|Minister of State Security]] | term_start = 9 August 1951 | term_end = 5 March 1953 | predecessor = [[Sergei Ogoltsov]] | successor = [[Lavrentiy Beria]] | office1 = Full member of the [[Presidium of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|19th]] [[Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Presidium]] | term_start1 = 16 October 1952 | term_end1 = 5 March 1953 | office2 = Member of the [[Secretariat of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|19th]] [[Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Secretariat]] | term_start2 = 5 March 1953 | term_end2 = 5 April 1953 | birth_date = 14 September 1904 | birth_place = [[Kropyvnytskyi Raion|Karlivka]], [[Kherson Governorate]], [[Russian Empire]] | death_date = {{death date and age|mf=yes|1983|11|27|1904|9|14|df=y}} | death_place = [[Moscow]], [[Soviet Union]] | spouse = | children = | profession = | party = [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] (1926–1961) | native_name_lang = ru | native_name = {{nobold|Семён Игнатьев}} }} '''Semyon Denisovich Ignatiev''' ({{langx|ru|Семён Денисович Игнатьев}}; 14 September 1904 – 27 November 1983) was a Soviet politician, and the last head of the secret police appointed by [[Joseph Stalin]].
==Early career== Ignatiev was the son of a peasant family of [[Ukrainians|Ukrainian]] ethnicity. When he was ten, his parents moved to [[Uzbekistan]], and he learnt to speak Uzbek. After the [[October Revolution|Bolshevik Revolution]], he joined [[Komsomol]] and became a trade union organiser in [[Bukhara]]<ref name="Valeyev">{{cite web |title="Выходец из КГБ был настоящим заступником национального образования и татарского народа" ("An ex-KGB officer was a real defender of national education and the Tatar people" |url=http://tatar-congress.org/ru/blog/vyhodets-iz-kgb-byl-nastoyashim-zastupnikom-natsionalnogo-obrazovaniya-i-tatarskogo-naroda/ |website=ТАТАРЫ: СТРАТЕГИЯ ДЕЙСТВИЙ |date=24 August 2020 |access-date=13 February 2021}}</ref> and an engineer, joined the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Communist Party]] in 1926. For most of his career, he was a discreet regional [[apparatchik]] in the border republics of the USSR.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Zalessky |first1=K.A. |title=Семен Денисович Игнатьев, Официальная справка члена ЦК |url=http://hrono.ru/biograf/bio_i/ignatev_sd.php |website=Khronos |access-date=13 February 2021}}</ref> In 1934-38, he worked in the central party apparatus in Moscow, but received sudden promotion in 1938, as a result of the [[Great Purge]], when he was appointed First Secretary of the communist party in the [[Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic|Buryat ASSR]]. He was subsequently First Secretary in the [[Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic|Bashkir ASSR]], in 1944-46, and served in senior party posts in the [[Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic|Dagestan ASSR]], and Uzbekistan. In May or June 1946, he was summoned to Moscow to act as an inspector of party organisations, on the recommendation of [[Nikolai Patolichev]], who had taken over as a party secretary.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Patolichev |first1=N.S. |title=Measures of Maturity, My Early Life |date=1983 |publisher=Pergamon |location=Oxford |isbn=0-08-024545-5 |pages=285–86}}</ref> In March 1947, he was appointed a secretary of the communist party of [[Belarus|Belorussia]], responsible for agriculture, but was removed early in 1950, and posted to Uzbekistan.
== Head of Security == In December 1950, Ignatiev was recalled to Moscow and appointed head of the department of the [[Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] that supervised party, [[Komsomol]] and trade union personnel, and given the task of investigating the Minister of State Security ([[Ministry of State Security (Soviet Union)|MGB]] - forerunner of the [[KGB]]), [[Viktor Abakumov]], who had been accused of corruption by a rival, [[Ivan Serov]]<ref name="Birin2">{{cite web |last1=Birin |first1=Mikhail |title=Семен Игнатьев: самый "бескровный" министр госбезопасности Сталина (Semyon Ignatiev: the most "bloodless" Minister of State Security of Stalin) |url=https://www.business-gazeta.ru/article/136398 |website=БИЗНЕС Online |access-date=13 February 2021}}</ref> When Abakumov was dismissed and arrested, in July 1951, Ignatiev was originally appointed representative of the Central Committee in the MGB. On 9 August 1951, he was appointed Minister of State Security.<ref name="Birin2" /> He was a member of the [[Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] from 1952 until 1961. He also briefly served as a member of the [[Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Presidium of the Central Committee]] (previously named Politburo) in the final months before Stalin's demise.
Ignatiev's first task was to purge the security apparatus. In just over a year, he had 42,000 MGB officers sacked.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Jonathan Brent |first1=and Vladimir P. Naumov |title=Stalin's Last Crime: the Doctors' Plot |date=2004 |publisher=John Murray |location=London |isbn=0-7195-6508 1 |page=153}}</ref> His tenure as its head coincided with the anti-semitic campaign that began with the arrests of every known Jew employed by the MGB - [[Lev Shvartzman]], [[Nahum Eitingon|Leonid Eitingon]], [[Leonid Raikhman]], [[Andrei Sverdlov]], son of [[Yakov Sverdlov]], and many more- and culminated in the infamous [[Doctors' plot]].
On 5 March 1953, after Stalin's death, Ignatiev was removed from his post in the MGB, as Beria absorbed the MGB into his [[Ministry of Internal Affairs (Russia)|MVD]], and was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee. In April, it was announced in ''[[Pravda]]'' and other newspapers that the Doctors' Plot had been a miscarriage of justice and that Ignatiev had been guilty of "political blindness and ignorance" in allowing it to happen.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Rapoport |first1=Yakov |title=The Doctors' Plot, Stalin's Last Crime |date=1991 |publisher=Fourth Estate |location=London |isbn=1-872180-13-2 |pages=189–90}}</ref>
== Role in the Anti-Semitic Purge == Ignatiev's subordinate, [[Mikhail Ryumin]], was charged with being the main instigator of the Doctors' Plot, for which he was shot. At the same time, it was Ignatiev's good fortune to be the first former head of the security services in almost 30 years to escape being arrested and executed - the fate suffered by [[Genrikh Yagoda]], [[Nikolai Yezhov]], [[Vsevolod Merkulov]], Beria and Abakumov. In later life, Ignatiev would claim that he was never really involved in the Doctors' Plot, except to pass messages between Stalin and Ryumin,<ref name="Birin2" /> and that Stalin had repeatedly threatened to have him killed if he did not obey orders. [[Nikita Khrushchev]] evidently believed him. In the famous [[On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences|Secret Speech]] that he delivered in 1956 to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, in which he exposed Stain's crimes for the first time, Khrushchev remarked: "Present at this Congress as a delegate is the former Minister of State Security Comrade Ignatiev. Stalin told him curtly, 'If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors we will shorten you by a head'."<ref>{{cite web |last1=Khrushchev |first1=Nikita |title=Khrushchev's Secret Speech, 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,' Delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union |url=https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/115995.pdf?v=3c22b71b65bcbbe9fdfadead9419c995 |website=Wilson Center Digital Archive |publisher=Wilson Center |access-date=13 February 2021}}</ref> In his memoirs, Khrushchev claimed:
{{quote|I knew Ignatiev well, and I knew he was a very sick man. He had had a near fatal heart attack. He was mild, considerate and well-liked. We all knew what sort of physical condition he was in. Stalin was crazy with rage, yelling at Ignatiev and threatening him, demanding that he throw the doctors in chains, beat them to pulp, and grind them into powder.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Khrushchev |first1=Nikita |title=Khrushchev Remembers |date=1971 |publisher=Sphere |location=London |pages=253–54}}</ref>|}}
By contrast, the former MGB officer, [[Pavel Sudoplatov]], asserted that "at the peak of the anti-semitic campaign, not Ryumin but Mesetsov, Konyatkin and Ignatiev were in charge of the criminal investigation and the beating of the doctors"<ref>{{cite book |last1=Sudoplativ |first1=Pavel |title=Special Tasks, the Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - a Soviet Spymaster |date=1995 |publisher=Warner Books |location=London |isbn=0-7515-1240-0 |page=306}}</ref> He described Mesetsov and Konyatkin, who was Ryumin's deputy, as "incompetent". Ryumin was sacked in November 1952, while Ignatiev remained in office, though he collapsed on 14 November 1952 after transmitting a direct order from Stalin that the prisoners would be tortured. He may have been reluctant to have the instruction carried out, but the historians Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov have noted that "Ignatiev's malaise and exhaustion did not prevent him from slavish obedience."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Brent |first1=and Naumov |title=Stalin's Last Crime |page=221}}</ref>
Sudoplatov also alleged that Ignatiev planned to carry out assassinations in Germany and Paris of elderly opponents of the Soviet regime, including exiled [[Mensheviks]] and a Ukrainian nationalist who "was in this seventies, no longer active, but Ignatiev's group was eager to report his liquidation to impress the government."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Sudoplatov |title=Special Tasks |page=330}}</ref> Other planned targets for assassination allegedly included [[Josip Broz Tito]] and [[Alexander Kerensky]].<ref name="Birin2" />
== Later career == In February 1954, Ignatiev was reappointed to the post of First secretary in the Bashkir republic, which he had held ten years earlier. In June 1957-October 1960, he was head of the communist party in [[Tatarstan]]. Tatar historian credit him with having lobbied Moscow in 1958 to revive the Tatar language. According to one historian, Rimzil Valeyev "no other party leader cared for the [[Tatar language]] and culture as fundamentally and effectively as Ignatiev did in 1957-1960"<ref name="Valeyev" /> - partly because no other party official in Tatarstan had Ignatiev's experience of high level politics in Moscow. Ignatiev retired "for health reasons" in 1961. He died of natural causes in 1983 and was buried in the [[Novodevichy Cemetery]] in Moscow, along with many members of the Soviet elite.
==References== {{Reflist}} *{{cite book |last1=Gorlitzki |first1=Yoram |last2=Khlevniuk |first2=Oleg |title=Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2004 |isbn=0-19-534735-8 }} *{{cite book |last=Marie |first=Jean-Jacques |title=Staline |location=Paris |publisher=Fayard |year=2001 |isbn=2-213-60897-0 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/staline0000mari }} *{{cite book |last=Sebag Montefiore |first=Simon |title=Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar |location=London |publisher=Phoenix |year=2004 |isbn=0-7538-1766-7 }}
==External links== * [https://web.archive.org/web/20070818114048/http://hronos.km.ru/biograf/ignattv_s.html A biography of Semyon Ignatiev] (in Russian) * [https://web.archive.org/web/20070222181419/http://www.fsb.ru/history/liders/ignatiev.html Official FSB profile of Semyon Ignatiev] (in Russian) * [https://espressostalinist.com/2014/08/23/the-jewish-anti-fascist-committee-and-the-anti-jewish-plot/]
{{19th Presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union}} {{Chiefs of Soviet secret police agencies}} {{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ignatiev, Semyon}} [[Category:1904 births]] [[Category:1983 deaths]] [[Category:People from Kherson Governorate]] [[Category:People from Yelisavetgradsky Uyezd]] [[Category:Members of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, 1955–1959]] [[Category:Members of the Central Auditing Commission of the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)]] [[Category:Members of the Secretariat of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] [[Category:Members of the Presidium of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] [[Category:Members of the Central Committee of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] [[Category:Members of the Central Committee of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] [[Category:First convocation members of the Soviet of the Union]] [[Category:Second convocation members of the Soviet of the Union]] [[Category:Third convocation members of the Soviet of the Union]] [[Category:Fourth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union]] [[Category:Fifth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union]] [[Category:Recipients of the Order of Lenin]] [[Category:Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour]] [[Category:Burials at Novodevichy Cemetery]]