Autor/Autorin
7 July 2019
– In 1994, Pavel Sudoplatov admitted to Swedish officials that he had based the allegations contained in his memoir Special Tasks about Raoul Wallenberg’s alleged death by poisoning in 1947 entirely on information he had obtained from Russian media reports.
– Contrary to Sudoplatov’s claims, he was not merely an outside observer of the activities of Soviet biochemist Grigory Mairanovsky, head of the notorious MGB Toxicological Laboratory. In the years 1942-1946, Mairanovsky’s laboratory was located in Sudoplatov’s Directorate of Terror, and from 1946 to 1950 Mairanovsky poisoned a large number of victims on Sudoplatov’s direct orders. Sudoplatov knew the full background of his and Mairanovsky’s victims, including their names. So if Stalin had given Mairanovsky the order to kill Raoul Wallenberg, Sudoplatov would have known about it – he would not have had to guess.
– Until 1989, Sudoplatov apparently knew nothing about Raoul Wallenberg and did not know his name either. Raoul Wallenberg was therefore not part of these special murders ordered by Stalin and carried out by Sudoplatov and Mairanovsky in 1947.
– These facts were known to a joint Swedish-Russian working group, but were not disclosed in the group’s two official reports from 2000.
– Sudoplatov’s statements in his 1994 memoirs appear to have been part of a deliberate Russian disinformation effort aimed at ending official Wallenberg research at that time.
– The current leadership of the Russian State Security Service (FSB) and most likely the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, which arranged for the rehabilitation of Raoul Wallenberg in 2000, certainly know the full truth about his fate.
– The findings raise important questions about the motivation of the Russian authorities to obstruct Wallenberg’s research for so long. They also emphasise the need for researchers, for Raoul Wallenberg’s family and especially for the Swedish government to press the Russian authorities to make available the important documents that are currently still locked away in Russian archives.
For further information please contact:
Susanne Berger
Coordinator
RWI-70
www.rwi-70.de
6045 25th Rd Nd N
Arlington, VA 22207 USA
E-mail: susanne.berger@rwi-70.de
Phone: + 1 571 594 1701
Säkerhetsrådet, 7 July 2019
Documents obtained from Swedish government archives show that former Soviet state security officer Lieutenant General Pavel Sudoplatov based his claims about the alleged death by poisoning of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in 1947 solely on information he received from Russian media reports in 1993. Sudoplatov also seriously misrepresented his connection with Grigori Mairanovsky’s Toxicological Laboratory from 1938 to 1946 and with Mairanovsky personally until 1950. The joint Swedish-Russian working group that investigated Raoul Wallenberg’s fate in the 1990s knew about these facts, but did not disclose them in two official reports from 2000. Sudoplatov’s claims appear to have been part of a deliberate Russian disinformation effort to close the Wallenberg case.
In his memoirs Special Tasks , published in 1994, Soviet State Security Colonel Pavel Sudoplatov claimed that Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg , imprisoned in the Soviet Union in 1945, was most likely poisoned by Soviet biochemist Grigori Mairanovsky in his notorious MGB toxicological laboratory in 1947. In 1944, the Swedish government appointed Wallenberg as secretary in its legation in Budapest to protect the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi persecution. In January 1945, Wallenberg was detained by the Soviet military counter-intelligence organisation SMERSH in Budapest and taken to Moscow. The subsequent Soviet and Russian governments claimed that he died or was executed in the summer of 1947, but the full circumstances of his fate were never revealed.
It was assumed that Sudoplatov, as head of the Ministry of State Security’s Terror and Sabotage Service (MGB), had special insider knowledge of the Kremlin’s darkest secrets. The American author and journalist Kati Marton summarised the prevailing opinion in 1995: „Although questions have been raised about some parts of Sudoplatov’s book, there is no reason to doubt him on the subject of Wallenberg.“ However, the documents from Swedish archives and additional information from several Russian sources strongly suggest that Sudoplatov’s statements were apparently part of a deliberate Russian disinformation effort aimed at ending official Wallenberg research in the 1990s.
Sudoplatov’s claims about Raoul Wallenberg bear a striking resemblance to the recent publication of a chapter on the Wallenberg case published in 2016 in the memoirs of Ivan Serov , the former chairman of the KGB. Anatoly Sudoplatov , the son of Pavel Sudoplatov and a colonel in Russian state security, played a central role in the inclusion of the dodgy information about Raoul Wallenberg in both memoirs. This reinforces the assumption that both publications were part of a possible deliberate effort by the Russian authorities to end the Wallenberg investigation. Sudoplatov’s book was published during the ongoing official investigation of the Swedish-Russian working group (1991-2000) in Russia, while Serov’s memoirs were published shortly before Wallenberg’s niece Marie von Dardel-Dupuy filed a lawsuit against the Central Archives of the State Security Service (FSB) in 2017.
When Swedish and Russian diplomats questioned Pavel Sudoplatov in June 1994, he voluntarily admitted that he had obtained all the information about the Raoul Wallenberg case entirely from Russian media sources. In a written reply, Sudoplatov stated:
„In (…) Special Tasks: Notes of an UnwantedWitness , which I co-authored, all reflections on Wallenberg’s fate are based on the interpretation of materials and documents published in our [Russian] press.“
Then he added:
„The version that Wallenberg was killed in [Grigori] Mairanovsky’s laboratory is presented in the book only as a hypothesis.“
Sudoplatov’s statement is in the collection of documents of the Swedish-Russian working group, but has never been made available to the public.
More importantly, Sudoplatov seriously misrepresented his personal and professional connection to Mairanovsky in his memoirs. Contrary to Sudoplatov’s claims, he was not merely an outside observer of Mairanovsky’s activities, but directly supervised his work. According to Russian documents, Sudoplatov knew the names and backgrounds of Mairanovsky’s victims killed in 1946-1950. If Stalin and the Soviet leadership had ordered Mairanovsky to poison Wallenberg, Sudoplatov would have known about this order and would not have had to speculate. In fact, Mairanowsky had not been in charge of the toxicological laboratory since mid-1946. He could therefore not have killed Wallenberg there. It seems that Sudoplatov did not even know Wallenberg’s name until he was questioned about the case by Russian journalist Vladimir Abarinov in 1989. „‚And who is this man [Wallenberg],‘ – Sudoplatov asked Abarinov when the latter called him [about the Wallenberg case] – ‚this is the first time in my life I’ve heard the name‘.“
In addition, Yevgeny Pitovranov, former head of the MGB’s internal counterintelligence from 1946 to 1951, interviewed Sudoplatov personally after his memoirs were published. Although the transcript remains secret, the report of the Russian working group states: „No information about R. Wallenberg was found in [Sudoplatov’s] file and during [Pitovranov’s] interview.“ All this means that both Swedish and Russian officials were aware at the end of 1994 that Sudoplatov knew nothing about Wallenberg. They also chose not to address Sudoplatov’s apparent misrepresentation of his direct interactions with Mairanovsky. In this sense, both reports are misleading. The Swedish report did not even mention that Swedish officials had interviewed Sudoplatov separately in 1994 and what clarifications he had givenThe Wallenberg case is not the only inaccurate claim about alleged poisoning in Sudoplatov’s memoirs. He states that the famous Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels and a secret agent of the MGB named Vladimir Golubov-Potapov were „pricked with a poison needle“ in January 1948. However, it is known from the recently published documentation that these two victims were murdered on Stalin’s orders without the use of poison.
It is possible that Sudoplatov’s „hypothesis“ about Wallenberg’s alleged poisoning by Mairanovsky was primarily intended to indirectly confirm the Soviet government’s official version of Wallenberg’s death in his prison cell on 17 July 1947, allegedly from a heart attack. Apparently, the desire to adhere to the official Soviet version of Wallenberg’s death also guided the decision of Soviet and later Russian officials to withhold information for decades about an unknown prisoner No. 7, who was interrogated for over 16 hours on 23 July 1947 along with Wallenberg’s driver, Hungarian citizen Vilmos Langfelder. It was only in 2009 that FSB archivists informed us that prisoner no. 7 was „in all probability Raoul Wallenberg“. If this is true, it would mean that Wallenberg was alive at least six days after his official death date of 17 July 1947.
Together with these and other relevant facts, Sudoplatov’s lies raise a crucial question about the possible motivations of the Russian authorities for the highly selective release of information in the Wallenberg case: Why is it, even today, so important for the Russian authorities to stick to the official version of Raoul Wallenberg’s death in Soviet captivity? This attitude seems all the more perplexing given that there is currently no reliable evidence of Wallenberg’s prolonged survival in the Soviet prison system.
The official Soviet version of Wallenberg’s heart attack during interrogation looks very suspicious. This was usually the diagnosis given by prison doctors in cases where prisoners on remand died as a result of torture and/or exhaustion. Heart attack (infarction) was also noted in the late 1950s in the death certificates of political prisoners sentenced to death or shot in Stalin’s time. All this therefore points to the possibility that the attempts to conceal the circumstances of Wallenberg’s death were aimed at hiding how and when he died.
The current FSB leadership and most likely the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, which issued Raoul Wallenberg’s rehabilitation in 2000, know the full truth. Several high-ranking officials of Stalin’s security services lived well into the early 2000s. The former first deputy chairman of the KGB, Army General Filipp Bobkov, died just last month at the age of 93. Apparently Bobkov was responsible when the KGB returned some of Wallenberg’s personal possessions „accidentally discovered“ in the KGB Central Archives in 1989-1991 to Nina Lagergren and Professor Guy von Dardel, Wallenberg’s half-sister and half-brother.
Researchers, Raoul Wallenberg’s family and above all the Swedish government must now urgently put pressure on the FSB and the Russian government to publish important information about Wallenberg’s fate, which is still secret and has been concealed for far too long.