Untitled edit

Ivan Serov was the head of GRU and KGB ??????? That is on polish wikipedia.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.18.63.251 (talkcontribs)

I don´t think he dead 1990? I think it was 1963 and he killed him self. After the Penkowsky affair. Source: Inside the KGB.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.166.8.234 (talkcontribs)

yes he shot himself in 1963 this article is terrible and it sucks that i don't have the time to fix it —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.2.125.42 (talk) 03:22, 31 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

WikiProject class rating edit

This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 16:53, 27 August 2007 (UTC)Reply

Cleaned up edit

I have slightly improved the article by adding a bit of new information to it, removing all references to the writings by publicist Viktor Suvorov, whose credibility is a serious question, resorting to more neutral terms, and deleting a number of false and poorly sourced claims, such as those which involve Serov carrying out the execution of Mikhail Tukhachevsky in 1937, when the former was merely a subsidiary of the Frunze Military Academy and had nothing to do with the purge in the Red Army. Eriba-Marduk (talk) 18:17, 8 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, you have not improved anything at this time. Your edits were reverted due to a barrage of unsupported claims made during the rewording of the original text. Please do not remove sourced data without feedback from the community. Thanks, Poeticbent talk 19:58, 8 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Sorry, I have provided a source for every claim and made a number of references to the same article by N. Petrov that is listed in the Further Reading section; the only difference being that I have referred to its Russian original.
As for the removed 'data', the article in its current form is plain ridiculous. For example, it claims that "Serov was widely known for boasting to his colleagues that he could break every bone in a man's body without killing him" (sic!) and then refers to a publication that appeared on the pages of the Tribune magazine in 1958. This claim is most likely false, since Serov held senior positions and worked as a high-ranking organizer who didn't have to torture any prisoners or POWs by himself in order to gain information or convict them. Besides, the link in the reference is dead, the source lacks any concrete evidence and there are no other sources either in Russian or English to back up this claim. Hence, it should be removed from the article. Next, the article goes on saying that the "Time magazine has accused him of being responsible for the death of 'hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian peasants' in this time period". Although there is little doubt that Serov was responsible for many deaths, I doubt that a short claim made on the pages of the Time magazine is important enough to be presented in the article. Likely, I doubt that Khruschev should be labelled as the "Butcher of the Ukraine" just because some article on h2g2.com applies this term to him; he has never been known under that nickname in Ukraine itself. References to the work by Viktor Suvorov, a publicist who's credibility is at an all-time low, and his claim that Serov, then a mere student at the Frunze Military Academy, might have somehow executed Tukhachevsky, are at odds with facts and common sense. Eriba-Marduk (talk) 23:06, 9 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion edit

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 11:06, 19 August 2019 (UTC)Reply