Shvartsman apologise - for causing blood to spill on the carpet. He also beat the arrested Red Army officers Kirill Meretskov and Boris Vannikov with a rubber truncheon, though when charged with this offence 12 years later, he claimed that the beatings did not amount to 'torture'. On Stalin's orders, he also kidnapped and killed the wife of Marshal Kulik. Espionage He was involved with a plan to build up a network of spies inside the Manhattan Project. The NKVD's first success was the recruitment of Klaus Fuchs. The project was given the codename "Enormoz". In November 1944, Pavel Fitin reported: Despite participation by a large number of scientific organization and workers on the problem of Enormoz in the U.S., mainly known to us by agent data, their cultivation develops poorly. Therefore, the major part of data on the U.S. comes from the station in England. On the basis of information from London station, Moscow Center more than once sent to the New York station a work orientation and sent a ready agent, too [Klaus Fuchs]. Another important source was John Cairncross. Fitin reported to Merkulov: Valuable information on Enormoz is coming from the London station. The first materials on Enormoz were received in late 1941 from our source List [John Cairncross], containing valuable and absolutely secret documents both on the substance of the Enormoz problem and on measures by the British government to organize and develop work on the problem of atomic energy in our country. In connection with American and Canadian work on Enormoz, materials describing the state and progress of work in three countries—England, the U.S., and Canada—are all coming from the London station. During the war, Merkulov wrote a patriotic play Engineer Sergeyev, using the pseudonym Vsevolod Rokk. Post war The author Nikolai Tolstoy, in his Victims of Yalta (1977), recounts Merkulov speaking to the imprisoned Cossack general Pyotr Krasnov in the Lubyanka in 1945. (The report is the testimony of the general's son, Nikolai Krasnov, who was also present and later released from the Gulag under Nikita Khrushchev's 1955 amnesty.) Sooner or later there will be a clash between the Communist Bear and the Western Bulldog. There will be no mercy for our sugar-coated, honey-dripping, wheedling, grovelling allies! We'll blow them to blazes with all their kings, with all their traditions, lords, castles, heralds, Orders of the Bath and Garter, and their white wigs. When