Vsevolod Nikolayevich (Boris) Merkulov (; – 23 December 1953) was the head of NKGB from February to July 1941, and again from April 1943 to March 1946. He was a leading member of what was later derisively described as the "Beria gang". Early life Merkulov was born in 1895 in Zagatala in present-day Azerbaijan. His Russian father and Georgian mother were both minor members of the nobility. His father, an army captain, was convicted of embezzlement around the year 1900, and died in 1908. In 1913, Vsevolod Merkulov graduated from the Tiflis Gymnasium with a gold medal and became a student at Saint Petersburg University, Department of Physics and Mathematics, but did not graduate. In 1916, he was drafted into the Russian Army. In 1918, he left the army and moved to Tiflis (Tbilisi), where for a time he was unemployed, then worked as a teacher. From September 1921, after the Red Army invasion of Georgia, he was enlisted Cheka, and its successor, the GPU. Merkulov first met Lavrentiy Beria in 1923, when Beria was 24 and had been made deputy chairman of the Georgian GPU. He owed his subsequent promotions to Beria's patronage. He joined the Communist Party in 1925. From 1925 to 1931, he was Head of Secret Operations Directorate and Deputy Head of he GPU of Adzharistan. In 1931, he was made head of the Secret Political Department of the Transcaucasian GPU, but soon afterwards transferred to party work, when Beria was First Secretary of the Transcaucasian communist party. He wrote a pamphlet about Beria, entitled The Faithful Son of the Leninist-Stalinist Party. He was head of the Industry and Transport section of the Georgian CP Central Committee in 1936-38. Transfer to Moscow Merkulov was transfered to Moscow in August 1938, shortly after Beria had been chosen by Stalin to take over control of the NKVD from Nikolai Yezhov. When Beria took over as head of the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) on 29 September 1938, he chose Merkulov as his deputy. In 1939, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Merkulov interrogated Yefim Yevdokimov, an associate of Yezhov who had been under arrest for five months but had refused to cooperate. On 13 April 1939, Yevdokimov broke down and 'confessed' to being part of the 'Yezhov conspiracy'. At his trial, he said that he had