the Hungarian crisis, sending reports to the Kremlin from Budapest, and escorting visiting Soviet Presidium leaders Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov via an armoured personnel carrier into Budapest on 24 October, as there was too much shooting in the streets. In 1956, the Hungarian Revolution overthrew the incumbent communist Hungarian government, and in response, János Kádár formed a new government that was more loyal to Moscow, which received little popular support. Serov was responsible for arresting the supporters of Imre Nagy who were trying to negotiate with Soviet military officials. Serov organized deportations of Hungarians, one being Nagy. Serov also tried stopping The Workers' Council of Budapest from negotiating for the return of deportees and political rights, using Soviet troops to prevent the council from meeting in the city's Sports Hall. Serov co-ordinated the abduction of Pál Maléter, the Hungarian general, and the disruption of peace talks between the Red Army and the Hungarian forces. Removal Serov was removed from his post as head of the KGB in 1958 after hints by Nikita Khrushchev, who had said that Western visitors could expect that they "wouldn't see so many policemen around the place" and that the Soviet police force would undergo a restructuring. Serov became the director of the GRU. GRU director In the GRU, he was a participant in the Cuban Missile Crisis, helping the Soviet leadership with American intelligence. Downfall After the failure of the Soviet Union to gain the upper hand in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Serov was dismissed. In 1965, he was stripped of his party membership. Serov's downfall from power has been linked to Oleg Penkovsky, his protégé, being an officer who became a double agent. Serov died in 1990 at the Central Military Clinical Hospital in Krasnogorsk. He was buried at the cemetery in the village of Ilyinskoye in Krasnogorsky District, Moscow Oblast. Awards and decorations Soviet Union jubilee medals SOURCE: Foreign Serov's award of the Gold's Cross of the Virtuti Militari was posthumously deprived in 1995 by the decision of the President of Poland Lech Wałęsa. Personality In MI5 files about Serov, British agents who had met him called him "something of a ladies' man," good mannered, carefully dressed and a moderate drinker. He displayed a considerable familiarity with detective fiction such as Sherlock Holmes. His sense of humour was somewhat heavy, and his jokes were broadly sarcastic and, on occasion, strongly anti-Semitic. According