Kobulov

The surname Kobulov may refer to either of the two Soviet Union statesmen and state security officers who are occasionally confused with one another and who were brothers:

Bogdan Kobulov
Bogdan Kobulov (Богда́н Заха́рович Кобулов) (1 March 1904 – 23 December 1953) was a Soviet politician and member of the Soviet security and police apparatus during and briefly after the Joseph Stalin years.

Kobulov was born in Tbilisi the son of an ethnic Armenian tailor. He joined the OGPU in 1931 and became one of Beria's closest associates.

He was a candidate member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (18th & 19th Congresses), and was Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the second convocation.

He held a series of senior posts in the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and was the most trusted henchman of the NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria. As head of the Investigative Branch of the USSR NKVD from December 22, 1938 to September 4, 1939, he was one of the major organizers of the political terror.

At the fall of Lavrentiy Beria, Kobulov was arrested along with his boss on June 27, 1953; he was convicted on multiple charges, including espionage, and sentenced to death and executed on December 23, 1953.

Amayak Kobulov
Bogdan Kobulov's younger brother, Amayak Zaharovich Kobulov (Амаяк Захарович Кобулов) (1906-1955), was also an NKVD officer. In the history of Soviet espionage he is noted for his stint in Berlin as chief of the Main Directorate of State Security Foreign Branch's rezidentura from September 1939 until June 1941. While in Berlin, in August 1940, he recruited a supposedly well-connected Latvian journalist Orest Berlinks (codenamed by the Soviets "Litseist"), who, in fact, was used by the Germans as a channel of disinformation and might have been instrumental in cementing Stalin's conviction that Adolf Hitler did not intend to attack the USSR in 1941.

From July 1941 to January 1945, he was NKVD chief in Uzbekistan.

In 1944, as People’s Commissar (minister) of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan, he made administrative and logistical arrangements for the reception of the deported Crimean Tatars in Uzbekistan.

He was sentenced to death on October 1, 1954, and shot on February 2, 1955.