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Matvei Davidovich Berman was a Soviet security officer and head of the Gulag Soviet prison camp system from 1932 to 1937.

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Gleb Ivanovich Bokii was a Ukrainian Communist political activist, revolutionary, and paranormal investigator in the Russian Empire. Following the October Revolution of 1917, Bokii became a leading member of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, and later of the OGPU and NKVD.

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Vladimir Georgievich Dekanozov (Dekanozishvili) was a Soviet senior state security operative and diplomat.

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Mikhail Maksimovich Gvishiani was an ethnic Georgian who served as executive officer in the Soviet NKVD. He oversaw the deportation and relocation of ethnic groups from the North Caucasus, which was planned and organized by Lavrentiy Beria and approved by Stalin. Mikhail Gvishiani is particularly known for his involvement in the burning of some 700 civilians in what would later become known as the Khaibakh massacre.

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Amayak Zakharovich Kobulov was a Soviet politician and member of the Soviet security (OGPU-NKVD) and police apparatus during and briefly after the Joseph Stalin years, as was his older brother Bogdan Kobulov.

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Genrikh Samoilovich Lyushkov was an officer in the Soviet secret police and its highest-ranking defector. A high-ranking officer of the NKVD, he played a role in perpetrating Stalin's Great Purge. When, in 1938, he suspected he would soon fall victim to the purge, he fled to the Japanese. Thereafter, he acted as a major source of intelligence for Imperial Japan about the Soviet Union. At the end of World War II, he was killed by the Japanese in order to prevent him from falling back into Soviet hands.

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Lieutenant General Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He became involved in several famous episodes, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940, the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project, and Operation Scherhorn, a Soviet deception operation against the Germans in 1944. His autobiography, Special Tasks, published in 1994, made him well known outside the USSR, and provided a detailed look at Soviet intelligence and Soviet internal politics during his years at the top.

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Aleksandr Ivanovich Uspensky was a senior officer of the Cheka, the GPU and the NKVD. Uspensky was both a perpetrator and a victim of the Great Purge.

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Nikolai Sidorovich Vlasik was a ranking Soviet state security (NKVD-NKGB-MGB) officer, Lieutenant-General, best known as head of Joseph Stalin's personal security from 1931 to 1952.

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Lieutenant-General Avraami Pavlovich Zavenyagin was a leading figure in the Soviet nuclear projects of the 1940s and 1950s.