Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII

by Vadim Birstein

  SMERSH successfully fought against and outwitted many operations of the German secret services, the Abwehr and SD (the foreign branch of the German State Security). These results were not only because of the overwhelming number of SMESRH officers compared to the German intelligence services, but were also due to the sophistication of SMERSH’s organization. During its three years of existence, SMERSH operatives captured or killed 9,500 German agents and saboteurs and successfully carried out more than 180 deception operations. In August–September 1945, during a short military campaign against Japan, thirty-five SMERSH operational groups dropped from planes to arrest approximately 800 intelligence and military Japanese leaders and at least 400 former White Russian and Russian fascist collaborators with the Japanese. Later, during vetting of the Japanese POWs, SMERSH operatives arrested up to 50,000 alleged Japanese agents. According to General Aleksandr Bezverkhny, head of the current Russian military counterintelligence, ten million POWs, Soviet and foreign, were vetted by SMERSH.5

  SMERSH was created on Stalin’s secret orders. This is not surprising, since SMERSH existed during a time when Stalin was juggling many competing security agencies, constantly changing their structure, responsibilities, and leaders. In addition, Stalin took steps to ensure that SMERSH personnel would be difficult to identify, even by the Red Army personnel they worked among. For instance, SMERSH officers wore standard Red Army uniforms and had standard Red Army ranks, since they were formally part of the Defense Commissariat, but they did not report to the military hierarchy—only to higher-level SMERSH officers. SMERSH officers could be identified only by their special IDs.

  Due to the complete secrecy that surrounded SMERSH during and just after the war, its activities are almost unknown in the West. If the name ‘SMERSH’ is familiar to English readers, it is probably because of its use in the spy novels of Ian Fleming. A Royal Navy intelligence man during World War II, Fleming must have run across the name during his work and decided to use SMERSH as the name of his fictional Soviet spy agency, perhaps because the acronym sounds vaguely absurd in English. In the second chapter of his debut novel, Casino Royale, SMERSH is introduced in a fictional ‘Dossier to M,’ which is a curious combination of fact and fiction.6 Fleming states correctly that ‘SMERSH is a conjunction of two Russian words: “Smyert Shpionam”, meaning roughly: “Death to Spies”’, but he incorrectly identifies the head of SMERSH as Lavrentii Beria (in fact, NKVD Commissar) and locates its headquarters in Leningrad, while SMERSH headquarters, like all important Soviet agencies, was actually in Moscow. In his second novel, From Russia with Love, Fleming places SMERSH’s HQ in Moscow on the Sretenka Street, not far from its real location on Lubyanka (Dzerzhinsky) Square, but writes that SMERSH was ‘the murder apparat of the MGB’, which is not accurate.7

  Even among Western historians and the many avid readers of World War II history, SMERSH is almost unknown. For instance, the impressive 982-page The Library of Congress World War Companion, published in 2007, does not mention SMERSH at all.8 Similarly, the British historian Chris Bellamy mentions SMERSH only twice in his encyclopedic 813-page study, Absolute War, even though this book about the Great Patriotic War analyses, among other topics, the role of the troops of the Soviet security services.9 Obviously, these omissions have occurred because of the secrecy and lack of archival information until the 2000s. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky devote only three paragraphs to SMERSH in their comprehensive book on the history of Soviet security services, KGB: The Inside Story, which was published in 1990; this is not nearly enough coverage of such an important organization and its role during World War II.10 In The Lesser Terror, Michael Parrish gives an accurate short account of what was known in the early 1990s about SMERSH’s activities and its leader, Abakumov, but the few other English-language books that do mention SMERSH mostly give inaccurate information.11

  The most important works in English about SMERSH are two little-known memoirs by defectors: SMERSH by Nicola Sinevirsky (a pseudonym of Mikhail Mondich, a young man from Carpathian Ruthenia who worked for SMERSH as a translator), and Nights Are Longest There: A Memoir of the Soviet Security Services by A. I. Romanov (a pseudonym for the only known SMERSH defector, Captain Boris Baklanov).12 I have found the information in both of these memoirs to be quite accurate. The detailed descriptions of SMERSH interrogations, during which Sinevirsky acted as translator, are particularly revealing.

  If you talk to Russian war veterans about the World War (which they call the Great Patriotic War), most of them still recall the fear of the osobisty, as military counter intelligence officers were generally known, and of smershevtsy (plural for officers of SMERSH; the singular is smershevets). The word osobist (singular) comes from the name Osobyi otdel (Special Department or OO) of counterintelligence departments in the Red Army until April 1943. For instance, Vladimir Nikolaev, a Russian writer and veteran of World War II, recalled:

  The so-called SMERSH (‘Death to Spies’) was the most horrible organization within the army and the fleet… Day and night, its countless fattened impudent officers watched every serviceman, from privates up to generals and marshals. Everyone was afraid of SMERSH… Its officers frequently invented criminal cases to demonstrate their necessity and usefulness, but mainly to avoid being sent to the front line. They lived very well and escaped the bullets and bombs.13

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who described his arrest by SMERSH operatives at the front in February 1945 in his famous book, The Gulag Archipelago, tells us that ‘the counterintelligence men used to love that tastelessly concocted word “SMERSH”… They felt that it intimidated people.’14

  Until recently, many Russians knew of the activities of smershevtsy mainly through a popular novel, In August 1944, by Vladimir Bogomolov, published in 1974.15 Bogomolov, a former military intelligence officer, based the novel on his own experience during the war. The KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or State Security Committee) and Defense Ministry were amazed that Bogomolov had managed to recreate the events so accurately without using documents. They tried to prevent the publication of two chapters of the novel, but Bogomolov, who was not a member of the Communist Party or the Writers Union, refused to compromise with the authorities, and the novel was finally published without censorship.16 The novel describes SMERSH’s actions against Ukrainian nationalists and became an icon of the Great Patriotic War among many Soviet war veterans.

  The roles of osobisty and smershevtsy were always controversial in Russia because most of the war veterans who had fought at the front line could not forget—or forgive—the brutality of military counterintelligence. The writer Vasil’ Bykov may have given the most powerful descriptions of osobisty in his novels The Trap (1964) and The Dead Do Not Feel Pain (1966). Before The Trap was published, a Soviet censor forced Bykov to change the ending of his story in which a lieutenant who had just escaped from the Germans was shot by an osobist. In the new ending, the lieutenant was sent into an attack after the osobist had threatened to shoot him. The Dead Do Not Feel Pain was banned in the Soviet Union from 1966 till 1982 because of Bykov’s portrayals of cruel commanders, a ruthless osobist, and a brutal chairman of the military tribunal. As functionaries of the Party’s Central Committee indignantly wrote, Bykov depicted the osobist called Sakhno ‘as a villain and a murderer. Sakhno takes justice in his hands and kills soldiers and officers, and shoots the wounded to death.’17

  Obviously, the Party bureaucrats would have been more comfortable with the glorious ‘truth of generals’ celebrated in the memoirs of high commanders. Later Bykov responded to Marshal Ivan Konev, one such memoirist, who criticized Bykov’s novel on the grounds that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had awarded him the highest Order of Lenin for the Kirovograd Operation in January 1944, which Bykov described. Bykov explained: ‘In his [Konev’s] and Stalin’s opinion, this was a successful operation. Possibly, seen from the Kremlin’s perspective, it was. But there was also a different point of view: that of a soldier who was lying on a snowy fiel
d covered with blood and trampled down with tank tracks, where our regiment was almost completely destroyed.’18

  Bykov described his own experience with the OO in A Long Road Home, an autobiographical work published after his death in 2003. He recalled how in 1941, when he was a 17-year-old soldier, an osobist ordered him to be executed as a traitor because he had become separated from his military unit while trying to buy some food (soldiers were not provided with any rations). An aged Red Army private, not an NKVD executioner, fired a shot over Bykov’s head, and he was able to run away. The other unfortunate servicemen detained by the same osobist were shot to death.

  But it was not until 2003 that a special exhibition at the Central Military Museum in Moscow revealed for the first time the organizational structure and activities of SMERSH.19 A part of the sixtieth-anniversary celebration of SMERSH’s birth, the exhibition presented a flattering portrait of SMERSH and highlighted its success in fighting German spies. However, the exhibition made little mention of SMERSH’s more sinister activities, such as the vetting camps (fil’tratsionnye lagerya) where hundreds of thousands of innocent repatriated Russian POWs, unfairly suspected of treason and espionage, were subjected to brutal interrogations by SMERSH investigators.20 Many of the same exhibits, along with some additions, were presented at the exhibition 90 Years of Military Counterintelligence, which opened in December 2008 at the same museum.21

  The present Russian security service, the FSB (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti or Federal Security Service, the main successor of the Soviet KGB that includes the current military counterintelligence), produced both exhibitions in conjunction with the Central Military Museum. The FSB even published a glossy ‘coffee-table’ companion book to the 2003 exhibition that is highly complimentary of Abakumov, although he, as an enforcer of Stalin’s will at the highest level, personally arrested and often participated in brutal interrogations of many innocent people.22 Viktor Stepakov, an FSBaffiliated author, went so far as to raise the question of rehabilitation, i.e., official recognition that Abakumov was not guilty of any crime, in his recent biography of Abakumov. Stepakov cites the opinion of Ivan Krauze, a secret service veteran: ‘Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov was a good man… If during an interrogation he beat somebody up, these were enemies of the people since he did not touch innocent [arrestees]… A monument must be erected to him as an innocent victim killed by the libertarian [Nikita] Khrushchev.’23

  The controversy continues on the Russian TV. In November 2004, a Russian TV documentary, People’s Commissar of SMERSH: The Fall portrayed Abakumov as a devoted, talented serviceman, inspired by Communist ideals, who was executed on the order of traitors. On May 6, 2009, the Russian government-controlled TV channel Rossiya showed a new ‘documentary’ movie (actually a work of fiction) called To Kill Comrade Stalin, in which Abakumov and SMERSH operatives are shown saving Stalin’s life by arresting a Nazi assassin sent by the German secret services. Contrary to this, on December 30, 2010 the Russian historian Nikolai Svanidze broadcasted his TV documentary Historical Chronicle of 1950. Viktor Abakumov in which he presented Abakumov quite adequately. Soon after this broadcast Svanidze’s TV program was closed.

  Many war veterans felt that the osobisty would survive because they were in the barrage detachments placed behind the fighting troops, and would end up creating myths about the war. For instance, a former private described the feeling of the servicemen on the front line: ‘We [soldiers], dressed in cold greatcoats, will perish at the front line, while osobisty in sheepskin coats behind our backs and armed with heavy machine guns, will survive. And later they will tell stories about how they defeated Hitler.’24 This is exactly what happened.

  Recently a number of memoirs written by security veterans who served in SMERSH and military counterintelligence just after the war have become publicly available. Unfortunately, these memoirs provide little information about military counterintelligence history. However, they are a source of details about everyday counterintelligence work, and they also allow the reader to better understand the psychology of these brutal people. Even 65 years after the war the security-service veterans remain mostly staunch Stalinists, extremely anti-Western and anti-American, and they still believe that they made no mistakes in their glorious work of finding traitors within the Red Army.

  Here is an example from former SMERSH officer Leonid Ivanov, who wrote in 2009: ‘I consider rightful the decision made by J. Stalin [in 1944] to exile the Crimean Tatars [executed by the NKVD, NKGB (State Security Commissariat) and SMERSH] for their numerous crimes from such an [important] strategic region… as the Crimean Peninsula… The eviction of the Tatars from the Crimea was an act of historic justice. There is no sense in saying that the whole Tatar people in the Crimea were not guilty. And were the Russian people guilty when they were killed and burned alive during the Tatar-Mongolian invasion [in the 13th–15th centuries]?’25

  Fortunately, material that goes beyond FSB-controlled information has recently become available, enabling me to write this book. In the past ten years, independent Russian archivists and historians from the Alexander Yakovlev International Democracy Foundation and Memorial Society (both in Moscow) have published numerous compilations of original documents released from important archives, including the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation (APRF), the FSB Central Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), and a few others, all located in Moscow. Perhaps most important, the Memorial Society, which is devoted to the commemoration of Stalin’s victims, has published a series of books in Russian on the history and structure of the security services and the biographies of many of their key personnel. When I cite documents from these books, I give the number of the document in the book, while all archival details are available in the book. Additionally, many important archival documents were published in the Russian press.26

  Unfortunately, all these materials were published only in Russian, and so the English-reading audience interested in Soviet and World War II history, as well as many historians who work only with documents translated into English, are not aware of them.

  In addition to these materials, my sources for this volume include a number of personal files of foreign prisoners that I studied at the RGVA in 1990–91; some documents that I discovered in the GARF; several incomplete SMERSH/MGB (State Security Ministry) investigation files in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC) that the Museum’s archive received from the FSB Central Archive in Moscow; numerous memoirs; NKVD history sources published primarily in Russian; and copies of prisoner cards from the Vladimir Prison Archive. Also I used documents from the archive of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs—the collection of documents on Raoul Wallenberg posted on the website of this Ministry. In the Nuremberg chapter, I cite several documents that I found in the U.S. National Archive (NARA) in Washington, DC.

  I even used documents published as photos in the FSB’s coffee-table book SMERSH, reading the documents with the help of a magnifying glass. Finally, I found a great deal of useful information on several Russian websites that provide access to an enormous number of books in Russian on such topics as military history, World War II, the memoirs of GULAG survivors, and hundreds of interviews with World War II veterans collected from 2007 on.27 Almost all the materials and documents that I used in this book are available only in Russian and are new to the English-speaking audience.

  If my description of SMERSH’s activities in this book seems a bit fragmentary, it is because I was only able to reconstruct so much. The SMERSH orders and reports I found are scattered throughout hundreds of sources, and it took years to find and collect them. I have translated extensive excerpts from the most important sources and included them throughout the book. I recreated the organization and work of military tribunals, the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court, and military prosecutors mostly on the basis of the recently published memoirs. Only during my work on this book were t
he first statistics on the activity of military tribunals during the war published.28

  Regrettably, many details are still unknown. For instance, the organizational structure of the NKVD Troops Guarding the Red Army Rear, created in May 1943 partly to support SMERSH’s activities, is still a mystery. And only the general structure of the NKGB—that is, the number and names of directorates and departments—is known. This information is important for a complete understanding of SMERSH, because NKGB officers, primarily from the 1st (intelligence) and 2nd (domestic counterintelligence) directorates, replaced SMERSH field officers in newly occupied territory, continuing arrests and interrogations while SMERSH units moved ahead with the advancing Red Army. This NKGB activity was described only in the memoirs of Anatolii Granovsky, an NKVD/NKGB officer who defected to the West in 1946.29