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

by Vadim Birstein

While talking about World War II, it is necessary to keep in mind the enormous number of Soviet servicemen killed in that war, especially during the chaotic period that followed the German invasion in June 1941. Officially, Stalin declared that seven million Soviet citizens perished during the war, but according to some memoirs, in his inner circle he used to say that ‘30 million of our people have been killed, and of them, 20 million were [ethnic] Russians.’30 In 2010, the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces claimed that 8,668,000 servicemen were killed during the war, while the total losses were 26.6 million people.31 The Russian historian Boris Sokolov writes that between 26.3 and 26.9 million servicemen were killed.32

  Although this number might be an overestimate, it is obvious that the number given by the General Staff was underestimated—possibly, with the intention of making the Soviet and German losses appear equal. In fact, the Germans and their allies lost between 3 and 3.6 million servicemen at the Eastern (Russian) Front, and between 1 and 1.5 million at the Western Front, in addition to approximately 2 million civilians. In 2008, the Military-Memorial Center of the Russian Armed Forces listed the names of 16.5 million servicemen killed and about 2.4 million men missing in action.33 Comparing these figures to the 416,000 Americans killed during World War II highlights the enormity of this tragedy.

  It is likely that the real extent of Soviet losses will never be known. Even 65 years after the war ended, approximately 80 per cent of archival documents about the war were still classified in Russia and, therefore, it was hard to make an independent estimation of losses.34 Also, unlike American soldiers, Russian soldiers did not have ‘dog tags’. Before the war, in March 1941, special lockers were introduced in which privates were supposed to put a note with their personal data.35 These lockers were abandoned in November 1942 because of their inefficiency. In October 1941, privates and low-level commanders began to receive special IDs similar to a passport without a photo (the high-level commanders had had such IDs from the beginning of the war) but issuing of these IDs at the fronts was not completed until July 1942. Therefore, during the first year of the war, most servicemen had no identification papers.

  And even when sophisticated forensic methods of identification did become available, the Soviet—now, the Russian—state has shown little interest in identifying all the dead. As late as 2005, it was reported that at least a half a million unidentified soldiers killed during 1941–42 were thought to still be lying either unburied or buried in unmarked graves in Russian forests.36

  The publication of this book is especially timely now, because the present Russian government seems intent on whitewashing Stalin’s atrocities and the history of the Soviet security services. Since Vladimir Putin (a former KGB lieutenant colonel and then FSB head before becoming Russian president) came to power in 2000, siloviki (‘men of power’) with mostly KGB backgrounds have taken over key positions in government and business. They call themselves ‘Chekists’—followers of the first Bolshevik security service, the CheKa (Chrezvychainaya komissiya or Extraordinary Commission), created in 1918 under Felix Dzerzhinsky’s command, to unleash the first wave of Soviet repression and persecution, the Red Terror. This group is also known today as the Corporation or Brotherhood. In February 2009, Andrei Illarionov, a former Putin adviser and now the leading Russian-opposition economist, testified before the American House Committee on Foreign Affairs: ‘The members of the Corporation do share strong allegiance to their respective organizations, strict codes of conduct and of honor, basic principles of behavior, including among others the principle of mutual support to each other in any circumstances and the principle of omerta.’37 These people see themselves as the descendants of the NKVD/SMERSH/MGB and are proud of those agencies. The Economist dubbed the current Russian regime the ‘spookocracy’.38

  To burnish their image, the current secret services have begun to connect themselves with Russia’s imperial past.39 This process has coincided with an enormous increase in the number of new books glorifying Stalin and his epoch. For instance, during 2010 and early 2011, about 60 books praising Stalin and his administration, compared to 21 serious history books about Stalin’s time, were published in Russia.40 In the spring of 2007, Russian TV (NTV channel) showed a forty-episode series, Stalin Alive, in which Stalin is depicted as a repentant intellectual. Even the sinister Beria, NKVD Commissar from 1938 until 1946, whose name was synonymous with terror in the Soviet Union, is portrayed as ‘the best manager of the 20th century’. There is nothing about his cruel atrocities in his official biography given on the FSB website.41

  Putin has ordered textbooks rewritten. One of them called Stalin ‘one of the most successful USSR leaders’ and used the euphemism ‘Stalin’s psychological peculiarities’ to describe Stalin’s mass repressions.42 The intensive pro-Stalin propaganda has already resulted in the brainwashing of the Russian younger generation. In a poll conducted in October 2009, more than half of respondents over 55, and more than a quarter of 18-to 24-year-olds, said that they felt positively about Stalin.43

  The current Chekist attempts to whitewash Stalin and his methods must be strongly rebuffed. I hope the present book will help ensure that the atrocities of Stalin’s regime will not be forgotten.

  For me, the topic of World War II has a personal dimension as well. While researching material for the chapter about the International Nuremberg Trial, I found out that the name of my great-uncle, Dr. Meer D. Birstein, was on a list of victims killed by the Nazis in 1941–42, which was presented by the Soviet Prosecutor Lev Smirnov on February 26, 1946 (Exhibit USSR 279).44 My great-uncle was a surgeon at a hospital in the town of Vyazma, and he chose to stay with his patients despite the rapid German advance and his own awareness of the German attitude toward Jews.

  Also, like everyone born in Moscow during that war, in my childhood I heard stories about the disastrous year 1941, when the Soviet leadership was not prepared for the German advance and about the panic in Moscow on 16 October 1941, when German tanks showed up in Moscow’s suburbs. My mother, a doctor who was promoted in 1941 to the rank of Captain of Medical Service, served in a military field hospital from June 1941 until the end of 1943, and witnessed many horrifying events. For thousands of civilian volunteers called opolchentsy sent out to defend Moscow, there was only one rifle for every three soldiers.45 In Leningrad there was only one rifle per thirty volunteers, and there were no munitions. Soviet pilots dropped scrap metal during the night instead of bombs, hoping at least to disturb the Germans’ sleep. Since practically all modern planes had been destroyed by the Germans, pilots used old two-man planes made of plywood. The number of Soviet defenders killed during that period, among them many of my parents’ friends, is simply unknown. Even more horrifying were stories about the everyday life of servicemen at the front later—arrests of officers by osobisty for no discernible reason, punishment battalion (shtrafbat) attacks through minefields, and so forth.

  The poverty of most of my classmates in the early 1950s was profound. Many were raised by mothers because their fathers had been killed during the war or were imprisoned in the GULAG. And I cannot forget the thousands of human stumps—young men who had lost their legs and sometimes also one or both hands—who were seen after the war in the streets everywhere throughout the country. They had wooden discs instead of legs and they moved by propelling themselves with their hands (if they had them). Many of these ‘stumps’ had the highest military awards attached to their chests, and most of them begged for money. Their pension was 150 rubles a month, at a time when a loaf of bread cost 100 rubles at the market.

  In July 1951, these people disappeared from the streets of Moscow. Following a secret decree, the militia (Soviet police) collected them and placed them in specially organized invalid reservations under squalid conditions, and the government reduced their pensions.46 From time to time you would see an escapee from one of the reservations, singing patriotic war songs on a suburban train and begging for money.

  All these memories will remain wit
h me for the rest of my life.

  One more issue is haunting me: the enormous scale of atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers in Eastern Europe and China in 1944–45. This topic was taboo during all the Soviet years, and many of Russia’s official historians and nationalists are still furiously denying the facts.47 But I personally knew two Red Army officers who tried to stop rapes and reported to their superiors about the atrocities they had witnessed. Both were punished for ‘slandering the Red Army’ and spent years in the GULAG. However, the scale of the atrocities, especially in Hungary and Germany, became clear only from recent publications in Russian.48 It is scary that even now, 65 years after the war, according to the interviews on the website http://www.iremember.ru, many war veterans recall the atrocities without remorse and consider the mass rapes of women and killings of children and old people to be justified by the atrocities the German troops committed in the Soviet territory in 1941–42.

  I would like to end with a citation from the very thoughtful memoirs by Nikolai Nikoulin, a war veteran who became a prominent, internationally known art historian at the Leningrad Hermitage. In November 1941 Nikoulin volunteered for the army, just after he graduated from high school in Leningrad. He wrote his memoirs in the 1970s, not even hoping that they would ever appear in print; they were published in 2008. As he states in the introduction, the memoirs were written ‘from the point of view of a soldier who is crawling through the mud of the front lines’. Nikoulin was very strong in accusing the Soviet regime of an inhuman attitude toward its own people:

  The war especially strongly exposed the meanness of the Bolshevik government…

  An order comes from above: ‘You must seize a certain height.’ The regiment storms it week after week, each day losing a large number of men. The replacements for casualties keep coming without interruption; there is no shortage of men. Among them there are men swollen with dystrophy from Leningrad [in the Nazi blockade], for whom doctors had just prescribed intensive feeding and staying in bed for three weeks; there are also 14-year-old kids…who should not have been drafted at all…

  The only command is ‘Forward!!!’ Finally, a soldier or a lieutenant—a platoon commander—or even, infrequently, a captain—a company commander—says, while witnessing this outrageous nonsense: ‘Stop wasting the men! There is a concrete-enforced pillbox on the top! And we have only the 76-mm cannon! It cannot destroy it!!!’

  Immediately a politruk [political officer], a SMERSH officer, and a military tribunal start to work. One of the informers, plenty of whom are present in every unit, testifies: ‘Yes, in the presence of privates he [the officer] questioned our victory!’ After this a special printed form, where there is a space for a name, is filled in. Now everything is ready. The decision is: ‘Shoot him in front of formation!’ or ‘Send him to a punishment company!’—which is practically the same thing.

  This is how the most honest and responsible people perished…

  It was a stupid, senseless killing of our own servicemen. I think this [artificial] selection among the Russian people is a time bomb that will explode in a few generations, in the 21st or 22nd century, when the numerous scoundrels selected and raised by the Bolsheviks will give rise to new generations of those who are like them.49

  Nikoulin died in 2009. Unfortunately, he lived to see his prediction coming true in the twenty-first century.

  For me, writing this book was like talking to the people of my parents’ generation, such as Nikolai Nikoulin, Vasil’ Bykov, and many, many others. Our ‘conversations’ were very painful, and like my harrowing postwar memories, they will stay with me forever.

  Notes

  1. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i dokumenty, edited by V. S. Khristoforov, et al. (Moscow: Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie, 2003; second edition 2005; and the third, 2010) (in Russian).

  2. The number of divisions from Table 51 in G. F. Krivosheev et al., Velikaya Otechestvennaya bez grifa sekretnosti. Kniga poter’ (Moscow: Veche, 2009), 206–7 (in Russian).

  3. I. I. Kuznetsov, Sud’by general’skie:Vysshie komandnye kadry Krasnoi Armii v 1940–1953 gg. (Irkutsk: Izdatel’stvo Irkutskogo universiteta, 2000), 180 (in Russian).

  4. V. N. Stepakov, Narkom SMERSHa (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 93 (in Russian).

  5. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 6.

  6. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1953), 10.

  7. Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love (first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1957), 10, 28.

  8. The Library of Congress World War II Companion, edited by David M. Kennedy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).

  9. Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (New York: Vantage Books, 2007), 29–30 and 644.

  10. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operatrions from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990), 342–3.

  11. Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 111–45.

  12. Nicola Sinevirsky, SMERSH (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950); A. I. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There: A Memoir of the Soviet Security Services, translated by Gerald Brooke (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1972). After the war, Mikhail Mondich (Sinevirsky) (1923–1969) lived in the United States, while Boris Baklanov escaped to the American sector in Vienna and went to live in London.

  13. Vladimir Nikolaev, Stalin, Gitler i my (Moscow: Prava cheloveka, 2002), 155 (in Russian).

  14. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney, Vols. I and II (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 23.

  15. Vladimir Bogomolov, V avguste sorok chetvertogo (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1974) (in Russian).

  16. Vladimir Bogomolov, ‘Ya reshil svesti do minimuma kontakty s gosudarstvom,’ Novaya gazeta, No. 33, May 17, 2004 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2004/33/25.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  17. Letter of the Party Central Committee, dated April 15, 1966, in A. Novikov and V. Telitsyn, ‘Mertvym—ne bol’no, bol’no—zhivym,’ Voprosy literatury, No. 6 (2004) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2004/6/nov15.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  18. V. V. Bykov, ‘Dolgaya doroga domoi,’ Druzhba narodov, No. 8 (2003) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/2003/8/bykov.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  19. ‘Russia Unveils Stalin Spy Service,’ BBC News, April 19, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2960709.stm, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  20. Vadim Telitsin, ‘SMERSH’: Operatsii i ispolniteli (Smolensk: Rusich, 2000) (in Russian).

  21. Nikolai Poroskov, ‘Voennaya kontrrazvedka vchera i segodnya,’ Voennopromyshlennyi kur’er, No. 48 (264), December 10-16, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.vpk-news.ru/article.asp?_sign=archive.2008.264.articles.chronicle_03, retrieved September 4, 2011

  22. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki.

  23. V. N. Stepakov, Narkom SMERSHa (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 145 (in Russian).

  24. Cited in Dmitry Oreshnikov, ‘Finskaya voina kak opyt sotsiologii. Chast’ tret’ya,’ Yezhednevnyi zhurnal, June 10, 2010 (in Russian), http://www. ej.ru/?a=note&id=10171, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  25. Leonid Ivanov, Pravda o ‘SMERSH’ (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2009), 112 (in Russian).

  26. M. B. Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR. 1923–1960. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya, 1998); N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD. 1934–1941. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya 1999); A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. Organy VCheKa–OGPU–NKVD–NKGB–MGB–MVD–KGB. 1917–1991. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2003); N. V. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gosbezopasnosti, 1941–1954. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya, 2010). All in Russian.

  27. Especially the sites http://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/, http://militera.lib.ru, and http://www.iremember.ru, all retr
ieved September 4, 2011.

  28. Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy. Voina 1941–1945 gg. V materialakh sledstvenno-sudebnykh del (Moscow: Terra, 2006); Aleksandr Beznasyuk and Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Tribunal. Arbat, 37 (Dela i lyudi) (Moscow: Terra, 2006).

  29. Anatoli Granovsky, I Was an NKVD Agent (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1962), 235–58.

  30. Recollections by Aleksander Golovanov, in F. I. Chuev, Soldaty imperii. Besedy. Vospominaniya. Dokumenty (Moscow: Kovcheg, 1998), 229 (in Russian).

  31. Krivosheev et al., Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 39–43.

  32. Details in Boris Sokolov, Poteri Sovetskogo Soyuza i Germanii vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine: Metody podschetov i naibolee veroyatnye rezul’taty (Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2011) (in Russian).

  33. Vladimir Dobryshevsky, ‘Pomnit’ vsekh poimenno,’ Krasnaya zvezda, June 18, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.redstar.ru/2008/06/18_06/3_05.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  34. Aleksandr Melenberg, ‘Podachka iz arkhiva,’ Novaya gazeta, No. 48, May 7, 2010 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/048/09.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  35. NKO orders No. 138, dated March 15, 1941 (Document No. 109 in Russkii arkhiv: Velikaya Otechestvennaya: Prikazy Narodnogo Komissara Oborony SSSR, 13 (2-1) (1994), 258–61), and No. 376, dated November 17, 1942 (Document No. 292 in ibid., 13 (2-2) (1997), 368), on personal lockers, and No. 330, dated October 7, 1941 (Document No. 86 in ibid., 111–2), on IDs.

  36. Stepan Kashurko, ‘Lezhat’ smirno!,’ Novaya gazeta, No. 33, May 12, 2005 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2005/33/00.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  37. Testimony of Andrei Illarionov, Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, Washington, DC, and the President of the Institute of Economic Analysis, Moscow, before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs at the hearing ‘From Competition to Collaboration: Strengthening the U.S.-Russia Relationship,’ February 25, 2009, http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/111/ill022509.pdf, retrieved September 4, 2011.