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

by Vadim Birstein

  38. ‘The Making of a Neo-KGB State,’ The Economist, August 25–31, 2007, 25–28. A detailed analysis of the Russian political and business elite is given in Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Anatomiya rossiiskoi elity (Moscow: Zakharov, 2004) (in Russian).

  39. Vladimir Ivanov and Igor Plugatarev, ‘FSB menyaet orientiry,’ Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, October 29, 2004 (in Russian), http://nvo.ng.ru/spforces/2004-10-29/7_fsb.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  40. List of published books in Russia on http://www.biblio-globus.com, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  41. http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/history/author/single.htm%21id%3D10318168%2540fsbPublication.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  42. Istoriya Rossii. 1900–1945 gg. Kniga dly uchitelya, edited by Aleksandr Danilov and Aleksandr Filippov (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2009).

  43. Owen Matthews, ‘Young Russians’ About-Face From the West.’ Newsweek, November 5, 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/id/221210, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  44. The Soviets participated only in the Military International Tribunal and the Trial of the Major War Criminals (November 1945–October 1946). Most Russians are not aware of the twelve American Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings that followed from 1946 to 1949.

  45. Only recently were several truthful memoirs about these events published, including Nikolai I. Obryn’ba, The Memoirs of a Soviet Resistance Fighter on the Eastern Front, translated by Vladimir Kupnik (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2007), and Vladimir Shimkevich, Sud’ba moskovskogo opolchentsa. Front, okruzhenie, plen. 1941–1945 (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2008) (in Russian).

  46. Aleksandr Melenberg, ‘Pobeda. Vremya posle bedy. Chast’ III. L’goty veteranam Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v instruktsiyakh i postanovleniyakh vlasti,’ Novaya gazeta, tsvetnoi vypusk 17 (May 11, 2007) (in Russian). http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2007/color17/07.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  47. The denial intensified after the publication in 2005 of the Russian translation of Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Viking, 2002), see S. Turchenko, ‘Nasilie nad faktami,’ Trud, July 21, 2005 (in Russian). Beevor’s Russian opponents ignored the fact that Beevor cited Soviet documents from the Russian military archive.

  48. For instance, a discussion in Mark Solonin, Net blaga na voine (Moscow: Yauza-Press, 2010), 180–264 (in Russian).

  49. N. N. Nikoulin, Vospominaniya o voine (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, 2008), 41–42 (in Russian).

  Part I. The Big Picture

  CHAPTER 1

  Soviet Military Counterintelligence: An Overview

  The history of SMERSH is so intimately intertwined with the many skeins of Soviet political and secret service history I decided to start out this volume with a short overview of Soviet military counterintelligence and its place in the larger landscape of the Soviet Union. Hopefully this will serve to keep the reader oriented in the chapters that follow, where detailed explanations of the many byzantine cabals of Stalin and other political and secret service figures are necessary to illuminate the dark history of SMERSH. And as an aid to keeping track of the many confusing transformations and personnel changes in the secret services, I have provided a listing of the various organizations (Table 1-1).

  It all began on November 7, 1917 when the Bolshevik Party organized a coup known as the October Revolution and took over political power in Russia. The Party was small, consisting of about 400,000 members in a country with a population of over 100 million.1 Soon the Bolshevik government was on the verge of collapse. The troops of the Cossack Ataman (Leader) Pyotr Krasnov and the White Army of General Anton Denikin were threatening the new Russian Republic from the South, Ukraine and the Baltic States were occupied by the Germans, and Siberia was in the hands of anti-Soviet Czechoslovak WWI POWs.

  But the numerous peasant revolts that erupted throughout Bolshevik-controlled territory were even more dangerous for them. In these circumstances Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, unleashed terror to hang onto power. On December 20, 1917, the first Soviet secret service, the VCheKa (Vserossiiskaya Chrezvychainaya Komissiya po bor’be s kontrrevolyutsiei i sabotazhem or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), attached to the SNK (Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov or Council of People’s Commissars, i.e. the Bolshevik government) was created.2 The VCheKa’s task was ‘to stop and liquidate counterrevolutionary and diversion activity’ and ‘to put on trial in the Revolutionary tribunal those who had committed sabotage acts and the counterrevolutionaries, and to develop methods for fighting them’. Since this time and to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, through the VCheKa and its successors, a comparatively small Bolshevik (later Communist) Party controlled the large population of Russia (later the Soviet Union) through intimidation and terror. In Lenin’s terminology, this method of control was called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.3 But, in fact, the Bolshevik’s tactics were the same as those of any organized criminal or fascist group, such as the Italian Mafia and the Nazi Party in Germany.4

  TABLE 1-1. SOVIET SECURITY SERVICES AND THEIR HEADS

  The VCheKa, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Bolshevik from a family of minor Polish nobility, who as a teenager dreamed of becoming a Catholic priest, consisted of only 12 members. On September 2, 1918, the VCheKa issued ‘The Red Terror Order’ to arrest and imprison members of socialist non-Bolshevik parties.5 Additionally, all big industrialists, businessmen, merchants, noble-landowners, ‘counterrevolutionary priests’, and ‘officers hostile to the Soviet government’ were to be placed into concentration camps and forced to work there. Any attempt to resist was punished by immediate execution.

  Three days later the SNK issued an additional decree, entitled ‘On the Red Terror’.6 It ordered an increase in VCheKa staff (known from then on as the Chekisty) culled from the ranks of devoted Bolsheviks. Within a year the VCheKa became an organization with a headquarters in Moscow and branches throughout the whole country. The SNK decree also ordered ‘to isolate the class enemies in concentration camps; to shoot to death every person close to the organizations of White Guardists [members of the White armies], plots and revolts; to publish the names of the executed, as well as an explanation why they had been executed’. The Red Terror was in full swing, and during its first two months alone, at least 10,000–15,000 victims were executed.7 Very soon Dzerzhinsky, a brutal workaholic with an ascetic lifestyle, earned his nickname ‘Iron Felix’.8

  The first decrees set up the objectives, rules, and even phraseology for the future Soviet security services. Any real or potential threat to Bolshevik power became a ‘counterrevolutionary crime’, and later, in Joseph Stalin’s Criminal Code of 1926, these ‘crimes’ comprised fourteen paragraphs (treason, espionage, subversion, assistance to the world bourgeoisie, etc.) of the infamous Article 58. The perpetrators of such crimes, soon called ‘enemies of the working people’, were found mostly among former bourgeoisie, nobles, and any professional or educated person. However, there were also numerous workers and peasants among the victims of the Red Terror. Relatives of persons sought for counterrevolutionary crimes were also often arrested. This practice was formalized in Stalin’s time, when legal convictions of relatives of ‘enemies of the people’ became a standard practice. It’s important to note that only the VCheKa and its successor organizations were allowed investigate ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’.

  Already in these first decrees there was a category of enemies called ‘the hostile officers’, which was the beginning of Lenin’s and then Stalin’s suspicious attitude to the professional military. In fact, detachments of revolutionary soldiers and sailors (as the navy privates are called in Russia) played a critical role in the Bolshevik coup. Very few high army and navy officers joined these detachments or supported the Bolsheviks.

  On January 28, 1918, the SNK declared the creation of the Red Army and by February 23, which was later announced as the Red Army’s birthday, some detachments of the new army had been formed.9 On December 1
9, 1918, the first military counterintelligence organization, the VO (Voennyi otdel or Military Department), was established within the VCheKa (Table 1-2).10 It included previous counterintelligence organizations that existed in the armies in the field.11 On January 1, 1919, the VO was renamed Osobyi otdel (Special Department) or the OO. This name was definitely reminiscent of the political police of the czarist time, when Osobyi otdel within Departament politsii or the Police Department investigated crimes against the state such as the activities of revolutionary parties, foreign espionage, and treason.12

  The word ‘osobyi’ is translated as ‘special’, but the English definition does not give the full sense of its Russian usage. In the Soviet secret services, osobyi (the singular of osobye) was used to describe a department whose specific functions required concealment. However, in the Soviet security services the acronym ‘OO’ was never used for anything but military counterintelligence. In addition to the OO in the VCheKa headquarters in Moscow, there were OOs of fronts (as the army groups are called in Russia in wartime), OOs in the armies, and Special Sections in divisions. The regional VCheKa branches, the so-called GubCheKas, also had OOs.13

  The task of the OOs was ‘fighting counterrevolution and espionage within the army and fleet’.14 In other words, the Bolsheviks were more concerned about finding enemies of the regime among its own military than about catching enemy agents. This attitude explains why, during the whole of the Soviet era, military counterintelligence was part of security services, and was within the armed forces only during SMERSH’s three-year existence and for one other very brief period, and then only formally.

  During the Civil War (1918–22) that followed the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to draft czarist officers into the Red Army.15 Although the loyalty of these officers was obviously an issue, their military training and experience were critical during that war. But with the success of the Red Army in the war, the czarist officers became less dangerous to Stalin than the young Red Army commanders who adored his archenemy Leon Trotsky.

  From 1918 till 1925, Trotsky was Commissar for Military (and Naval) Affairs; later this post was called the Defense Commissar. A talented orator (contrary to Stalin, who spoke Russian with a heavy Georgian accent; Stalin’s real last name was Dzhugashvili), Trotsky was extremely popular among the Red Army commanders. Taking into consideration that in November 1920, the Red Army and Navy had 5,430,000 servicemen, and even after a partial demobilization in January 1922 numbered 1,350,000, the number of enthusiastic Trotsky supporters was very high.16 Also, Stalin’s failure as a military commander during the Civil War made him especially jealous of Trotsky’s popularity.17

  TABLE 1-2. SOVIET AND RUSSIAN FEDERATION MILITARY COUNTERINTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATIONS

  In the meantime, in 1922, due to Lenin’s illness (he suffered from a progressive paralysis), the Politburo, the Party’s governing group, elected Stalin General Secretary, i.e. leader of the Bolshevik Party.18 Trotsky formed an opposition group which resulted in a long struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. In 1927, Trotsky lost all his posts, and two years later he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Finally, on Stalin’s order, he was assassinated in 1940 by an NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del or People’s Internal Affairs Commissariat) killing squad.

  Stalin never forgot Trotsky’s supporters, the ‘Trotskyists’, especially among the armed forces. They were constantly persecuted, even after World War II.19 Possibly, Stalin’s fear that the officers who served under Trotsky remained his secret supporters despite Trotsky’s political defeat was behind Stalin’s distrust of the military and his expectation that it would organize plots against him. In fact, there were no military plots; if alleged ‘plots’ were discovered by the OO, they were OO fabrications to please Stalin.

  During the Civil War the OO was considered so important that from August 1919 to July 1920, Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the VCheKa, and from July 1920 to May 1922, his deputy Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, headed the OO in Moscow (Table 1-2).20 However, from the beginning, the special OO departments were involved in campaigns that were not strictly military. The first OO chief, Mikhail Kedrov, executed civilians, including children, who were suspected of counterrevolutionary activity during the civil war. Military counterintelligence also participated in the creation of phony anti-Soviet underground organizations aimed at misleading White Russians who were living abroad, often trapping emissaries sent to the Soviet Union by those Russian émigrés. In the late 1920s to early 1930s, it was also involved in rounding up and sending into exile independent farming families known as kulaks during the organization of the kolkhozy (collective farms).21

  In the 1920s–early 1930s, the OO played a special role in the VCheKa/NKVD. Almost all its leaders (Table 1-2) were later appointed to leading positions in other branches of the security services. Menzhinsky succeeded Dzerzhinsky after the latter died in 1926, and Genrikh Yagoda, once Menzhinsky’s deputy and OO head from 1922–29, became the first NKVD Commissar in 1934.22 On December 20, 1920, foreign intelligence, part of the OO, became a separate Inostrannyi otdel or INO (Foreign Department; later the all-powerful First Directorate, and currently, Sluzhba vneshnei razvedki, SVR or Foreign Intelligence Service). On July 7, 1922, the OO was divided in two parts, the OO (counterintelligence in the armed forces) and Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi otdel or KRO (Counterintelligence Department; later the Second Directorate) in charge of internal counterintelligence, i.e. capturing spies and White Guard agents.

  Artur Artuzov (born Frauchi), a long-time officer of the OO, was appointed head of the KRO.23 Vasilii Ulrikh, also an OO officer and the future chairman of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, became his deputy.24 However, from 1927 to 1931, the OO and KRO existed as a united structure with a joint secretariat. It was headed by Yan Olsky, who headed army OO departments during the Civil War and then became Artuzov’s deputy in the KRO (Table 1-2).25

  Through the beginning of World War II the OOs were part of the VCheKa’s successors, first the OGPU and then the NKVD, and military counterintelligence was focused on the destruction of military professionals whom Stalin did not trust or hated. In 1927, he ordered Menzhinsky, the OGPU chairman, ‘to pay special attention to espionage in the army, aviation, and the fleet’.26

  In 1928, the OGPU prepared the first show trial, the so-called Shakhtinskoe delo (Mining Case) against top-level mining engineers in the Donbass Region (currently, Ukraine) and foreigners working in the coal-mining industry.27 Yefim Yevdokimov, OGPU Plenipotentiary (representative) in the Donbass Region, persuaded Stalin that the numerous accidents in the Donbass coal mines were the result of sabotage. Allegedly, the accidents were organized by a group of engineers, who had worked in the mining industry in pre-revolutionary times, and foreign specialists.28 According to Yevdokimov, these vrediteli (from the Russian verb vredit’ or to spoil; in English the word vrediteli is usually translated as ‘wreckers’) followed orders from the former owners of the mines who now lived abroad. The idea of sabotage conducted by wreckers played an important role in Soviet ideology and propaganda and was usually applied to members of the technical intelligentsia and other professionals. Stalin ordered arrests, and 53 engineers and managers were duly apprehended.

  During the investigation, the OGPU worked out principles that were followed for all subsequent political cases until Stalin’s death. Before making the arrests, investigators invented a plot based on operational materials received from secret informers. This was not difficult because, beginning in the VCheKa’s time, the Chekists’ work, especially that of military counterintelligence, was based on reports from numerous secret informers. Thus the OGPU and its successors always had a lot of information about an enormous number of people and could easily fabricate any kind of ‘counterrevolutionary’ group. After the alleged perpetrators were arrested, the investigators’ job was to force the arrestees to ‘confess’ and sign the concocted ‘testimonies’. Since during interrogations new individuals were drawn in (during interrog
ations, people were forced to name their friends and coworkers), the case could snowball.

  During the investigation of the Shakhtinskoe delo, OGPU interrogators applied primarily psychological methods to the arrestees, not the physical torture they widely used during the Red Terror and later. The arrestees were deprived of sleep for days, as the investigators repeatedly read the concocted ‘testimonies’ and continually threatened to persecute family members. A special Politburo commission, with Stalin’s participation, controlled the OGPU investigation. Two months before the end of the investigation the official Communist Party daily newspapers Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia started to publish articles condemning members of the ‘counterrevolutionary organization’ in the Donbass Region and the ‘bourgeois specialists’ guilty of sabotage. Stalin made the same accusations in his speeches.

  An open session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court began on May 18, 1928 and continued for 41 days. Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s main legal theorist, presided. 23 defendants of 53 pleaded not guilty, and 10 admitted to partial guilt. Eleven defendants were sentenced to death (of them, only six were executed). Most of the others were given terms of imprisonment from one to ten years, while eight defendants were acquitted. Yevdokimov was promoted to head of the OGPU’s Secret Operations Directorate that included the OO and KRO; in other words, for the next few years he supervised the OO’s activity.

  The Shakhtinskoe delo became a model for the trials that followed in the late 1920s–early 1930s, of which the Prompartiya (Industrial Party) show trial in November–December 1930 was the most important.29 During the investigation, Stalin not only read transcripts of interrogations of the arrestees, but personally suggested questions for additional interrogations. At the trial Nikolai Krylenko, RSFSR (Russian Federation) Prosecutor, declared that in political cases a confession from perpetrators prevails over the proof of their guilt: ‘In all circumstances the defendants’ confession is the best evidence.’30 Krylenko referred to the old Roman principle Confessio est regina probatum or ‘Confession is the Queen of evidence’, commonly used by the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. Later Vyshinsky, USSR Prosecutor from 1935 to 1939, supported this thesis.31 This gave a legal basis for the Chekists to apply every means to force confessions.