All these trials created a mass hysteria among the Soviet population. People became afraid of plots organized from abroad and of numerous foreign spies who supposedly wanted to destroy ‘the first proletarian state’. The OGPU successfully promoted a belief that the ‘Organs’ (as security services were generally called) ‘never make a mistake’, meaning that if a person was arrested on political charges his or her arrest was justified without proof.
It wasn’t long before the military was targeted. Between 1930 and 1932 the OOs prepared the first purge against Red Army officers, charging them with treason and espionage. It became known as the Vesna (Spring) Case.32 From 1924 onwards, the OOs collected materials about czarist officers who served in the Red Army. Known under the operational name Genshtabisty (General Staff Members), in 1930 these materials were used to create the Vesna Case. Up to 10,000 officers were arrested throughout the country on false charges and many were sentenced and imprisoned, while 31 high-level former czarist officers were executed.
In early 1931, 38 Navy commanding officers were arrested as ‘wreckers’ in the Baltic Fleet alone.33 Interestingly, Olsky and Yevdokimov were against the Vesna Case and were dismissed. Izrail Leplevsky, who had started the Vesna Case in Ukraine, replaced Olsky.34 Stalin personally wrote a draft of the Politburo decision that accused Olsky, Yevdokimov and some other OGPU functionaries of disseminating ‘demoralizing rumors that the case of wreckers among the military was supposedly falsified [in the original, Stalin used a colloquial Russian expression “dutoe delo”].’35
These actions triggered a flight of servicemen from the country. From October 1932 to June 1933 alone, twenty Red Army commanders and privates crossed the border and escaped to Poland.36 But the Vesna Case was only a rehearsal for the actions brought against the military elite, such as the well-known Mikhail Tukhachevsky case a few years later, during the Great Terror (1936–38).37 According to the official statistics, from 1937–38 1,344,929 persons were sentenced for ‘counterrevolutionary’ crimes and 681,692 of them were executed; other sources mention 750,000 executed. During this time physical torture for extracting the necessary ‘confessions’ became routine during NKVD investigations.38
Military commanders were persecuted in several stages, and after each wave the military counterintelligence heads and interrogators most actively involved in the purges were, in turn, arrested, tried, and executed (Table 1-2). Although unquestionably loyal, they—along with highlevel NKVD personnel—simply knew too much about Stalin’s methods. For instance, Stalin found it necessary to fabricate accusations against Genrikh Yagoda (a long-time head of the OO and OGPU who was also the first NKVD Commissar) and his team, accusing them of organizing a plot within the security services.39
Stalin’s purges of the military peaked during the years of the Great Terror, when 40,000 members of the military elite were persecuted, including approximately 500 high-ranking officers; of them, 412 were shot and 29 died under interrogation.40 This number is astonishing considering that only 410 generals and marshals died during the whole of World War II.41 As usual, Stalin read the interrogation transcripts of the main arrestees and directed investigations. Even during the desperate days of late 1941 Stalin continued to order the arrests of generals, blaming them for the disasters of the first months of the war—disasters that were largely a result of his own mistakes and miscalculations.
Olga Freidenberg, a cousin of the internationally-famous poet and Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak, noted a macabre practice in her memoirs. In those years radio news about show trials and announcements of death sentences for ‘enemies of the people’ were followed by broadcasts of the Russian folk melody ‘Kamarinskaya’ or the Ukrainian Cossack dance tune ‘Gopak’.42 In the Kremlin-controlled media of those times, the broadcast of these dances—the Kamarinskaya, traditionally performed by a drunken, joyful peasant, and the Gopak, a victory dance performed with sabers—conveyed a clear, and chilling, message.
Many American authors describe Stalin’s actions during the purges as symptomatic of a developing paranoia.43 In my opinion, Stalin was not mentally ill. Rather, his behavior can be likened to the actions of a Mafia boss who maintains his power and position in the criminal world by killing off all possible opposition. Chistki or purges and ‘unmasking’ enemies in the armed forces and the NKVD obviously played an important role for Stalin—most of the officers who had served prior to the Revolution or were active during the October Revolution and the Civil War had perished and were replaced by recruits from a young generation of devoted Communist and Komsomol (Communist Youth Union) members. These people grew up in Stalin’s Soviet Union and were personally devoted to the Leader and Teacher, as Stalin was called in the newspapers. The OO/SMERSH functionaries, including Viktor Abakumov, SMERSH’s head, who operated during World War II, belonged to this younger generation.
Between autumn 1939 and summer 1940, Stalin acquired a part of Poland, three Baltic States, and a portion of Romania by making opportunistic use of the secret appendices of the Ribbentrop-–Molotov Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. The security services, including the OO, actively participated in the Soviet occupation of the new territory, purging former national and military leaders, politicians, intelligentsia, and industry owners—that is, everyone who could potentially oppose the Sovietization that followed.
In February 1941, Stalin reorganized the security services in response to the new circumstances. The huge, unwieldy NKVD was divided into three parts. Military counterintelligence was transferred to the NKO (Defense Commissariat); a new organization, the NKGB (State Security Commissariat), became responsible for foreign intelligence; and the KRO ran domestic counterintelligence, among other things. Possibly, if not for the war, the NKGB would have continued the mass arrests of the Red Terror period since by March 1941, it had a cardfile for 1,263,000 ‘anti-Soviet elements’ who potentially could have been arrested.44 The NKVD was left to manage the slave labor in the camps and provide special troops to support NKGB actions in the newly occupied territory. It was also tasked with creating a separate system of camps for foreign prisoners of war.
Stalin was now ready to order his troops to continue their march to the West, but the unexpected invasion of Russia by Adolf Hitler’s troops on June 22, 1941 scuttled all his plans. During the disastrous and chaotic first months of World War II, the focus of the state security services returned to controlling the Soviet Union’s own citizens, many of whom at first greeted the Germans as liberators. Stalin undid his February changes, and recreated a huge NKVD.
Military counterintelligence was transferred back to the NKVD in the form of the OO Directorate, or the UOO (the ‘U’ means ‘Directorate’, which indicated that the OO had become a larger organization), and was given a new chief, the rising star Viktor Abakumov. Abakumov had already demonstrated his efficiency early in 1941, when he participated in the purging of the Baltic States. During this first period of World War II, the main goal of military counterintelligence was to prevent desertions and to vet the vast numbers of servicemen who had been surrounded or captured by the fast-advancing Germans.
In the spring of 1943, with the success of the Red Army in Stalingrad, it became clear that the war was finally becoming an offensive one. The Red Army began to liberate Nazi-occupied Soviet territory and prepared to advance into Europe. At this point, Stalin returned to the tripartite organization of the secret services of early 1941, with the military counterintelligence directorate now rechristened SMERSH and formally made a part of the NKO. In essence, SMERSH was simply the UOO, renamed and made independent of the main body of secret services. Abakumov, the UOO’s head, became head of SMERSH, and most of the UOO’s personnel were also transferred. SMERSH’s staff was considerably larger than the UOO’s.
SMERSH differed from the UOO in another extremely important aspect—Abakumov reported directly to Stalin, because Stalin had special plans for SMERSH. The Soviet dictator needed an organization he personally controlled to help him politically consolidate the
territorial gains he expected the Red Army to make in Eastern Europe and Germany. Therefore, SMERSH was truly Stalin’s secret weapon—a weapon that was even more effective than tanks and bombs in conquering new territory in the West.
By the time of SMERSH’s creation, Stalin was the all-powerful dictator of the Soviet Union. He was general secretary of the Communist Party, chairman of the Council of Commissars, chairman of the wartime GKO (State Defense Committee), Defense Commissar, and commander in chief of the armed forces.
The order from Stalin that created SMERSH on April 19, 1943 was marked ‘ss’ (two small Russian ‘s’ letters, an acronym for sovershenno sekretno or Top Secret).45 A quotation from the order detailing SMERSH’s responsibilities conveys a deep distrust of the Red Army, and its last point makes clear that SMERSH was to play a special role:
The ‘SMERSH’ organs are charged with the following:
a) combating spy, diversion, terrorist, and other subversive activity of foreign intelligence in the units and organizations of the Red Army;
b) combating anti-Soviet elements that have penetrated into the units and organizations of the Red Army;
c) taking the necessary agent-operational [i.e., through informers] and other (through commanding officers) measures for creating conditions at the fronts to prevent enemy agents from crossing the front line and to make the front line impenetrable to spies and anti-Soviet elements;
d) combating traitors of the Motherland in the units and organizations of the Red Army (those who have gone over to the enemy side, who hide spies or provide any help to spies);
e) combating desertion and self-mutilation at the fronts;
f) investigating servicemen and other persons who have been taken prisoner of war or have been surrounded by the enemy;
g) conducting special tasks for the People’s Commissar of Defense.46
Due to the secrecy surrounding SMERSH, at first even officers in the field did not know SMERSH’s real name. Daniil Fibikh, a journalist working for a military newspaper at the Northwestern Front, wrote in his diary: ‘Special detachments SSSh—“Smert’, smert’ shpionam” [“Death, death to spies”] (!) [an exclamation mark in the original] attached to the Special Departments have been organized.’47 In June 1943 Fibikh found out what this organization was about. SMERSH operatives arrested him for ‘disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda’ (Article 58-10 of the Criminal Code) after a secret informer reported on Fibikh’s critical remarks regarding the Red Army. Fibikh was sentenced to a ten-year imprisonment in the labor camps.
Soon the ruthlessness of SMERSH interrogators became legendary. The investigative officers, known as ‘smershevtsy’, tortured and killed thousands of people whether they were guilty of intelligence activity or not. Two Soviet defectors who served in SMERSH published littleknown English-language memoirs in which they described the horrific interrogation methods.48 In one of these books, Nicola Sinevirsky, a military translator, wrote how he was forced to witness a brutal beating by a female SMERSH officer:
The Pole did not answer. Galya moved closer to him. She moved the rubber hose slowly back and forth in front of his face. ‘Don’t make yourself a bigger fool than you are already. Is that clear?’
The Pole looked around helplessly and said, ‘I don’t understand you.’
I translated Galya’s words to the prisoner. As I did so, Galya broke in, ‘He lies! The son of a bitch! He understands, all right! There is more cunning in him than in all of Poland. Listen to me, you Polish pig!’ Galya screamed, raising the rubber hose above her head…
Galya beat the Pole across the face unceasingly. ‘I’ll beat you bloody. I’ll beat you until you confess or you die on this spot!’ A torrent of coarse oaths burst from Galya’s lips…
The Pole’s face was beaten into a formless mass of flesh and blood. Blood dripped in thin streaks over his chest and on his shirt. His badly bruised eyes showed no spark of life…
The work on him was resumed where she had left off before our short break for dinner. It was four o’clock in the morning before the sentries finally carried away the broken body of the dying Pole…
Like a drunken man, I stumbled to my quarters and collapsed on my bed without undressing. In a matter of seconds, it seemed that I had slipped quietly into a heavy coma.
It took days for me to recover from the bloody apparition.49
Each front had its own SMERSH directorate stationed at the front line with the Red Army troops, and SMERSH made wide use of informers on all levels of the Red Army and among former prisoners of war.50 SMERSH’s chain of command was completely independent of the military hierarchy, so a SMERSH officer was subordinate only to a higher-level SMERSH officer. Constant communication between SMERSH front-line units and Moscow headquarters was maintained, with Abakumov preparing daily reports for Stalin.
Becoming head of SMERSH was a big promotion for Abakumov. As the chief of SMERSH’s predecessor, the UOO, he had been a subordinate of Lavrentii Beria, the notorious NKVD head. Now he was Beria’s equal, and his relationship with Stalin was a direct challenge to Beria.
Abakumov soon proved his worth, scoring impressive victories against the Germans. SMERSH had hundreds of double agents working among the Germans, especially in Abwehr intelligence schools. Many German agents therefore were known to SMERSH even before they crossed the front line, and were immediately identified and arrested. SMERSH also identified high-ranking intelligence and counterintelligence officers among German POWs and sent them to Moscow for interrogation. The level of intelligence about the enemy thus increased enormously. Deceptive ‘radio games’ or ‘playbacks’, in which captured German intelligence men and radio operators created fake German military broadcasts, were also a great success. However, the screening (fil’tratsiya) of Soviet servicemen who had been in German captivity, and the identification of spies, mostly imagined, among Soviet servicemen remained an important part of SMERSH’s job.
The Red Army’s advances into Eastern Europe meant that there were whole new classes of people to arrest: active members of political parties, local officials, diplomats, and so forth. Numerous Russian-émigré and White Guard organizations that had dispersed throughout Europe after the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922 were also a target. SMERSH arrested members of these organizations in Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and later in the Chinese provinces freed from Japanese occupation. But the group that SMERSH pursued most passionately was the Russian Liberation Army (ROA), which was formed from Soviet POWs in German captivity under the leadership of the former Soviet general Andrei Vlasov and his staff. Following the Yalta agreements with Stalin, British and American Allies forcibly handed over many units of the ROA and other anti-Soviet Russian troops, some of whom were even British citizens, to SMERSH.51
People arrested by SMERSH were dealt with in a number of ways. Soviet servicemen were tried by military tribunals and then sent to punishment battalions or executed. Enemy agents of low importance were put in NKVD prisoner-of-war camps, while important prisoners were sent to SMERSH headquarters in Moscow, where they were intensively interrogated both during and after World War II. Among them were former leaders of European governments such as Count István Bethlen, the Hungarian prime minister from 1921 to 1930, and Ion Antonescu, the Romanian fascist dictator from 1941 to 1944, whose wife was also brought to Moscow.52
Among SMERSH’s actions was the arrest of numerous diplomats. Some of them were guilty of crimes, like the Germans Gustav Richter and Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, both of whom played a crucial role in the Holocaust in Romania and Bulgaria. However, SMERSH also arrested completely innocent Swiss and Swedish diplomats, who were representing neutral governments. This was particularly galling to the Swedes, who had represented Soviet interests in Nazi Germany and Hungary for several years.
Perhaps SMERSH’s most infamous arrest was that of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved many thousands of Jews in Budapest at the end of World War II by providing them with fake documents, e
stablishing safe houses, pulling people off trains bound for extermination camps, and so forth.53 Named a Righteous Gentile by the Israeli government for his heroic actions, the truth of what happened to Wallenberg after his arrest by SMERSH is one of the deepest mysteries of World War II. It seems likely that he died in the Soviet investigation prison Lubyanka in 1947.54 An even deeper mystery is why he was never repatriated to Sweden, despite the fact that he was a member of the powerful Wallenberg family and worked for the family corporation. The Wallenbergs, whose wholly family-owned interests during World War II amounted to perhaps half the gross national product of Sweden, had also been involved in mutually beneficial financial dealings with the Soviet Union since the 1920s.
High-level Abwehr and SD (the foreign branch of the Nazi State Security) officers also became prisoners of SMERSH. Among them were Lieutenant General Hans Piekenbrock, head of Abwehr Abteilung (Department) I (foreign intelligence) from 1937 to 1943; Colonel Erwin Stolze, deputy head of Abwehr Department II (sabotage and subversion) from 1937 to 1944, who was known as Saboteur No. 2; and Lieutenant General Franz-Eccard von Bentivegni, head of Abwehr Department III (counterintelligence) from 1943 to 1944.55
SMERSH also arrested and interrogated SS-Oberführer (Major General) Friedrich Panzinger, former head of the Gestapo’s Department A, which specialized in combating Communism and other opposition in Nazi Germany. He was well-known as the head of the Gestapo commissions that investigated both the famous Soviet spy network the Red Orchestra in 1942, and the anti-Hitler plotters in 1944. Between these two investigations, from September 1943 to May 1944, Panzinger headed the Gestapo branch in Riga, the capital of Latvia, and simultaneously commanded Einsatzgruppe A, a Latvia-based SS killing squad. After his release from Soviet imprisonment in October 1955, Major General Panzinger committed suicide while awaiting arrest in West Germany.
Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII Page 5
