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

by Vadim Birstein

  At that time, Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party and, no doubt, approved the indictments and outcome of the trial. Having been a member of Stalin’s inner circle, Khrushchev had, of course, signed off on many of Stalin’s orders between 1937 and 1953. According to some sources, when Khrushchev came to power, he also ordered the destruction of archival documents pertaining to his role in the Great Terror, during which, as first Party secretary of Moscow and the Moscow Province (oblast), he sanctioned thousands of arrests and executions.

  Abakumov was one of the few people who, because of his close relationship with Stalin in 1943–51, knew the intimate details of how decisions were made by Stalin and the Politburo, including Khrushchev. Also, Abakumov and his leading investigators received personal instructions from Stalin and Politburo members regarding whom to arrest and what torture to apply. Obviously, Abakumov was a man who knew too much. After his trial, he was determined to share his knowledge. According to the memoirs of the executioner, he shot Abakumov in the back of the head while Abakumov was screaming, ‘I will write about everything to the Politburo.’ He was dead before he finished pronouncing the word ‘Politburo’.79

  But even before Beria was arrested, soon after Stalin’s death political prisoners who had managed to survive the purges began to be released from labor camps and prisons.80 This process continued for a few years. However, in order to receive a residency permit to live in Moscow or Leningrad, or obtain a professional job, former prisoners needed to be ‘rehabilitated’.

  Being rehabilitated constituted an official recognition that the political prisoner had been convicted unlawfully and restored the person’s civil rights.81 By April 1, 1954, 448,344 prisoners sentenced for committing ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ were still in the labor camps and prisons.82 In May 1954 the specially created Central Commission for reconsidering the cases of those sentenced for ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ started work, and the Military Collegium also began to reconsider many political cases even before Khrushchev’s historical speech about Stalin’s crimes in February 1956. Soon it appeared that in thousands of cases, including military ones, there was no family member to whom the Military Collegium could report the rehabilitation, since the whole family had perished in purges.83 As for imprisoned foreigners, they were released and repatriated, mostly in 1954–56.

  The following statistics cast light on the enormous work of rehabilitation: from 1918 to 1958, 6,100,000 arrestees were convicted in the Soviet Union of committing anti-Soviet (political) crimes, of whom 1,650,000 were executed.84 Of the total number, approximately 1,400,000 political convicts had in fact committed the alleged crimes (for instance, those who joined the Nazi troops and security services during the war), and 4,700,000 were absolutely innocent. Additionally, there were between 2.5 and 7.0 million people, spetspereselentsy (special deportees), sent into exile before and during the war.

  In 1960 the infamous ‘political’ Article 58 was abolished, but it did not disappear completely. The new, ‘Khrushchev’ Criminal Code included separate articles on treason, espionage, terrorism, sabotage, and wrecking. But paragraph 58-10 (anti-Soviet propaganda) was transformed into Article 70: ‘Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda being carried out in order to undermine or weaken the Soviet power…and dissemination, production or keeping works of the same content in the written, printed or other form for the same purpose is punished by imprisonment from six months to seven years and an additional exile from one to five years.’ Article 72 stipulated the same punishment for being a member of an anti-Soviet organization. As before, the NKVD/MGB, now the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or State Security Committee; Table 1-1), investigated such crimes.

  In 1966, after Leonid Brezhnev (Communist Party leader from 1964–82) replaced Khrushchev, Article 190-1 was additionally introduced in the code. It stated that ‘a systematic dissemination of undoubtedly false fabrications that slander the Soviet power… is punished by imprisonment up to three years’. Since the 1960s, Soviet political dissidents were sentenced mostly under Article 70 or 190-1. However, some writers and poets were tried as ‘social parasites’ (tuneyadtsy).

  In 1983–84, during the short tenure of Yurii Andropov, a long-time KGB chairman before he became general (first) Party secretary (Table 1-1), a new paragraph was included in Article 70 that made financial support of political prisoners and their families from abroad a crime, and Paragraph 3 was additionally introduced in Article 188, stating that ‘intentional disobedience’ to the camp’s administration—which could be, for instance, an undone button on the prisoner’s shirt—was punished by up to five years’ imprisonment. Potentially this article meant that a political prisoner would not ever be released.

  Of course, the number of prisoners sentenced in the 1960s–80s for committing ‘anti-Soviet crimes’ was small compared with the political convicts of Stalin’s time, but political charges existed until 1989, when Articles 70 and 190-1 were finally abolished. For example, in 1976 there were 851 political prisoners in labor camps and Vladimir Prison, and of those, 261 were sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 70).85 Additionally, the KGB warned up to 36,000 potential perpetrators whom it suspected of anti-Soviet activity.

  The rehabilitation process stopped for a few years during Brezhnev’s time, but then it continued. By January 1, 2002, more than 4,000,000 former political prisoners had been rehabilitated. Except for a small group of Nazi collaborators like General Andrei Vlasov and his confidants, some White Russians, leaders of Soviet security services and real Nazis, all Soviet and many foreign prisoners mentioned in this book were rehabilitated. In other words, almost every serviceman, as well as most of the foreigners arrested by Soviet military counterintelligence during World War II and just after it, were innocent.

  In the 1990s–2000s, there were even attempts to rehabilitate Beria and Abakumov. In May 2000, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused an application by the members of Beria’s family to overturn the 1953 conviction.86 The court ruled that Beria and his accomplices could not be politically rehabilitated because of their crimes against the Soviet people. But the court found Dekanozov, Meshik, and Vlodzimersky guilty of abuse of authority, rather than of crimes against the state covered by Article 58 of Stalin’s time, and the sentence for them was posthumously changed from death to 25 years’ imprisonment.

  A few years later, following the trend of security services-affiliated historians toward glorifying Stalin and his men, a 798-page book entitled Beria: The Best Manager of the 20th Century was published in Russia.87 It not only glorifies Beria, but also tries to persuade the reader that the crimes Beria committed were necessary for the progress of the Soviet economy, winning the war against Hitler, and successfully fighting the Cold War.

  During the 1990s, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation twice considered Abakumov and his co-defendants’ political rehabilitation.88 In July 1997, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court found Abakumov, Leonov, Likhachev, Komarov, and Broverman guilty of abuse of authority, but not of political crimes. In December 1997, the Presidium of the Russian Federation Supreme Court posthumously changed the death sentence for these four to 25 years imprisonment in labor camps, and rescinded confiscation of property for all defendants. Chernov was totally rehabilitated in 1992.

  The historians and officers of the current FSB (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti or the Federal Security Service) are fond of Viktor Abakumov. One of his biographers, Oleg Smyslov, called him in the press ‘a Knight of State Security’, while the politician and former KGB Major General, Aleksei Kondaurov, maintains that Abakumov was ‘one of the KGB’s most democratic leaders’.89

  The legacy of SMERSH continued with the notorious KGB, which was created in 1954. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, military counterintelligence remained within the KGB. Pyotr Ivashutin, former head of one of the SMERSH field directorates, was a KGB deputy chairman between 1954 and 1956, and then, until 196
3, its first deputy chairman. Sergei Bannikov, who began his career in the OO of the Baltic Fleet and then served in the SMERSH Directorate of the Navy Commissariat, headed the 2nd KGB Main Directorate (counterintelligence) from 1964 to 1967.90 Grigorii Grigorenko, one of the radio-games organizers in the 3rd SMERSH Department (he participated in 181 games), headed the same 2nd KGB Main Directorate from 1970 to 1978, and then became KGB deputy chairman, from 1978 to 1983. When Grigorenko died in 2007, an obituary in the FSB-connected newspaper Argumenty nedeli (Arguments of the Week) identified fourteen foreign spies discovered and arrested under Grigorenko’s supervision, and called him ‘a genius of Russian counterintelligence’.91

  The sinister Filipp Bobkov, head of the notorious 5th KGB Directorate from 1969 to 1984, which was in charge of persecuting political dissidents, graduated from SMERSH’s Leningrad School in 1946.92 Bobkov served as a deputy, then as first deputy KGB chairman, until the end of the KGB in 1991.

  During the transition of the Soviet KGB into the Russian Federation Security Ministry, the Federal Security Committee and, finally, the FSB (Table 1-1), military counterintelligence did not change much.93 In 1997, Colonel General Aleksei Molyakov, head of the FSB Military Counterintelligence Department (UVKR), told the press: ‘The situation in the Russian Federation Armed Forces is under our strong control… Military counterintelligence… has clear orders to uncover and prevent extremist and other dangerous tendencies in time… [Its] staff consists of 6,000 officers.’94 After resigning from the service, Molyakov and Lieutenant General Vladimir Petrishchev, who succeeded him as head of the UVKR in 1997 and served until 2002, joined the siloviki (‘men of power’)—a group of former highlevel KGB and military officers who became part of President Vladimir Putin’s ruling elite. Molyakov presided over the National Military Fund, which assists retired KGB/FSB and military officers, and is personally supported by Putin.

  In 2005, Petrishchev was elected a member of the Highest Council of Officers or VOS.95 This eleven-member council represents the mostly retired ultra-nationalist high-ranking military, FSB, Foreign Intelligence Service, and MVD (Interior Affairs Ministry) officer community, as well as leaders of the Cossacks. Most probably, Petrishchev, a military counterintelligence professional, is not a genuine member of VOS but is just keeping an eye on its activities from the inside. He is also a member of the thinktank Fund for Development of Regions, which helps the government with economic and political decisions and the distribution of governmental funds.96

  There is a representative of military counterintelligence in the Administration of the current Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev: Colonel General Vladimir Osipov, who made his career in various KGB military counterintelligence directorates, including the Moscow Military District.97 From 1991 till 1998, Osipov worked at the Federal Agency for Governmental Communication and Information (formerly part of the KGB), mostly as head of its Personnel Directorate. From 1998, Osipov headed the Personnel Directorate of the administrations of all three Russian presidents: Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and, finally, Dmitrii Medvedev. In other words, from 1998 onwards, the selection of administration staff members was controlled by the siloviki, a group of former high-level KGB officers currently in power in Russia, with Vladimir Putin at their forefront. In 2009, while restructuring his administration, President Medvedev appointed Osipov head of the Administration’s Directorate for Governmental Awards, which had previously been part of the Personnel Directorate.

  In 2008, Russian President Medvedev appointed a new FSB Director: Army General Aleksandr Bortnikov, a former KGB man (from 2003 to 2004, he headed St. Petersburg’s FSB branch) who was closely connected to Putin. However, the new director did not make any serious changes in the FSB, and by 2011, Colonel General Aleksandr Bezverkhny still continued to head the Military Counterintelligence Department of the FSB, as the UKVR has been called since 2001. On May 25, 2005, Bezverkhny unveiled a monument entitled ‘The Glory of Military Counterintelligence’ in the yard of a mansion occupied by the Military Counterintelligence Directorate of the Moscow Military District, at 7 Prechistenka Street in central Moscow.98 There is also a small, private military counterintelligence history museum in this building. According to the press, most of its exhibition is devoted to SMERSH. Obviously, the Russian security services are proud to claim SMERSH and its brutal activities as part of their history.

  Notes

  1. General information in Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, translated from the Russian by Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit Books, 1986).

  2. SNK Protocol (transcript) No. 21, dated December 20, 1917. Document No. 1, in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. Organy VCheKa–OGPU–NKVD–NKGB–MGB–MVD–KGB. 1917–1991. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2003), 302–3 (in Russian).

  3. Details in E. Rozin, Leninskaya mifologiya gosudarstva (Moscow: Yurist, 1996) (in Russian).

  4. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

  5. VCheKa Order, dated September 2, 1918. Document No. 2, in GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) 1917–1960, edited by A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov (Moscow: Materik, 2000), 14–15 (in Russian).

  6. SNK Decree, dated September 5, 1918. Document No. 3 in ibid., 15; on the VCheKa history see, for instance, George Legett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operatrions from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990), 38–64; changes in the VCheKa structure in 1917–21 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 14–24.

  7. Nicolas Werth, ‘The Red Terror in the Soviet Union,’ in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repressions, edited by Stepane Curtois et al., translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, 71–81 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  8. On Dzerzhinsky’s activity see, for instance, F. E. Dzerzhinsky—predsedatel’ VChK–OGPU 1917–1926, edited by A. A. Plekhanov and A. M. Plekhanov (Moscow: Materik, 2007) (in Russian).

  9. On the creation of the Red Army, see Aleksandr Melenberg, ‘Krasnyi Podarok,’ Novaya Gazeta, No. 18, February 18, 2011 (in Russian), http://www.novgaz. ru/data/2011/018/19.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  10. Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 17. On the early period of the VO/OO see A. A. Zdanovich, ‘Kak L. D. Trotsky i Revvoensovet Respubliki ‘poteryali’ kontrrazvedku,’ Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal (hereafter VIZh), no. 3 (1996): 65–73, no. 5 (1996), 75–82 (in Russian). A short overview of the OO history from 1918 to 1983 was given in Amy W. Knight, ‘The KGB’s Special Departments in the Soviet Armed Forces,’ ORBIS 28, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 257–80.

  11. The first network of military counterintelligence was created in the czarist army in June 1915, during World War I. Each front (a group of armies), army, and military district had its KRO or Counterintelligence Department within the headquarters, and the network reported to the KRO within the Main Directorate of the General Staff. Details in A. A. Zdanovich, Otechestvennaya kontrrazvedka (1914–1920): Organizatsionnoe stroitel’stvo (Moscow: Kraft+, 2004), 19–62 (in Russian). On military counterintelligence (later military intelligence) abroad see B. A. Starkov, Okhotniki na shpionov. Kontrrazvedka Rossiiskoi imperii 1903–1914 (St. Petersburg: SiDiKom, 2006) (in Russian).

  12. The czarist secret police consisted of three parts, details in Ch. A. Ruud and S. A. Stepanov, Fontanka, 16. Politicheskii sysk pri tsaryakh (Moscow: Mysl’, 1993), 81–172 (in Russian); Z. Peregudova, Politicheskii sysk v Rossii (1880–1917 gg.) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000).

  13. Joined order of Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and the Soviet government, dated February 3, 1919. Document No. 20, in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 330–1. In 1929, gubernii (administration regions) were renamed oblasti (provinces), and the regional OGPU branches became Provincial GPUs.

  14. Instruction on the Special Departments of the VCheKa, dated February 8,
1919. Document No.21, in ibid., 331–2.

  15. Details in A. G.Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty na sluzhbe Respublike Sovetov (Moscow: Nauka, 1988) (in Russian).

  16. Figures from tables 69 and 70 in Rossiya i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil. Statistichesloe issledovanie, edited by G. F. Krivosheev (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2001) (in Russian).

  17. On Stalin’s activity during the Civil War, see, for instance, Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, edited and translated from the Russian by Harold Shukman (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 38–52, and Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2004), 163-74.

  18. In 2004, after analyzing old medical records, a group of western neurologists concluded that most likely Lenin suffered and died of syphilis. V. Lerner, Y. Finkelstein, and E. Witztum, ‘The enigma of Lenin’s (1870-1924) malady,’ European Journal of Neurology 11, no. 6 (June 2004), 371–6; also, Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 306, 355.

  19. In 1948, imprisoned Trotskyists who were still alive were transferred to new camps, MVD Order No. 00219, dated February 28, 1948. Document No. 41 in GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 135–7.

  20. Detailed biography of V. P. Menzhinsky in Oleg Mozokhin and Teodor Gladkov, Menzhinskii—intelligent s Lubyanki (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005) (in Russian).

  21. Details in A. A. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti i Krasnaya armiya (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2008) (in Russian).