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

by Vadim Birstein

  22. Short biography of G. G. Yagoda (1891–1938) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 159–60, and details in Mikhail Il’insky, Narkom Yagoda (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005) (in Russian). Contrary to the historical facts, the author of this book, an FSB-affiliated historian, presents Yagoda as a real plotter.

  23. Artuzov headed the KRO from 1922 to 1927, and from 1931 to 1935, he headed the INO. Biography of A. A. Artuzov (1891–1937) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 93–94.

  24. In October 1923, Ulrikh was appointed deputy chairman of the Military Collegium. Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 34.

  25. Biography of Y. K. Olsky (1891–1938) in Vadim Abramov, Kontrrazvedka. Shchit i mech protiv Abvera i TsRU (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2006), 85–101 (in Russian).

  26. Stalin’s telegram to Menzhinsky dated June 23, 1927. Quoted in Aleksandr Yakovlev, ‘Glavnokomanduyyushchii predal armiyu,’ Nezavisimaya gazeta, No. 63, August 28, 2003 (in Russian), http://2003.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/2003/63n/n63n-s23.shtml, retrieved September, 2011.

  27. L. P. Belyakov, ‘Shakhtinskoe delo,’ in Repressirovannye geologi, edited by L. P. Belikov and Ye. M. Zabolotsky, 395–8 (Moscow: Ministerctvo prirodnykh resursov, 1999) (in Russian). Recently the OGPU files of this case were declassified and the first volume of these materials was published: Shakhtinskii protsess 1928 g. Podgotovka, provedenie, itogi. Kniga 1, edited by S. A. Krasil’nikov et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011) (in Russian).

  28. On the career of Ye. G. Yevdokimov (1891–1940) and his role in the Shakhtinskoe delo see Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ‘Agency and Terror: Evdokimov and Mass Killing in Stalin’s Great Terror,’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 53, no. 1 (March 2007), 26–43.

  29. V. Goncharov and V. Nekhotin, ‘Dela “Prompartii” i “Trudovoi krest’yanskoi partii (TKP)” (1930–1932)’ in Prosim osvobodit’ iz tyuremnogo zaklyucheniya, edited by V. Goncharov and V. Nekhotin (Moscow: Sovremennyi pisatel’, 1998), 173–7 (in Russian).

  30. Krylenko’s speech on December 4, 1930. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discusses Krylenko’s role in the promotion of confessions in political cases in Archipelago Gulag, Vol. 1.

  31. A. Ya. Vyshinsky, Teoriya sudebnykh dokazatel’stv v sovetskom prave (Moscow: Yuridicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1941), 180–1 (in Russian).

  32. Details in Ya. Yu. Tinchenko, Golgofa russkogo ofitserstva v SSSR. 1930–1931 gody (Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 2000) (in Russian), N. Cherushev, ‘Nevinovnykh ne byvaet…’ Chekisty protiv voennykh, 1918–1953 (Moscow: Veche, 2004), 147–99 (in Russian), and a review in Degtyarev and Kolpakidi, SMERSH, 55–59; Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 376–93.

  33. Ibid., 370–2.

  34. Biography of I. M. Leplevsky (1896–1938) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 270–1.

  35. Politburo decision P55/26/3, dated August 10, 1931. Document No. 274 in Lubyanka. Stalin i VChK–GPU–OGPU–NKVD. Yanvar’1922–dekabr’ 1936, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 280 (Moscow: Materik, 2004) (in Russian).

  36. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 507.

  37. S. A. Kropachev, ‘Politicheskie repressii v SSSR 1937–1938 godov: prichiny, masshtaby, posledstviya’ (2007) (in Russian), http://www.kubanmemo.ru/library/Kropachev01/repress37_38.php, retrieved September 4, 2011. On the Tukhachevsky case, see N. Cherushev, 1937 god: elita Krasnoi Armii na Golgofe (Moscow: Veche, 2003) and Yuliya Kantor, Voina i mir Mikhaila Tukhachevskogo (Moscow: Vremya, 2005) (both in Russian)..

  38. In 1937–38, Stalin personally ordered beatings, signing an order on January 10, 1939 to apply ‘physical treatment’ (torture) to the arrested ‘enemies of people.’ Document No. 8 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR ‘Smersh.’ 1939–mart 1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 14–15 (Moscow: Materik, 2006) (in Russian).

  39. A short biography of G. G. Yagoda (1897–1938) in N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934–1941. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya 1999), 459–60 (in Russian). Details in Mikhail Il’insky, Narkom Yagoda (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005) (in Russian). Contrary to the facts, the author, an FSB-affiliated historian, presents Yagoda as a real plotter.

  40. Data from O. F. Suvenirov, Tragediya RKKA. 1937-1938 (Moscow: Terra, 1998), 317 (in Russian). Additional information on the mechanism of repressionsions in the Red Army and Navy in Vladimir Khaustovand Lennart Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD i repressii 1936-1938 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 189–227 (in Russian).

  41. Data from Table 2 in Michael Parrish, Sacrifice of the Generals: Soviet Senior Officer Losses, 1939–1945 (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press. Inc., 2004), xvii.

  42. Perepiska Borisa Pasternaka, edited by Yelena V. Pasternak and Yevgenii B. Pasternak (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1990), 160 (in Russian).

  43. On Stalin’s presumed paranoia, see, for instance, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin. A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1988). In his last biography of Stalin, Robert Service cautiously characterized Stalin in the 1930s as a person with ‘a deeply disordered personality’ (Stalin: A Biography [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2005], 344).

  44. Oleg Khlevnyuk, Khozyain. Stalin i utverzhdenie stalinskoi diktatury (Moscow: Rosspen, 2010), 302 (in Russian).

  45. Photo of this document with Stalin’s editorial notes in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i arkhivnye materialy, edited by V. S. Khristoforov, V. K. Vinogradov, O. K. Matveev, et al. (Moscow: Glavarkhiv Moskvy, 2003), 67 (in Russian).

  46. GKO (State Defense Committee) Order No. 3222ss/ov on the creation of GUKR ‘SMERSH,’ dated April 21, 1943. Document No. 151, in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 623–6.

  47. Daniil Fibikh, ‘Frontovye dnevniki 1942–1943 gg.,’ Novyi Mir, no. 5 (2010) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/2010/5/fi2.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  48. Nicola Sinevirsky, SMERSH (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950); ‘Romanov,’ Nights Are Longest There.

  49. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 121–6.

  50. In the military history literature, a Soviet ‘front’ is sometimes called ‘an army group.’ See Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, 426.

  51. See details in Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia, 1944–47 (London: Deutsch, 1974); Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977); J. Hoffmann, Istoriya vlasovskoi armii (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1990), 231–62 (in Russian, translated from the German).

  52. Count Bethlen died in the Butyrka Prison Hospital in 1946, while Antonescu and several of his ministers were handed over to Romanian state security. In May 1946, they faced trial in Bucharest and were condemned to death and executed on June 1, 1946.

  53. The literature on Raoul Wallenberg is vast, and many documents about his activities in Hungary have been published. See for instance Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg. His Remarkable Life, Heroic Battles and The Secret of His Mysterious Disappearance, translated into English by Frank Vajda (Melbourne, Australia: The University of Melbourne, 1989). Unfortunately, the description of Wallenberg’s captivity is given incorrectly in all his biographies in English, because the authors used old and unreliable sources.

  54. For a brief discussion of Wallenberg’s incarceration and death in Moscow, see V. B. Birstein, ‘The Secret of Cell Number Seven,’ Nezavisimaya gazeta, April 25, 1991, 4; ‘Interrogations in Lubyanka,’ Novoe vremya, no. 1 (1993), 42–43; and ‘Raoul Wallenberg: The Story of Death,’ Evreiskie novosti, no. 2 (July 2002), 6. All in Russian, but the English version of these articles is available at http://www.vadimbirstein.com.

  55. Texts of several testimonies written by Stolze, Pieckenbrock and Bentivegni in 1945–47 while being detained by SMERSH and MGB are given in Julius Mader, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1977).

  56. The Rote Kapelle: The CIA’s History of Soviet Intelligence and Espionage Networks in Western Europe, 1936–1945 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, Inc., 1979), 110, 126–8, and other
s.

  57. A book by Irina Bezborodova entitled Wehrmacht Generals in Captivity, published in Russian in 1998 (Generaly Vermakhta v plenu [Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet]), unfortunately introduced some misunderstandings of the fate of a number of German general POWs in the Soviet Union.

  58. Mohnke’s Archival–Investigation File H-21144, FSB Central Archive, a photocopy at the USHMM Archive, RG-06.052.

  59. See details in Vladimir A. Kozlov, ‘Gde Gitler?’ Povtornoe rassledovanie NKVD-MVD SSSR obstoyatel’st ischeznoveniya Adolfa Gitlera (1945–1949) (Moscow: Modest Kolyarov, 2003) (in Russian).

  60. Rehabilitated in 1994. Rasstrel’nye spiski. Moskva 1935–1953, 340.

  61. Data from Shun Akifusa’s Prisoner Card in the Vladimir Prison Archive.

  62. Vasilevsky’s order, dated August 22, 1945, and Beria’s order, dated August 23, 1945, Document Nos. 474 and 475 in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Sovetsko-yaponskaya voina, T. 18 (7-2) (Moscow: TERRA, 2000), 102–3 (in Russian).

  63. L. G. Mishchenko, Poka ya pomnyu… (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2006), 80 (in Russian).

  64. The Soviets participated only in the International Military Tribunal and the Trial of the Major War Criminals (November 1945–October 1946), which I call here ‘the International Nuremberg Trial.’ Most Russians are not aware of the twelve American Subsequent Nuremberg Trials that followed from 1946–49.

  65. The most updated description of the Katyn Forest massacre is given in Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, edited by Ann M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

  66. Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 417.

  67. In some Western sources, Belkin is identified with the first name ‘Fyodor’ or ‘Fedor’ instead of Mikhail. See, for instance, George H. Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954 (New York: Praeger, 1987), 30.

  68. Document Nos. 41 and 42 in Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG, 136–41.

  69. Document No. 132 in ibid., 555–67.

  70. Quoted in A. S. Smykalov, ‘’Osobye lagerya’ i ‘osbye tyur’my’ v sisteme ispravitel’no-trudovykh uchrezhdenii sovetskogo gosudarstva v 40–50-e gody,’ Gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 5 (1997), 84–91 (in Russian).

  71. For example, the memoir of a Soviet Nuremberg Trial translator written in the 1990s mistakenly claims that the SMERSH group in Nuremberg was supervised by Beria rather than Abakumov. T. S. Stupnikova, ‘Nichego krome pravdy:’ Niurenberg–Moskva. Vospominaniya (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1998), 60 and 101 (in Russian).

  72. Thaddeus Wittlin, Commissar: The Life and Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (New York: Macmillan, 1972); this book, written before archival revelations, contains a lot of incorrect information. Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); also, Chapter 8 in Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (New York: Random House, 2004), 341–87.

  73. Arkhiv noveishei istorii Rossii, T. IV. ‘Osobaya papka L. P. Berii.’ Iz materialov Sekretariata NKVD–MVD SSSR 1946–1949 gg. Katalog dokumentov, edited by V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenko, 254 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1996) (in Russian).

  74. A letter of V. N. Zaichikov to the Central Committee, dated July 16, 1953, quoted in Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 129 (in Russian).

  75. Cited in Kirill Stolyarov Palachi i zhertvy (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1997), 88 (in Russian).

  76. Biographies of Ya. M. Broverman (1908–?), V. I. Komarov (1916–1954), A. G. Leonov (1905–1954), M. T. Likhachev (1913–1954), and I. A. Chernov (1906–1991) in Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gosbezopasnosti, 220, 479, 541–2, 548, and 906.

  77. Cited in Stolyarov Palachi i zhertvy, 104.

  78. Chernov’s recollections in ibid., 98.

  79. The executioner Colonel Talanov’s words cited in Stolyarov, Palachi i zhertvy, 106.

  80. V. P. Naumov, ‘K istorii sekretnogo doklada N. S. Khrushcheva na XX s’ezde KPSS,’ Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, no. 4 (1996), 147–68 (in Russian).

  81. The legal aspect in V. N. Kudryavtsev and A. I. Trusov, Politicheskaya yustitsiya v SSSR (St. Petersburg: Yuridicheskii tsentr Press, 2002), 343–58 (in Russian) and A. G. Petrov, Reabilitatsiya zhertv politicheskikh repressii: opyt istoricheskogo analiza (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo INION RAN, 2005) (in Russian).

  82. O. B. Mozokhin, Pravo na repressii. Vnesudebmyepolnomochiya organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (1918-1953) (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2006), 243 (in Russian).

  83. A. Muranov and V. Zavenyagin, Sud nad sud’yami (osobaya papka Ulrikha) (Kazan: Kazan, 1993), 60–61 (in Russian).

  84 Kudryavtsev and Trusov, Politicheskaya yustitsiya, 329–35.

  85. Leonid Mlechin, in Vladimir Kozlov, Neizvestnyi SSSR. Protivostoyanie naroda i vlasti 1953–1985 (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2006), 13–14 (in Russian).

  86. Andrei Sukhomlinov, Kto vy, Lavrentii Beria? (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2004), 449–52 (in Russian).

  87. Sergei Kremlev [apparently, a pen name made up from the word ‘the Kremlin’], Beria. Luchshii menedger XX veka (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2008) (in Russian); the second edition was published in 2011.

  88. Vadim Abramov, Abakumov—nachal’nik SMERSHa—Vzlyot i padenie lyubimtsa Stalina (Moscow: Yauza, 2005), 205–6 (in Russian).

  89. Oleg Smyslov, ‘Rytsar’ GB,’ Rossia, June 9-15, 2005, 8 (in Russian).

  90. Biography of S. G. Bannikov (1921-1989) in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 254.

  91. Stanislav Lekarev, ‘Umer genii rossiiskoi kontrrazvedki,’ Argumenty nedeli, no. 22 (56), May 31, 2007, http://www.argumenti.ru/espionage/2007/06/34624/, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  92. Biography of F. D. Bobkov (b. 1925) in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 256–7.

  93. The current FSB structure in Andrei Soldatov and Irina Bogoraz, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and The Enduring Legacy of the KGB (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 243–6.

  94. Molyakov’s interview in Igor Korotchenko, ‘Voennaya kontrrazvedka ne dopustit vooruzhennogo myatezha,’ Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 19, 1997 (in Russian).

  95. ‘Obrazovan Vysshii Ofitserskii Sovet,’ http://rusk.ru/st.php?idar=103107, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  96. Vladimir Petrishchev, ‘Rossii nuzhna svoya ideya,’ Vremya novostei, No. 98, June 6, 2005 (in Russian).

  97. ‘Kadroviku prezidenta porucheno sosredotochit’sya na nagradakh,’ Pravo. ru, October 15, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.pravo.ru/news/view/18706, retrieved September 4, 2011.

  98. ‘V Moskve otkryt monument slavy voennoi kontrrazvedki,’ Interfax-AVN, May 5, 2005 (in Russian), http://www.chekist.ru/?news_id=742, retrieved March 16, 2011.

  Part II. The Roots of SMERSH

  CHAPTER 2

  Stalin’s Ruling Mechanism

  The years 1938 through 1941, during which Stalin consolidated his power and gained new territory in Europe, are critical to an understanding of Soviet military counterintelligence and particularly SMERSH. In order to gain total control of the Soviet Union, Stalin made sophisticated and extra-legal use of the Communist Party structure, the secret services, the judicial system, and the legislative system on all levels.

  The Politburo: Stalin and His Confidants

  By late 1938, with the purges of the Great Terror over, the situation within the Party leadership stabilized. By 1939 the Politburo, the Communist Party ruling body, was Stalin’s ‘instrument of personal rule’.1 From March 1939 to March 1946, it consisted of the same nine full members and at first two, then five candidate (non-voting) members:

  Members Candidates

  Joseph Stalin Lavrentii Beria

  Vyacheslav Molotov Nikolai Shvernik

  Andrei Andreev Georgii Malenkov (after Feb.1941)

  Lazar Kaganovich Aleksandr Shcherbakov (after Feb. 1941)

 
Mikhail Kalinin Nikolai Voznesensky (after Feb. 1941)

  Nikita Khrushchev

  Anastas Mikoyan

  Kliment Voroshilov

  Andrei Zhdanov

  The real Politburo was a small group of five or six of Stalin’s most trusted confidants. 2 He called them ‘the five’ or ‘the six’, and together they usually worked late into the night. However, Stalin carefully kept up the fiction of a functioning government, officially publishing Politburo decisions as decisions of either the entire Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (the highest legislative body in the Soviet Union), or the Council of Commissars (known after 1946 as the Council of Ministers). Politburo meetings often continued after working hours at Stalin’s ‘nearby’ dacha in the Moscow suburbs. Stalin, especially at his dacha, ‘liked to use foul language (matershchina). And all members of his circle followed his example’.3

  At meetings in Stalin’s office on the second floor of the triangular eighteenth-century Yellow Palace in the Kremlin, he guided the discussion of matters prepared by the Politburo’s secretariat. Non-members like Viktor Abakumov were invited to present important issues. The Politburo voted on each question discussed, and Stalin’s secretariat head Aleksandr Poskrebyshev telephoned absent members to record their votes.4 As did most Soviet people, those in Stalin’s inner circle called him ‘Khozyain’, meaning ‘Boss’ or ‘Master’, and stood at attention even while talking to him on the phone.5 Or they said ‘HE’, making it clear the significance of ‘HE’, as Lev Mekhlis, a secretary of Stalin, did: ‘It’s always pleasant to hear how HE speaks.’6

  Stalin decided many important questions, especially regarding the NKVD and the Red Army, alone or only with Molotov, and he frequently gave orders orally rather than in writing. For instance, Stalin didn’t put his signature on the General Staff plans he approved, even when changes were made.7 This allowed him to place blame on the generals when things went wrong.