The Chief Military Prosecutor’s office in Moscow consisted of the following departments:
Department of the Chief Prosecutor for the Red Army
Department of the Navy Prosecutor26
Department of the Prosecutor for NKVD Troops
Department of the Military Prosecutor for Railroad Transportation (from 1943)
Department of the Military Prosecutor for Marine and River Navigation (from 1943).27
It was headed by the following individuals:
N. F. Rozovsky, 1935–1939 (arrested)
P. F. Gavrilov, 1939–May 1940 (acting)
P. F. Gavrilov, May 1940–February 1941
N. I. Nosov, March 1941–March 1945
In an Army Prosecutor’s Office cases were usually opened on the order of a member of the Military Council of the Army. Military councils (not to be confused with military tribunals) were unique Soviet institutions of shared command and responsibility in the Red Army. Lieutenant General Konstantin Telegin, a long-time member of such councils during the war, described their role:
Fronts (as well as armies, except an air force army) were directed by a Military Council… [A military council] consisted of the military commander, two members, chief of staff, artillery and air force commanders…
To implement a commander’s decision, an agreement with [the senior] military council member was necessary. All directive documents issued by the front command were signed by the commander and [the senior] military council member with their names on the same line, while the chief of staff put his signature below, on the next line. This was done to emphasize the equal responsibility of the commander and the military council member for the realization of the decision.28
The senior of the two military council members was a high-ranking Party functionary like Nikolai Bulganin or even Politburo member Nikita Khrushchev. The senior member usually had no military training or experience; his role was essentially to be the Politburo’s eyes and ears in the field and directly control the activity of high commanders. Stalin frequently changed commanders at the fronts on the basis of reports from these members. The other member was usually a military supply commander. Besides their main duties, military councils were involved in the punishment of servicemen.
The total number of servicemen investigated and sentenced under Article 193 during the war was higher than the number investigated by OO/SMERSH under Article 58. On the whole, all military tribunals, including those in the Navy and NKVD, convicted 2,530,683 servicemen and of them, 471,988 were sentenced for ‘counter revolutionary crimes’ and 792,192 were convicted of military crimes. About 8 and a half percent, or 217,080, were sentenced to death and executed.29
Another count of persons convicted by the Red Army military tribunals only gives a more detailed picture. Of the total number of 994,300 servicemen convicted 422,700, or 42 per cent, served their sentences in their units (usually officers were demoted to privates) or, after July 1942, in special punishment troops called shtrafbaty and shtrafnye roty. However, this option was generally only available to those who committed military and real (bandits, rapists, embezzlers, etc.), not political, crimes. Most of the 436,600 convicts who ended up in labor camps (45 per cent of the total), were convicted of counter revolutionary crimes. The rest, 135,000, were sentenced to death and executed. One third, 376,300, were convicted of desertion.30 An NKVD report dated January 1, 1945, which gives a detailed breakdown of the sentences of all the prisoners in NKVD labor camps at that time, indicates that 28.3 per cent were incarcerated for counter revolutionary crimes and only 6.5 per cent were convicted of military crimes (Table 3-1).31
Overseeing political cases opened by the OO/SMERSH investigators was the second main duty of military prosecutors.32 For instance, before the war, in order to arrest a serviceman on counter revolutionary charges, both the OO head and a military prosecutor of the local district were required to sign an arrest warrant, which had to be authorized by a military commander. Additionally, the NKO Commissar had to approve arrests of all officers from platoon commander up, but usually no objections were raised.33 NKVD requests for Kliment Voroshilov’s (NKO Commissar from 1926 to 1940) approval of persecutions comprise 60 thick archival volumes. Semyon Timoshenko, who replaced Voroshilov, approved the arrests of generals just before the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.
TABLE 3-1. PRISONERS IN NKVD LABOR CAMPS ON JANUARY 1, 1945¹
Type of Crime Article/Paragraph of the Criminal Code² No. of Prisoners % of Total
Counterrevolutionary Crimes (investigated by the OOs and other NKVD branches and after April 1943, by SMERSH and NKGB)
Treason against the Motherland 58-1a, 1b 77,067 19.6
Espionage 58-1a, 1b; 58-6; 193-24 16,014 4.1
Terror acts and terrorist intentions 58-8 10,245 2.6
Diversions 58-9 3,206 0.8
Wreckers 58-7 8,175 2.1
Counterrevolutionary sabotage 58-14 24,567 6.3
Anti-Soviet plots and organizations 58-2; 58-3; 58-4; 58-11 31,298 8.0
Anti-Soviet propaganda 58-10; 59-7 130,969 33.4
Political bandits and participants in riots 58-2; 59-2; 59-3 7,563 1.9
Illegal crossing the border 59-10 5,585 1.4
Smuggling 59-9 1,266 0.3
Family members of traitors (chsiry) 58-1c; 58-12 6,449 1.7
Socially dangerous elements (SOE) 7-35 13,112 3.3
Others No data 57,093 14.5
Total 392,609 100.0
Military Crimes (investigated by military prosecutors)
Deserters 193-7, 9, 10 49,771 55.4
Self-inflictors 193-12 5,010 5.6
Marauders 193-27 1,743 1.9
Others 193 33,330 37.1
Total 89,854 100.0
Real Crimes (investigated by militsiya [Soviet police] and civilian prosecutors)
Real crimes (bandits, thieves, etc.) Various Articles 636,736 70.6
Special Laws and Decrees Not in the Code 254,107 28.1
Violation of the Passport Law 192a 11,945 1.3
Total 902,788 100.0
Grand Total for All Crimes 1,385,271 100.0
1. NKVD report, dated January 1, 1945; quoted in Nikita Petrov, Istoriya imperiiy ‘GULAG.’ Glava 12 (in Russian), http://www.pseudology.org/GULAG/Glava12.htm, retrieved September 15, 2011.
2. Classification of paragraphs according to the NKVD report on prisoners in the Correction-Labor Colonies, dated January 1, 1943. Document No. 96 in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) 1917–1960 (Moscow: Materik, 2000), 426–28 (in Russian).
During the war, the arresting procedure of OO/SMERSH operatives changed.34 The arrest of a private or a low-ranking officer required a military prosecutor’s approval; the arrest of a mid-ranking commander, the approval of the commander and prosecutor of the unit; and the arrest of a high-ranking officer, the approval of the Military Council of the Army. The highest commanders, as before, could be arrested only with the approval of the NKO Commissar—in other words, of Stalin himself.
To arrest a serviceman, an OO/SMERSH investigator wrote the arrest warrant (Postanovlenie na arrest) and decision (on the selection of a measure of restraint) (Postanovlenie ob izbranii mery presecheniya) which substantiated the necessity of keeping the arrestee in custody. Both documents were also signed by the investigator’s superiors and a prosecutor. Copies of these documents were included in the investigation file (Sledstvennoe delo), which contained mostly transcripts called protokoly of the interrogations that followed.
While concluding the case, the OO/SMERSH investigator summarized the results of his investigation in an indictment (Obvinitel’noe zaklyuchenie). This document was also signed by the investigator’s superiors, and a copy was sent to a prosecutor. The prosecutor was obliged to ask the accused if he agreed to the indictment and if he had complaints about, for instance, torture during the investigation. Commonly, the final verdict of the tribunal at the end of the hearing simply repeated the indictment.
The relationship between OO/SMERSH investigators and military prosecutors, as well as with military tribunal chairs and members, was uneasy. Prosecutors had legal training, while the majority of OO/SMERSH officers were uneducated and sometimes almost illiterate. Also, as a rule, OO/SMERSH investigators presented cases based on accusations provided by unreliable informers and confessions obtained under duress. Beyond that, the OO investigators used to try to influence the chair’s decision. Delagrammatik recalled: ‘Frequently the osobisty [OO/SMERSH officers] attached a sealed envelope with an inscription “For the Eyes of the Chair of MT [military tribunal] Only” to the case file received by our tribunal. It contained data about the defendant obtained from informers… Sometimes the seksoty [secret informers] testified as witnesses (or pseudo-witnesses, if necessary) at the hearing.’35
Many honest prosecutors rejected these falsified cases, insisting on a new investigation or even closing such cases entirely. These closures led Aleksei Sidnev, head of the OO of the Leningrad Military District (LVO), to send a report entitled ‘On the Anti-Soviet Practice of the Military Prosecutor’s Office of the LVO’ to Bochkov (an insubordinate act, since Sidnev should have sent the report through his superior, OO head Mikheev) in March 1941.36 Bochkov forwarded Sidnev’s report to his deputy and chief military prosecutor, Vladimir Nosov, who determined that Sidnev had slandered the prosecutors. However, no measures were taken against Sidnev, who later became a high-level SMERSH and then MGB functionary.
The independence shown by military prosecutors was rare and potentially dangerous. During Bochkov’s tenure as OO head, dossiers (or, in secret-service jargon, ‘operational files’) were collected on many military prosecutors, as well as members of military tribunals.37
Death Sentences
During the war, the Commander of the Front could disaffirm any decision of tribunals within his front, even a death sentence.38 In any case, the Front Military Council needed to approve or disapprove the death sentence of a high-ranking officer. In theory, a serviceman condemned to death had the right to appeal; in practice, appealing was useless. As Delagrammatik notes, ‘I recall no occasion when the commander of a unit did not approve the death sentence.’39
After the summer of 1942, military tribunals usually replaced death sentences in criminal cases with sending the condemned to a punishment unit fighting at the front. Delagrammatik gives an example: ‘Two servicemen from the Marine Brigade were convicted of self-inflicted injury “by shooting at each other from behind a tree in order not to be drafted”… Instead of the death penalty, the military tribunal… condemned each of them to 10 years of imprisonment in labor camps. The punishment was commuted to sending them to a punishment platoon. Only “espionage” [i.e., 58-1b] was inevitably punished by death.’ Delagrammatik gives more detail about an ‘espionage’ case of Olga Serdyuk, a woman from Kiev:
This large young woman, who was a medical nurse, was tried. She was charged with the worst crime—Article 58-1b, treason against the Motherland committed by a military person…
While writing down a transcript [of the hearing], I could not find any espionage activity in her testimony. She admitted that, while a prisoner of the Germans she signed a collaboration agreement with the German intelligence. That was all, but the fact of this recruitment, even in the absence of any espionage activity, was enough for the military tribunal. Even though she herself had told the court about the recruitment and there was no independent proof of it.
A guilty verdict and speedy execution followed.40
During the war, military tribunals sentenced more than 2.5 million Soviet military men and women.41 Of these, 472,000 men were sentenced for counter revolutionary activity, i.e. under Article 58, and a total of 217,000 were shot; of those, 135,000 were sentenced by military tribunals of the Red Army. Death sentences were usually executed by an OO (later SMERSH) officer or a Red Army platoon attached to the OO/SMERSH Department, before the eyes of the formation.
The enormity of these executions becomes evident from a comparison with death sentences in foreign armies. British military tribunals sentenced 40 servicemen, while French tribunals sentenced 102, and American tribunals sentenced 146 servicemen to death.42 The German field military tribunals sentenced 30,000 servicemen to death, and approximately the same number of German deserters was shot at the end of the war without trial, mostly by the SS blocking units and military gendarmes.
Notes
1. A division of crimes into two groups, (a) crimes against the new political law and order, and (b) all other crimes already existed in the first Russian Federation Criminal Code of 1922 (Article 27). Criminal codes of the other Soviet republics had the same article as Article 58 but with a different article number—for instance, in the Ukrainian Criminal Code it was Article 54.
2. For an English translation of the paragraphs of Article 58 see Jacques Rossi, The Gulag Handbook: An Encyclopedia Dictionary of Soviet Penitentiary Institutions and Terms Related to the Forced Labor Camps, translated from the Russian by William A. Burhans (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 539–50. The main section of this volume is an invaluable dictionary of Gulag jargon and terminology.
3. Document No. 13, in Reabilitatsiya: Kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materialy. Mart 1953–fevral’ 1956, edited by A. Artizov et al., 77 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2000) (in Russian).
4. Joint decision of VTsIK (All-Russian Central Executive Committee, predecessor of the USSR Supreme Council) and Sovnarkom, dated July 20, 1934. Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov o repressiyakh, edited by Ye. A. Zaitsev, 161 (Moscow: Respublika, 1993) (in Russian).
5. NKVD report to Stalin, dated October 5, 1938 (FSB Central Archive, Fond 3, Opis’ 5, Delo 79, L. 281); quoted in Arsenii Roginsky and Aleksandr Daniel, ‘Arestu podlezhat zheny…’ Polit.ru, October 30, 2003 (in Russian), http://www.polit.ru/research/2003/10/30/628134.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
6. Organizational details of persecutions of chsiry, including children, were given in NKVD Operational Order No. 00486, dated August 15, 1937; in Sbornik zakonodatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov, 86–93.
7. Quoted in Yulian Semenov, Nenapisannye romany (Moscow: DEM, 1989), Chapter 27 (in Russian), http://virlib.ru/read_book.php?page=31&file_path=books/9/book04207.gz, retrieved September 5, 2011.
8. Report of Yu. D. Sumbatov to Beria, dated January 29, 1939 (FSB Central Archive, Fond 3, Opis’ 6, Delo 839, L. 35), quoted in Roginsky and Daniel, ‘Arestu podlezhat zheny.’
9. Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, dated May 31, 1941. Vedomosti Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, no. 25 (1941) (in Russian).
10. Safonov’s report to Andrei Vysinsky, dated December 22, 1941. Document No. 212 in Deti GULAGa, 1918–1956, edited by S. S. Vilensky, A. I. Kokurin, G. V. Atmashkina, and I. Yu. Novichenko, 376 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2002) (in Russian).
11. Details in S. Lakoba, Abkhazia posle dvukh imperii. XIX–XXI vv. (Moscow, 2004), 111–22 (in Russian).
12. Politburo decision P19/277, dated August 17, 1940. Document No. 124 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR, 184.
13. Victor Levenstein, Po-nad narami tabachnyi dym… (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2008), 149 (in Russian). L. Ye. Vlodzimersky (1903–1953) headed the NKVD/NKGB/MGB Investigation Department for Especially Important Cases (OVD) until 1946.
14. Menachem Begin, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia, translated from the Hebrew by Katia Kaplan (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977), 81.
15. Anna Yatskova, ‘Istoriya sovetskogo suda,’ Otechestvennye zapiski, no. 2 (2003) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/oz/2003/2/iackov.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
16. M. Delagrammatik, ‘Voennye tribunaly za rabotoi,’ Novyi Mir, no. 6 (1997) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/1997/6/delagr.htm, retrieved September 4, 2011. This source gives examples of a number of standard cases tried by military tribunals.
17. Vyacheslav V. Obukhov, Pravovye osnovy organizatsii ideyatel’nosti voennykh
tribunalov voisk NKVD SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow: MVD Moscow University, 2002). Candidate of Sciences Dissertation, 41, 96 (in Russian). I am indebted to Professor Jeffrey Burds (Northeastern University, Boston, MA), who pointed out this source.
18. From 1943 to 1945, the USSR Supreme Court also included the Military-Railroad Collegium and the Military-Transportation Collegium. From the end of 1944 till April 1954, there was also the Collegium of Labor Camps Courts. Nikita Petrov, GULAG, Chapter 11, http://www.pseudology.org/GULAG/Glava11.htm, retrieved September 4, 2011.
19. Details in Obukhov, Pravovye osnovy, 89–101.
20. In early 1942, the Directorate of Military Tribunals was renamed the Main Directorate of Military Tribunals which consisted of the Directorate of Military Tribunals and Directorate of the Navy Tribunals. Also, the Department of Military Tribunals of the NKVD troops became the Directorate of Military Tribunals of the NKVD troops. Ibid., 42 and 96.
21. Details in ibid., 48.
22. Interview with Zyama Ioffe, former member of a divisional military tribunal, February 5, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.iremember.ru/drugie-voyska/ioffe-zyama-yakovlevich.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
23. Delagrammatik, ‘Voennye tribunaly.’
24. See whole texts of paragraphs 193-17, 193-20–23 in Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy. Voina 1941–1945 gg. v materialakh sledsvenno-sudebnykh del (Moscow: Terra, 2006), 281–6 (in Russian).
25. Interview with Ioffe.
26. In 1939, the Office of the Chief Prosecutor of the Navy was established after a separate Navy Commissariat had been organized, and in 1941, it became a department within the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office.
27. The department structure from A. V. Kudryashov, “Deyatel’nost’ voennoi prokuratury v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Nauchnaya sessiya MIFI, 6 (2005): 169–70 (in Russian).
Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII Page 11
