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

by Vadim Birstein

  On the ground there were bodies dressed in summer outfits, in soldier’s blouses and boots. These were the victims of the autumn 1941 battles.

  On top of them, there were layers of bodies of marines in peacoats and wide black trousers.

  On top of the marines lay the bodies of soldiers from Siberia, dressed in sheepskin coats and Russian felt boots [valenki], who were killed in January– February 1942.

  On top of them, there was a layer of bodies of political officers dressed in quilted jackets and hats made of fabric; such hats were distributed in Leningrad during the blockade.

  In the next layer, the bodies were dressed in greatcoats and white camouflage gear; some had helmets, while others did not. These were the corpses of soldiers of many divisions that attacked the railroad during the first months of 1942.31

  Hendrick Viers, who defended this railroad on the German side and whom Nikoulin met in the 1990s, told him about the combat in January 1942: ‘At the early dawn, a crowd of Red Army soldiers used to attack us. They repeated the attacks up to eight times a day. The first wave of soldiers was armed, but the second was frequently unarmed, and very few could reach the road.’32

  Contemporary St. Petersburg officials do not seem to care about those who perished. At the beginning of 2009, the remains of more than 180,000 soldiers killed in the autumn of 1941 still lay in the forest at the Sinyavin Heights. Instead of burying the remains, in 2008 the city administration used this territory as a dump.33

  Notes

  1. Mikhail Khodorenok and Boris Nevzorov, ‘Chernyi oktyabr’ 41-go. Pod Vyaz’moi i Bryanskom Krasnaya Armiya poteryala sotni tysyach boitsov,’ Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie 20 (June 21–27, 2002), 5 (in Russian); details in L. Lopukhovsky, 1941. Vyazemskaya katastrofa (Moscow: Eksmo–Press, 2008) (in Russian).

  2. Details in Yu. A, Zhuk, Neizvestnye stranitsy bitvy za Moskvu. Krakh Operatsii ‘Taifun’ (Moscow: Khranitel’, 2007) (in Russian).

  3. Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (New York: Charles Scribbner’s Sons, 1946), 374.

  4. Robert Robinson with Jonathan Slevin, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books Ltd., 1988), 161.

  5. From the memoir of N. A. Sbytov. Document No. I-34, in Moskva voennaya, 1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty, edited by K. I. Bukov, M. M. Gorinov, and A. N. Ponomarev, 83–86 (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995) (in Russian).

  6. Serov’s letter to Stalin, dated February 8, 1948. Document No. 29, in Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 268–73 (in Russian).

  7. GKO Order No. 801ss, dated October 15, 1941. Document No. II-34, in Moskva voennaya, 365–6.

  8. Report of K. R. Sinilov, dated August 9, 1942. Document No. III-37, in ibid., 550.

  9. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom, 375–6.

  10. Arkadii Perventsev, ‘Iskhod [iz ‘dnevnikov pisatelya opervykh dnyakh Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny],’ Moskva, no. 1 (2005), 192–222 (in Russian).

  11. During the first six months of war, there were 141 German air strikes on Moscow, and 2,196 Muscovites were killed, while 5,512 were wounded. Many buildings were completely or partially destroyed in the center of Moscow, including the Bolshoi and Jewish theaters and Moscow University. Details in Moskva voennaya, 409–67.

  12. An excerpt from the memoirs of V. P. Pronin, chair of Moscow Council, in ibid., 725.

  13. GKO Order No. 813, dated October 19, 1941. Document No. I-55, in ibid., 124–5. Sinilov remained the commandant of Moscow until June 1953, when he participated in Beria’s unsuccessful putsch.

  14. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom, 377. From October 20 until December 13, 1941, 121,955 people were arrested in Moscow. Of these, 23,937 were released, 4,741 were sentenced by military tribunals to imprisonment and 357 to death, while 15 were executed on the spot; the rest were tried later. Aleksandr Beznasyuk and Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Tribunal. Arbat, 37 (Dela i lyudi) (Moscow: Terra, 2006), 12 (in Russian).

  15. Text of the speech at http://www.sovmusic.ru/text.php?fname=st_71141, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  16. Interview with Mark Ivanikhin in Vitalii Yaroshevsky, ‘Mark i katyushi,’ Novaya gazeta, no. 41, April 19, 2010 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/041/22.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  17. Recollections by Fyodor Kiselev, the crew head, in Vladimir Batshev, ‘7 noyabrya 1941,’ Lebed.com, no. 509, December 3, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.lebed.com/2006/art4815.htm, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  18. Details in M. Yu. Myagkov, Vermakht u vorot Moskvy, 1941–1942 (Moscow: RAN, 1999) (in Russian).

  19. Lev Bezymensky, Bitva za Moskvu. Proval operatsii ‘Taifun’ (Moscow: Yauza, 2007), 188 (in Russian).

  20. Moskva voennaya, 81–128.

  21. Vitalii Shentalinsky, Donos na Sokrata (Moscow: Formica-S, 2001), 325–82 (in Russian).

  22. Beria’s instruction No. 2756/B, dated October 18, 1941. Document No. 617, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 2 (2), 215–6; also Document Nos. 650 and 675, in ibid., 260–1 and 305.

  23. Stalin’s resolution on the first page of the list at http://stalin.memo.ru/images/t378-196.jpg, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  24. From Abakumov’s report, dated December 9, 1941, in Boris Syromyatnikov, ‘Neotsennyonnyi vklad,’ Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, December 1, 2006, http://nvo.ng.ru/spforces/2006-12-01/7_vklad.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  25. Mark Solonin, 23 iyunya:”Den’ M” (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2007), 411-20 (in Russian)

  26. Report of Captain Berezkin, head of the OO of the 1st Shock Army, dated February 14, 1942. Quoted in Yurii Veremeev, Krasnaya Armiya v nachale Vtoroi mirovoi (Moscow: Eksmo-Algoritm, 2010), 91–93 (in Russian).

  27. B. V. Sokolov, ‘The Role of Lend-Lease in Soviet Military Efforts, 1941–1945,’ Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 7, no. 3 (September 1994), 567–86.

  28. Quoted in Syromyatnikov, ‘Neotsennyonnyi vklad.’

  29. Details in Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).

  30. V. F. Vorsin, ‘Motor Vehicle Transport Deliveries Through “Lend-Lease”,’ Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 10, no. 2 (June 1997), 153–75.

  31. N. N. Nikoulin, Vospominaniya o voine (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, 2008), 55–56 (in Russian).

  32. Ibid., 67.

  33. Dmitrii Steshin, ‘Svalka na kostyakh geroev,’ Komsomol’skaya pravda, January 27, 2009 (in Russian), http://kp.ru/daily/24233/433433/, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  CHAPTER 10

  More About OOs

  Catching German spies was the main duty of OO officers. In 1941–1942, due to the disastrous situation at the front, they worked in close cooperation with the political officers. Because of their privileged position, many OO officers were out of control.

  Catching German Spies

  There were no special units in the OOs and the UOO that dealt with German spies. Identification of German agents was part of the routine work of the OOs. In November 1941, Pavel Zelenin, OO head of the Southern Front, issued the following order:

  Enemy intelligence agents are trying to infiltrate our military units under the cover of [Soviet] servicemen who supposedly have escaped as POWs from the enemy, or who have gotten through the encirclement or become detached from their formations. Their goals are diversion, espionage, and demoralization [of our troops]…

  I suggest conducting all cases against agents in the investigation departments of the OOs of the front and the armies, as well as in the OO of NKVD Troops Guarding the Rear… The divisional and brigade OOs… should conduct preliminary investigations…

  As a counterintelligence measure, the OO heads of the armies should introduce a practice of recruiting enemy agents, especially those who previously served in the Red Army… The front OO should approve such recruitments, as well as the dispatching of these double agents behind the
enemy’s front line.1

  The NKVD Troops Guarding the Rear of the Red Army (hereinafter ‘rear guard troops’) that Zelenin mentions belonged to a separate directorate formed in April 1942 within the NKVD Main Directorate of Interior Troops and headed by State Security Senior Major Aleksandr Leontiev.2 Head of the rear guard troops of a particular front reported to Leontiev and the Military Council of the front. Also, the Military Council of the front, together with the head of the rear guard troops of the front, decided how deep in the front’s rear these troops should operate.

  Nikolai Stakhanov, head of the NKVD Main Directorate for Border Guard Troops, described the rear guard troops in his report to Beria about a meeting with the American major generals John R. Deane, head of the U.S. Military Mission in Moscow, and Harold R. Bull, assistant chief of staff (G-3) at Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters (SHAEF) in Europe.3

  Two days before this meeting, on January 15, 1945, a group of American and British military representatives, including Dean and Bull, had a two-hour conversation with Stalin in the Kremlin.4 The Allied generals thanked Stalin for the Soviet supportive offensive during the ongoing Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944–January 25, 1945).5 In response to the generals, Stalin declared, ‘We have no [special] treaty, but we are comrades,’ and talked at length about the offensive, stressing the importance of the ‘Cheka-type’ troops for controlling German espionage in the conquered areas.

  The American generals were so interested in the ‘Cheka-type’ rear guard troops that Beria ordered Stakhanov to provide the generals with basic information on the structure and activities of these troops. According to Stakhanov, the rear guard troops were typically placed 15–25 kilometers behind the front line, at the rear of the combat detachments. Their task was ‘to fight individual agents and small intelligence-saboteur groups of the enemy’. The rear guard troops consisted of divisions of 5,000 men each; each division included three regiments, and each regiment consisted of three battalions. These troops did not have tanks or artillery, but they had vehicles for mobility.

  Back in 1941, the osobisty constantly reported on the capturing of enemy agents. For instance, in December 1941 the OO of the Western Front reported to front commander Zhukov that from the beginning of the war, ‘505 agents were arrested and identified. Of them, four were recruited before the war; 380 were recruited from the POWs; 76 were civilians recruited in the occupied territories; 43 were from civilians who lived near the front line; and two agents were found among the headquarters staff’.6 Almost a year later, during August 1942, at the Stalingrad Front ‘110 agents were arrested and identified… Of them, 97 were arrested at the front line and three in the front’s rear, while 10 were unmasked through secret agents… Of those, 12 were commanding officers, 76 were privates, and 13 were women’.7

  These reports did not mean that all servicemen whom the osobisty described as agents were, in fact, real agents. For example, many soldiers were arrested for keeping leaflets the Germans had dropped from planes. Besides the propaganda leaflets, there were also leaflets that a Soviet serviceman could use as a pass if he decided to change sides and to get through the front line to the Germans. But many soldiers kept the leaflets simply as paper for writing letters or making cigarettes. They were supplied only with low-quality tobacco called makhorka, and they had to roll their own makeshift cigarettes from makhorka and a piece of paper. German leaflets worked well for this purpose, but if an OO informer told the supervising osobist that a soldier had an enemy’s leaflet, the soldier was usually arrested on suspicion of being an enemy agent or planning to change sides.8 These cases were so numerous that in November 1942 the head of the Main Directorate of Military Tribunals (Justice Commissariat) and the chief military prosecutor issued a joint directive trying to prevent sentencing ‘when the ill intention of the servicemen who possessed leaflets had not been established’.9

  Here is an example of a typical OO suspect. In September 1942, the 24-year-old officer Yeleazar Meletinsky was arrested by the OO Department of the 56th Army and accused of espionage. He knew German and served in military intelligence. In his memoirs, Meletinsky wrote:

  The arrestees under investigation were kept in a big barn… separately from the sentenced placed in a special dugout. Interrogations were conducted in another semi-dugout… Strangely, only ten years [of imprisonment] were given for treason [instead of the death penalty], but a person could be shot for praising the German technical equipment. The barracks were very dirty, and everybody had lice… Convoy soldiers were extremely rude…

  The investigator called me up only once. ‘Do you admit your guilt?’ ‘No.’… ‘We won’t check anything [the investigator said]. I have enough material to shoot you to death. We won’t accuse you of espionage, but we’ll try you for agitation…’

  The military tribunal… sentenced me to 10 years in corrective labor camps plus five years of deprivation of civil rights after that term, as well as confiscation of all my possessions. I was accused of anti-Soviet agitation aimed at demoralizing the Red Army. The verdict said that I praised the Fascist regime and Hitler.

  The Red Army soldier who took me [from the tribunal] to the dugout where the sentenced were kept told me on the way that the German books found in my officer’s field bag had caused the tribunal’s decision. These were a trophy Russian-German phrase book and a book of Lutheran psalms that one of the German prisoners had given to me.10

  The fact that Meletinsky was a Jew and, therefore, would be extremely unlikely to ‘praise the Fascist regime and Hitler’ only emphasizes the absurdity of the verdict. The other arrestees, falsely accused of treason, including two teenagers drafted in the nearby village, were sentenced to death and mercilessly shot. Many years later Meletinsky became a distinguished, internationally recognized linguist.

  The OOs arrested not only real and imagined enemy agents, but also sent their own agents to the enemy. A report from the Stalingrad Front mentioned the OO’s active counterintelligence measures:

  On the whole, 30 agents were sent to the enemy’s rear in August [1942]; of them, 22 had counterintelligence duties, and eight had other tasks.

  Additionally, during the retreat to the new positions, 46 rezidents [heads of spy networks], agents, and liaison people were left at the enemy’s rear. They were assigned to penetrate the enemy’s intelligence organs and collect counterintelligence information.

  Three agents came back from the enemy’s rear and brought important information about the enemy’s intelligence.

  In August… the NKVD Special Department of the Front opened two Agent Files, one under the name ‘Reid’ [Raid], about watching the safe apartments used by German intelligence in the city of Stalingrad, and another called ‘Lira’ [Lyre], on watching the Yablonskaya [German] Intelligence School…

  Also, 10 spies were arrested.11

  Apparently, there was no contact with the agents in the field except through the liaison people or agents who reported the information when they came back.

  OOs and Political Officers

  The OO officers worked on a daily basis with the political officers known as politruki (the plural of politicheskii rukovoditel’, meaning political mentor), who were responsible for enforcing correct political behavior among the servicemen.12 In the field units, one of the duties of political officers was a distribution among members of the Party and Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) of the ‘correct’ slogans that they were obliged to shout during attacks. These included ‘For the Motherland!’, ‘For Stalin!’, and ‘Death to the German occupiers!’13 However, war veterans recalled that the slogans had only propaganda value in the military newspapers because nobody would have been able to hear such shouts in a noisy battle.14

  In July 1941, the Red Army’s politruki were renamed military commissars (voennye komissary) and became independent of the military command, like OO officers.15 Commissars, important during the Civil War, had been revived in 1937 during the Great Terror, then demoted in 1940 and made subordin
ate to military command. Now commissars again became very powerful, reporting only to their own headquarters, GlavPURKKA (part of the Central Committee), and not to the military commanders. Until May 1942, the GlavPURKKA was headed by Lev Mekhlis and after June 1942, by Aleksandr Shcherbakov, a Politburo candidate member.

  Although commissars remained primarily responsible for troop morale and Party organizations in the army, they also monitored whether unit commanders followed orders and could recommend the arrest of servicemen they suspected of treason. Additionally, until October 1942 political commissars even had some limited oversight of field OO officers, because OO officers in corps and divisions reported not only to their OO superiors but also to the political commissars of their military units.

  In October 1942, the role of political commissars was again transformed, perhaps because of improved discipline in the Red Army.16 Political commissars, now renamed zampolity (the plural of zampolit, a short form of ‘deputy commander for political matters’), began reporting once again to their military unit commanders, as well as to their own superiors.

  Each corps, division, and brigade had a zampolit appointed by the Glav-PURKKA, and zampolity at these levels headed their own political departments. A corps zampolit reported to the Army Political Directorate, which reported to the Front Political Directorate.17 At a regimental level there was a zampolit appointed by the Army Political Directorate, as well as a partorg (Party secretary responsible for the members of the Communist Party), a komsorg (secretary of the Communist Youth Organization) and an agitator, in charge of reading newspapers to the privates, while at a battalion level, there were a zampolit, a partorg, and a komsorg. Partorgi, komsorgi, and agitatory were appointed from among servicemen and assisted the zampolity. Through these chains of command many Party and Komsomol members reported on their fellow comrades. Finally, there was a company zampolit who every three days wrote a bulletin to his superior regarding the political morale of his company. This was an organization that spied on servicemen in addition to the OOs.