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

by Vadim Birstein

  Most commanders hated the zampolity. Georgii Arbatov, later head of Moscow’s Institute of USA and Canadian Studies, recalled:

  We, fighting commanders… secretly despised [zampolity] and laughed at them… In trying to justify their privileged position and participation in command decisions without professional knowledge… they made our difficult life at the front line even harder. And they ruined the lives of many good and courageous people, accusing them of “defeatist thoughts” or “enemy propaganda”… or making scapegoats of them for military failures.18

  However, looking back at the war years, some former privates consider ‘political workers’ to have been necessary in the army because they were the only source of news. They also regulated the high tension among soldiers of different ethnic origins (according to many memoirs, the level of hidden anti-Semitism was very high among Russian privates).19 Of course, through political commissars, soldiers ‘received just a restricted portion of the actual information. Usually it was vague, as well’.20

  Even now, however, other veterans still deeply despise the ‘political workers’ and call them names like ‘rear rats and parasites’.21 The writer Viktor Astafiev, a veteran, wrote: ‘I consciously did not join the Party at the front, although in 1944 the political departments… forced almost everyone to join it… But we did not care about Stalin and about screaming “hurrah”; our dream was to drop down and have a little bit of sleep.’22

  Although the OO head did not interfere in the day-to-day affairs of the unit commander the way a zampolit did, the military commander had to submit copies of all his orders to the OO officer. The OO officer could submit written questions that the commander was obligated to answer in writing. OO heads also had a say in the promotion of unit officers.23

  Censorship was another example of joint activity of the OO and zampolity.24 Servicemen were categorically prohibited from writing diaries or other personal notes, and very few of them dared to violate this prohibition.25 All letters were severely censored. Using data culled from servicemen’s letters, the OO heads reported on troop morale to Abakumov’s deputy, Solomon Milshtein.26 Each report included politically correct and incorrect excerpts from these letters. The politically incorrect letters were confiscated and destroyed, their authors were punished, and the zampolity of the offending writers’ units were informed. OO officers were urged to remain vigilant: ‘All OO heads are instructed to send agents [secret informers] to identify individuals who have voiced anti-Soviet statements and to prevent them from engaging in any anti-Soviet activity.’27

  The OOs also reported on the work of political officers. The 7th departments of the front political directorates (and the 7th sections within the political departments of the armies) attracted the special attention of the osobisty. These political departments and sections were in charge of political propaganda among the enemy troops. Officers of these units interrogated German POWs, used them for writing propaganda leaflets and for radio transmissions to the German troops, and so on. This close relationship with enemy POWs was constantly monitored by the osobisty.28

  In 1941, the OO and political officers were better armed than the infantry. On October 21, 1941 the commander of the armored troops, Colonel General (later Marshal) Yakov Fedorenko, reported to Stalin: “Automatic arms [machine guns]…, designed for the infantry, in fact are given to the rear units of the divisions, armies, and fronts, especially to such institutions as tribunals, prosecutor’s offices, and special and political departments, and not to the fighting troops. Most commanders also have these arms… It is necessary to ban having these automatic arms in the rear units.”29 Stalin never issued any such order.

  Officers Out of Control

  In spite of dual control of the troops through military counterintelligence and political officers, discipline was not ideal and sometimes, even OO officers committed outright murder. On December 12, 1941, Marshal Timoshenko, commander of the Southwestern Front, and Nikita Khrushchev, of the front’s Military Council, signed an order stating: ‘The Head of the Special Department of the First Tank Brigade, and Assistant to the Technical Department of the Tank Regiment, ordered, without any reason, that the Lieutenant of the 1st Tank Brigade be shot to death.’30 The order said the officers were to be tried by a military tribunal ‘for overreaching their authority, unauthorized shootings, and beatings [of subordinates]’.

  There is an additional note in the order: ‘All members of this group were drunk.’ The problem of drunken officers was serious. In August 1941, Stalin signed a GKO decision: ‘Beginning September 1, 1941, every soldier and commander at the front line is to be provided with 100 grams of 40-proof vodka every day.’31 From June 1942 on, only the front-line troops involved in offensive actions received 100 grams of vodka, while the rest received 50 grams.32

  Most of the Great Patriotic War veterans always recalled their every-day ‘100 grams’ with warm feeling. However, the distribution of vodka was not well managed: ‘Vodka is still given to HQ members, commanders, and units with no right to receive it. Some unit commanders and commanding members of HQs use their positions to get vodka from storage in violation of orders and rules. Military councils of the fronts poorly control the distribution of vodka. The inventory of vodka in the units is not carried out satisfactorily.’33 Tank crews even invented a method to conceal vodka they had obtained illegally. They dismantled several shells, threw the gunpowder away and replaced it with vodka, then attached projectiles back and made special marks on the shells.34 Only the crew members could distinguish the usual kind of shells from those filled with vodka. An American POW liberated by Soviet troops from a German concentration camp reported to the American military officials in April 1945: ‘Most of the Russian front-line troops, including officers, are intoxicated at all times.’35

  Drinking was a serious problem even during the Battle of Moscow. On April 5, 1942, Stalin signed an angry order regarding the air defense (PVO) corps of Moscow:

  Discipline in the Moscow Regional PVO Corps is very poor. Drinking parties, especially among the commanding officers, are common. Poor discipline and excessive drinking are not being properly dealt with. The number of discipline violations incurred by Red Army privates, officer cadets, and low-and high-level commanders of the PVO detachments is growing.

  This situation must not be tolerated any more.

  I order:

  1. To arrest and try by military tribunal:

  a) The commissar of the Main PVO Directorate, Brigade Commissar Kurganov, for chronic drinking;

  b) The commissar of the 745th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Regiment, Corps Commissar Zakharov, for drinking and for not reporting [to his post] during an enemy-air-raid alert;

  c) Politruk [political officer] of the 3rd Company of the 175th Artillery Regiment, Andreev, and the air force mechanic of the same company, Military Technician of the 2nd Rank Kukin, for a drinking party, riot, and random gunfire that resulted in the fatal shooting of Lieutenant Kazanovsky, the head of the signal company.

  2. To dismiss the commander of the PVO Main Directorate, Major General of Artillery [Aleksei] Osipov, for drinking, and to demote him from his position…

  […]

  10. To inform all commanding and political officers of the PVO detachments about this order.

  Defense Commissar J. Stalin.36

  Of the mentioned officers, the fate of General Osipov is known. He was appointed commander of the Gorky Regional PVO Division, while the entire PVO Main Directorate was disbanded and its directorates and departments were placed under the military council of the Air Defense Troops.

  Pyotr Todorovsky, a 19-year-old infantry platoon commander in 1944 who became a famous movie director after the war, recalled that drinking caused enormous losses among young soldiers:

  Before the attack a sergeant used to bring us half of a bucket of [pure] alcohol and give each of us a cup of it… Usually a newly drafted soldier (we called them ‘pervachok’ [first-time participant]) drank a lot—for instance, half
of the cup—because of fear. … After drinking too much the newly drafted soldiers were almost always killed in the first attack. And the starichki [old men] didn’t drink at all, or only pretended that they were drinking: they touched the alcohol with their lips, but didn’t swallow. Drinking a little bit helped a soldier during an attack, but drinking too much [often] resulted in his death.37

  There were also accidents caused when servicemen stumbled upon a cache of methyl alcohol. An infantryman recalled: ‘During the battle for the city of Brest a tank car full of methyl alcohol was discovered at the railroad station… A lot of soldiers… filled their flasks with that alcohol, others drank while repeating: “We’ll perish anyway, while fighting.”… In the battalion, I think, at least fifty passed away.’38

  The situation described in the Timoshenko–Khrushchev order was quite typical. The military tribunals of the Don Front reported to Moscow that during the first quarter of 1942 ‘unauthorized executions of subordinates and crimes due to drunkenness were common among commanders’. 39 When Georgii Malenkov, a GKO member, came to inspect the Volkhov Front, the OO head reported that in March 1942 almost all of the commanding officers of the 59th Army got drunk frequently and had disreputable sexual relationships with servicewomen or so-called ‘PPZhs’ (an acronym of pokhodno-polevaya zhena, or ‘campaign wife’).40

  Although the OO and political officers considered PPZhs a problem in terms of morale, marshals like Konstantin Rokossovsky and Georgii Zhukov each lived openly during the war with a PPZh, and it was a common practice for high-and mid-level commanders.41 A lieutenant-veteran recalled: ‘Many servicewomen were officers’ PPZhs, but platoon commanders didn’t have PPZhs. We slept in the same dugout where our soldiers slept, while a company commander had his individual dugout. So, the company commander and officers of higher posts had more favorable conditions to have a PPZh… Usually a PPZh was decorated with the “For Combat Merits” medal.’42 High commanders were even more generous. For instance, Lidia Zakharova, Marshal Zhukov’s PPZh, received the Red Banner Order, the Red Star Order, five medals, and three foreign military awards. After the Red Army crossed the border with Germany, some officers even picked up girls of 16 or 17 and kept them for a while.43

  While there is no known record of what happened to the drunken OO men of the 1st Tank Brigade, the episode was not unusual. In 1946 Ivan Serov wrote to Stalin about the behavior of Pavel Zelenin, one of Abakumov’s men and later a high-level functionary in SMERSH:

  At the beginning of 1942, we [NKVD headquarters] received information that many groups among our soldiers at the Southern Front crossed the lines and went over to the enemy. At the same time, Security Major Zelenin, head of the Special Department of this front, did not prevent these treacherous actions during this difficult time, but became demoralized, lived with female typists, and gave them medals. He also enticed the wife of the head of the Army Political Department to his apartment, where he got her drunk and raped her…

  C.[omrade] Abakumov called for Zelenin, but I do not know his decision.44

  Abakumov constantly received reports from various fronts about the unprofessional behavior, misconduct and illegal actions of OO officers.45 During 1942, he issued several orders demanding that the OOs improve the quality of their investigative work.46

  Notes

  1. OO Directive No. 003260, Southern Front, dated November 18, 1941, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 3 (2), 316–8.

  2. NKVD Order No. 00852, dated April 28, 1942; partly quoted in Sergei Kononov, SMERSH. Momenty istiny (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2009), 220–2 (in Russian). Also, NKVD instruction, dated April 30, 1942. Document Nos. 1 and 2 in Apparat NKVD-NKGB v Germanii, 1945–1953, edited by N. Petrov and Ya. Foitsik, 54–59 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2009) (in Russian).

  3. Stakhanov’s report, dated January 17, 1945, with Beria’s cover letter, dated January 19, 1945. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Stalin’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 92, Ll. 86–89.

  4. Na prieme u Stalina. Tetradi (zhurnaly) zapisei lits, pronyatykh I. V. Stalinym (1924–1953 gg.), edited by A. V. Korotkov, A. D. Chernev, and A. A. Chernobaev, 447 (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2008) (in Russian).

  5. Bradley F. Smith, Sharing Secrets with Stalin: How the Allies Traded Intelligence, 1941–1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 234–5.

  6. Report No. 70991-sch by Belyanov, OO head of the Western Front, to Georgii Zhukov, commander of the same front, dated December 30, 1941, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 3 (2), 480–85.

  7. Report by V. M. Kazakevich, deputy OO head of the Stalingrad Front, to the UOO, dated September 10, 1942, in ibid., 3 (2), 227–28.

  8. N. V. Grekov, ‘Deiatel’nost’ kontrrazvedki “SMERSH” po presecheniyu izmeny i dezertirstva v voiskakh vo vremya Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 gg.,’ VIZh, no. 2 (1996), 42–48 (in Russian).

  9. Joint Directive No. 00146/004137 by Zeidin, head of the Main Directorate of Military Tribunals, and Nosov, Chief Military Prosecutor, dated November 30, 1942. Cited in Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy, 302.

  10. Ye. M. Meletinsky, Izbrannye stat’i. Vospaminaniya (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi unyiversitet, 1998), 487–8 (in Russian).

  11. The above-cited report by Kazakevich, dated September 10, 1942.

  12. V. P. Artemiev et al., Political Controls in the Soviet Army: A Study Based on Reports by Former Soviet Officers (New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1954), 60–61, 74–75.

  13. Reports of political officers cited in Senyavskaya, 1941–1945, 132–33.

  14. Bykov,’ Za Rodinu! Za Stalina!’

  15. Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council, dated July 16, 1941(draft edited by Stalin). Document No. 11 in ‘Voina. 1941–1945,’ Vestnik Arkhiva Presidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow, 2010), 37–40 (in Russian).

  16. Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council, dated October 9, 1942.

  17. Pages in Artemyev et al., Political Controls, 9–15.

  18. Georgii Arbatov, ‘Nastupali po gogolevskim mestam,’ Novaya gazeta, no. 86, November 13, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2006/86/37.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  19. For example, memoirs by Mikhail Baitman, former military intelligence officer, interview on September 22, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.iremember.ru/razvedchiki/baytman-mikhail-ilich.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  20. Interview with Georgii Minin, former mortar man, July 4, 2006, http://www.iremember.ru/minometchiki/minin-georgiy-ivanovich.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  21. Recollections of Elya Gekhtman, former infantryman, May 7, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.iremember.ru/pekhotintsi/gekhtman-elya-gershevich.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  22. Viktor Astafiev’s letter to V. Kondratiev, dated December 28, 1987, in ‘Tol’ko prestupniki mogli tak sorit’ svoim narodom,’ Novaya Gazeta, no. 46, May 6, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/046/00.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  23. Roman Kolkowicz, The Soviet Military and the Communist Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 76–77.

  24. Joint Order of the NKO and NKMF, dated July 13, 1941. From August 1941 onwards, the 2nd NKVD Special Department was responsible for censorship, but the OOs continued to perform operational censorship of army correspondence. Abramov, SMERSH, 64–65.

  25. David Samoilov, ‘Lyudi odnogo varianta. Iz voennykh zapisok,’ Avrora, nos. 1–2 (1990), 68 (in Russian).

  26. Reports in Lubyanka v dni bitvy za Moskvu. Po rassekrechennym dokumentam FSB RF, edited by V. K. Vinogradov et al., 291–360 (Moscow: Zvonnitsa, 2002) (in Russian).

  27. Report of the OO deputy head of the Kalinin Front to Milshtein, dated February 13, 1942, in ibid., 320–3.

  28. For instance, Report No. 2397/6 by the OO of the Kalinin Front to the NKVD in Moscow, dated March 4, 1942, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopanosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine. T. 3. Kn. 1. Krushenie ‘Blitskriga.’ 1 yanvarya—31 iyuly
a 1942 goda (Moscow: Rus’, 2003), 10–60 (in Russian).

  29. Fedorenko’s report to Stalin, dated October 21, 1941. Document No. 37 in ‘Voina 1941–1945,’ Vestnik Arkhiva Presidenta, 85.

  30. An order to the troops of the Southwestern Front No. 0029, dated December 12, 1941, in Skrytaya pravda voiny, Chapter 4, http://www.rkka.ru/docs/spv/SPV4.htm, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  31. GKO Decision No 562ss, dated August 22, 1941. Mentioned in NKO Order No. 0320, dated August 25, 1941. Document No. 58, in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy narodnogo komissara oborony SSSR (1943–1945 gg.), T. 13 (2-2) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 73 (in Russian).

  32. GKO Order 1227s, dated May 11, 1942, cited in NKO Order No. 0373, dated May 12, 1942. Document No. 188, in ibid., 228. Also, GKO Order No. 2507s, dated November 12, 1942, cited in NKO Orders No. 0883, dated November 13, 1942, and No. 031, dated January 13, 1943, Document No. 289, in ibid., 365–6, and Document No. 16 in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy, T. 13 (2-3), 28.

  33. GKO Order No. 1889s, dated June 6, 1942, cited in NKO Order No. 0470, dated June 12, 1942. Document No. 289, in ibid., 251–2.

  34. Interview with Semyon Tsvang, former sergeant in a reconnaissance company of a tank brigade, November 19, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.iremember.ru/razvedchiki/tsvang-semen-ruvimovich.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.

  35. Quoted (page 763) in Frank Costigliola, ‘“Like Animals or Worse”: Narratives of Culture and Emotion by U.S. and British POWs and Airmen behind Soviet Lines, 1944–1945,’ Diplomatic History, 28, no. 5 (November 2004), 749–80.