36. NKO Order No. 0063, dated April 5, 1942, Document No. 161 in Russkii arkhv: Velikaya Otechestvennaya: Prikazy, T. 13 (2-2), 193–4.
37. Quoted in Zoya Yershok, ‘My valyalis’ na trave… Voina. Svidetel’skie pokazaniya sarshego leitenanta Petra Todorovskogo,’ Novaya gazeta, April 23, 2010 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/043/19.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.
38. Interview with Nikolai Safonov, former infantryman, April 30, 2008, http://www.iremember.ru/pekhotintsi/safonov-nikolay-ivanovich.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.
39. A review of trials of the Red Army commanders in 1943 in Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy, 466–71.
40. Quoted in B. V. Sokolov, Razvedka. Tainy Vtoroii mirovoi voiny (Moscow: AST-Press, 2001), 432–7 (in Russian).
41. Igor Plugatarev, ‘Voevat’, tak s iumorom!’ Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, April 1, 2005 (in Russian), http://nvo.ng.ru/history/2005-04-01/6_humor.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.
42. Interview with Nikolai Chistiakov, former infantryman, July 14, 2006, http://www.iremember.ru/pekhotintsi/chistyakov-nikolay-aleksandrovich.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.
43. The above-cited recollections by Nikolai Safonov.
44. Serov’s letter to Stalin, dated September 8, 1946, in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 244–7.
45. Two letters: No. Sh/003778 by Sharashenidze, dated April 4, 1942, and No. 08529/4 by Isai Babich, dated July 9, 1942. Document Nos. 876 and 1006, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 3 (1), 321, and ibid., 3 (2), 33–40.
46. NKVD Orders No. 00988, dated May 15, 1942, and No. 001854, dated August 30, 1942 (both signed by Abakumov). Documents No. 933, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 3 (1), 449–51, and No. 1071, in ibid., 3 (2), 183–85.
CHAPTER 11
Alleged New Traitors (Late 1941–Early 1943)
It sounds incredible, but draconian measures against military commanders and their arrests by Abakumov’s men continued on a mass scale during the next two years, which were decisive in turning the course of the war.
Typical Accusations
From autumn 1941 to early 1943, the UOO, including Abakumov personally, continued to arrest generals at the fronts. Most of them were charged with treason and espionage (paragraph 58-1b) (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com). On the whole, from 1941 to 1945, field military tribunals sentenced 164,678 so-called traitors: in 1941, 8,976; in 1942, 43,050; in 1943, 52,757; and in 1944, 69,895.1
Disseminating lies about the Red Army (paragraph 58-10) was the second common accusation. Any criticism of the Red Army or Party leaders, especially discussions about the disastrous period at the beginning of the war, was considered lies and anti-Soviet propaganda. For example, a former secretary of a military tribunal recalled that a colonel received ten years in a labor camp for telling his fellow officers that Marshal Semyon Budennyi, with whom he had attended military academy, could not understand the principles of fractions.2 Among generals alone, twenty were arrested and sentenced from 1941 to early 1943 for anti-Soviet propaganda (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com). Overall, at the end of 1944, prisoners sentenced on 58-10 charges constituted a third of all 392,000 political prisoners in the GULAG.3
The UOO also discovered new ‘plots’. The purported plot of teachers at the Frunze Military Academy (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com) was the most bizarre. Eight teachers (seven generals and a colonel) were arrested in November and December 1941 in the city of Tashkent, to which the Academy was evacuated from Moscow in October. As Abakumov reported to Stalin in 1945, they ‘were arrested as active participants in an anti-Soviet group whose goal was to establish contacts with the Germans and to overthrow the Soviet government. During their hostile activity the participants… intended to create conditions favorable for the Germans to enter Moscow’.4
It is hard to believe that Abakumov seriously considered it possible that these teachers had contacts with the Germans and tried to help them to conquer Moscow. It was discovered in the late 1950s, during the rehabilitation process, that this nonsense was based on the secret reports of a female informer named Bondarenko who worked at the Political Department of the Frunze Academy.5 Interestingly, despite the rhetoric, the ‘plotters’ were charged with paragraph 58-10 (anti-Soviet propaganda), and not accused of treason and plotting (which would be paragraphs 58-1b and 58-11, respectively). The teachers were brought to Moscow and kept in NKGB investigation prisons (the UOO/SMERSH did not have its own prisons), where the investigation was conducted.
As usual, under torture the arrestees were forced to ‘confess’, and the investigator Mikhail Likhachev, who will be mentioned in this book more than once, was especially successful in extracting these ‘confessions’. However, the fates of the teachers, as well as of the other 29 generals kept in NKGB prisons, were decided only after the war, when Abakumov presented Stalin with a list of generals arrested by the UOO/SMERSH and kept in Moscow prisons without trial.
Put on Ice
The generals arrested in 1941 and brought back to Moscow, like the Frunze Academy teachers, or after Moscow prisons were evacuated in October 1941, Konstantin Samoilov and others, as well as those arrested in 1942 (Vladimir Golushkevich, Fyodor Romanov, Aleksandr Turzhansky; Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com) were held in solitary confinement or, in the prison’s jargon, ‘conserved’ or ‘put on ice’, in the most horrifying prison of all, Sukhanovo (or Sukhanovka). In official documents, this facility was called ‘Special Object No. 110’.6 In 1938, under Beria’s supervision, this small seventeenth-century monastery in the Moscow suburbs was converted into an especially harsh investigation prison, equipped with tools for torture.7 Beria had a personal office on the second floor, connected by an elevator with the torture chambers on the first floor. Beria’s elevator also reached the basement where the punishment cells, kartsery, were located. Later Abakumov used the same office.
Approximately 150–160 prisoners under investigation were kept in this prison. Most of the cells were extremely small—1.56 by 2.09 meters (61.4 by 82.3 inches)—especially for two prisoners.8 For one prisoner, there was room only for a stool made of iron pipes and a table one meter long and 15.24 centimeters wide, both attached to the floor, and a narrow, but very heavy wooden folding bed (in fact, a board) attached to the wall. In the early morning the prisoner was ordered to lift the bed up and a guard locked it to the wall. In the evening, a guard unlocked the bed, and the prisoner was ordered to let it down. At night, the stool supported the bed. In the cells for two prisoners, there were two folding beds. Frequently an interrogated prisoner was kept with a stool pigeon as a cell mate.
During the day, the bed was up, and a prisoner had no choice but to sit on the iron stool and stare at the iron door of the cell; the door was equipped with a peephole through which a guard watched the prisoner from the corridor. Yevgenii Gnedin, a prisoner at Sukhanovo, recalled:
There was one guard for every three cells. The shade of the peephole was moved up almost every minute. If a prisoner made an incautious movement, the door’s lock was immediately opened and a guard stepped in and inspected the prisoner and the cell.9
There was a window in the cell furnished with specially made glass that was corrugated, and almost opaque. The same type of glass covered a bulb attached to the ceiling. The window was fortified with bars and mesh. The guard opened a small panel above it for a few minutes every morning.
The walls were painted a depressing light-blue color. A bucket was used as a toilet, and every morning the prisoner was ordered to take the bucket out to a lavatory in the corridor to empty it. Alexander Dolgun, an American prisoner, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The toilet was one of eight doors in the short corridor, four on each side [on every floor].’10
In Lubyanka and Lefortovo, two guards accompanied a prisoner on the way from his cell to an investigator’s office. But in Sukhanovo, two guards held the prisoner’s arms and the third pushed the prisoner from behind.11 According to memoirs, investigat
ors used 52 methods of torture in this prison, such as forcing an interrogated prisoner to sit on a stool upturned so that the stool’s leg penetrated the prisoner’s rectum; putting an interrogated prisoner in a cell full of cold water up to the knees for a day and a night.12 These were typical additions to the standard severe beatings. For extra punishment, there were cold kartsery without a heating device and hot kartsery with overheating, dark kartsery without light, and kartsers so small that a prisoner could only stand.
Some prisoners (both male and female) were brought from Lubyanka and Lefortovo to Sukhanovo for a short time, to give them a psychological shock, to frighten them, or to briefly torture them. If a prisoner was not interrogated for a long time, his investigator called him once every three months to make sure that he had not gone insane.13 Some prisoners did end up going insane, but usually they were not sent to a prison mental hospital right away, and terrified their prison neighbors with wild screams. Sometimes a prisoner managed to commit suicide despite the tight surveillance.
During the war, the ‘conserved’ generals were kept without interrogation. It is hard to imagine how the ‘iced’ prisoners managed to survive for years in the horrific conditions of Sukhanovo. They were tried only in 1951–52. At the time three of them had already died in Sukhanovo and in Butyrka Prison Hospital (the only hospital in investigation prisons in Moscow). One more general, Fedot Burlachko, died in 1949 in the MVD Kazan Psychiatric Prison Hospital, which was notorious for its inhumane treatment of prisoners.14
After Stalin’s death Sukhanovka was not used as a prison any more, but it continued to belong to the MVD.15 In the 1960s–70s, there was a special MVD school, then a training center for MVD troops. Although from 1992 onwards, buildings of the former prison were given step by step to the Orthodox Church, part of the MVD School existed in the monastery until 1995. The church officials completely destroyed Beria–Abakumov’s office and torture chambers below it that were intact until the mid-1990s. No research of the buildings by historians, no descriptions by architects, and even no photos were made. Currently, it is a working monastery consisting of newly constructed shining buildings without any reminder of the terrifying past and tortured victims. The FSB Central Archive keeps a register of the prisoners held in Sukhanovo during Stalin’s time as one of its main secrets.
Stalin’s Approval
It should be remembered that generals were usually arrested with Stalin’s personal approval. The case of Major General Ivan Rukhle is an example of a senseless action during a turning point of the war, leading up to the Battle of Stalingrad.
On the Stavka’s decision, General Rukhle, head of the Operations Department and deputy chief of the headquarters (HQ) of the Stalingrad Front, was dismissed from his posts at the end of September 1942 and then arrested on October 5.16 Before that, on the order of Georgii Malenkov, Stavka’s representative at the Stalingrad Front, Colonel Yevgenii Polozov, HQ chief of the 4th Tank Army, together with the OO of that army, falsified materials against Rukhle. Malenkov chose Polozov for this purpose because Polozov had hated Rukhle deeply ever since Rukhle fired him from the HQ of the front for poor professional performance. Rukhle was charged with treason (Article 58-1b) during the preparation of the previous operation in Kharkov.
In May 1942, approximately 230,000 Soviet servicemen were taken prisoner near Kharkov and 87,000 were killed while attempting to get through the German encirclement. Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the Southwestern Front; Nikita Khrushchev, a member of the Military Council; and General Ivan Bagramyan, HQ chief of that front, were responsible for the ill-planned offensive that culminated in this catastrophe. After Rukhle received the plan of their offensive for implementation, he tried to contact Stalin through Nikolai Selivanovsky (head of the front OO) and Abakumov, and with their help to send Stalin a report regarding the weak points of the plan. However, Timoshenko had already declared at the HQ meeting that ‘Comrade Stalin, our great friend and teacher, has approved the offensive plans of the front’, and, therefore, that Rukhle acted against Stalin’s will.17 Instead of handing Rukhle’s report over to Stalin, Abakumov informed Khrushchev that some HQ members were against the plan.
Timoshenko and Khrushchev soon realized that the offensive was poorly prepared and would result in total defeat. Anastas Mikoyan, a Politburo member, recalled:
I remember well May 18 [1942], when a serious threat of the defeat of our Kharkov offensive operation was coming. Late at night a few Politburo members—Molotov, Beria, Kalinin, Malenkov, probably Andreev, and I—were in Stalin’s office. We already knew that Stalin had rejected the request of the military council of the Southwestern Front to stop the offensive because of the danger of [German] encirclement. Suddenly the telephone rang.
Stalin told Malenkov: ‘Find out who it is and what he wants.’
[Malenkov] took the receiver and told us that it was Khrushchev…
Stalin said: ‘What does he want?’
Malenkov answered: ‘On behalf of the high command [of the Southwestern Front] Khrushchev requests stopping the offensive on Kharkov immediately and concentrating the main efforts on the counterattack against the enemy.’
‘Tell him that given orders are not discussed, but followed,’ said Stalin. ‘And then hang up.’18
Later, after a special investigation of the catastrophe by Aleksandr Vasilevsky, acting chief of the general staff, Stalin dismissed Bagramyan from his post, while Timoshenko and Khrushchev were reprimanded. Rukhle was chosen as a scapegoat.
Rukhle was brought to Moscow and kept in Lubyanka Prison for the rest of the war. In August 1944 Polozov, arrested for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ and already sentenced, was placed together with Rukhle, apparently as a cell spy, and advised Rukhle to ‘confess’. But only in February 1952 did the MGB Department for Investigation of Especially Important Cases conclude the case. Rukhle was charged with a ‘criminal attitude toward his duties while being at high positions in the HQ of the Southwestern, and then the Stalingrad Front’ under Article 193-17b. The case was so weak that on September 4, 1952, after the hearing, the Military Collegium returned materials to the MGB for an additional investigation.
On March 23, 1953, after Stalin’s death, the Military Collegium heard Rukhle’s case for the second time. Now he was accused of a ‘criminal attitude toward his duties’ (Article 193-17a), but only at the Stalingrad Front. Rukhle strongly denied his guilt, but the Collegium sentenced him to a ten-year imprisonment, which he had already spent in Lubyanka. Rukhle was released, and on May 29, 1953, the Plenum of the Supreme Court rehabilitated him. After this his rank was restored and he continued his military career.
One lucky navy commander was released through the intervention of a friend. Investigator Mikhail Likhachev, who has already been mentioned, arrested Admiral Gordei Levchenko, deputy Navy Commissar and commander of the troops in the Crimea, on November 16, 1941, after the Crimea had fallen. Later an important investigator in SMERSH and the MGB, Likhachev, who had never been in battle, cynically asked Levchenko: ‘What was your criminal activity in connection with the surrender of most of the territory of the Crimean Peninsula to the enemy?’19
On January 25, 1942, Levchenko was sentenced to a prison term of ten years in a labor camp, and promptly the next day a transcript of Levchenko’s interrogation was on Stalin’s desk. But Navy Commissar Nikolai Kuznetsov courageously defended Levchenko, and a few days later Stalin pardoned Levchenko, who was demoted to captain of the first rank and returned to the fleet. He was appointed commandant of the Leningrad and then the Kronstadt Naval bases. In 1944, he was promoted again to deputy VMF Commissar.
Many other navy commanders were punished and some were executed. On December 1, 1942, Kuznetsov wrote to the Military Council of the Black Sea Fleet: ‘The number of those convicted is enormously high compared to the other fleets… Report to me on the reasons for this large number of convictions and on your measures.’20 Little information is available about most of these cases. Some commanders an
d pilots were punished if a vessel was blown up by a mine. Others were convicted because they destroyed their vessels to prevent them from being taken by the enemy, an action that tribunals considered treacherous.
The Purges Widen
In June 1942, Beria suggested the GKO would widen the number of crimes for which family members of perpetrators would be persecuted.21 Espionage was one of his examples. From the beginning of the war, the OOs arrested over 23,000 servicemen on charges of espionage, attempts at treason against the Motherland, and treacherous intention. Additionally, in the non-occupied territories of the USSR 1,220 arrestees were sentenced as spies and 2,917 arrestees accused of spying were under investigation. In Beria’s opinion, family members of those sentenced to death for espionage needed to be punished.
Beria also reported to Stalin on another extremely troubling trend: since the beginning of the war, sixteen servicemen had killed their commanders and gone over to the enemy. In fact, there was always tension between privates and commanding officers in the Red Army. As the World War II veteran Vasil’ Bykov recalled, the relationships within the army were based on ‘the rule of complete obedience to superiors and cruelty without mercy toward subordinates’.22 He also explained, from his own experience: ‘Every serviceman felt fear coming from a threat behind, from superior commanders and all punishment organs [OOs, SMERSH, NKVD troops]… When a commander promises to shoot you on the spot in the morning if you don’t take back a farm or a height just captured by the enemy… you do not know who to fear more, the Germans or your commander. A German bullet may miss you, but the bullet of your commander won’t, especially if he involves a military tribunal.’23
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