The 6th Department or Investigation Unit existed only in the GUKR SMERSH in Moscow. Its investigators commonly worked in coordination with investigators of the 2nd Department. Later, its head and deputy head, Aleksandr Leonov and Mikhail Likhachev, respectively, played important roles in interrogations of the highest level German POWs, and Likhachev headed a group of SMERSH officers sent to the Military International Trial in Nuremberg.
Cases prepared by the 6th Department were tried by the Military Collegium or the OSO of the NKVD. As already mentioned, in May 1943, Abakumov and Merkulov joined the OSO board.50 They or their representatives presented cases investigated by SMERSH or the NKGB, respectively.
The 7th GUKR SMERSH Department was in charge of statistics and archival data. It was also responsible for surveillance of high-level military personnel in the Central Committee and the Defense and the Navy Commissariats, as well as those involved in secret work who were sent abroad. Colonel Aleksandr Sidorov, who previously worked at a similar 1st NKVD Special Department, was appointed head of this department. After the war he continued heading the 7th Department (statistics and archival data) of military counterintelligence.
The 8th Department was responsible for ciphering. Later, after 1946, its head Colonel Mikhail Sharikov continued the same work in the MGB.
The 9th Department was in charge of operational equipment. Earlier, in the UOO, its head, Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Kochetkov, had overseen the 11th Department that was in charge of surveillance of the engineering, chemical, and signals troops. After the war, in 1946–49, Kochetkov headed the MGB’s Department ‘B’, which was in charge of the use of technical equipment, including the surveillance of phone calls. The 10th Department carried out arrests, searches and surveillance.
Little is known about the activity of the 11th GUKR Department ‘S’, i.e. Special Operations, headed by Colonel Ivan Chertov. According to the recollection of a member of this department, it was responsible for sending intelligence and terrorist groups, similar to those created by Sudoplatov’s 4th NKGB Directorate (terrorism), to the rear of the German troops.51 Sudoplatov used groups of 15–20 trained saboteurs, many of whom were foreign Communists who had participated in the Spanish Civil War and knew the German language well. Members of the groups formed by the 11th Department were selected from among physically strong men, usually former sportsmen who knew martial arts and were able to use various types of firearms. These intelligence and terrorist groups were sent to the enemy’s rear during the massive Red Army offensive actions. In other words, this was SMERSH’s version of the Abwehr’s Brandenburger saboteurs.
Finally, there was a Political Department in Moscow consisting of only two people: its head, Colonel Nikifor Siden’kov, and a typist.52 Later, in the MGB, Abakumov promoted Siden’kov to an important position as deputy head of the Main Directorate for the MGB Interior Troops (former NKVD/MVD Interior Troops).
Of course, SMERSH also had purely administrative personnel, and administration and finance Departments. Ivan Vradii, one of Abakumov’s deputies, headed the Personnel Department. The Administration and Finance Department was headed at first by Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Polovnev, then, from August 1943, by Lieutenant Colonel Maksim Kochegarov, former head of the 1st Moscow GUKR SMERSH School. After the war, Kochegarov was a deputy, and then, from November 1947 till mid-1951, head of the MGB Administration Department.
Notes
1. NKO Order No. 25, signed by Stalin and dated January 15, 1943. Document No. 18, in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya otechestvennaya. Prikazy Narodnogo Komissara Oborony SSSR, 13 (2–3), 30.
2. Letter to Stalin, dated December 19, 1944, in Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (New York: RosettaBooks, 2002), 260–1.
3. Politburo decision P38/3, dated July 21, 1942, and Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, dated July 29, 1942.
4. NKO Order No. 258, dated July 30, 1943. Document No. 155, in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2-3), 191–2.
5. A. I. Romanov’s description of Merkulov in Nights Are Longest There: A Memoir of the Soviet Security Services, translated by Gerald Burke (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 55.
6. Quoted in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i dokumenty, edited by V. S. Khristoforov et al., 64 (Moscow: Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie, 2003) (in Russian).
7. 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, 401 (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2008) (in Russian).
8. Merkulov’s letters to Stalin Nos. 334/B, 340/B, and 365/B, dated April 2, 4, and 14, 1943, respectively. The last letter is Document No. 149 in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. Organy VCheKa-OGPU-NKVD-NKGB-MGB-MVDKGB. 1917–1991. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2003), 621–2 (in Russian).
9. Na prieme u Stalina, 403.
10. Politburo decisions P40/91, dated April 14, 1943. Document No. 234 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR ‘SMERSH.’ 1939–1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 371–2 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2006) (in Russian).
11. The new NKGB structure in Merkulov’s letter and the Central Committee’s decision, dated April 14, 1943. Document Nos. 149 and 150 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 621–3. The NKVD structure on January 1, 1944, in ibid., 197.
12. Na prieme u Stalina, 404–5.
13. Photo of the document in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 67.
14. Na prieme u Stalina, 405.
15. Document No. 151 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 623–6.
16. Na prieme u Stalina, 406.
17. Abakumov’s letter to Stalin No. 103/A, dated April 27, 1943, and NKO Order Nos. 1/ssh and 3/ssh, dated April 29, 1943; signed by Stalin. Photos on pages 72 and 76, SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki.
18. GKO Decision No. 3399, dated May 20, 1943. Document No. 32 in Yurii Gor’kov, Gosudarstvennyi komitet oborony postanovlyaet (1941–1945). Tsifry, dokumenty (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2002), 527–8 (in Russian).
19. Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 79.
20. Page 124 in Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, ‘NKVD–NKGB–SMERSH: Struktura, funktsii, kadry. Stat’ya tret’ya (1941–1943),’ Svobodnaya mysl 8 (1997), 118–28 (in Russian). Details in Vadim Abramov, Abakumov—nachal’nik SMERSHa. Vzlet igibel’ lyubimtsa Stalina (Moscow: Yauza-ksmo, 2005), 88–98 (in Russian).
21. NKVD Order, dated May 15, 1943. Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 79. Details in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 293–310.
22. Klim Degtyarev and Aleksandr Kolpakidi, SMERSH (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2009), 146 (in Russian).
23. Ibid., 147.
24. Vadim Abramov, SMERSH. Sovetskaya voennaya razvedka protiv razvedki Tret’ego Reikha (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005), 135 (in Russian).
25. Joint directive of the Justice Commissar and chief USSR Prosecutor, dated August 10, 1943. Vyacheslav V. Obukhov, Pravovye osnovy organizatsii i deyatel’nosti voennykh tribunalov voisk NKVD SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 gg. Candidate of Sciences Dissertation (Moscow: MVD Moskovskii Universitet, 2002), 122 (in Russian).
26. ‘Regulations on the Main Counterintelligence Directorate of the Defense Commissariat (“Smersh”) and its organs,’ approved by Stalin on April 21, 1943. Document No. 151 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 623–6.
27. Ibid.
28. ‘Dokladnaya zapiska V. N. Merkulova na imya N. S. Khrushcheva ot 23 iyulya 1953 g.,’ in Neizvestnaya Rossiya. XX vek. Kniga tret’ya (Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledie, 1993), 72 (in Russian).
29. N. V. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gosbezopasnosti 1941–1954. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya, 2010), 110 (in Russian).
30. Sergei Osipov, ‘SMERSH otkryvaet tainy. Interv’ev,’ Argumenty i fakty, no. 26 (1331), June 26, 2002 (in Russian), http://gazeta.aif.ru/online/aif/1131/09_01, retrieved September 7, 2011.
31. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 75.
32. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 69–70.
33. SMERSH. Istoric
heskie ocherki, 214–5.
34 Nicola Sinevirsky, SMERSH (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950), 93–94.
35. Abakumov’s report to Beria No. 650/A, dated January 1945. A photo in N. V. Gubernatorov, SMERSH protiv Bussarda (Reportazh iz akhiva tainoi voiny) (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2005) (in Russian), between pages 192 and 193.
36. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 73.
37. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 70–71.
38. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 150.
39. D. P. Tarasov, Bol’shaya igra SMERSHa (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2010), 20–21 (in Russian).
40. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 166.
41. Ibid., 186–7.
42. Tarasov, Bol’shaya igra SMERSHa, 20.
43. NKO Order No. 0071, dated April 19, 1943. Document No. 103 in Russkii Arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2–3), 124–7.
44. Ibid., 242.
45. Andreas Hilger, Nikita Petrov, and Günther Wagenlehner, ‘Der “Ukaz 43”: Entstehung und Problematik des Dekrets des Präsidium des Obersten Sowjets vom 19. April 1943,’ in Sowjetische Militärtribunale, vol. 1, Die Verurteilung deutscher Kriegsgefangener 1941–1953, edited by Andreas Hilger, Ute Schmidt, and Günther Wagenlehner, 181–5 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2001).
46. The full text of the Decree, dated April 19, 1943, was included in the NKO Order without a number. Document No. 106 in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2–3) (1997), 129–30 (in Russian). An excerpt in English is on page 106 in George Ginsburgs, ‘Light Shed on the Story of Wehrmacht Generals in Soviet Captivity,’ Criminal Law Forum 11 (2000), 101–20.
47. NKVD Order No. 00968, dated July 11/12, 1943, and NKVD Instruction No. 311-ss, dated June 16, 1943. Document Nos. 107 and 108 in Istoriya stalinskogo GULAGa. Konets 1920-kh –pervaya polovina 1950-kh godov. Tom 2. Karatel’naya sistema: Struktura i kadry, ed. by N. V. Petrov (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004), 220–2 (in Russian).
48. Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy. Voina 1941–1945 gg. v materialakh sledstvenno-sudebnykh del (Moscow: Terra, 2006), 628 (in Russian).
49. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 116–7.
50. Beria and Merkulov’s joint report, dated May 20, 1943. Document No. 237 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 377.
51. Vyacheslav Shevchenko, ‘“SMERSH” opasnee smercha,’ Leninskaya smena. Ekspress-K, no. 81 (16229), May 11, 2007 (in Russian), http://www.express-k.kz/show_article.php?art_id=8885, retrieved September 7, 2011.
52. Abramov, SMERSH, 264.
CHAPTER 17
Leaders of SMERSH
While appointing Viktor Abakumov and his deputies Nikolai Selivanovsky, Pavel Meshik, and Isai Babich leaders of SMERSH, Stalin, obviously, had serious reasons. He needed a secret service that would fight enemy intelligence, control the enormous Soviet army, and be loyal and subordinated only to him. Apparently, Abakumov and his deputes’ backgrounds and careers fit Stalin’s expectations.
Abakumov the Man
Abakumov was tall and well built, with a square face, high forehead, brown eyes, big nose and mouth, thick lips, and brown hair.1 He was considered quite handsome by men and women alike. ‘Romanov’, the pseudonym of a SMERSH officer who later defected, was impressed with Abakumov: ‘There was no doubt that the chief of GUKR Smersh was a very handsome man. He had an athletic build, just a shade overweight… He had…one eyebrow just a shade higher than the other. His thick, dark hair was brushed back.’2
In a three-page, handwritten autobiography that Abakumov prepared for the NKVD in December 1939, he claimed he was born in 1908 in Moscow.3 However, some mystery surrounds his real age, place of birth, and early career. In 1952, after he was arrested, investigators checked a church register of births in a small village in the Moscow Region. A record of Abakumov’s birth was not found.4 But the investigators apparently believed that Abakumov was not born in Moscow, as he claimed, but somewhere near Moscow.
Abakumov claims that his father received a salary so low that ‘our family of five people—a brother, a sister, and me—was always poor.’ He says that before the October Revolution his father was a worker who was sometimes employed in a small pharmaceutical plant in Moscow. These details helped establish Abakumov’s ‘class origin’ as proletariat, which was important for his NKVD career. It is possible that Abakumov concealed his father’s real position; this was common practice, because even as innocuous a position as store manager would place one in the ideologically undesirable bourgeoisie class.5 After the October Revolution, Abakumov’s father was a maintenance man in a hospital. He died in 1922 when Abakumov was fourteen. Abakumov also states that before the revolution his mother was a seamstress, and after the revolution she was a charwoman in the same hospital where her husband worked.
According to Abakumov, he attended only four years of grade school. Amazingly, he was very literate, often editing documents written by his barely literate subordinates. ‘Romanov’ stresses in his memoirs that Abakumov’s orders ‘were very different from army orders…[They] were always absolutely clear, and never had any kind of introduction.’6
Abakumov also claims to have volunteered for the army in 1921. This is odd, since even under the Soviet standards of the time a thirteen-year-old boy would not have been accepted. This and the above-mentioned inconsistencies in Abakumov’s biography led Boris Sokolov, a knowledgeable Russian historian, to hypothesize that Abakumov might have been three or four years older and better educated than he claimed.7 It is also possible that somebody helped Abakumov join the army at such a young age so that he could at least eat—there was famine throughout the country in those years. Another mystery is that no sources give any information about Abakumov’s brother and sister.
In any case, Abakumov served as a medical orderly in the 2nd Moscow Special Brigade until the end of 1923. This brigade was part of the Formations for Special Tasks, or ChON—military units consisting mostly of Party and Komsomol (Union of Young Communists) members who were used to back up Chekist actions. They were formed in April 1919 and played an important role in the Civil War.8 From November 1919 until mid-1921, Nikolai Podvoisky, an Old Bolshevik, who was one of the leaders of the Revolution and the first War Commissar, was its commander.9
In August 1920, an anti-Soviet peasant uprising broke out in Tambov Province. In April 1921, the Politburo appointed Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the best Red Army military leaders, Commander of the Tambov Military District and put him in charge of suppressing the uprising.10 Apparently, Vladimir Lenin insisted on Tukhachevsky’s appointment after Tukhachevsky commanded a successful repression of the military anti-Bolshevik revolt in the city of Kronstadt in March 1920. As Tukhachevsky’s sister Olga recalled, after the appointment to Tambov Tukhachevsky ‘went to his room and drank for two days… This was the only occasion during his whole life when he became dead drunk’.11
The tactics the thirty-year-old Tukhachevsky used against the peasants were brutal even by Civil War standards. For instance, on June 11, 1921 he signed an order to shoot numerous hostages and anyone who did not give his name. The uprising was finally suppressed only in July–August 1921, after Tukhachevsky’s troops used, at least once, chemical weapons against the insurgents and their families who were hiding in the forests.12
Abakumov’s 2nd Moscow Special Brigade participated in suppressing this and a similar peasant revolt in the Ryazan Province. One can only wonder what effect participating in these events at such a young age may have had on the teenage Abakumov.
In 1924, after the ChON was disbanded, Abakumov returned to Moscow, where he worked at several unimportant jobs. In 1930, after being accepted as a member of the Communist Party, he was appointed head of the Military Department of the Komsomol Zamoskvoretsky Regional Office. In 1932, he joined the OGPU, the NKVD’s predecessor, which existed from 1922 to 1934.
First Years in the OGPU/NKVD
For the first year Abakumov worked in the Economic Department (EKO) of the Moscow Regional Branch of the OGPU (Table 17-1). In 1933, he was transferred
to the Economic Directorate (EKU) of the central OGPU. Mikhail Shreider (who was, at the time, the head of the 6th Section of the EKO of the OGPU’s Moscow Regional Branch), describes Abakumov’s transfer:
[Yakov] Deich, first deputy of the OGPU Plenipotentiary [Representative] of the Moscow Region, called me on the phone and recommended that I take into my section a ‘good guy’ who had had problems with his previous superior, the head of the 5th Section [Iosif Estrin]. Although he was not ‘a very capable guy’, some important persons ‘asked for him very much’.
Deich did not tell me who was asking for Abakumov, but, from the tone of his voice, they were very high-ranking people, and most probably, their wives were behind it [Abakumov was a ladies’ man]… Deich added that Abakumov was supposedly an adopted son of one of the October Uprising leaders, [Nikolai] Podvoisky.13
TABLE 17-1. VIKTOR ABAKUMOV’S POSITIONS FROM 1932 TO 1943
Shreider’s recollection is not quite accurate. In fact, in 1933, Abakumov was transferred to the OGPU Economic Directorate or EKU. Moving from the regional office to the Moscow headquarters after only a few months was a big promotion, which seems to confirm Shreider’s statement that Abakumov had a patron. The information that Abakumov was supposedly Nikolai Podvoisky’s adopted son is interesting since Podvoisky was the commander of Abakumov’s unit until 1921. However, after being blamed for a military disaster in Ukraine during the Civil War, his military career took a nosedive. From September 1921, Podvoisky presided over the Council of Sportsmen (Sportintern) and later held other Party posts. As Boris Bazhanov, one of Stalin’s secretaries and an individual well versed in Party intrigues once wrote, ‘In government circles his [Podvoisky’s] name was usually accompanied by the epithet “old fool.”’14
Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII Page 34
