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

by Vadim Birstein

  Deputy NKVD Commissar

  After the NKVD was divided into the NKVD and NKGB in February 1941, Beria called Abakumov back to Moscow. At this point it appears that Abakumov was in Beria’s favor, because on February 25, 1941, Abakumov was appointed deputy NKVD Commissar. This was quite a promotion for an NKVD officer whose previous position was as head of an important but provincial NKVD directorate. Abakumov was soon given an important assignment: to participate in the cleansing of the Baltic states in the spring of 1941.

  After the NKVD/NKGB merger in July, Abakumov became head of the UOO. He was also promoted to state security Commissar of the third rank, equivalent to lieutenant general in the army. For the next two years Abakumov remained one of the most powerful men under Beria.

  Many military counterintelligence officers admired Abakumov. Nikolai Mesyatsev, a former OO/SMERSH investigator, recalled in his memoirs:

  Abakumov kept the members of the Central Apparatus of Special Departments [in Moscow] firmly in his hands. He was greatly feared. As the [OO] veterans said, he was tough and willful. He worked a lot and forced others to work a lot. I liked his appearance, it gained everyone’s favor.57

  In another interview, Mesyatsev added: ‘[Abakumov] always talked about business calmly. He did not order anyone to stand at attention in front of him and invited [a visitor] to sit down.58

  Sergei Fedoseev, another NKVD man, had a similar opinion: ‘It was easy to talk to him. Despite his high position and the authority he had at the highest level of power, he was an open person, and any worker in the NKVD could approach him, regardless of any disparity in rank. He could create a relaxed feeling during a conversation and, most important, give good professional advice and support you if necessary.’59

  Abakumov differed from the other NKVD leaders in other ways as well. Unlike Beria, he had interests besides power and women. A contemporary wrote:

  [Abakumov] liked, for instance, to walk on foot through Moscow (!) [all other Soviet leaders used heavily guarded cars]. He rarely used a car, and if he went by car, he usually drove it himself. One could see him at the skating rink at 28 Petrovka Street skating or, more frequently, standing in a crowd of ‘regular’ people and watching the skaters. At a stadium, where he used to go to support the Dinamo team [an NKVD soccer team], he also sat among ordinary people. Besides sport, he was interested in theatre… Interestingly, he liked classical music and used to go to concerts of symphonic and chamber orchestras.60

  Another contemporary wrote more skeptically about Abakumov after the war:

  He was very pushy and insistent, with abrupt and demanding manners toward subordinates. He liked to ‘mix’ with common people and to give money to poor old women. He also liked spicy Caucasian shashlik [a type of kebab] and Georgian wines, despite his kidney stones. He was…very well dressed…[and] was also an excellent driver and frequently drove a trophy white Fiat sports car.61

  In February 1943, Abakumov was promoted to State Security Commissar of the 2nd Rank, an equivalent to Colonel General in the army. With his subsequent appointment as head of SMERSH in April that year, Abakumov became Beria’s equal. Maksim Kochegarov, a SMERSH subordinate close to Abakumov, later described his style of administration as SMERSH’s head:

  In SMERSH ABAKUMOV kept everyone in fear. This allowed him to dictate his will in all cases…

  ABAKUMOV developed a special, deliberately elaborate system of intimidation and persecution of his subordinates.

  By using foul language with or without a reason, ABAKUMOV suppressed any shy attempt of a subordinate to contradict him. Any word said against his opinion always provoked a flood of ABAKUMOV’s verbal abuses mixed with threats to punish the subordinate, to ‘send him to Siberia’, or to imprison him.

  After the frightened and stunned victim of ABAKUMOV’s abuse left his office, ABAKUMOV’s adherents—[Ivan] CHERNOV, head of [SMERSH] Secretariat, and [Yakov] BROVERMAN, his deputy—continued working on the subordinate. They tried to persuade him that to contradict ABAKUMOV was, in fact, to do harm to himself…

  ABAKUMOV did not restrict himself to frightening people. By the same token he wanted to show that he was a boss who cared about his subordinates. Frequently he was quite generous, but for this purpose he used governmental funds. Therefore, he used a stick and a carrot method, and at the same time he went around the law.62

  Apparently, while working with Beria as UOO head, Abakumov learned something from Beria’s style of command and administration.

  Abakumov’s Deputies

  Much less is known about Abakumov’s new deputies. Two of them, Nikolai Selivanovsky and Isai Babich, came from OOs. The third, Pavel Meshik, was an old colleague of Abakumov and a Beria man.

  Nikolai Selivanovsky

  In 1923, after graduating from a GPU school in Moscow, the 21-year-old Nikolai Nikolaevich Selivanovsky joined the OO of the Central Asian Military District.63 From 1930 to 1941, he served in various sections of the OO in Moscow. He was definitely successful because in July 1937 he received his first award, the Order of the Badge of Honor.

  Interestingly, in July-October 1937 Selivanovsky made trips to Prague and Paris, two centers of the Russian emigration in Europe. Although the goals of these trips are unknown, during that year the NKVD organized a series of provocations and terrorist acts in both cities in which Selivanovsky might have participated. In the spring of 1937, on Stalin’s order, NKVD agents planted (with the help of the Czech police) falsified documents among the belongings of Anton Grylewicz, a German émigré who lived in Czechoslovakia.64 Grylewicz, a former German Communist leader, was very close to Leon Trotsky and Stalin hoped that the Czech authorities would organize a trial against Grylewicz, which would be, in fact, an anti-Trotsky trial. Most probably, this plan emerged due to the close relationship between the Soviet and Czech intelligence services from 1936–38, when they even had a joint intelligence center (Vonano, located in Prague) that worked against the Germans and Austrians.65 Grylewicz was arrested in Prague in June 1937, just after the Tukhachevsky trial in Moscow, but in November he was released after he had proven that he was not the owner of the incriminating documents.

  In Paris, a group of NKVD agents headed by Yakov Serebryansky was preparing to kidnap Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, and Selivanovsky’s trip might have been connected with these preparations. However, Sedov mysteriously died in February 1938 after a surgical operation, and the kidnapping became unnecessary. The same year Serebryansky and the members of his group were arrested upon their return to Moscow, and, on Beria’s order, Abakumov tortured Serebryansky in Lubyanka.

  Selivanovsky could also have participated in preparations for the assassination of the NKVD defector Ignatii Reiss, who was killed on September 2, 1937 in Switzerland (however, the preparations were made in Paris), or in the successful kidnapping of General Yevgenii Miller, chairman of the Russian émigré military organization ROVS.66 On September 22, 1937, a group of NKVD agents abducted Miller in Paris. The general was brought to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, where he was kept at first as Prisoner No. 110 and then as ‘Pyotr Ivanov’. On May 11, 1939, he was finally shot without trial.

  Most of the participants in these terrorist acts were liquidated. Sergei Shpigelglas, deputy head of the NKVD’s foreign intelligence who organized Reiss’s and Miller’s operations in Paris, was arrested in November 1938, and in January 1940 the Military Collegium sentenced him to death and he was executed. Former Russian émigrés who assisted Shpigelglas in Paris and then escaped to Moscow were also executed. But Selivanovsky’s career continued to be successful.

  Back in Moscow, in 1938, Selivanovsky fabricated a case against Eduard Lepin, a military attaché to China and former military attaché to Finland and Poland.67 As a military attaché, Lepin represented military intelligence. At the end of 1937, he was called back to Moscow and arrested as an alleged member of a Latvian nationalistic group within the Red Army; Selivanovsky headed the investigation. On August 20, 1938, the Military Collegium sentenced Lepin to
death, and he was shot.

  In 1939, Selivanovsky became head of the 7th Section (responsible for infantry), then from 1939 to 1940, he headed the 9th Section (supply units), and, finally, from 1940 to 1941, the 5th Section (motorized infantry) of the OO. He continued to head this section after the OO was transferred to the NKO in February 1941. In November of that year, Selivanovsky succeeded Mikheev as head of the OO of the Southwestern Front after Mikheev was killed in action.

  On July 25, 1942, Selivanovsky, now head of the OO of the Stalingrad Front, sent a ciphered telegram directly to Stalin, trying, as he said, ‘to save Stalingrad, to save the country’.68 Two days earlier Lieutenant General Vasilii Gordov replaced Marshal Timoshenko as commander of the Stalingrad Front. At the same time, the Germans began a successful offensive and by July 25, three divisions of the front were surrounded by the enemy. In his telegram Selivanovsky accused Gordov of mistakes that resulted in the defeat and stated that Gordov was not respected by his subordinates.

  It was a serious military insubordination to address Stalin over Abakumov and Beria, Selivanovsky’s direct superiors, and immediately Beria ordered Selivanovsky to come to Moscow. Later Selivanovsky recalled: ‘In Moscow, Beria cursed me for a long time. He said that the appointment of a front commander should not be my business because it is a prerogative of the Supreme High Command.’69 But Stalin, apparently, considered the telegram important. It arrived just after the Red Army left the city of Rostov-on-Don, and the telegram informed Stalin about a potentially even bigger disaster at the Stalingrad Front. At the time, Stalin was preparing his infamous NKO Order No. 227 (‘No Step Back!’) that introduced penal battalions and companies into the army, as well as barrage units consisting of Red Army, and not NKVD, servicemen.

  On July 27, Stalin signed this order, and almost immediately he ordered Abakumov to personally evaluate the situation at the Stalingrad Front. In the meantime, on August 1, Gordov and Nikita Khrushchev, a member of the Military Council of the front, ordered, following Stalin’s Order No. 227, the creation of two penal battalions for officers, penal companies for privates, and 36 barrage detachments.

  Abakumov and a huge group of his high-level subordinates spent five days inspecting the situation at the front line in Stalingrad, questioning commanders and checking the NKVD and Red Army barrage detachments in the rear.70 Firstly, Abakumov briefed Gordov and Khrushchev. Then he divided his subordinates into three groups and sent them to different detachments of the front. Abakumov, accompanied by Selivanovsky, led one of the groups. It was attacked by German aircraft several times on the way to and at the front line.

  On August 6, the groups were back at the front HQ to discuss the results of their inspection trips, and the next day Abakumov sent a report to Stalin. Gordov was dismissed and later appointed commander of the 33rd Army at the Western Front, while Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko replaced him as commander of the Stalingrad Front. However, after the war, in 1947, Gordov was arrested on charges of treason; in fact, the MGB secretly recorded his critical talks about Stalin.71 On August 24, 1950 the Military Collegium sentenced Gordov to death and he was executed.

  At the end of August 1942, after Abakumov left, Selivanovsky reported to Moscow on the activity of his OO that month:

  On the whole, 110 German spies have been arrested and unmasked. Among them…there were 12 commanding officers and 76 servicemen, and 13 women-spies…

  On the whole, 30 of our agents were sent in August [1942] to the enemy’s rear. Also, 26 rezidents [heads of spy networks] and agents were left in the enemy’s rear during the withdrawal of our troops tasked with becoming members of the enemy’s intelligence and collecting counterintelligence information.

  Three agents returned from the enemy’s rear. They provided our military intelligence with important information.72

  It is not clear whether Selivanovsky was talking about two crucial pieces of intelligence his department received in August 1942—about the structure of the 6th German Army under the command of Field–Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, and the German plans for taking Stalingrad.

  In SMERSH, Selivanovsky, Abakumov’s deputy, was responsible for collecting and analyzing intelligence data. Of the three SMERSH deputies, he was the closest to Abakumov, continuing as his deputy after the war when Abakumov became State Security Minister. After Selivanovsky was arrested in 1951 as ‘Abakumov’s accomplice’, he became mentally ill and was sent to a special psychiatric hospital for examination. Possibly, this saved him from being tried and executed along with Abakumov. After his release in 1953, Selivanovsky was discharged from the MVD ‘due to health problems’. Selivanovsky outlived Abakumov by 43 years (he died in 1997), and he never released any secrets about his work in SMERSH/MGB, including information about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, in whose case he was involved.

  Pavel Meshik

  Abakumov’s second deputy, Pavel Yakovlevich Meshik, was, according to his son Charles, ‘a tall, handsome man. He had a beautiful voice and a very self-confident style of behavior’.73 Interestingly, Meshik was so fascinated by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species that he named one of his three sons after Darwin.

  In March 1932, at the age of twenty-one, Meshik began his work in the EKU of the OGPU, where he met Abakumov.74 In 1937, he moved to the GUGB Counterintelligence Department. In December of the same year he received the Order of the Badge of Honor, most likely for his participation in fabricating the case of Moisei Rukhimovich, Defense Industry Commissar. 75 In July 1938, the Military Collegium sentenced Rukhimovich to death and he was shot.

  In January 1939, Meshik was appointed assistant to Bogdan Kobulov, head of the NKVD Investigation Unit. Sergei Mironov-Korol’, arrested on January 6, 1939, was Meshik’s first victim in this unit. He was a prominent old Chekist—he began his career as head of OOs during the Civil War, and later occupied many important posts.76 In 1937, Mironov was appointed Minister to Mongolia, and from April 1938 onwards, he headed the 2nd Eastern Department within the Foreign Affairs Commissariat. For almost a year Meshik used to call Mironov’s wife Agnessa to his NKVD office to give her short notes written by Mironov, asking her to write brief replies. She was never arrested for being the wife of an ‘enemy of the people’, and for the rest of her life Agnessa tried to figure out why Meshik organized the exchange of letters.77

  She didn’t know that this was a common method used by NKVD interrogators to blackmail the investigated prisoner. To force the prisoner to write or sign false testimonies, especially if other people were mentioned, an investigator would tell the prisoner that his wife would not be arrested as long as he was ‘cooperating’, and as proof that she was still free, the investigator used the exchange of notes. In February 1940, the Military Collegium sentenced Mironov to death and he was executed. Interestingly, Mironov has never been rehabilitated, which usually means that he had tortured the arrestees when he worked in the OGPU/NKVD.

  Ironically, Mikhail Kedrov, the first head of the OO (Table 1-2), was among the victims whose cases Meshik helped to fabricate. Kedrov, arrested in April 1939, was accused of having been an agent of the czar’s secret police (okhranka) in the past, of connections with the NKVD’s fake ‘Yagoda plot’ of old Chekists, and of being an American spy. In his appeal to the Politburo, Kedrov described in detail how Meshik tortured him. On July 9, 1941, the Military Collegium miraculously acquitted Kedrov.78 However, following USSR Prosecutor Bochkov’s instruction about acquittals, Kedrov was not released from prison. With the Germans marching on Moscow, he was moved to Saratov and shot on October 18, along with twenty-two other prisoners.

  Meshik personally tortured other arrested Chekists, including Kedrov’s son Igor and Ivan Miroshnikov.79 Miroshnikov, who survived long imprisonment in labor camps, testified in 1953 that Meshik was especially brutal when he used to arrive in Sukhanovo Prison completely drunk and beat up prisoners. Miroshnikov added that ‘generally, Meshik was extremely cynical. He used to show his fist to me while saying, “Here is the Soviet government,�
� then come up to me and hit me with the fist with terrible force’.80 However, Igor Kedrov was not as lucky as Miroshnikov. On January 24, 1940, the Military Collegium sentenced him to death and the next day he was executed.

  One more survivor, Aleksandr Mil’chakov, former General Secretary of Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) and then head of Glavzoloto (the company that managed the state gold mines), who was arrested in May 1939, also recalled Meshik as a cynical investigator and person:

  Lieutenant Meshik, comfortably leaning in a chair, puts his legs on the desk. There is a rubber truncheon brought from Berlin near the inkwell on it. Recently an NKVD delegation visited Berlin, apparently to ‘exchange experiences’ [with the Germans]. From time to time Meshik takes the truncheon in his hands and plays with it…

  After Meshik sniffed a small flask, his eyes began to glitter and he laughed loudly. Today Meshik is ‘philosophizing’: ‘The Chekists are Stalin’s new vanguard. And we will destroy everybody who is in our way… We, the Chekists, are a party within the party… You are saying that you are not guilty of anything… But you must be destroyed because you are useless for us… Stalin himself blessed your arrest.’81

  In September 1939, Meshik was appointed head of the Investigation Unit of the NKVD Main Economic Directorate. At his trial in December 1953, Meshik claimed that he was not responsible for the interrogation methods he used (note that he talks about himself in the third person): ‘I think the problem is not how many prisoners Kobulov and Meshik have beaten up, but that they did beat them up… I think that Beria’s low trick and disgusting crime was that he persuaded interrogators that the Instantsiya allowed and approved the beatings [of course, Stalin did approve the torture]… Interrogators, including myself, used beatings and torture thinking it was the right thing to do.’82 The word ‘Instantsiya’ that Meshik used was an important term in the Party jargon of Stalin’s bureaucrats. As Stalin’s biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore noted, Instantsiya was ‘an almost magical euphemism for the Highest Authority’.83 It was used in official documents and speeches to indicate Stalin or, sometimes, the Politburo. In other words, NKVD/MGB officials never said that Stalin gave them an order; they said the Instantsiya did.