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

by Vadim Birstein

  But in the 1930s, the Japanese enthusiastically supported the RFP’s anti-Soviet terrorist activity. In 1936, the Japanese assisted a group called ‘The First Fascist Unit for Saving Russia,’ under the command of Rodzaevsky’s bodyguard, Matvei Maslakov, in crossing the Soviet border.31 The NKVD troops immediately discovered the group and killed forty of its members.

  In 1937, General Yoshijiro Umezu, commander in chief of the Kwantung Army and, from 1939 to 1942, Japanese ambassador to Manchukuo, ordered the establishment of a special school to train Russian terrorists, appointing Rodzaevsky as its head.32 Soviet intelligence heard about the school’s activity through Ivar Lissner, a reporter for Völkischer Beobachter and a prominent anthropologist, who pretended to work for the Abwehr but was, in fact, a Soviet agent. In June 1940, the Japanese arrested Lissner on suspicion of espionage. He was released after the war. As for General Umezo, in July 1944 he was appointed chief of the Japanese general staff. In 1948, the International Military Tribunal in Tokyo sentenced him to life in prison and he died in prison in 1949.

  The Japanese military leaders planned the active use of émigré Russian military formations in the coming war against the Soviet Union. In 1938, Ataman Semenov organized the first detachment, called the Asano Brigade after the Japanese Colonel Takashi Asano.33 Subordinate to the HQ of the Kwantung Army, the brigade fought against Korean partisans. In 1939, a unit of 250 men from this brigade participated in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol against the Red Army. In 1943, the brigade, renamed the Russian Military Unit of the Manchukuo Army, included infantry and Cossack cavalry units. From 1944 onwards, Cossack Colonel Smirnov commanded the formation, which had grown to 4,000 men by 1945.

  Another Cossack corps, ‘Zakhipgapsky,’ formed under the command of General A. P. Baksheev in 1943, was subordinate to Japanese Lieutenant Colonel Takashi Hishikari, the Kwantung Army ambassador to Manchukuo. Three additional small units of approximately 250 men each consisted of young Russian volunteers in three Manchurian regions. While Japanese officers commanded these units, the junior officers were Russians.

  Contrary to Japanese hopes, after the first Soviet paratroopers landed in several Manchurian cities, young Russians actively assisted them in capturing Japanese military commanders. Rodzaevsky and Vlasievsky, along with several loyal men, moved to the town of Tientsin, where they met with a group of NKVD representatives. The NKVD officers told the escapees that they would be pardoned if they went to the Soviet Union voluntarily. Vlasievsky flew to Manchuria, where he met with Marshal Malinovsky. After the meeting, he was brought to the Soviet city of Chita, where SMERSH operatives arrested him and sent him to Moscow.

  On September 22, 1945, Rodzaevsky wrote a letter to Marshal Vasilevsky, who handed it over to the Soviet Embassy in Beijing (then known as Peking).34 After reading it, Soviet representatives brought Rodzaevsky to Changchun, the capital of Manchuria, where SMERSH operatives arrested him. Many other émigrés were arrested in Harbin and other cities. Prince Nikolai Ukhtomsky, a journalist and writer in Harbin, later told his fellow prisoners in the Vorkuta Labor Camp that a group of Soviet paratroopers had landed in the center of Harbin and immediately arrested him and several other White émigrés.35 In September 1945, Abakumov reported to Beria:

  The SMERSH Directorate of the Transbaikal Front has found and arrested leaders of the anti-Soviet White Guardist movement in Japan and Manchuria:

  RODZAEVSKY, K. V., the ideologue and leader of the ‘Russian Fascist Union,’ born in 1908 in the town of Blagoveshchensk, a Russian, former member of the VLKSM [Communist Youth Union], in 1928 escaped from the Soviet Union to Manchuria;

  VLASIEVSKY, L. F., head of the anti-Soviet central ‘Bureau of Russian Emigrants’ in Manchuria [i.e., BREM], born in 1889 in the village of Chindan (Transbaikal Region), a Russian, escaped with the rest of the gang of Ataman SEMENOV to Manchuria, Lieutenant General of the White Army.

  Therefore, at present we have arrested all leaders of the White Guardists in Manchuria: SEMENOV, G. M.; RODZAEVSKY, K. V.; VLASIEVSKY, L. F.; Ataman SEMENOV’s Deputy, Lieutenant General of the White Guard Army, BAKSHEEV, A. P.; leaders of the White Cossack and anti-Soviet organizations, generals of the White Army BLOKHIN, P. I.; DRUIN, F. B.; GARMAEV, Urain; MOSKALEV, T. P.; KUKLIN, M. V.; Prince UKHTOMSKY, N. A.; and others.

  RODZAEVSKY and VLASIEVSKY have already been brought to the Main SMERSH Directorate, where they will be carefully interrogated.

  I have already reported the above to Comrade STALIN.36

  More arrests, especially of the ROVS representatives in China, followed. Later most of the above-mentioned arrestees were convicted in show trials.

  Also arrested was Boris Bryner, a businessman with a Swiss passport and an affiliation to the Swiss Consulate in Tientsin (Tianjin), who was the father of the famous Hollywood actor Yul Brynner. Boris Bryner was a son of Jules (Julius) Bryner, a Swiss citizen who moved to Russia and became a successful businessman, and a Buryat (Mongolian) mother.37 Later Yul and his sister Vera added the second ‘n’ to the family surname after arriving in the United States. After graduating from St. Petersburg Mining Institute, Boris worked as a manager of the Tetyukhe Lead and Zinc Mines Company established by his father not far from Vladivostok. He married a Russian woman, Maria (Marousia) Blagovidova, who gave birth to Yul, the future actor (born Yulii Borisovich Bryner), and Vera. Boris maintained the rights to the family mines until 1931, which made his enterprise the longest-running private company in the Soviet Union.

  In 1931, Boris was forced to leave Vladivostok for Harbin, where his wife Marousia had moved a few years earlier after Boris abandoned her and their two children; in 1934, they moved to Paris. Since the Soviets considered Boris a ‘Russian capitalist,’ in 1945 SMERSH operatives arrested Boris together with his second wife and their small daughter. Mr. and Mrs. Bryner were imprisoned and interrogated for six months. They were released after negotiations between the Swiss authorities and the Soviets.

  SMERSH’s search for Genrikh Lyushkov, possibly the most wanted enemy among the Far Eastern Russians, failed because he was already dead. Lyushkov, State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank, was the highest NKVD officer who ever defected.38 From 1931 to 1936, Lyushkov held high posts within the Special Political Department of the OGPU/NKVD. Later he headed the Azov-Black Sea NKVD Directorate, before Abakumov succeeded him. After this, in 1937, Lyushkov was appointed head of the NKVD Far Eastern Directorate. Stalin personally instructed Lyushkov concerning the necessity of arrests there. As a result, 250,000 people were arrested, of whom 7,000 were shot. Lyushkov also supervised the exile of 175,000 Koreans and 7,000 Chinese, considered potential Japanese spies, from that area to Central Asia.39 In June 1938 Lyushkov was ordered to Moscow, but fearing his inevitable arrest, he defected to Japan.

  In Japan, Lyushkov took the name Toshikazu Yamaguchi, became a Japanese citizen, and worked for the Japanese General Staff in Tokyo. Based on Lyushkov’s information, the Japanese reorganized their army in Manchuria. Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy in Tokyo, microfilmed part of a German report on Lyushkov’s interrogations by the Japanese and sent the microfilm to Moscow. Lyushkov also gave numerous interviews about ongoing terror in the Soviet Union.

  Lyushkov offered Japanese intelligence a plan to assassinate Stalin at his dacha in the Caucasus. In 1939, a group of White Russian terrorists headed by Lyushkov arrived near the Turkish–Soviet border. It is possible that there was a Soviet agent in the group, because when it reached the border Soviet Border Guards were already on alert and prevented its penetration into Soviet territory.40 Later Lyushkov made a second attempt to assassinate Stalin, but it also failed.

  In July 1945, Lyushkov was transferred to the Special Intelligence Agency of the Kwantung Army in the city of Dairen. On August 19, during the Soviet offensive, Captain Yutaka Takeoka, a member of this agency, killed Lyushkov after the latter refused to commit suicide. Japanese intelligence was probably afraid that if SMERSH or the NKVD captured him, Lyushkov would release too much informat
ion.

  On November 25, 1945 SMERSH operatives captured Takeoka.41 In Moscow Abakumov personally interrogated him about Lyushkov. In April 1946, Takeoka was used as a witness at the show trial of Ataman Grigorii Semyonov, Konstantin Rodzaevsky and the others. In June 1948, Takeoka was sentenced to a 25-year imprisonment. He was kept in Vladimir Prison separately from the other Japanese prisoners, until released and repatriated in 1956.

  The arrested General Yamada, commander in chief of the Kwantung Army, was sent to Kartashov’s GUKR SMERSH department in Moscow. During the 1949 Khabarovsk Trial, Yamada received a prison sentence of twenty-five years for his culpability in testing biological weapons on POWs, carried out by the infamous Unit 731 that was part of the Kwantung Army.42

  Among the other Japanese routinely sent to Kartashov’s department were Colonel Saburo Asada, head of the 2nd (Intelligence) department of the staff of the Kwantung Army; his deputies, Lieutenant Colonels Tamaki Kumazaki and Hiroki Nohara; Yoshio Itagaki, a son of Seishiro Itagaki, war minister from 1938–1939; Lieutenant General Genzo Yanagita, head of the Japanese military mission in Harbin; Major Kinju Ishikawa, head of a sabotage group of that mission; and Hadjime Kanie, head of the Sakhalin military mission. Senior Lieutenant Prince Fumitaka Konoe, a son of the former Japanese Prime Minister, and Funao Miyakawa, former General Counselor in Vladivostok and then in Harbin, as well as some others, were held and interrogated for eight months in a camp for Japanese POWs in Manchuria, before being sent to Moscow.43

  As in Europe, mass killings of Japanese and even Chinese civilians, looting, and rapes continued in Manchuria, Korea, and South Sakhalin after they were occupied by the Red Army. Corporal Hal Leith, a member of the OSS team Cardinal parachuted into a location near Mukden in Manchuria in order to rescue American POWs, recalled: ‘All they [Soviet soldiers] do is loot and kill, and they don’t stick to looting from the Japanese. Some soldiers wear as many as 10 watches.’44 Another member of the same team reported that as an explanation of the atrocities, a Soviet general told the Americans that the soldiers who committed atrocities belonged to the ‘shock troops’ made up of men whose families had been butchered by the Germans; they were eager for revenge, he said, adding that after Germany those vengeful soldiers were dispatched to the Far East. The general claimed: ‘Not being normal in their minds, they were bent on looting, killing, and rape.’45 Even if that had been true (and it was not), the Soviet general did not explain why atrocities were not stopped by the high command, or by SMERSH.

  The End of the War

  On September 2, 1945, Japan signed a formal surrender in a ceremony on board the USS Missouri. General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied powers, directed the signing. The Soviet delegation of two generals and an admiral was headed by Lieutenant General Kuzma Derevyanko, the Soviet representative at MacArthur’s headquarters.46 Derevyanko spoke both English and Japanese. After the signing, Derevyanko spent several days in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, taking photos and making detailed notes about the destruction of the city. On October 5, he reported to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and three military leaders in the Kremlin on Japan’s capitulation and on his trip to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.47 Nine years later, on December 30, 1954, Derevyanko died due to the effects of radiation exposure.

  In the meantime, on September 3, 1945, the Soviet Union officially declared the defeat of Japan. Since then, the Western Allies and China have considered August 15 the day of the Japanese surrender, while the Russians consider September 2 the day of Japan’s defeat. In 2010, September 2 became a Russian holiday to commemorate the last day of World War II.

  SMERSH and NKVD operational groups continued making arrests after the end of the war. The memoirs of some arrestees reveal that in October 1945, Soviet military officials called meetings with the leaders of Russian organizations in Harbin and in other cities in Manchuria.48 Once the émigrés had assembled, they were simply surrounded by Soviet troops and arrested.

  In Mukden, an operational group arrested the last Chinese and Manchurian emperor, 39-year-old Henry Pu Yi, along with the members of his family and his court.49 In all, 225 paratroopers landed in this city, and thirty SMERSH officers took part in arresting the former emperor. He was later held in Camp No. 27 and in a POW camp near Khabarovsk in Siberia. He wrote several letters to Stalin thanking the USSR for saving his life. Pu Yi intensively studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy as well as the history of the Soviet Communist Party, which he even wanted to join.50 The Soviets used Pu Yi as a witness at the trials of Japanese war criminals in Khabarovsk in September 1946 and in Tokyo in May 1946–November 1948. In July 1950, on Stalin’s order, officers of the GUPVI’s Operational Directorate turned over Pu Yi, along with fifty-seven of his relatives and former government members, to Chinese officials. Pu Yi wrote to Stalin: ‘I wish for the Soviet people to flourish forever and Generalissimo Stalin to be healthy and live for many years to come.’51 In China, Pu Yi was held in prisons and labor camps for ‘reeducation’ until 1959. After his release, Pu Yi worked in the botanical gardens of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published his memoirs.52 He died in 1967.

  In Moscow, many of the Japanese prisoners and Russian émigrés caught in China spent years in investigation prisons. In 1948–51, most of the Japanese prisoners were sentenced to twenty-five years in special prisons, where some of them died.53 Shun Akifusa, former head of the Japanese military mission in Harbin, died in Vladimir Prison in March 1949, while Funao Miyakawa, former Japanese general counsel in Harbin, died in 1950 in Lefortovo Prison, still awaiting trial. Prince Fumitaka Konoe, a son of the former Japanese prime minister, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison in 1951. After spending four years in Aleksandrovsk and Vladimir special prisons, he died in a transit camp en route to Japan. General Otozo Yamada survived his imprisonment and returned to Japan.

  About 640,000 of the Japanese servicemen taken prisoner, including 16,000 Chinese and 10,200 Koreans, were brought to the GUPVI camps on the Soviet territory and used for slave labor.54 This was a direct violation of the Potsdam Declaration of the western Allies, signed on July 26, 1945, the 9th point of which stated: ‘The Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed, shall be permitted to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives.’55 But the Soviets did not comply because Stalin did not sign this declaration. Japanese estimates reveal that approximately 250,000 Japanese POWs perished in the labor camps, while Russian officials claim that a much smaller number, 62,068 Japanese, died. It is possible that the real numbers of Japanese POWs held in Soviet captivity—and of related fatalities—will never be known.

  Only on October 19, 1956, more than three years after Stalin’s death, did Japan and the Soviet Union sign the agreement ending the war. A peace agreement between the two countries has never been signed due to an unresolved dispute regarding the status of the southern Kuril Islands.

  Notes

  1. Details of negotiations and of the agreement in Boris Slavinsky, The Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact: A Diplomatic History, 1941–1945, translated by Geoffrey Jukes (New York: RoutledgeCurson, 2004), 32–60.

  2. I. P. Makar, ‘Iz opyta planirovaniya strategicheskiogo razvertyvaniya Vooruzhennykh Sil SSSR na sluchai voiny s Germaniei i neposredstennoi podgotovki k otrazheniyu agressii,’ VIZh, no. 6 (2006), 3–9 (in Russian).

  3. GKO Decision No. 3407ss, ‘The NKVD Construction Site No. 500,’ dated May 21, 1943.

  4. Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers. The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 147.

  5. Vasilevsky was summoned to Stalin’s office on July 9, 26, 28, and 29. 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, 437–8 (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2008) (in Russian); A. M. Vasilevsky, Delo vsei zhizni (Moscow: Politizdat, 1978), 507 (in Russian).

  6. SMERSH, Istoricheskie och
erki, 246.

  7. 1283. The text of the protocol at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/yalta.asp, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  8. Cited in Volkogonov, Stalin, 493.

  9. Ibid., 419–20.

  10. Abakumov’s report to Beria, dated June 30, 1945, in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 246.

  11. Ibid., 246.

  12. Takashi Nakayama, ‘Invasion of the Soviet forces,” Chapter 1 in The Japanese Internees and Forced Labor in the USSR after the Second WorldWar; The Excerpt Version, 1-49, http://www.heiwa.go.jp/en/pdf/10/chapter_01.pdf, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  13. Beria’s report to Stalin, dated July 27, 1945. Document No. 85 in Stalinskie stroiki GULAGa 1930–1953, edited by A. I. Kokurin, and Yu. N. Morukov (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2005), 250 (in Russian).

  14. Details, for instance, in David M. Glantz, The Soviet Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, 1945: ‘August Storm’ (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003).

  15. On the events in Tokyo see, for instance, Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 152–5.

  16. Details in Tsuyoshi Heasegava, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), 252–89.

  17. Vladimir Vereshchagin and Nikolai Gordeev, ‘Voennaya kontrrazvedka Zabaikal’ya v razgrome Kvantungskoi armii i osvobozhdenie severo-vostoka Kitaya,’ Istoriko-ekonomicheskii zhurnal, no. 4 (1998) (in Russian), http://www.chekist.ru/print/1217, retrieved September 9, 2011; A. Doshlov, ‘Zabaikal’tsy za Khinganom,’ VIZh, no. 5 (2005), 24–25 (in Russian).