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

by Vadim Birstein

  Prostitutes were also a tool of SMERSH surveillance: ‘Among the Austrian agents whom Smersh recruited, the procurers of girls for allied military personnel worked with particular success… We had in Vienna a number of “meeting houses” or brothels, which Smersh financed for the same purpose.’87 SMERSH/MGB used these methods in all occupied countries.

  In the Soviet occupational zones, the Russian Federation Criminal Code with its notorious Article 58 was introduced. Under various paragraphs of this article, not only Soviet citizens but also local citizens arrested by SMERSH were charged, mostly as spies (Article 58-6).88 Besides investigating the arrestees locally, the UKRs sent many of those suspected of espionage to Moscow.

  The fate of Gotthold Starke, a German journalist and diplomat arrested by the operatives of the UKR SMERSH of GSOVG in the town of Mulhausen in July 1945, is a good example (Appendix II, see http://www.smershbook.com). Apparently, his main ‘crime’ was being an attaché at the German Embassy in Moscow just before the outbreak of war. During the war, Starke served in the Press and Communication Department of the German Foreign Office, and he was chief editor of the newspaper Deutsche Rundschau in Polen published by the German occupation authorities in Poland. Starke was kept in Moscow investigation prisons until October 7, 1947, when the OSO sentenced him to a 10-year imprisonment for his ‘assistance to the world bourgeoisie’ (Article 58-4) and spy activity (Article 58-6/1).89 Even the length of the term shows that the case was falsified: at the time, most spies were sentenced either to no less than 15 years of imprisonment, or to death. Starke’s Finnish cell mate in Vladimir Prison, Unto Parvilahti, later recalled:

  Gotthold Starke was a finely cultured man, a humanist and journalist by vocation… Starke had got terribly thin; he often had severe heart attacks; he breathed with only one lung, but it would have been hard to find a better cell-mate. If the rest of the world’s diplomats were equipped with the same tact as Gotthold Starke, the world would be a more peaceful place.90

  Starke was released in July 1955, after serving the term.

  The other arrestee, Christian Ludwig of Mecklenburg, was ‘guilty’ of being a duke. His father, Friedrich Francis IV, was the reigning grand duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, but he abdicated after World War I. Christian Ludwig was his father’s successor as Grand Duke due to the marriage of his elder brother Friedrich to a non-noble woman. UKR SMERSH of GSOVG arrested Duke Christian Ludwig in October 1945 at his Ludwigslust Castle. A year before that, in 1944, he was discharged from the German Army, ostensibly for being a member of a former ruling house; most probably, the real reason was that he was close to the military plotters against Hitler.

  On his prisoner card in Vladimir Prison, the duke’s employment status is given as ‘manager of an estate.’ Obviously, he personally committed no crime because later he was charged with ‘the preparation and conducting of aggressive war against the Soviet Union’—a ‘crime’ of which any officer of the German Army could have been accused.91 Duke Christian Ludwig was kept in Moscow investigation prisons until October 1951, when the OSO sentenced him to a 25-year imprisonment. Like Starke, the duke was sent to Vladimir Prison. The card has a handwritten note: ‘He is socially dangerous due to his past.’ The duke was released in June 1953.

  Those arrestees who were investigated locally were tried by military tribunals of the occupation troops. The above-mentioned Nagy-Talavera described a court session of the military tribunal of the TsGV in Baden that tried him:

  The trial was a farce…

  The table was covered with a red cloth and on the wall were pictures of Kalinin, Stalin, and Lenin and some slogans about Soviet justice. Two guards with machine pistols were standing in the room at all times…

  [The] box where the prisoners had to be was in fact the most horrible [of all]. There were things written on it in four languages—in German ‘Gott hilft mir’ and ‘Gott ste, mir bei,’ because they were giving death sentences here also, and in Romanian and Hungarian, ‘Goodbye, my mother, forever,’ etc…

  They sentenced me to 25 years of slave labor… Helping the Americans was the main charge. I was sentenced on Paragraph 58, Article 6 [espionage].92

  Political convicts, including Nagy-Talavera, were transported to the Soviet Union to serve their terms. However, the OSO in Moscow made decisions on the most important cases in absentia, while prisoners were still kept in Baden or Germany. Many prisoners sentenced to death were also transported to Moscow for execution.93

  Additionally, SMERSH operatives in all occupied countries were involved in vetting Soviet citizens brought by in the Nazis as slave laborers (ostarbeiters) during the war, as well as POWs. One hundred vetting camps for returning POWs and civilians, each holding 10,000 people, were created in the rear zones of the 1st and 2nd Belorussian fronts, and the 1st–4th Ukrainian fronts.94 Vetting was performed by Vetting and Screening Commissions (PFK) that included both SMERSH officers from the staff of UKRs and officers sent from Moscow HQ.95 SMERSH officers checked POWs, while civilians were checked by joint NKVD, NKGB and SMERSH commissions.

  In Austria, the filtration camp near the town of Wiener-Neustadt, 50 kilometers from Vienna, was the biggest. Anatoly Gulin, a former Red Army sergeant who was captured by the Germans but subsequently escaped and spent the last months of the war in an Italian partisan group, recalled entering this camp with other Soviet repatriates transported from Italy:

  The camp…occupied a gigantic area surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with watchtowers at the corners, manned by guards. Inside the barbed wire were the partially bombed-out buildings of a town with an aerodrome. After our companies walked into this territory, the Red Army camp administrators… insulted us with language so foul that we had almost forgotten the meaning of the words [while in captivity]. The commandant of the camp…was literally seething with hatred…It looked like if he could, he would have killed all of us…

  We were put in a semi-destroyed building…

  The camp was guarded by soldiers recruited in Central Asia, and they were no better than the Germans. They thought we were criminals… They used to shoot at our windows without any reason, and they wounded some of us.96

  Gulin also briefly described the vetting procedure:

  One day the osobisty [SMERSH officers] came to the camp, and the intense work started: one repatriate after another was called in, and some persons even twice. Finally, it was my turn. A young lieutenant interrogated me. He pretended to be important and tried to look older than he was.

  After I answered his last question, he gave me permission to leave, but suddenly he stopped me at the door. He was interested in my watch and simply demanded that I give it to him. I was filled with indignation and abruptly refused. The lieutenant responded with foul language and said that if I had been clever enough to cooperate, I would have been at home in a couple of months, but now I would work for the Motherland for a few years…

  The next day…I saw documents of [my] interrogation with the conclusion ‘To be interned.’ This is how the osobist took vengeance on me.

  Gulin was sent to a ‘labor battalion,’ which was no different from being a prisoner in labor camps. He was released in December 1946.

  Romanov described vetting from the point of view of a SMERSH officer:

  The work of the PFKs took up a great deal of time. Camps for Soviet citizens from the west existed for several years, getting gradually smaller and closing one by one. The Chekist officers who worked in them were a sorry sight to see. They looked harassed, short on sleep, and pale, and their mood was permanently bad. There was too much work and…the entire responsibility for any persons set free after vetting lay on these officers. Their names figured in all the personal documents of the people who had passed through their hands. Those being vetted, however, were an even sorrier sight.97

  Kidnappings were also common in the Allied occupation zones. For instance, in January 1946, General Mark Clark, commander of the American forces in Austria and head of the American delegation in
the ACC, reported to Washington about one such operation. On January 23, 1946, several members of the Soviet Repatriation Mission (in fact, SMERSH officers) entered the house of a former German agent, now working for the Americans, who they wanted to kidnap. This was Richard Kauder, known also as Fritz Klatt and ‘Max’. However, Clark’s men had set a trap, and they arrested the entire Soviet team. One of the SMERSH officers was wearing the uniform of an American military policeman. Two others had civilian coats over their Red Army uniforms. All of them were armed. Enraged, General Clark informed TsGV Commander Marshal Konev that the next day the offenders ‘would be shoved over the line into the Russian Zone.’98

  There was also a separate SMERSH operational group in Vienna subordinated to the 1st Department of the UKR headquarters in Baden.99 It was responsible for the political reliability of all Soviet civilians and servicemen in Vienna, including Zheltov’s group in the ACC. A small detachment of this group was also stationed in the town of Modling, not far from Vienna, where a branch (second echelon) of the TsGV’s HQ was located.

  This operational group had plenty of work. Any contact between Soviet servicemen and the Austrians or other foreigners was strictly forbidden, and marrying a foreigner was the worst offense of all. Vitalii Nikolsky, an intelligence officer who served in the TsGV’s HQ, wrote in his memoirs:

  All contacts with the Austrian offices and private persons were strictly official and scrutinized. Personal contacts, especially with women, were prohibited. It was also forbidden to visit local restaurants, cafes and entertaining places such as cinemas, theaters, clubs, etc. The violators…were immediately sent to the country’s border under a military convoy, regardless of their rank and position. Later, in the Motherland, harsh Party punishment was applied and measures at work were taken against them. Officers were commonly discharged from the army.100

  Despite all draconian SMERSH measures, many officers risked going to restaurants and dancing halls. Colonel V. P. Babich, a signals officer who had served at the 3rd Ukrainian Front, recalled:

  A huge army of [SMERSH] operatives took care of the ideological purity of Soviet citizens and spied on them… They also involved Austrians in spying on servicemen. In one of the guesthouses I saw a notice: ‘If a Soviet serviceman visits this guesthouse, please, call the Commandant’s Office at this number…’

  One day I entered a restaurant with a girl. The waiter, who heard us speaking Russian, told us: ‘The commandant of the 2nd (Soviet) Sector [in Vienna] forbids us to serve the Russians’… After this we spoke German in public places.101

  Military service in the ‘capitalistic’ Austria was considered so hard that officers of the Red Army (including SMERSH) were given two vacations per year of 45 days each. However, the way home was not safe. Partisans of the Ukrainian underground army, the UPA, were constantly blowing up trains between the city of Lvov and the Soviet border in the Carpathian Mountains. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that the Soviet secret services finally liquidated the West Ukrainian partisans.

  Notes

  1. A. I. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There: A Memoir of the Soviet Security Services, translated by Gerald Brooke (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 144. From July 1945 to October 1947, G. S. Yevdokimenko (1914–1996) was deputy head of the Inspection (SMERSH/MGB operational group) at the Allied Control Commission in Budapest.

  2. Interview with Yevgenii Agapov, former intelligence officer, on Aprrill 6, 2009, http://iremember.ru/razvedchiki/agapov-evgeniy-fedorovich.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  3. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 163–5.

  4. Ibid., 165.

  5. Nikolai Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty moei zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 212 (in Russian).

  6. Abakumov’s letter to Beria, dated June 22, 1945, quoted in Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 60–61 (in Russian).

  7. Beria’s report to Stalin No. 718/b dated June 22, 1945. Document No. 7 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD SSSR v Germanii. 1945–1950 gg. Sbornik dokumentov i stsatei, edited by S. V. Mironenko, 27–28 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001) (in Russian).

  8. NKVD Order No. 00780, dated July 4, 1945. Document No. 8 in ibid., 28–30; Beria’s report No. 1023/b, dated August 30, 1945. Document No. 319 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR ‘SMERSH.’ 1939–mart 1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova (Moscow: Materik, 2006), 533–4 (in Russian).

  9. Page 353 in N. V. Petrov, ‘Apparat upolnomochenogo NKVD-MGB SSSR v Germanii (1945–1953 gg.),’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD SSSR v Germanii, 349–66.

  10. Serov’s report to Beria, dated July 22, 1945. Document No. 12 in Petrov, Pervyi predsedael’ KGB, 227.

  11. Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council, dated July 9, 1945, cited on page 99 in Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, ‘NKVD-NKGBSMERSH: Struktura, funktsii, kadry. Stat’ya chetvertaya,’ Svobodnaya mysl’, no. 9 (1997), 93–101 (in Russian).

  12 Abakumov’s report No. 824/A, dated August 28, 1945, quoted in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 61.

  13. Beria’s letter to Stalin No. 1023/b, dated August 29, 1945, quoted in ibid., 61–62.

  14. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 129.

  15. I. V. Bystrova, ‘Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR,’ in Sovetskoe obshchestvo: vozniknovenie, razvitie, istoricheskii final (Moscow, 1997). T. 1, 150–89 (in Russian).

  16. Stavka’s Directive No. 11095, dated May 29, 1945. Document No. 267 in Russkii Arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 15 (4–5), 420–1.

  17. David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 31.

  18. Rudolf Pikhoya, Moskva. Kreml’. Vlast’. Sorok let posle voiny 1945–1985 (Moscow: AST, 2007), 47–50 (in Russian).

  19. A. N. Buchin, 170,000 kilometrov s G. K. Zhukovym (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1994), 184–5 (in Russian).

  20. Zhukov and Telegin’s telegram to the GSOVG troops, dated June 30, 1945, quoted in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 49–50.

  21. Zhukov’s Order No. 00138/op, dated September 9, 1945, and quoted in ibid., 54.

  22. Stalin’s directive to the Military Council of GSOVG, dated September 20, 1945, published in Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 10 (2000), 146–8 (in Russian).

  23. Directive of the Plenum of the USSR Supreme Court No. 13/14/V, dated November 27, 1945, cited in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 56.

  24. Serov’s note to General S. F. Gorokhov and Colonel S. I. Tyulpanov, dated December 1946, quoted in ibid., 57.

  25. Order No. 0409, dated December 26, 1944. Document No. 281 in Russkii Arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy Narodnogo komissara Oborony SSSR (1943–1945), Tom 13 (2-3) (Moscow: Terra, 1997), 343–7 (in Russian).

  26. P. Knyshevsky, Dobycha. Tainy germanskikh reparatsii (Moscow: Soratnik, 1994), 120, 137 (in Russian).

  27. Abakumov’s Order No. 00170, dated September 27, 1945. Quoted in Yevgenii Tolstykh, Agent Nikto. Iz istorii ‘Smersh’ (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 2004), 149–50 (in Russian).

  28. An excerpt from Serov’s report to Stalin about Abakumov, dated September 8, 1946. Page 245 in Document No. 19 in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 244–7.

  29. Pages 245–6 in ibid.

  30. On the ‘Aviators Case’ see I. N. Kosenko, ‘Taina “Aviatsionnogo dela,”’ VIZh, nos. 6 & 8 (1994); Pikhoya, Moskva. Kreml’. Vlast’, 50–55.

  31. Text of Stalin’s order, dated May 26, 1943, in O. S. Smyslov, Vasilii Stalin. Zalozhnik imeni (Moscow: Veche, 2003), 153 (in Russian).

  33. Recollection by Svetlana Novikova, a daughter of Aleksandr Novikov, in Larisa Goryacheva, ‘Interview no. 28,’ 2000 (in Russian), http://www.peoples.ru/military/aviation/novikov/, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  34. On the case of S. A. Khudyakov (1902–1950) see Nikolai Smirnov, Vplot’ do vysshei mery (Moscow:
Moskovskii rabochii, 1997), 132–6 (in Russian).

  35. Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Tribunal dlya ‘stalinskikh sokolov’ (Moscow: Terra, 2008), 339–49 (in Russian).

  36. Text of the letter in Pikhoya, Pikhoya, Moskva. Kreml’. Vlast’, 53.

  37. Quoted in Aleksandr Vais, ‘Dolgozhitel’. ‘Aviatsionnoe’ delo, Argumenty i fakty, 8 (92), April 21, 2006 (in Russian), http://gazeta.aif.ru/online/longliver/92/23_01, retrieved September 9, 2011.

  38. Decision of the Presidium of the Central Committee on rehabilitation of A. I. Shakhurin, A. A. Novikov, and others, dated June 12, 1953. Document No. I-28 in Reabilitatsiya: Kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materially. Mart 1953–fevral’ 1956, edited by A. Artizov et al., 50–51 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2000) (in Russian).

  39. Quoted in A. A. Lyovin, Perebitye kryl’ya: dokumental’naya povest’ (Moscow: [no publisher], 1996), 238 (in Russian).

  40. Yelena Loria, ‘Svetlana Novikova: “Ottsa nazyvali ‘letayushchim krylom Zhukova”,’ Izvestia, February 3, 2003 (in Russian).

  41. Abakumov’s short cover letter addressed to Stalin, dated April 30, 1946, with Novikov’s statement from the same date. Document No. 3 in Lubyanka. Stalin i MGB SSSR. Mart 1946–mart 1953, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 11–16 (Moscow: Materik: 2007) (in Russian).

  42. Quoted in Lyovin, Perebitye kryl’ya, 235–6.

  43. Gennadii Kostyrchenko, ‘Malenkov protiv Zhdanova. Igry stalinskikh favoritov,’ Rodina, No. 9 (2000), 85–92 (in Russian).

  44. Quoted in Smyslov, Vasilii Stalin, 196.

  45. Quoted in Lyovin, Perebitye kryl’ya, 237.

  46. Pikhoya, Moskva. Kreml’. Vlast’, 54.

  47. Zvyagintsev, Tribunal dlya ‘stalinskikh sokolov,’ 346–7.