83. Sheinin’s testimony quoted in Aleksandr Zvyagintsev and Yurii Orlov, Prokurory dvukh epokh. Abdrei Vyshinsky i Roman Rudenko (Moscow:Olma-Press), 215 (in Russian).
84. Grishaev and Solovov, ‘Domyslami nel’zya snyat.’
85. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 324.
EPILOGUE
The Road to the Top: Abakumov Becomes a Minister
With the end of the war, the necessity for SMERSH as a separate military counterintelligence organization disappeared and in spring of 1946, Stalin began restructuring the security services. By March, Viktor Abakumov reached the peak of his career, being appointed State Security (MGB) Minister. Many of SMERSH’s high-ranking officers received key positions in the MGB, while GUKR SMERSH became the 3rd Main Directorate of the MGB. As usual, this process was a result of Stalin’s planning and Politburo decisions. Here is how it happened.
On September 4, 1945, the GKO was disbanded and the Politburo returned to its routine work.1 A month later, at the Politburo’s suggestion, Stalin went on vacation to the Caucasus—his first holiday in nine years. On December 17, 1945, he was back in Moscow, and that evening he met in the Kremlin with Viktor Abakumov, who was still head of SMERSH. Also present were Nikolai Bulganin, former member of the GKO and Deputy Defense Commissar, Aleksei Antonov, head of the General Staff, and Sergei Shtemenko, head of the Operational Directorate of the General Staff. At 8:15 p.m., Abakumov left Stalin’s office, while the other generals remained with Stalin for the next 40 minutes.2 Most probably, Stalin discussed with the military leaders the changes he planned to make in the structure of the defense and state security commissariats.
On December 29, 1945, the Politburo approved Lavrentii Beria’s request to be dismissed from his post as NKVD Commissar.3 Stalin personally edited the draft of the decision and wrote the reason for the dismissal: ‘Because he [Beria] is too overwhelmed with work at his other central position.’ Apparently, Beria’s appointment as head of the Atomic Project was so secret that Stalin did not want to mention it even in an internal Politburo document. Beria’s first deputy, the colorless but dependable Sergei Kruglov (whose organization of security during the Yalta, Potsdam, and San Francisco conferences had impressed the British and American leaders), was appointed as NKVD Commissar and on January 10, 1946, he started his new job.
During the first months of 1946, Stalin was changing his policy toward former Western allies. On February 9, 1946, in a speech at a meeting at the Bolshoi Theater, Stalin stressed the economic progress in the Soviet Union that, according to him, was the basis of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.4 Stalin did not mention the role of the Western Allies in WWII and their crucial economic aid to the USSR. He did, however, discuss the inevitable clash between the two world systems of power, capitalism and Communism. This was the first step toward Soviet isolationism.
The reaction of the West was quick. On March 15, 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous ‘iron curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri, calling for a unified British–American response to the growing Soviet aggression.5 The Cold War had begun, and according to Stalin, the Soviet Union needed better-organized management of its economy and tighter political control over the country.
On March 15, 1946, the same day Churchill gave his speech in Missouri, the names of all commissariats were changed to ministries on Stalin’s suggestion. Stalin’s reasoning was that the title ‘commissar reflects the period of Civil War and revolutionary changes… The war [WWII] showed that our social organization is very strong… It is time to replace the title “commissar” with the title “minister.”’6 Four days later the Council of Commissars was renamed the Council of Ministers, and Stalin was appointed its Chairman, with Beria as one of his deputies. Kruglov became Minister of Internal Affairs or head of the MVD, and Merkulov was named State Security Minister, head of the MGB—a position he held for only a month and a half.
Before Merkulov was dismissed, on November 29, 1945, the Politburo replaced Merkulov’s First Deputy Bogdan Kobulov, whom Beria brought from Georgia to Moscow in 1939, with Sergei Ogoltsov. Ogoltsov joined the CheKa in 1918 and made his career mostly in provincial special departments. Stalin chose Ogoltsov for the new MGB post because from December 1942 till March 1944, Ogoltsov headed the NKVD/NKGB regional branch in the city of Kuibyshev, the second Soviet capital during the war, where most governmental offices and foreign embassies were evacuated. Stalin considered Ogoltsov as a possible replacement of Merkulov. But for the next five years, Ogoltsov remained the second person in the MGB and became an acting minister for only a month after Abakumov’s arrest in July 1951.
In April 1946, a decision to replace Merkulov with Abakumov was made. On the evening of April 24, Abakumov, Merkulov, and Ogoltsov were summoned to the meeting of ‘the Six’ (minus one) in Stalin’s office.7 Stalin, Beria, Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Mikoyan attended the meeting; Molotov was traveling abroad. The meeting started at 11:35 p.m. and most probably included a discussion of the reorganization of the MGB and the replacement of Merkulov with Abakumov. At 12:30 a.m., Abakumov, Merkulov, and Ogoltsov left the office, having been ordered to prepare a draft of the new MGB structure.
On May 4–7, 1946, the Politburo approved the draft.8 Merkulov was dismissed, and Abakumov was appointed the new MGB Minister. The reasons behind Merkulov’s dismissal became clear only after August 20, 1946, when Stalin dictated a Politburo resolution that stated: ‘Comrade Merkulov, while holding an extremely responsible position [i.e., State Security Commissar/Minister] was dishonest and did not inform the Central Committee about a difficult situation in the CheKa [Stalin continued to call the Soviet secret service by its earliest name], and until the last moment concealed from the Central Committee the fact of the failure of the [intelligence] work abroad.’9
Apparently, Stalin was referring to three serious failures of the 1st NKGB Directorate (foreign intelligence). In September 1945, the cipher clerk of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, defected to the Canadian authorities.10 He provided the Canadian, British, and American security services with detailed information on about two hundred GRU and NKGB spies in Canada and the United States who were involved in Soviet atomic espionage. Additionally, two months later, in November 1945, the former Soviet agent Elizabeth Bentley began revealing to the FBI her knowledge of NKGB operations in the United States.11
Finally, the NKGB deputy rezident (leader of a spy group) in Turkey, Konstantin Volkov, tried to defect to the British. This time the NKGB reacted immediately and a team of NKGB agent-boeviki (combat agents), headed by Andrei Onishchenko, was sent to Turkey without delay.12 Onishchenko was an experienced intelligence officer and in 1943, while he was in charge of security in Tehran during the meeting of Stalin with Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Onishchenko ‘overplayed’ the German intelligence terrorist group headed by the legendary Otto Skorzeny. In 1945, he headed the Middle East Department within the 1st NKGB Directorate.
On September 21, 1945 the team arrived in Turkey; Onishchenko had a cover of a diplomatic courier. Three days later the team put the captured and sedated Volkov and his wife on a plane to Moscow. Volkov was secretly tried, sentenced to death, and executed. But this small triumph by the NKGB boeviki who prevented Volkov’s defection was not enough to save Merkulov.
At Stalin’s suggestion, the Politburo not only dismissed Merkulov but also demoted him to a candidate for the Central Committee membership.13 After this, his high-level party career was over. In August 1946, Merkulov was appointed a deputy head, and from April 1947, head of the Main Directorate of Soviet Property Abroad of the Council of Ministers—an organization through which the Soviet Union managed the operation of plants, mines, and oil fields in the occupied territories of Austria, Germany, and Romania. Pavel Fitin, head of the 1st NKGB Directorate who was in charge of all operations of Soviet foreign intelligence during WWII, was also dismissed and for three months, he had no job at all.
The NKGB intelligence failures were only a
n excuse for the dismissals. Merkulov was a devoted ally of Beria and felt uneasy about dealing with Stalin. After his dismissal, Merkulov wrote to Stalin: ‘You, Comrade Stalin, once called me “shy.” Unfortunately, this was true. I felt uncomfortable calling you on the phone and I was even more uncomfortable about writing you regarding many issues that I wrongly believed were not important enough for your attention during the war, because I knew how busy you were. The shyness I felt resulted in my making mistakes. Mainly, there were a few occasions when I didn’t inform you at all, or informed you in smoothed-over terms, about issues that I should have reported to you immediately.’14
Stalin clearly wanted an MGB Minister who wasn’t shy, and who was totally devoted and subordinated to him. And from April 1943 onwards, Abakumov was subordinated directly to and only to Stalin. Most probably, Stalin had already been planning some future trials in his mind and Abakumov, who had organized the very efficient operation of SMERSH, was the best candidate for the job.
Later Merkulov blamed Abakumov for his fall from grace, saying that Abakumov ‘was no less ambitious and power-loving than Beria, but [far] more stupid.’ In June 1953, Merkulov wrote to Nikita Khrushchev about the situation back in 1946: ‘Abakumov stopped taking into consideration the opinion of the Politburo members… Beria was extremely afraid of Abakumov and tried to preserve a good relationship with him against all odds, although he knew that Abakumov was a dishonest man… Abakumov complained about me to Comrade Stalin and the Central Committee… For two years I did not even shake hands with Abakumov.’15 But even if Abakumov hated Merkulov and had intrigued against him, this was not enough to prompt Stalin’s decision to replace Merkulov by Abakumov. More like he was seeking, through Abakumov, to put the MGB under his direct control. In October 1950, Stalin ‘pardoned’ Merkulov and appointed him Minister of State Control.
However, it seems that Abakumov was fascinated with power politics. While he was still head of SMERSH, Abakumov carefully studied the Nazi hierarchy and relationships between members of Hitler’s entourage. As Daniil Kopelyansky, the investigator whom Abakumov considered to be his personal translator, recalled, in 1945–46 Abakumov used to watch Nazi documentaries about Nazi leaders for hours.16 After the war he also went to the Kremlin for a meeting with Stalin in a trophy limousine that had belonged to Heinrich Himmler. Perhaps Abakumov identified with Himmler.
In the meantime, on May 6, 1946 Abakumov presented the Politburo with a proposal regarding his new deputies:
Top Secret
USSR Council of Ministers
To: Comrade Stalin I. V.
I am sending, for your approval, a list of deputies to the USSR State Security Minister:
Ogoltsov Sergei Ivanovich, Lieutenant General, who until now worked as Deputy State Security Commissar, as [deputy] on general questions [a new title for the first deputy];
Selivanovsky Nikolai Nikolaevich, Lieutenant General, Deputy Head of the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’;
Blinov Afanasii Sergeevich, Lieutenant General, Head of the Moscow Branch Directorate of the State Security Ministry;
Kovalchuk Nikolai Kuzmich, Lieutenant General, Head of the SMERSH Directorate of the Transcarpathian Military Region;
On the Cadres, Svinelupov Mikhail Georgievich, Major General, who until now worked as Deputy State Security Minister.
I am asking for your decision.
May 6, 1946.17
It is clear that Abakumov was ordered, probably at the previous Politburo meeting, to take only two of his future deputies from SMERSH (Selivanovsky and Kovalchuk) and the rest, from Merkulov’s MGB. Abakumov’s new first deputy would not be his SMERSH ‘alter ego’ Selivanovsky, but Ogoltsov, with whom Abakumov had never worked before. Probably Stalin wanted to keep an eye on Abakumov through Ogoltsov, who would be a candidate for Abakumov’s immediate replacement, if it became necessary.
Stalin wrote in the right upper corner of Abakumov’s list of proposed deputies: ‘I agree. J. Stalin,’ and the next day the Politburo formally approved Abakumov’s deputies. Now Selivanovsky supervised military counterintelligence, and Kovalchuk controlled the interior (domestic) counterintelligence. There was no question that Kovalchuk could do his new job. Nikola Sinevirsky, who once translated the interrogation of a Hungarian POW for Kovalchuk (at that time the head of the SMERSH Directorate of the 4th Ukrainian Front), said of Kovalchuk: ‘Loyal SMERSH operatives admired his [Kovalchuk’s] intelligence and lived in deathly fear of his influence in high [C]hekist circles… He was a general whose conscience was stained with blood of hundreds of thousands of Russians and peoples of other countries… I observed for the first time this slim, averagesized man. His most remarkable features were his eyes, smiling, yet alarmingly sharp and piercing.’18
Blinov, former head of the Moscow MGB Branch (which was a very high position in the MGB hierarchy), became responsible for the Investigation Directorate for Especially Important Cases, or OVD. Very soon the OVD was involved in the investigation of all the main political cases of the late 1940s. Finally, on September 7, 1946, Lt. General Pyotr Fedotov, the new head of the 1st MGB Main Directorate (foreign intelligence) and former head of NKGB’s interior counterintelligence, was also appointed Abakumov’s deputy.
With the appointment of Abakumov as MGB Minister, GUKR SMERSH was absorbed into the new MGB structure. Most of it became the 3rd MGB Main Directorate (3rd GU), military counterintelligence, under Selivanovsky’s command.19 The function of the 3rd GU returned to the traditional surveillance of Soviet military forces. It consisted of three directorates controlling the Soviet Army (on February 25, 1946 the Red Army was renamed the Soviet Army), Marine Fleet, and Air Force, correspondingly. The SMERSH directorates of the Soviet troops in Germany, Austria/Hungary, Romania/Bulgaria, and Poland were renamed military counterintelligence directorates of these troops and continued their sinister activity against the civilian populations in those countries, as well as against military authorities and representatives of the secret services of the former Allies in those countries.
During the reorganization, the 6th GUKR SMERSH Department was merged with the former NKGB OVD Department, and Aleksandr Leonov, former head the 6th SMERSH Department, was appointed head of the new MGB OVD Directorate. Two of Leonov’s deputies, Mikhail Likhachev and Vladimir Komarov—Abakumov’s secretary from 1941 to 1946—held on to their posts in the MGB OVD Directorate. During the next five years, all three played a key role in all the major political cases of the time.
Sergei Kartashov’s 2nd GUKR SMERSH Department, which investigated many important foreign prisoners, became the 4th Department of the 3rd Main MGB Directorate. It had a number of functions: (1) Counterintelligence in the zones of Germany occupied by the former allies; (2) Counterintelligence in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary, Finland, Manchuria, and Korea against the enemy agents who had possibly penetrated Soviet offices and occupation troops in those countries; (3) Guidance of the operational activity of the Inspectorates attached to the Allied Control Commissions; (4) Work with and investigation of foreign POWs important in terms of military counterintelligence; (5) Continuation of vetting the Soviet POWs who had been in German captivity in various countries.20 The 4th Department existed until September 1948, when most of its prisoners captured from 1944–45 had been convicted, and then it was merged with the OVD.
In August 1949, former head of the 4th Department Kartashov was sent to Hungary as Senior MGB Adviser to the State Security Directorate of the Hungarian MVD, where he stayed until May 1950. In March 1950, many of Kartashov’s former investigators were transferred to the Investigation Department of the 2nd MGB Main Directorate (interior counterintelligence), where they finished cases of foreigners arrested by SMERSH during and just after the war. Interestingly, although Kartashov was not arrested along with Abakumov and his colleagues in 1951 or persecuted later, he had never been promoted to the rank of general like the other former GUKR SMERSH department heads. Kartashov continued to serve in the KGB until 1967, becom
ing a consultant of the head of the Foreign Intelligence (1st Main Directorate), but he remained only a colonel—the rank he was promoted to in 1943, during the creation of SMERSH.
In November 1946, Abakumov created his own MGB OSO (Special Board), and until 1953, it sentenced most of the prisoners arrested by the MGB within the country and abroad.21 With the acquisition of the OSO, the MGB became a closed institution: it arrested people on political charges, investigated cases, tried the arrestees, and put the most important convicts into its own special prisons: Vladimir, Verkhne-Uralsk, and Aleksandrovsk.
After coming back to Moscow in May 1946, both Pavel Grishaev and Boris Solovov, watchdogs in Nuremberg, had fast-track careers. Pavel Grishaev participated in the investigation of the most important OVD cases of Andrei Vlasov (1946), the Alliluevs (relatives of Stalin’s wife) (1947), the famous folk singer Lidia Ruslanova and her husband General Vladimir Kryukov (1948), members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (1951–52), and others. He became a ruthless torturer, beating both male and female prisoners.
In mid-1951, Selivanovsky, Korolev, Leonov, Likhachev, Komarov, and many other former SMERSH, then MGB, high-level officers were arrested—sharing the fate of their boss, Abakumov. This was Stalin’s new wave of changes in the Party leadership and government. However, neither Grishaev, nor Solovov were arrested.
In September 1951, 33-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Grishaev was appointed Assistant to the new head of the OVD, Mikhail Ryumin, a former SMERSH investigator. In this capacity, Grishaev became one of the leading and most ruthless investigators of his former boss and patron, Abakumov.22 Grishaev also interrogated his own former superiors, Leonov and Likhachev. In mid-1953, now arrested, Grishaev’s boss Ryumin testified: ‘On November 4 [1952] I, together with the assistant to the head of sledchast’ [OVD] Grishaev, arrived in Lefortovo Prison and ordered the beating of a group of the arrested Chekists [i.e., Abakumov and his accomplices] with rubber truncheons and lashes. However, these measures did not produce any result [i.e., a false confession].’23
Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII Page 69
