CHAPTER 17
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.10Apparently, 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
There is no documentary evidence that Podvoisky adopted Abakumov; in fact, he did adopt two sons, but Abakumov wasn’t one of them. The adoption of children, especially those of other Party colleagues, was common among the Old Bolsheviks. For instance, Mikhail Kedrov, the first head of the OO and Podvoisky’s brother-in-law, raised Iogan (Ivan) Tubala, a son of friends of Kedrov’s wife.15 However, if Abakumov was Podvoisky’s protégé, this would have given him extraordinary opportunities.
Although Podvoisky did not serve in the VCheKa/OGPU, he was connected with the leaders of that organization. Through his marriage to Nina Didrikil, Podvoisky was related to the members of the OGPU/NKVD elite. One of her sisters, Olga, was married to Mikhail Kedrov.16Another, Augusta, was married to Christian Frauchi. Their son, Artur Artuzov (surname at birth: Frauchi), became one of the most important leaders of the OO, Counterintelligence Department (KRO), Foreign Intelligence (INO), and Military Intelligence (RU).17 Podvoisky was also well acquainted with Genrikh Yagoda, OGPU head, and then the first NKVD Commissar. In 1918–19, before Yagoda was transferred to the OO in the VCheKa, he was Podvoisky’s secretary (upravlyayushchii delami).
The EKU controlled all branches of industry, agriculture, and foreign trade, and it constantly discovered ‘spies and saboteurs’ among the foreign specialists working in the Soviet Union and among members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia.18 While serving in the EKU, Abakumov met Pavel Meshik, who was working as an assistant investigator in the 1st Section of the EKU. Later, from mid-1943, Meshik was one of Abakumov’s three deputies in SMERSH.
In 1934, Abakumov was involved in EKU general operational activities, such as supervising informers. However, his superiors had a problem with his character: ‘Sometimes he does not think over the possible consequences of his [secret] agents’ work. Although he is disciplined, he needs moral guidance.’19 These notes evidently refer to Abakumov’s reputation as a playboy.
Among his colleagues, Viktor Abakumov was known as being quite gregarious and a keen dancer, earning the nickname Vitya-fokstrotochnik (‘Vik-foxtrot dancer’; Vitya is a diminutive of Viktor).20 This detail is interesting because in 1924, OGPU head Yagoda sent an order to all regional OOs and other OGPU departments banning the foxtrot, shimmy, and other new Western dances in public places.21 They were considered ‘bourgeois society’s imitations of a sex act’ and in 1930, the dances were officially prohibited in the Soviet Union. However, big bands became popular again in the Soviet Union in 1944, after the Western Allies opened the Second Front in Europe. Even the Dzerzhinsky NKVD Club in the city of Kuibyshev (currently, Samara), where the main Moscow organizations, including embassies, were evacuated, had its professional ‘NKVD Jazz Orchestra’.22 In 1948, the word ‘jazz’ was prohibited as part of a campaign against the ‘bourgeois culture’ and ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ [a euphemism for the Jewish intelligentsia] and many jazz musicians were persecuted. The NKVD Jazz Orchestra was reduced to a small group called the ‘MVD Variety Orchestra’.
Shreider describes another incident that also sheds light on Abakumov’s character. Showing up one day at a ‘safe’ apartment used by NKVD officers for meetings with their informers (in secret-service jargon, such apartments were called kukushki, or ‘cuckoos’, referring to the fact that a cuckoo leaves its eggs in other birds’ nests), Shreider found Abakumov in the company of a young woman, who was supposedly one of his informers. She did not conceal the fact that she had an intimate relationship with Abakumov and that Abakumov wrote ‘her’ reports to the NKVD by himself, and she only signed them. Later Shreider found out that Abakumov’s other female informers did the same.
Womanizing was very common behavior within the NKVD, especially as the powerful secret service officers could easily blackmail their female informers with threats of arrest. Some NKVD leaders did not bother with seduction and simply raped female informers or women they picked up or arrested.23 The most infamous example was Beria. Every Muscovite (including myself, when I was a child) was aware of the special Beria team headed by Colonel Rafael Sarkisov, head of Beria’s bodyguards, who would simply snatch attractive women and girls off the street and bring them to Beria.24 Beria was also brazen enough to attack women among the nomenklatura. According to Abakumov’s former deputy, Abakumov stopped gathering secret reports on Beria’s affairs after it became clear that ‘the wives of so many high-level functionaries were mentioned in the reports that the leak of this information would have made Abakumov an enemy not only of Beria, but of half of the party and country leaders’.25 The list of hundreds of women whom Beria raped became evidence at his trial in 1953.
Womanizing even ended the successful career of one of the cronies Beria brought from the Caucasus—Vladimir Dekanozov. In contrast with the physically big Abakumov, Dekanozov was ‘short, almost a dwarf, stocky, with a barrel-like chest, nearly bald head and bushy red eyebrows’.26 In 1953, his driver testified: ‘Dekanozov used women in the car. Trips with women occurred almost daily. Sometimes Dekanozov, traveling in the car day and night, picked up several women.’27 On March 19, 1947, the Politburo discharged Dekanozov from the post of deputy foreign minister because of a sex scandal: he had seduced a daughter of Molotov’s close co-worker.28
As for Abakumov, after he became MGB Minister in 1946, he ordered the arrest of the popular Soviet movie star, Tatyana Okunevskaya, after she rejected his advances.29 It is possible that Abakumov was particularly interested in her because his rival, Beria, had previously drugged and raped her. In Abakumov’s investigation file there is an undated letter from his common-law wife, Tatyana Smirnova, saying that sometimes Abakumov beat her up and that he had had a love affair with a female co-worker, who later became his legal wife.30
Abakumov’s dalliances were also well known in the NKVD/MGB: ‘Abakumov was a regular nighttime visitor to the [NKVD/MGB] club, playing snooker with his cronies and having sex with his numerous mistresses in a private room, which he kept stocked with a great variety of imported liqueurs and French perfumes.’31 Although prostitution was outlawed in the Soviet Union, Abakumov may also have patronized prostitutes. Ivan Serov, a Beria associate who feuded with Abakumov for years, reported to Stalin in 1948 that ‘during the difficult days of war [Abakumov] used to stroll along the city streets [in Moscow], searching for easy girls [prostitutes] and taking them to the Hotel Moscow’.32 According to Peter Deryabin, a former MGB officer, Abakumov ‘maintained a string of private brothels’.33
However, in 1933, Abakumov was not yet powerful enough to get away with such flagrant womanizing. A furious Shreider wrote a report about Abakumov’s behavior to the EKO head, and the next day Abakumov was fired. Somebody’s ‘strong hand’ (possibly Deich or Podvoisky) helped him again, and he was appointed, as Mikhail Shreider put it, ‘an inspector at the Main Directorate of [Labor] Camps’—that is, the GULAG, the NKVD directorate headed by Matvei Berman that administered the slave labor of convicted prisoners in camps and prisons.34 The 3rd section of the GULAG, where Abakumov worked, managed camp guards. It was reorganized twice (Table 17-1, middle column) and in August 1935, when the section was renamed the Department of Guards, Abakumov was promoted to Operational Investigator. On December 20, 1936, he was also promoted to State Security Junior Lieutenant, which was quite a high rank for a 28-year-old Chekist. It is possible that Deich was instrumental in this promotion because at the time he held the high position of Yezhov’s secretary.35
In the GUGB
On April 15, 1937, while still listed on the organizational chart of the GULAG in the Secret-Operational Section, Abakumov was transferred to a much more prestigious job in the Secret-Political Department (SPO) of the GUGB, the predecessor of the NKGB.36It’s possible that this promotion, too, was achieved with someone’s protection. The SPO was in charge of fighting anti-Soviet elements and members of political parties, and Abakumov arrived at a very important time. The Great Terror was in full swing and the SPO was investigating the case of Genrikh Yagoda, the first NKVD Commissar, working to connect him to old Chekists and Party functionaries.
Abakumov was personally involved in the investigation of at least three Great Terror cases. On June 21, 1937, Valentin Trifonov, who supervised the activity of foreign concessions in the USSR, was arrested. An Old Bolshevik, from December 1917 to January 1918 Trifonov was a VCheKa member, at a time when the VCheKa consisted of only eleven people.37 Later he worked under Podvoisky, and during the Civil War he commanded a Special Expeditionary Corps that conducted punitive operations against the Don Cossacks. Then from 1924 to 1925, Trifonov was first chairman of the Military Collegium. Abakumov interrogated Trifonov from June to September 1937.38 On March 5, 1938, Stalin and four other Politburo members signed a list of names (a ‘death list’) of individuals, including Trifonov, who the NKVD had suggested should be executed.39 Ten days later the Military Collegium sentenced Trifonov to death and he was shot.
Another case involved Semyon Korytnyi, a secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee, who was arrested on June 26, 1937. His main ‘crime’ was that his wife, Izabella Yakir-Belaya, was Iona Yakir’s sister. A high-ranking military leader, Yakir was arrested a month before Korytnyi, and was tried and executed with Tukhachevsky on June 11, 1937. Nikita Khrushchev recalled the Korytnyi couple in his memoirs: ‘Korytnyi was a Jew, a very efficient man, a good organizer and orator. He was married to Yakir’s sister, who was also a devoted Party member. She spent the whole Civil War at Yakir’s side, and was a Party functionary [in the Red Army].’40 Khrushchev did not mention that, as first Party secretary of Moscow, he was required to approve the arrest of Korytnyi and his wife. He also didn’t mention that after Korytnyi’s daughter Stella was released from a labor camp in 1956, he cried in her presence and repeatedly claimed that he was unable to do anything to help when the Korytnyis were arrested.41
In 1954, Roman Rudenko, the USSR Chief Prosecutor, wrote in his rehabilitation request to the Central Committee:
During the two months after his arrest, Korytnyi did not admit his guilt. On August 21, 1937, Abakumov…received Korytnyi’s personal testimony that, since 1934, Korytnyi had been one of the leaders of the Moscow Regional Center of a counterrevolutionary Trotskyist organization [i.e., supporters of Leon Trotsky]…
During the subsequent interrogations conducted by Abakumov, Korytnyi gave detailed testimony about the counterrevolutionary activity of the Trotskyist organization and its members.
During the session of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, Korytnyi pleaded not guilty and stated that during the preliminary investigation, the investigators had forced him to give invented testimony and to make false statements about other persons.42
Despite his plea, in August 1939 the Military Collegium sentenced Korytnyi to death and on September 1, 1939, he was executed.
The third case Abakumov worked on involved Nathan Margolin, a Moscow City Party functionary arrested in November 1937. In 1955, Rudenko’s successor, Pyotr Baranov, wrote:
After investigation, it was concluded that the accusation against Margolin was falsified by former NKVD workers—Abakumov, Vlodzimersky, and Glebov-Yufa (all of whom have been convicted)…
During the investigation, unlawful methods and force were applied to Margolin. As a result, on November 27, 1937, he attempted to commit suicide in his cell by trying to suffocate himself by pulling with his hands a loop [around his neck] made of two handkerchiefs.43
The expression ‘unlawful methods’ is a euphemism for ‘torture’. In February 1938, the Military Collegium sentenced Margolin to death and two days later he was executed.
An official evaluation of Abakumov’s performance at the time of the three investigations stated: ‘He mercilessly fights spies and wreckers, as well as fascist agents.’44 In March 1938, Abakumov was promoted to assistant head of a section, apparently in recognition of his investigative work. Two months later he also received his first award, the Honored VCheKa-GPU Worker medal.
In September 1938, Abakumov was promoted again, this time to head of the 2nd Section, after Bogdan Kobulov, Beria’s closest man, was appointed head of the SPO (Table 17-1). Abakumov became involved in the even more important case of Yakov Serebryansky, a legendary figure in the OGPU/NKVD, who created NKVD killing squads throughout the whole of Europe. After inspecting the transcript of Serebryansky’s first interrogation on November 12, 1938, Beria wrote on the first page: ‘Comrade Abakumov! He [Serebryansky] should be strenuously interrogated.’45 Then Abakumov, Kobulov, and Beria himself interrogated Serebryansky on November 16. As Serebryansky later stated, he was mercilessly beaten and, as usual, forced to sign testimony that the interrogators had prepared for him.
In his memoir Pavel Sudoplatov mentions one more arrested foreign intelligence officer, Pyotr Zubov, in whose investigation Abakumov participated. 46 As a result of torture, Zubov became an invalid. Like Serebryansky, at the beginning of the war, on Sudoplatov’s request to Beria, Zubov was released from imprisonment and became part of Sudoplatov’s terrorist department.
In the Rostov Province NKVD
In December 1938, as Abakumov wrote in his biography, ‘the leaders of the NKVD promoted me to the high Chekist post of UNKVD Head of the Rostov Province’.47 Interestingly, a year before that, Abakumov’s protector Yakov Deich had been appointed to that post, which he held for five months. For Deich, contrary to Abakumov, this appointment was not a promotion, but rather the beginning of his downfall after his career had peaked as head of Yezhov’s NKVD Secretariat. Deich was arrested in March 1938 and six months later he died in prison while still under investigation; most probably, he was killed during an interrogation. Abakumov’s appointment was perhaps the first time Stalin became aware of the capable young Chekist, since this level of appointment was approved by the Politburo. The Rostov Province, populated by Don Cossacks, was so politically important that before Abakumov’s appointment, Stalin sent one of his own secretaries, Boris Dvinsky, to head the Party organization there. The Don Cossacks were one of the main anti-Bolshevik forces during the Civil War, and they strongly resisted collectivization (the organization of collective farms called kolkhozy) in the 1930s.
From 1930 to 1937, Dvinsky, a Party functionary, was deputy head of the Secret Sector of the Central Committee, as Stalin’s secretariat was called.48 He was also Stalin’s personal secretary. While working in Rostov, Dvinsky remained very influential in Party circles: he was a Central Committee member and was still in direct contact with Stalin. In 1938, along with Abakumov’s predecessor German Lupekin, Dvinsky asked for the Politburo’s approval to execute 3,500 people and to sentence an additional 1,500 to ten or more years in labor camps. Earlier the Politburo had already ordered the execution of 5,000 people in the province as well as the sentencing of 8,000 to long-term imprisonment.49
In 1939, Dvinsky and Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, head of Stalin’s secretariat and Stalin’s personal secretary, wrote an obsequious article entitled The Teacher and Friend of Mankind for a book honoring Stalin’s sixtieth birthday.50 Therefore, in Rostov, Abakumov was working with one of Stalin’s most devoted personal confidants.
As usual, at first Abakumov was working as acting head of the Rostov Province NKVD branch. Three weeks after his appointment, on December 28, 1938, he was promoted to State Security Captain, two ranks above his previous rank of state security lieutenant.51 It was quite unusual to skip a rank, and this promotion meant that the NKVD leaders wanted to encourage the young appointee.
Five months later, in April 1939, Abakumov finally became head of the Rostov Province NKVD Directorate. Almost nothing is known about Abakumov’s activity in Rostov. During the Soviet–Finnish Winter War (December 1939–March 1940), Abakumov’s directorate managed to arrest a group of sixteen alleged Finnish spies, supposedly led by a local Gypsy.52 The case was obviously phony since Rostov-on-Don is nowhere near Finland and Finnish spies would hardly consent to being led by a Gypsy. It is difficult to imagine how NKVD investigators explained what these Finnish spies were doing in this southern area of Russia. Most likely they were arrested simply because they were of Finnish and Karelian ethnicity. From 1937–38, the NKVD arrested 11,066 Finns throughout the whole country, and of these, 9,078 were executed.
In his biography Abakumov proudly wrote: ‘While heading the Rostov UNKVD, I was elected a delegate of the 18th VKP(b) [Communist Party] Congress [in 1939].’53 To be a delegate of a Party Congress, the highest organ of the Communist Party, was considered extremely prestigious in Soviet society and Abakumov’s election could have happened only if Dvinsky was supporting him.
On March 14, 1940, the 31-year-old Abakumov was promoted to State Security Senior Major, equivalent to Major General in the army, in recognition of his ‘service eagerness and industriousness’—once again skipping a rank. This promotion is especially surprising because he had just been investigated in connection with the allegations of an informer. According to a secret report, in the late 1920s, before he joined the NKVD, Abakumov ‘was observed using anti-Semitic expressions’.54 But the report included even a more incriminating detail: in 1936 Abakumov had supposedly had an affair with the wife of a German citizen named Nauschitz, an alleged German spy.
Abakumov denied the affair. However, he admitted that ‘he was acquainted with a citizen-woman MATISON [names were always typed in caps in NKVD documents], whom he met twice at a business club in Moscow’.55 The NKVD investigation found that the woman’s first husband had been executed for counter revolutionary activity, and her second husband lived abroad. In fact, someone named Abram Matison, a former Soviet trade representative in Persia, was arrested in Moscow in June 1939. In February 1940, he was sentenced to death and executed.56
The investigation had no repercussions for Abakumov. On the contrary, soon after his promotion Abakumov received an important military award, the Order of the Red Banner.
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.78However, 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’.80However, 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.
As previously mentioned, in March 1940 Meshik headed an operational NKVD group that arrived in the just-occupied Lvov Province.84 This was one of eleven NKVD groups sent to the former Polish territory to ‘cleanse’ (an NKVD term) it of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. A month later Meshik was decorated with the military Red Star Order, possibly for this action.
In February 1941, Meshik was appointed NKGB Commissar of Ukraine even though, like Abakumov, he was only thirty-one years old. Meshik reported to Moscow on the nationalistic underground Ukrainian movement in the newly acquired former Polish territories and on the movements of German troops in the Nazi-occupied part of Poland.85 Apparently, Moscow was impressed by Meshik’s activity because in May 1941, he received the Honored NKVD Worker medal.
The day after Operation Barbarossa began, Meshik was able to give Nikita Khrushchev, then Ukrainian first Party secretary, detailed information from secret informers regarding the local reaction to the invasion.86 A few days later, the Ukrainian NKGB began to arrest people who had criticized the response of Soviet leaders to the German invasion. During the first days of the war, 473 political prisoners, whose executions Merkulov approved in Moscow on Meshik’s request, were shot to death in Kiev’s prisons.87
In July 1941, in the middle of the battle for Kiev, Meshik went back to Moscow, where he was appointed head of the Economic Directorate (EKU) of the new NKVD.88 In February 1943, he was promoted to State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank and, finally, on April 19, 1943, he became deputy head of SMERSH.
It is possible that Abakumov was forced to choose Meshik as a deputy since a difficult relationship developed almost immediately between them. Much later, in August 1948, Ivan Serov, first deputy MVD minister, reported to Stalin that ‘in 1943, Abakumov told me that he would eventually shoot Meshik, no matter what’.89 No doubt Abakumov considered Meshik to be Beria’s spy. In turn, Meshik despised Abakumov. After Abakumov was arrested in 1951, Meshik called him ‘an adventurer’.90
In December 1953, Meshik was tried along with Beria and five of his men, including Merkulov and Kobulov. All of them were sentenced to death and executed on December 23, 1953.
Isai Babich
Abakumov’s third deputy, Isai Yakovlevich Babich, was born in 1902 to a Jewish family in the small Ukrainian town of Borislav.91 Although Babich was the only person of Jewish origin close to Abakumov, in the 1990s the German historian Joachim Hoffmann mistakenly wrote that Abakumov ‘surrounded himself with a whole group of Jewish collaborators’.92
In 1920, Babich joined the local branch of the CheKa in the city of Nikolaev and made a slow but steady advance within the CheKa, and then the NKVD of Ukraine. From December 1936 till August 1937, he headed the OO of the NKVD Directorate of Kiev Province, and in January 1938, Babich was promoted to acting head of this directorate. In other words, Babich supervised all arrests of military personnel during the Great Terror in Kiev Province, and in December 1937 he was awarded the Red Banner Order—apparently for this activity. In February 1938, he was transferred to the OO in Moscow, where he headed several sections.
Finally, in September 1940, Babich was appointed head of the OO of the Baltic Military District, which was created from the territory of the three just-annexed Baltic States: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. As head of military counterintelligence, he was in charge of the numerous arrests of high-ranking officers of the former armies of these states.
At the beginning of the war, Babich was a deputy head, and from May 1942 onwards, head of the OO of the Northwestern Front. In February 1943, he was promoted to State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank (Major General). As Abakumov’s deputy, Babich was responsible for SMERSH operations that sent agents behind enemy lines. The summer and autumn of 1945, when he headed SMERSH units in the Russian Far East during the short military campaign against Japan, were the highest point in his SMERSH career. After the war Babich became deputy head of the 3rd MGB Main Directorate (as SMERSH was called after it became part of the MGB in 1946), and he held that position until his death in 1948.
Besides the three operational deputies, Stalin appointed a fourth deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Vradii, to head the SMERSH Personnel Department.93 In Abakumov’s MGB, Vradii also headed the Personnel Directorate. After Abakumov’s arrest in 1951, Vradii was demoted to head of the labor department in the Ukhto-Izhemsk Labor Camp Directorate attached to the USSR Justice Ministry. In 1954, Vradii was accused of embezzling 26,000 rubles for the renovation of his apartment and transferred to the reserve.
On May 26, 1943 the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia published an order signed by Stalin assigning all SMERSH leaders actual military ranks.94 Selivanovsky, Meshik, Babich, and Pavel Zelenin became lieutenant generals, while Vradii and thirty-four of Abakumov’s assistants, along with the heads and deputy heads of SMERSH front directorates, became major generals.95 Curiously, only Abakumov was not given military rank during the war, even though he often wore a Red Army uniform. He remained State Security Commissar of the 2nd Rank, equivalent to Colonel General in the army.
The Personnel
Many officers of the GUKR SMERSH, especially investigators, were former mid-level OO officers. They had participated in the fabrication of cases during the Great Terror and survived the purges of that period, which wiped out the OO leadership. For instance, almost all low-level members of Izrail Leplevsky’s investigation team of about thirty officers, who created the 1937 Tukhachevsky case, continued their service.96 Two of Abakumov’s deputies, Selivanovsky and Babich, were veterans of the old OO.
The career of Vladimir Kazakevich, who from 1943 to 1945 was deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 2nd Belorussian and then of the 4th Ukrainian fronts, was typical of mid-level SMERSH officers.97 Nicola Sinevirsky recalled Kazakevich at the end of the war: ‘He was a tall man, heavyset of frame. His twisted nose gave his face a fierce look, and made almost everybody afraid of him. He was a severe and exacting officer.’98 In 1928, Kazakevich started working for the Ukrainian GPU as a secret agent, reporting on his fellow students at the Kharkov Institute of People’s Industry. As he wrote in 1948, ‘they were imprisoned due to my reports as an agent’.99 Later he joined the Ukrainian NKVD, but in 1937 he was transferred to Moscow, to the 4th GUGB (secret-political) Department. Then, in 1938, he was moved to the 5th GUGB (OO) Department.100
Before long, Kazakevich became known in Beria’s NKVD as one of the most efficient and ruthless investigators.101 Over a short period, he falsified at least eleven cases against high-level military men, including Marshal Aleksandr Yegorov and Komandarm Ivan Belov, who were sentenced to death. One of them, Komdiv N. F. Sevastiyanov, described Kazakevich’s methods in a letter to Stalin: ‘Captain Kazakevich used to hit me in the face so badly that I flew through the room. He punched me in the chin, under my ribs, and hit my knees with the heels of his boots… He forced me to lie down on a chair and then beat me with a rubber truncheon while knowing well that I had an inflamed liver… Also he beat me up with a truncheon while I was lying on the floor… During the three months that I was in Lefortovo Prison, I slept not more than an hour a day.’102 Other victims also made statements about the torture Kazakevich inflicted on them. The arrested Corps Commissar A. I. Zabirko wrote: ‘Kazakevich told me that he would beat me up until my ribs were broken or I became insane.’103 Most probably, Kazakevich used these torture methods later, in SMERSH.
The Military Collegium sentenced Sevastiyanov to death in July 1941, after the war had begun. At the time, Kazakevich was deputy head of the 3rd NKVD Department and then deputy head of OOs and, later, UKRs of various fronts. In November 1944, Kazakevich, together with Abakumov, cleansed the Bialystok region of Poland of members of the underground Armija Krajowa. For his activity, he received twenty-four military awards. Kazakevich retired in 1948.
In 1956, while being asked in the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office about Sevastiyanov, Kazakevich refused to admit that he had tortured him. As a result of the prosecutor’s reinvestigation of the Sevastiyanov case, Kazakevich was expelled from the Party, and two years later, his military pension was reduced by half as a punishment for his falsification of cases, although he had never been criminally charged.
This was quite typical. Kazakevich’s superior, Nikolai Kovalchuk, head of the UKR SMERSH of the 4th Ukrainian front, was also a brutal torturer. In 1937, in Tbilisi, Aslamazov, the arrested Komsomol secretary, jumped out a window during terrible beatings by Kovalchuk, a member of the Secret-Political Department in the Georgian NKVD.104 Soon Kovalchuk continued his successful career in Moscow, then in the UOO and SMERSH. After the war he even rose to deputy state security minister. Only in 1954 was Kovalchuk forced to retire and deprived of his lieutenant general rank for the ‘activity of discrediting an officer’, a Party euphemism that described torture used by a high-ranking security officer.
To prepare the new personnel, special schools for teaching SMERSH officers were opened in 1943: two in Moscow, for 600 and 200 students respectively, and four more in the cities of Tashkent (300 students); Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg; 200 students); and one each in the Siberian cities of Novosibirsk and Khabarovsk (200 and 250 students, respectively).105 These schools were established by GKO order and may have represented Stalin’s solution to the problem of unprofessional investigators.106 Later, special military counterintelligence courses in Leningrad and Saratov were also reorganized into schools. Depending on the school, the training lasted from four to nine months. Reserve groups of 50–100 graduates were created at each field SMERSH directorate and at the GUKR in Moscow. Despite these efforts, SMERSH officers remained poorly educated. Nikolai Mesyatsev, one of the SMERSH investigators, recalled in 2005 that ‘investigators were usually recruited from among poorly educated, uncultured people’.107Everyone who worked in SMERSH was sworn to secrecy. Sinevirsky recalled that before he was allowed to work as a translator in the UKR SMERSH of the 4th Ukrainian Front, he was forced to sign three copies of this pledge:
I hereby promise that never and at no place, even under the threat of capital punishment, will I mention anything of my work in the headquarters of the counterintelligence SMERSH of the Fourth Ukrainian Front. I am aware that should I fail to carry out this promise I will become subject to the severest penalties including the highest measure of punishment—shooting.108
Since SMERSH was formally part of the army, SMERSH officers had the ranks and uniforms of military officers.109 Romanov, a former SMERSH officer, wrote that ‘this was a camouflage measure to make it impossible to distinguish them from the rest of the armed forces’.110 In contrast, the ranks of NKGB and NKVD officers and their special insignias differed from those of the military. Therefore, NKGB and NKVD officers could be identified by their uniforms during World War II but SMERSH officers could not. What made it more confusing was that NKVD troops transported SMERSH prisoners. Typically, foreign POWs did not understand that they were being investigated by SMERSH, a special military counterintelligence service. The only secret service group known at that time in the West was the NKVD, and this has led to a lot of misidentification of SMERSH investigators as NKVD operatives in the memoirs of former POWs.
Notes
1. Abakumov’s description in a questionnaire (anketa) in his Investigation File. Cited in Kirill Stolyarov, Palachi i zhertvy (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1997), 12 (in Russian).
2. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 185.
3. A photo of Abakumov’s handwritten autobiography in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.
4. Yevgenii Tolstykh, Agent Nikto. Iz istorii ‘SMERSH’ (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 2004), 150 (in Russian).
5. If Abakumov doctored information in his biography, he was not the only one. Nikolai Yezhov hid the fact that his mother was not a Russian, but a Lithuanian. Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), 2.
6. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 234.
7. B. V. Sokolov, Narkomy strakha. Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Abakumov (Moscow: Ast-Press Kniga, 2001), 304–7 (in Russian).
8. Details in V. L. Krotov, ‘Chonovtsy’ (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1974) (in Russian), http://www.biografia.ru/cgi-bin/quotes.pl?oaction=sh ow&name=material73, retrieved September 7, 2011.
9. Detailed biography of N. I. Podvoisky (1880–1948) in Leonid Mlechin, Russkaya armiya mezhdu Trotskim i Stalinym (Moscow: Tsetropoligraf, 2002), 170–207 (in Russian).
10. Biography of M. N. Tukhachevsky (1893–1937) with new archival materials in Yuliya Kantor, Voina i mir Mikhaila Tukhachevskogo (Moscow: Ogonyok, 2005) (in Russian).
11. Quoted in ibid., 255.
12. Details in Boris Sokolov, Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Zhizn’ i smert’ ‘Krasnogo Marshala’ (Smolensk: Rusich, 1999), 206–28 (in Russian). Tukhachevsky also planned to use chemical weapons against insurgents in March 1921 during the Kronstadt anti-Bolshevik uprising.
13. Mikhail Shreider, NKVD iznutri: zapiski chekista (Moscow: Vozrozhdenie, 1995), 60–61 (in Russian).
14. Boris Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, translation and commentary by David W. Doyle (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990), 167.
15. I. F. Tubala (1897-1938) joined the VCheKa in 1918; in 1937, was head of the 1st Department, Main Directorate of the Border Guards. He was arrested on October 19, 1937 and executed on June 22, 1938. Klim Degtyarev and Aleksandr Kolpakidi, Vneshnyaya razvedka SSSR (Moscow: Eksmo, 2009), 587 (in Russian).
16. Detailed biography of M. S. Kedrov (1878–1941) in I. V. Viktorov, Podpol’shchik, voin, chekist (Moscow: Politizdat, 1963) (in Russian). A short biography of Nina (Antonina) Didrikil’ (1882–1953) (in Russian) at http://www.oval.ru/enc/55323.html, retrieved September 7, 2011.
17. On the Frauchi family and Artuzov, see Teodor Gladkov, Nagrada za vernost’—kazn’ (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2000) (in Russian)..
18. Oleg Mozokhin, VCheKa–OGPU. Na zashchite ekonomicheskoi bezopasnosti gosudarstva i v bor’be s terrorizmom (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 79–80 and 264–95 (in Russian).
19. An excerpt from Abakumov’s reference written by the 1st Section of the EKO in 1934; quoted in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.
20. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 60–62.
21. Yagoda’s cable, dated July 16, 1924. Document No. 107, in Genrikh Yagoda. Narkom vnutrennikh del SSSR, General’nyi komissar gosbezopasnosti. Sbornik dokumentov (Kazan, 1997), 323 (in Russian).
22. Igor Voshchnin and Yurii Khmelnitsky, ‘Jazz v Samare: vchera i segodnya’ (in Russian), http://www.vkonline.ru/toprint/15015.html, retrieved September 7, 2011.
23. Already in the 1920s, guards and OGPU officers of the first Soviet labor camp for political prisoners on Solovetsky Island, the so-called Solovki, as well as visiting Soviet officials, used female political prisoners as prostitutes or raped them during frequently organized orgies. A. Klinger, ‘Solovetskaya katorga. Zapiski bezhavshego’ (first published in 1927), in Zarya sovetskogo pravosudiya (London: Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd., 1991), edited by Mikhail Heller, 157–262 (in Russian).
24. Testimony of Nikolai Shatalin, MVD first deputy minister, in July 1953. Pages 176–7 in Document No. II-11 in Lavrentii Beria. 1953. Stenogramma iyul’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty, edited by V. Naumov and Yu. Sigachev, 87–218 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 1999) (in Russian).
25. Cited in Yevgenii Zhirnov, ‘Na doklady v Kreml’ on ezdil v mashine Gimmlera,’ Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 19 (472), May 21, 2002 (in Russian), http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=322678&print=true, retrieved September 7, 2011.
26. A contemporary, quoted in Mikhail Tumshis, VChK. Voina klanov (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 288–9 (in Russian).
27. Driver Buzin’s testimony during an investigation, 1953, cited in Sukhomlinov, Kto vy, Lavrentii Beria? (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2004), 188 (in Russian).
28. Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky, translated from the Russian by Jan Butler (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 353–4.
29. Tatyana Okunevskaya, Tat’yanin den’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 227–8, 265 (in Russian).
30. A letter of Abakumov’s wife in his Investigation File, cited in Tolstykh, Agent Nikto, 148.
31. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB:The Inside Story (New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 1990), 342.
32. Serov’s letter to Stalin, dated February 8, 1948. Document No. 29 in Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 268–73 (in Russian).
33. Peter Deryabin and Frank Gibney, The Secret World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1959), 232.
34. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 62.
35. Biography of Ya. A. Deich (1898–1938) in N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD. 1934–1941. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya 1999). 167 (in Russian).
36. The GULAG structure on April 15, 1937. Document No. II-59 in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) 1917–1960 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2000), 235–48 (in Russian). The Secret-Operational Section with Abakumov’s name is on page 239.
37. Protocol No. 21 of the Sovnarkom meeting on December 20, 1917. Document No. 1 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 302.
38. Abramov, Abakumov, 29–30.
39. The list at http://stalin.memo.ru/spiski/pg07005.htm, retrieved Sptember 7, 2011.
40. N. S. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya (Kniga 1) (Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999), 27 (in Russian).
41. Izabella Yakir-Belaya was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. Her daughter Stella was raised in an NKVD foster home and arrested in 1948. She committed suicide in 1969. Korytnyi’s son, Vladimir, committed suicide in 1960, after he found out about the fate of his parents. Three brothers of Korytnyi were also arrested from 1940-43 and shot. Ye. Sokolova and E. Veniaminova, ‘Ionocka, za chto?’ (in Russian), http://world.lib.ru/e/ewgenija_s/yakir.shtml, retrieved September 7, 2011.
42. A letter of R. A. Rudenko to the Central Committee, dated December 9, 1954. Document No. III-42 in Reabilitatsiya: kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materialy. Mart 1953–fevral 1956, edited by A. Artizov et al., 184–5 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2000) (in Russian).
43. A letter of P. V. Baranov to the Central Committee, dated March 24, 1955. Document No. IV-14 in ibid., 208–9.
44. Abakumov’s official biography quoted (page 87) in Vladislav Kutuzov, ‘Mertvaya petlya Abakumova,’ Rodina, No. 3 (1998), 86–90 (in Russian).
45. Quoted in A. Kolpakidi and D. Prokhorov, KGB. Prikazano likvidirovat’. Spetsoperatsii sovetskikh cpetssluzh 1918–1941 (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 437 (in Russian).
46. Pavel Sudoplatov, Spetsoperatsii. Lubyanka i Kreml’. 1930-1950 gody (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1998), 392 (in Russian).
47. A photo of Abakumov’s handwritten autobiography in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.
48. Biography of B. A. Dvinsky (1894–1973) in K. A. Zalessky, Imperiya Stalina. Biograficheskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Veche, 2000), 138 (in Russian).
49. Mikhail Frinovsky’s report, dated July 20, 1937, and the Politburo decisions P51/442, dated July 31, 1937, and P61/149, dated May 13, 1938. Document Nos. 151, 152 and 325, in Lubyanka. Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD. 1937–1938, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov and N. S. Plotnikova, 273–82 and 538 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2004) (in Russian).
50. K shesrtidesyatiletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya tovarishcha Stalina, edited by M. I. Kalinin (Moscow: OGIZ, 1939) (in Russian).
51. Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 80.
52. V. N. Stepakov, Narkom SMERSHa (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 32–34 (in Russian).
53. A photo of Abakumov’s handwritten autobiography in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.
54. Attachment to the Memo dated March 1, 1940. A photo on pages 197–8 in I. Linder and N. Abin, Zagadka dlya Gimmlera. Ofitsery SMERSH v Abvere i SD (Moscow: Ripol klassik, 2006) (in Russian). A third of the text is blacked out.
55. Ibid., 198.
56. See http://www.memo.ru/memory/DONSKOE/d40.htm, retrieved September 7, 2011.
57. Nikolai Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty moei zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 142 (in Russian).
58. Leonid Mlechin, Predsedateli KGB. Predsedateli organov bezopasnosti. Rassekrechennye sud’by (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2006), 270 (in Russian).
59. Fedoseev’s memoirs. Document No. I-105 in Moskva voennaya, 1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty, edited by K. I. Bukov, M. M. Gorinov, and A. N. Ponomarev (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995), 232 (in Russian).
60. Lyudmila Kafanova, ‘Palach’-zhertva,’ Chaika [Seagull] (Boston), no. 24, December 16 (2005), 28–42 (in Russian).
61. Page 301 in Aleksandr Liskin’s memoir ‘Rasskazhet ostavshiisya v zhivykh,’ in Abramov, Abakumov, 273–329.
62. Transcript of Kochergin’s interrogation on April 24, 1952. Pages 411–2 in Document No. 206 in Lubyanka. Stalin i MGB SSSR. Mart 1946–Mart 1953, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 408–23 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2007) (in Russian).
63. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gozbezopasnosti, 777–8. For an unknown reason, ‘Romanov’ described Selivanovsky under the name of ‘Chernyshov.’ Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 60, 69, 165, and 192.
64. Details in V. Rogovin, 1937 (Moscow: Moskva, 1996), Chapter 39 (in Russian), http://web.mit.edu/people/fjk/Rogovin/volume4/xxxix.html, retrieved September 7, 2011; W. G. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 147–9.
65. Vadim Abramov, Kontrrazvedka. Shchit i mezh protiv Abvera i TsRU (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2006), 70–71 (in Russian).
66. Details, for instance, in Kolpakidi and Prokhorov, KGB prikazano likvidirovat’, 322–41.
67. N. Cherushev, 1937 god: elita Krasnoi Armii na Golgofe (Moscow: Veche, 2003), 205–7 (in Russian).
68. Boris Syromyatnikov, Tragediya SMERSHa. Otkroveniya ofitsera-kontrrazvedchika (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2009), 358–9 (in Russian).
69. Quoted in ibid., 359.
70. Recollections of Mikhail Belousov, head of a department in the OO directorate of the Stalingrad Front, in ibid., 359–60.
71. Details of the case of generals Vasilii Gordov, Grigorii Kulik, and Filipp Rybal’chenko in Rudolf Pikhoya, Moskva. Kreml’. Vlast’. Sorok let posle voiny 1945–1985 (Moscow: AST, 2007), 59–62 (in Russian).
72. Cited in Emmanuil Ioffe, ‘Lichnoe delo chekista Selivanovskogo,’ Belarus’ segodnya, No. 139, July 22, 2005 (in Russian), http://www.sb.by/post/45172, retrieved September 7, 2011.
73. An interview with Meshik’s son, in Irina Ivoilova, ‘Smertnyi prigovor otmenit’. Posle rasstrela,’ Trud, No. 145, August 8, 2000 (in Russian).
74. Short biography of P. Ya. Meshik (1910–1953) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 297.
75. Yezhov’s report, dated February 8, 1938. Document No. 290 in Lubyanka. Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie, 471–84.
76. Biography of S. N. Mironov (1894–1940) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 301–2.
77. M. M. Yakovenko, Agnessa. Ustnye rasskazy Agnessy Ivanovny Mironovoi-Korol’ (Moscow: Zven’ya, 1997), 29–31 (in Russian).
78. Georgii Yakovlev, ‘’Delo’ otsa i syna,’ Pravda, no. 48 (25766), February 17, 1989 (in Russian).
79. Testimonies of P. I. Miroshnikov and N. F. Adamov, quoted in Andrei Sukhomlinov, Kto vy, Lavrentii Beriya? (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2003), 195–203 (in Russian).
80. Ibid., 197.
81. Pages 414–5 in N. Mil’chakova, ‘Pisat’ vsye-taki nado!’ in Reabilitirovan posmertno, Vypusk 2, 380–433 (in Russian).
82. Page 58 in B. S. Popov and V. T. Oppokov, ‘Berievshchina,’ ViZh, no. 10 (1991), 56–62 (in Russian).
83. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 151.
84. Nikita Petrov, in Igor Mel’nikov, ‘Kto povinen v smerti tysyach pol’skikh grazhdan,’ Belarus’ segodnya, December 18, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.sb.by/post/78592, retrieved September 8, 2011.
85. Meshik’s Instruction No. A-1282, dated April 10, 1941; a report to Nikita Khrushchev, Ukrainian Party Secretary, dated April 15, 1941, and Instruction No. A-1760, dated May 31, 1941; Reports to the Ukrainian Central Committee Nos. A-1250/sn and A-1292/sn, dated April 9 and 12, 1941. Document Nos. 180-181, 184-185 and 223 in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnost v Velikoi Otechstvennoi voine. Sbornik dokumentovi. Nakanune, T. 1 (2) (Moscow: Kniga i bizness, 1995), 82–85, 95–100, 188–92 (in Russian).
86. Excerpts cited in Genrikh Sikorsky, ‘Kak eto bylo. Nachalo ispytanii,’ Kievskie vedomosti, no. 127 (3513), June 22, 2005 (in Russian).
87. Ibid.
88. The new NKVD structure in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 74–77.
89. The above-mentioned letter from Serov to Stalin regarding Abakumov, dated February 8, 1948. Page 270 in Document No. 29 in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 268–73.
90. Page 59 in Popov and Oppokov, ‘Berievshchina,’ ViZh, no. 10 (1991).
91. A short biography of I. Ya. Babich (1902-1948) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 95–96.
92. Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941–1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation, translated by William Deist (Capshaw, AL: Theses & Dissertation Press, 2001), 197.
93. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 75. Biography of I. I. Vradii (1906–1984) in Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami bezopasnosti, 267–8; also, Yevgenii Zhirnov, ‘Chisto chekistskaia chistka,’ Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 36 (690), September 11, 2006 (in Russian).
94. A photo of this order in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 75.
95. On September 25, 1955, Ivan Vradii was promoted to Lieutenant General.
96. I. M. Leplevsky (1896–1938) headed the 5th GUGB department from December 25, 1936 till July 14, 1937. He was arrested on April 26, 1938, sentenced to death by the Military Collegium on July 28, 1938, and shot the same day. Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 270–1.
97. N. S. Cherushev, Udar po svoim. Krasnaya Armiya 1938–1941 (Moscow: Veche, 2003), 417–23 (in Russian); Abramov, SMERSH, 591.
98. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 140.
99. Quoted in Cherushev, Udar po svoim, 423.
100. In the 4th Department, Kazakevich participated, for instance, in the falsification of the case against high-level Party members who allegedly planned terrorist acts against Stalin. V. A. Agranovsky, Poslednii dolg: Zhizn’ i sud’ba zhurnalistskoi dinastii Agranovskikh (Moscow: Academia, 1994), 19–22 (in Russian).
101. Testimony of V. I. Budarev, former OO investigator, in Cherushev, Udar po svoim, 191.
102. Cited in ibid., 421.
103. Ibid., 422.
104. An excerpt from the transcript of an interrogation of Sergei Goglidze, 1953, quoted in Sukhomlinov, Kto vy, Lavrentii Beria, 175. A short biography of N.K. Kovalchuk (1902–1972) in Abramov, SMERSH, 504–5.
105. Details in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 78–80.
106. GKO Order dated June 15, 1943, in ibid., 78.
107. Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty, 126.
108. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 57.
109. NKO Order No. 1-ssh, signed by Stalin and dated April 29, 1943. A photo in SMERSH, 72.
110. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 67.