CHAPTER 1
The history of SMERSH is so intimately intertwined with the many skeins of Soviet political and secret service history I decided to start out this volume with a short overview of Soviet military counterintelligence and its place in the larger landscape of the Soviet Union. Hopefully this will serve to keep the reader oriented in the chapters that follow, where detailed explanations of the many byzantine cabals of Stalin and other political and secret service figures are necessary to illuminate the dark history of SMERSH. And as an aid to keeping track of the many confusing transformations and personnel changes in the secret services, I have provided a listing of the various organizations (Table 1-1).
It all began on November 7, 1917 when the Bolshevik Party organized a coup known as the October Revolution and took over political power in Russia. The Party was small, consisting of about 400,000 members in a country with a population of over 100 million.1 Soon the Bolshevik government was on the verge of collapse. The troops of the Cossack Ataman (Leader) Pyotr Krasnov and the White Army of General Anton Denikin were threatening the new Russian Republic from the South, Ukraine and the Baltic States were occupied by the Germans, and Siberia was in the hands of anti-Soviet Czechoslovak WWI POWs.
But the numerous peasant revolts that erupted throughout Bolshevik-controlled territory were even more dangerous for them. In these circumstances Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, unleashed terror to hang onto power. On December 20, 1917, the first Soviet secret service, the VCheKa (Vserossiiskaya Chrezvychainaya Komissiya po bor’be s kontrrevolyutsiei i sabotazhem or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), attached to the SNK (Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov or Council of People’s Commissars, i.e. the Bolshevik government) was created.2 The VCheKa’s task was ‘to stop and liquidate counterrevolutionary and diversion activity’ and ‘to put on trial in the Revolutionary tribunal those who had committed sabotage acts and the counterrevolutionaries, and to develop methods for fighting them’. Since this time and to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, through the VCheKa and its successors, a comparatively small Bolshevik (later Communist) Party controlled the large population of Russia (later the Soviet Union) through intimidation and terror. In Lenin’s terminology, this method of control was called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.3 But, in fact, the Bolshevik’s tactics were the same as those of any organized criminal or fascist group, such as the Italian Mafia and the Nazi Party in Germany.4
TABLE 1-1. SOVIET SECURITY SERVICES AND THEIR HEADS
The VCheKa, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Bolshevik from a family of minor Polish nobility, who as a teenager dreamed of becoming a Catholic priest, consisted of only 12 members. On September 2, 1918, the VCheKa issued ‘The Red Terror Order’ to arrest and imprison members of socialist non-Bolshevik parties.5 Additionally, all big industrialists, businessmen, merchants, noble-landowners, ‘counterrevolutionary priests’, and ‘officers hostile to the Soviet government’ were to be placed into concentration camps and forced to work there. Any attempt to resist was punished by immediate execution.
Three days later the SNK issued an additional decree, entitled ‘On the Red Terror’.6 It ordered an increase in VCheKa staff (known from then on as the Chekisty) culled from the ranks of devoted Bolsheviks. Within a year the VCheKa became an organization with a headquarters in Moscow and branches throughout the whole country. The SNK decree also ordered ‘to isolate the class enemies in concentration camps; to shoot to death every person close to the organizations of White Guardists [members of the White armies], plots and revolts; to publish the names of the executed, as well as an explanation why they had been executed’. The Red Terror was in full swing, and during its first two months alone, at least 10,000–15,000 victims were executed.7 Very soon Dzerzhinsky, a brutal workaholic with an ascetic lifestyle, earned his nickname ‘Iron Felix’.8
The first decrees set up the objectives, rules, and even phraseology for the future Soviet security services. Any real or potential threat to Bolshevik power became a ‘counterrevolutionary crime’, and later, in Joseph Stalin’s Criminal Code of 1926, these ‘crimes’ comprised fourteen paragraphs (treason, espionage, subversion, assistance to the world bourgeoisie, etc.) of the infamous Article 58. The perpetrators of such crimes, soon called ‘enemies of the working people’, were found mostly among former bourgeoisie, nobles, and any professional or educated person. However, there were also numerous workers and peasants among the victims of the Red Terror. Relatives of persons sought for counterrevolutionary crimes were also often arrested. This practice was formalized in Stalin’s time, when legal convictions of relatives of ‘enemies of the people’ became a standard practice. It’s important to note that only the VCheKa and its successor organizations were allowed investigate ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’.
Already in these first decrees there was a category of enemies called ‘the hostile officers’, which was the beginning of Lenin’s and then Stalin’s suspicious attitude to the professional military. In fact, detachments of revolutionary soldiers and sailors (as the navy privates are called in Russia) played a critical role in the Bolshevik coup. Very few high army and navy officers joined these detachments or supported the Bolsheviks.
On January 28, 1918, the SNK declared the creation of the Red Army and by February 23, which was later announced as the Red Army’s birthday, some detachments of the new army had been formed.9 On December 19, 1918, the first military counterintelligence organization, the VO (Voennyi otdel or Military Department), was established within the VCheKa (Table 1-2).10 It included previous counterintelligence organizations that existed in the armies in the field.11 On January 1, 1919, the VO was renamed Osobyi otdel (Special Department) or the OO. This name was definitely reminiscent of the political police of the czarist time, when Osobyi otdel within Departament politsii or the Police Department investigated crimes against the state such as the activities of revolutionary parties, foreign espionage, and treason.12
The word ‘osobyi’ is translated as ‘special’, but the English definition does not give the full sense of its Russian usage. In the Soviet secret services, osobyi (the singular of osobye) was used to describe a department whose specific functions required concealment. However, in the Soviet security services the acronym ‘OO’ was never used for anything but military counterintelligence. In addition to the OO in the VCheKa headquarters in Moscow, there were OOs of fronts (as the army groups are called in Russia in wartime), OOs in the armies, and Special Sections in divisions. The regional VCheKa branches, the so-called GubCheKas, also had OOs.13
The task of the OOs was ‘fighting counterrevolution and espionage within the army and fleet’.14 In other words, the Bolsheviks were more concerned about finding enemies of the regime among its own military than about catching enemy agents. This attitude explains why, during the whole of the Soviet era, military counterintelligence was part of security services, and was within the armed forces only during SMERSH’s three-year existence and for one other very brief period, and then only formally.
During the Civil War (1918–22) that followed the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had no choice but to draft czarist officers into the Red Army.15 Although the loyalty of these officers was obviously an issue, their military training and experience were critical during that war. But with the success of the Red Army in the war, the czarist officers became less dangerous to Stalin than the young Red Army commanders who adored his archenemy Leon Trotsky.
From 1918 till 1925, Trotsky was Commissar for Military (and Naval) Affairs; later this post was called the Defense Commissar. A talented orator (contrary to Stalin, who spoke Russian with a heavy Georgian accent; Stalin’s real last name was Dzhugashvili), Trotsky was extremely popular among the Red Army commanders. Taking into consideration that in November 1920, the Red Army and Navy had 5,430,000 servicemen, and even after a partial demobilization in January 1922 numbered 1,350,000, the number of enthusiastic Trotsky supporters was very high.16Also, Stalin’s failure as a military commander during the Civil War made him especially jealous of Trotsky’s popularity.17
TABLE 1-2. SOVIET AND RUSSIAN FEDERATION MILITARY COUNTERINTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATIONS
In the meantime, in 1922, due to Lenin’s illness (he suffered from a progressive paralysis), the Politburo, the Party’s governing group, elected Stalin General Secretary, i.e. leader of the Bolshevik Party.18 Trotsky formed an opposition group which resulted in a long struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. In 1927, Trotsky lost all his posts, and two years later he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Finally, on Stalin’s order, he was assassinated in 1940 by an NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del or People’s Internal Affairs Commissariat) killing squad.
Stalin never forgot Trotsky’s supporters, the ‘Trotskyists’, especially among the armed forces. They were constantly persecuted, even after World War II.19 Possibly, Stalin’s fear that the officers who served under Trotsky remained his secret supporters despite Trotsky’s political defeat was behind Stalin’s distrust of the military and his expectation that it would organize plots against him. In fact, there were no military plots; if alleged ‘plots’ were discovered by the OO, they were OO fabrications to please Stalin.
During the Civil War the OO was considered so important that from August 1919 to July 1920, Dzerzhinsky, chairman of the VCheKa, and from July 1920 to May 1922, his deputy Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, headed the OO in Moscow (Table 1-2).20 However, from the beginning, the special OO departments were involved in campaigns that were not strictly military. The first OO chief, Mikhail Kedrov, executed civilians, including children, who were suspected of counterrevolutionary activity during the civil war. Military counterintelligence also participated in the creation of phony anti-Soviet underground organizations aimed at misleading White Russians who were living abroad, often trapping emissaries sent to the Soviet Union by those Russian émigrés. In the late 1920s to early 1930s, it was also involved in rounding up and sending into exile independent farming families known as kulaks during the organization of the kolkhozy (collective farms).21
In the 1920s–early 1930s, the OO played a special role in the VCheKa/NKVD. Almost all its leaders (Table 1-2) were later appointed to leading positions in other branches of the security services. Menzhinsky succeeded Dzerzhinsky after the latter died in 1926, and Genrikh Yagoda, once Menzhinsky’s deputy and OO head from 1922–29, became the first NKVD Commissar in 1934.22 On December 20, 1920, foreign intelligence, part of the OO, became a separate Inostrannyi otdel or INO (Foreign Department; later the all-powerful First Directorate, and currently, Sluzhba vneshnei razvedki, SVR or Foreign Intelligence Service). On July 7, 1922, the OO was divided in two parts, the OO (counterintelligence in the armed forces) and Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi otdel or KRO (Counterintelligence Department; later the Second Directorate) in charge of internal counterintelligence, i.e. capturing spies and White Guard agents.
Artur Artuzov (born Frauchi), a long-time officer of the OO, was appointed head of the KRO.23 Vasilii Ulrikh, also an OO officer and the future chairman of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, became his deputy.24 However, from 1927 to 1931, the OO and KRO existed as a united structure with a joint secretariat. It was headed by Yan Olsky, who headed army OO departments during the Civil War and then became Artuzov’s deputy in the KRO (Table 1-2).25
Through the beginning of World War II the OOs were part of the VCheKa’s successors, first the OGPU and then the NKVD, and military counterintelligence was focused on the destruction of military professionals whom Stalin did not trust or hated. In 1927, he ordered Menzhinsky, the OGPU chairman, ‘to pay special attention to espionage in the army, aviation, and the fleet’.26
In 1928, the OGPU prepared the first show trial, the so-called Shakhtinskoe delo (Mining Case) against top-level mining engineers in the Donbass Region (currently, Ukraine) and foreigners working in the coal-mining industry.27 Yefim Yevdokimov, OGPU Plenipotentiary (representative) in the Donbass Region, persuaded Stalin that the numerous accidents in the Donbass coal mines were the result of sabotage. Allegedly, the accidents were organized by a group of engineers, who had worked in the mining industry in pre-revolutionary times, and foreign specialists.28 According to Yevdokimov, these vrediteli (from the Russian verb vredit’ or to spoil; in English the word vrediteli is usually translated as ‘wreckers’) followed orders from the former owners of the mines who now lived abroad. The idea of sabotage conducted by wreckers played an important role in Soviet ideology and propaganda and was usually applied to members of the technical intelligentsia and other professionals. Stalin ordered arrests, and 53 engineers and managers were duly apprehended.
During the investigation, the OGPU worked out principles that were followed for all subsequent political cases until Stalin’s death. Before making the arrests, investigators invented a plot based on operational materials received from secret informers. This was not difficult because, beginning in the VCheKa’s time, the Chekists’ work, especially that of military counterintelligence, was based on reports from numerous secret informers. Thus the OGPU and its successors always had a lot of information about an enormous number of people and could easily fabricate any kind of ‘counterrevolutionary’ group. After the alleged perpetrators were arrested, the investigators’ job was to force the arrestees to ‘confess’ and sign the concocted ‘testimonies’. Since during interrogations new individuals were drawn in (during interrogations, people were forced to name their friends and coworkers), the case could snowball.
During the investigation of the Shakhtinskoe delo, OGPU interrogators applied primarily psychological methods to the arrestees, not the physical torture they widely used during the Red Terror and later. The arrestees were deprived of sleep for days, as the investigators repeatedly read the concocted ‘testimonies’ and continually threatened to persecute family members. A special Politburo commission, with Stalin’s participation, controlled the OGPU investigation. Two months before the end of the investigation the official Communist Party daily newspapers Pravda(Truth) and Izvestia started to publish articles condemning members of the ‘counterrevolutionary organization’ in the Donbass Region and the ‘bourgeois specialists’ guilty of sabotage. Stalin made the same accusations in his speeches.
An open session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court began on May 18, 1928 and continued for 41 days. Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s main legal theorist, presided. 23 defendants of 53 pleaded not guilty, and 10 admitted to partial guilt. Eleven defendants were sentenced to death (of them, only six were executed). Most of the others were given terms of imprisonment from one to ten years, while eight defendants were acquitted. Yevdokimov was promoted to head of the OGPU’s Secret Operations Directorate that included the OO and KRO; in other words, for the next few years he supervised the OO’s activity.
The Shakhtinskoe delo became a model for the trials that followed in the late 1920s–early 1930s, of which the Prompartiya (Industrial Party) show trial in November–December 1930 was the most important.29 During the investigation, Stalin not only read transcripts of interrogations of the arrestees, but personally suggested questions for additional interrogations. At the trial Nikolai Krylenko, RSFSR (Russian Federation) Prosecutor, declared that in political cases a confession from perpetrators prevails over the proof of their guilt: ‘In all circumstances the defendants’ confession is the best evidence.’30 Krylenko referred to the old Roman principle Confessio est regina probatum or ‘Confession is the Queen of evidence’, commonly used by the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. Later Vyshinsky, USSR Prosecutor from 1935 to 1939, supported this thesis.31This gave a legal basis for the Chekists to apply every means to force confessions.
All these trials created a mass hysteria among the Soviet population. People became afraid of plots organized from abroad and of numerous foreign spies who supposedly wanted to destroy ‘the first proletarian state’. The OGPU successfully promoted a belief that the ‘Organs’ (as security services were generally called) ‘never make a mistake’, meaning that if a person was arrested on political charges his or her arrest was justified without proof.
It wasn’t long before the military was targeted. Between 1930 and 1932 the OOs prepared the first purge against Red Army officers, charging them with treason and espionage. It became known as the Vesna (Spring) Case.32 From 1924 onwards, the OOs collected materials about czarist officers who served in the Red Army. Known under the operational name Genshtabisty (General Staff Members), in 1930 these materials were used to create the Vesna Case. Up to 10,000 officers were arrested throughout the country on false charges and many were sentenced and imprisoned, while 31 high-level former czarist officers were executed.
In early 1931, 38 Navy commanding officers were arrested as ‘wreckers’ in the Baltic Fleet alone.33 Interestingly, Olsky and Yevdokimov were against the Vesna Case and were dismissed. Izrail Leplevsky, who had started the Vesna Case in Ukraine, replaced Olsky.34 Stalin personally wrote a draft of the Politburo decision that accused Olsky, Yevdokimov and some other OGPU functionaries of disseminating ‘demoralizing rumors that the case of wreckers among the military was supposedly falsified [in the original, Stalin used a colloquial Russian expression “dutoe delo”].’35
These actions triggered a flight of servicemen from the country. From October 1932 to June 1933 alone, twenty Red Army commanders and privates crossed the border and escaped to Poland.36 But the Vesna Case was only a rehearsal for the actions brought against the military elite, such as the well-known Mikhail Tukhachevsky case a few years later, during the Great Terror (1936–38).37 According to the official statistics, from 1937–38 1,344,929 persons were sentenced for ‘counterrevolutionary’ crimes and 681,692 of them were executed; other sources mention 750,000 executed. During this time physical torture for extracting the necessary ‘confessions’ became routine during NKVD investigations.38
Military commanders were persecuted in several stages, and after each wave the military counterintelligence heads and interrogators most actively involved in the purges were, in turn, arrested, tried, and executed (Table 1-2). Although unquestionably loyal, they—along with highlevel NKVD personnel—simply knew too much about Stalin’s methods. For instance, Stalin found it necessary to fabricate accusations against Genrikh Yagoda (a long-time head of the OO and OGPU who was also the first NKVD Commissar) and his team, accusing them of organizing a plot within the security services.39
Stalin’s purges of the military peaked during the years of the Great Terror, when 40,000 members of the military elite were persecuted, including approximately 500 high-ranking officers; of them, 412 were shot and 29 died under interrogation.40 This number is astonishing considering that only 410 generals and marshals died during the whole of World War II.41 As usual, Stalin read the interrogation transcripts of the main arrestees and directed investigations. Even during the desperate days of late 1941 Stalin continued to order the arrests of generals, blaming them for the disasters of the first months of the war—disasters that were largely a result of his own mistakes and miscalculations.
Olga Freidenberg, a cousin of the internationally-famous poet and Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak, noted a macabre practice in her memoirs. In those years radio news about show trials and announcements of death sentences for ‘enemies of the people’ were followed by broadcasts of the Russian folk melody ‘Kamarinskaya’ or the Ukrainian Cossack dance tune ‘Gopak’.42 In the Kremlin-controlled media of those times, the broadcast of these dances—the Kamarinskaya, traditionally performed by a drunken, joyful peasant, and the Gopak, a victory dance performed with sabers—conveyed a clear, and chilling, message.
Many American authors describe Stalin’s actions during the purges as symptomatic of a developing paranoia.43 In my opinion, Stalin was not mentally ill. Rather, his behavior can be likened to the actions of a Mafia boss who maintains his power and position in the criminal world by killing off all possible opposition. Chistki or purges and ‘unmasking’ enemies in the armed forces and the NKVD obviously played an important role for Stalin—most of the officers who had served prior to the Revolution or were active during the October Revolution and the Civil War had perished and were replaced by recruits from a young generation of devoted Communist and Komsomol (Communist Youth Union) members. These people grew up in Stalin’s Soviet Union and were personally devoted to the Leader and Teacher, as Stalin was called in the newspapers. The OO/SMERSH functionaries, including Viktor Abakumov, SMERSH’s head, who operated during World War II, belonged to this younger generation.
Between autumn 1939 and summer 1940, Stalin acquired a part of Poland, three Baltic States, and a portion of Romania by making opportunistic use of the secret appendices of the Ribbentrop-–Molotov Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. The security services, including the OO, actively participated in the Soviet occupation of the new territory, purging former national and military leaders, politicians, intelligentsia, and industry owners—that is, everyone who could potentially oppose the Sovietization that followed.
In February 1941, Stalin reorganized the security services in response to the new circumstances. The huge, unwieldy NKVD was divided into three parts. Military counterintelligence was transferred to the NKO (Defense Commissariat); a new organization, the NKGB (State Security Commissariat), became responsible for foreign intelligence; and the KRO ran domestic counterintelligence, among other things. Possibly, if not for the war, the NKGB would have continued the mass arrests of the Red Terror period since by March 1941, it had a cardfile for 1,263,000 ‘anti-Soviet elements’ who potentially could have been arrested.44 The NKVD was left to manage the slave labor in the camps and provide special troops to support NKGB actions in the newly occupied territory. It was also tasked with creating a separate system of camps for foreign prisoners of war.
Stalin was now ready to order his troops to continue their march to the West, but the unexpected invasion of Russia by Adolf Hitler’s troops on June 22, 1941 scuttled all his plans. During the disastrous and chaotic first months of World War II, the focus of the state security services returned to controlling the Soviet Union’s own citizens, many of whom at first greeted the Germans as liberators. Stalin undid his February changes, and recreated a huge NKVD.
Military counterintelligence was transferred back to the NKVD in the form of the OO Directorate, or the UOO (the ‘U’ means ‘Directorate’, which indicated that the OO had become a larger organization), and was given a new chief, the rising star Viktor Abakumov. Abakumov had already demonstrated his efficiency early in 1941, when he participated in the purging of the Baltic States. During this first period of World War II, the main goal of military counterintelligence was to prevent desertions and to vet the vast numbers of servicemen who had been surrounded or captured by the fast-advancing Germans.
In the spring of 1943, with the success of the Red Army in Stalingrad, it became clear that the war was finally becoming an offensive one. The Red Army began to liberate Nazi-occupied Soviet territory and prepared to advance into Europe. At this point, Stalin returned to the tripartite organization of the secret services of early 1941, with the military counterintelligence directorate now rechristened SMERSH and formally made a part of the NKO. In essence, SMERSH was simply the UOO, renamed and made independent of the main body of secret services. Abakumov, the UOO’s head, became head of SMERSH, and most of the UOO’s personnel were also transferred. SMERSH’s staff was considerably larger than the UOO’s.
SMERSH differed from the UOO in another extremely important aspect—Abakumov reported directly to Stalin, because Stalin had special plans for SMERSH. The Soviet dictator needed an organization he personally controlled to help him politically consolidate the territorial gains he expected the Red Army to make in Eastern Europe and Germany. Therefore, SMERSH was truly Stalin’s secret weapon—a weapon that was even more effective than tanks and bombs in conquering new territory in the West.
By the time of SMERSH’s creation, Stalin was the all-powerful dictator of the Soviet Union. He was general secretary of the Communist Party, chairman of the Council of Commissars, chairman of the wartime GKO (State Defense Committee), Defense Commissar, and commander in chief of the armed forces.
The order from Stalin that created SMERSH on April 19, 1943 was marked ‘ss’ (two small Russian ‘s’ letters, an acronym for sovershenno sekretno or Top Secret).45 A quotation from the order detailing SMERSH’s responsibilities conveys a deep distrust of the Red Army, and its last point makes clear that SMERSH was to play a special role:
The ‘SMERSH’ organs are charged with the following:
a) combating spy, diversion, terrorist, and other subversive activity of foreign intelligence in the units and organizations of the Red Army;
b) combating anti-Soviet elements that have penetrated into the units and organizations of the Red Army;
c) taking the necessary agent-operational [i.e., through informers] and other (through commanding officers) measures for creating conditions at the fronts to prevent enemy agents from crossing the front line and to make the front line impenetrable to spies and anti-Soviet elements;
d) combating traitors of the Motherland in the units and organizations of the Red Army (those who have gone over to the enemy side, who hide spies or provide any help to spies);
e) combating desertion and self-mutilation at the fronts;
f) investigating servicemen and other persons who have been taken prisoner of war or have been surrounded by the enemy;
g) conducting special tasks for the People’s Commissar of Defense.46
Due to the secrecy surrounding SMERSH, at first even officers in the field did not know SMERSH’s real name. Daniil Fibikh, a journalist working for a military newspaper at the Northwestern Front, wrote in his diary: ‘Special detachments SSSh—“Smert’, smert’ shpionam” [“Death, death to spies”] (!) [an exclamation mark in the original] attached to the Special Departments have been organized.’47 In June 1943 Fibikh found out what this organization was about. SMERSH operatives arrested him for ‘disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda’ (Article 58-10 of the Criminal Code) after a secret informer reported on Fibikh’s critical remarks regarding the Red Army. Fibikh was sentenced to a ten-year imprisonment in the labor camps.
Soon the ruthlessness of SMERSH interrogators became legendary. The investigative officers, known as ‘smershevtsy’, tortured and killed thousands of people whether they were guilty of intelligence activity or not. Two Soviet defectors who served in SMERSH published littleknown English-language memoirs in which they described the horrific interrogation methods.48 In one of these books, Nicola Sinevirsky, a military translator, wrote how he was forced to witness a brutal beating by a female SMERSH officer:
The Pole did not answer. Galya moved closer to him. She moved the rubber hose slowly back and forth in front of his face. ‘Don’t make yourself a bigger fool than you are already. Is that clear?’
The Pole looked around helplessly and said, ‘I don’t understand you.’
I translated Galya’s words to the prisoner. As I did so, Galya broke in, ‘He lies! The son of a bitch! He understands, all right! There is more cunning in him than in all of Poland. Listen to me, you Polish pig!’ Galya screamed, raising the rubber hose above her head…
Galya beat the Pole across the face unceasingly. ‘I’ll beat you bloody. I’ll beat you until you confess or you die on this spot!’ A torrent of coarse oaths burst from Galya’s lips…
The Pole’s face was beaten into a formless mass of flesh and blood. Blood dripped in thin streaks over his chest and on his shirt. His badly bruised eyes showed no spark of life…
The work on him was resumed where she had left off before our short break for dinner. It was four o’clock in the morning before the sentries finally carried away the broken body of the dying Pole…
Like a drunken man, I stumbled to my quarters and collapsed on my bed without undressing. In a matter of seconds, it seemed that I had slipped quietly into a heavy coma.
It took days for me to recover from the bloody apparition.49
Each front had its own SMERSH directorate stationed at the front line with the Red Army troops, and SMERSH made wide use of informers on all levels of the Red Army and among former prisoners of war.50 SMERSH’s chain of command was completely independent of the military hierarchy, so a SMERSH officer was subordinate only to a higher-level SMERSH officer. Constant communication between SMERSH front-line units and Moscow headquarters was maintained, with Abakumov preparing daily reports for Stalin.
Becoming head of SMERSH was a big promotion for Abakumov. As the chief of SMERSH’s predecessor, the UOO, he had been a subordinate of Lavrentii Beria, the notorious NKVD head. Now he was Beria’s equal, and his relationship with Stalin was a direct challenge to Beria.
Abakumov soon proved his worth, scoring impressive victories against the Germans. SMERSH had hundreds of double agents working among the Germans, especially in Abwehr intelligence schools. Many German agents therefore were known to SMERSH even before they crossed the front line, and were immediately identified and arrested. SMERSH also identified high-ranking intelligence and counterintelligence officers among German POWs and sent them to Moscow for interrogation. The level of intelligence about the enemy thus increased enormously. Deceptive ‘radio games’ or ‘playbacks’, in which captured German intelligence men and radio operators created fake German military broadcasts, were also a great success. However, the screening (fil’tratsiya) of Soviet servicemen who had been in German captivity, and the identification of spies, mostly imagined, among Soviet servicemen remained an important part of SMERSH’s job.
The Red Army’s advances into Eastern Europe meant that there were whole new classes of people to arrest: active members of political parties, local officials, diplomats, and so forth. Numerous Russian-émigré and White Guard organizations that had dispersed throughout Europe after the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922 were also a target. SMERSH arrested members of these organizations in Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and later in the Chinese provinces freed from Japanese occupation. But the group that SMERSH pursued most passionately was the Russian Liberation Army (ROA), which was formed from Soviet POWs in German captivity under the leadership of the former Soviet general Andrei Vlasov and his staff. Following the Yalta agreements with Stalin, British and American Allies forcibly handed over many units of the ROA and other anti-Soviet Russian troops, some of whom were even British citizens, to SMERSH.51
People arrested by SMERSH were dealt with in a number of ways. Soviet servicemen were tried by military tribunals and then sent to punishment battalions or executed. Enemy agents of low importance were put in NKVD prisoner-of-war camps, while important prisoners were sent to SMERSH headquarters in Moscow, where they were intensively interrogated both during and after World War II. Among them were former leaders of European governments such as Count István Bethlen, the Hungarian prime minister from 1921 to 1930, and Ion Antonescu, the Romanian fascist dictator from 1941 to 1944, whose wife was also brought to Moscow.52
Among SMERSH’s actions was the arrest of numerous diplomats. Some of them were guilty of crimes, like the Germans Gustav Richter and Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, both of whom played a crucial role in the Holocaust in Romania and Bulgaria. However, SMERSH also arrested completely innocent Swiss and Swedish diplomats, who were representing neutral governments. This was particularly galling to the Swedes, who had represented Soviet interests in Nazi Germany and Hungary for several years.
Perhaps SMERSH’s most infamous arrest was that of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved many thousands of Jews in Budapest at the end of World War II by providing them with fake documents, establishing safe houses, pulling people off trains bound for extermination camps, and so forth.53 Named a Righteous Gentile by the Israeli government for his heroic actions, the truth of what happened to Wallenberg after his arrest by SMERSH is one of the deepest mysteries of World War II. It seems likely that he died in the Soviet investigation prison Lubyanka in 1947.54 An even deeper mystery is why he was never repatriated to Sweden, despite the fact that he was a member of the powerful Wallenberg family and worked for the family corporation. The Wallenbergs, whose wholly family-owned interests during World War II amounted to perhaps half the gross national product of Sweden, had also been involved in mutually beneficial financial dealings with the Soviet Union since the 1920s.
High-level Abwehr and SD (the foreign branch of the Nazi State Security) officers also became prisoners of SMERSH. Among them were Lieutenant General Hans Piekenbrock, head of Abwehr Abteilung (Department) I (foreign intelligence) from 1937 to 1943; Colonel Erwin Stolze, deputy head of Abwehr Department II (sabotage and subversion) from 1937 to 1944, who was known as Saboteur No. 2; and Lieutenant General Franz-Eccard von Bentivegni, head of Abwehr Department III (counterintelligence) from 1943 to 1944.55
SMERSH also arrested and interrogated SS-Oberführer (Major General) Friedrich Panzinger, former head of the Gestapo’s Department A, which specialized in combating Communism and other opposition in Nazi Germany. He was well-known as the head of the Gestapo commissions that investigated both the famous Soviet spy network the Red Orchestra in 1942, and the anti-Hitler plotters in 1944. Between these two investigations, from September 1943 to May 1944, Panzinger headed the Gestapo branch in Riga, the capital of Latvia, and simultaneously commanded Einsatzgruppe A, a Latvia-based SS killing squad. After his release from Soviet imprisonment in October 1955, Major General Panzinger committed suicide while awaiting arrest in West Germany.
SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Heinz Pannwitz, who headed the Gestapo’s investigation of the Red Orchestra in France, also fell into SMERSH’s hands. After his release, the CIA interrogated Pannwitz concerning his Red Orchestra investigation and his interrogations by SMERSH, and used the resulting information in its 1979 report, The Rote Kapelle.56
Numerous high-ranking German military generals were also taken prisoner by SMERSH.57 Among them was the ruthless Lieutenant General Reiner Stahel, who was military commandant of Warsaw during the 1944 Uprising. He was arrested by SMERSH in Romania, where Hitler had sent him in a last-ditch effort to save the German troops stationed there. Stahel died in November 1955 in a transit POW camp, on his way to Germany as part of a large repatriation of German officers. Another SMERSH prisoner was SS Major General Wilhelm Mohnke. The Americans and Canadians mounted a ten-year search for him due to his order to kill Canadian POWs during the Normandy invasion in June 1944. It was only upon Mohnke’s release in 1956 that it became known that the Soviets had him all along.58
SMERSH operatives also arrested a group of people who witnessed the death of Hitler. In fact, there were two groups of such witnesses in Soviet captivity, and there were two completely separate investigations into the circumstances of Hitler’s demise. These were conducted independently by SMERSH under Abakumov’s personal supervision and by the Main Directorate for POWs (GUPVI), which was part of the NKVD, under the supervision of the head of the GUPVI, Amayak Kobulov.59 The NKVD and SMERSH competed to find out the truth in order to curry favor with Stalin, who was fascinated with the Führer. Stalin suspected that Hitler had somehow survived the bunker, and therefore wanted convincing proof of his death. One of the witnesses investigated by SMERSH, SS-Gruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Hans Rattenhuber, head of Hitler’s bodyguards, was, possibly, the person closest to Hitler while he was alive.
Japanese military prisoners were investigated by SMERSH as well. They included General Otozo Yamada, commander in chief of the Kwantung Army, and the American-educated Senior Lieutenant Prince Fumitaka Konoe, who attended Princeton University before World War II. The young prince belonged to a 1,200-year-old family of Japanese rulers, and SMERSH considered him an important prisoner because he was a son and the personal secretary of Prince Fumimaro Konoe, the two-time former Japanese prime minister (1937–39 and 1940–41). In addition, Fumikata Konoe was related to Emperor Hirohito through his wife, Masako, a cousin of the emperor. Konoe, who had never been seriously ill, died suddenly in October 1956 in a transit POW camp on the way back to Japan. His death, like Raoul Wallenberg’s, remains a great mystery.
General Yamada was more fortunate; he survived imprisonment and returned to Japan. Hiroki Nohara, deputy head of the Intelligence Department of Yamada’s army, was sentenced to death in February 1947 as a spy and executed.60 The Japanese Consul General in Harbin, Kimio Miyagawa, died in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow before he was tried, while General Shun Akifusa, head of the Japanese Military Mission in Harbin, was convicted of being a spy in December 1948 and sentenced to a 25-year imprisonment. Four months later he died in Vladimir Prison.61
To the disappointment of the SMERSH leadership, in August 1945 the last Manchurian Emperor Pu Yi was captured by an NKVD, not a SMERSH, operational group. Although the commander in chief in the Soviet Far East, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, ordered the transfer of Pu Yi to SMERSH, NKVD Commissar Beria only allowed SMERSH officers to interrogate Pu Yi; he remained in NKVD hands.62
Since SMERSH officers wore Red Army uniforms, people arrested by SMERSH operatives frequently did not know that they were in the hands of a separate secret service. Even Soviet POWs used to think that the NKVD or NKGB had arrested them. For instance, Lev Mishchenko, a Moscow physicist who volunteered in 1941 for the opolchenie (detachments of civilian volunteers) and was then captured by the Germans, wrote in the 2000s: ‘In June 1945, I was arrested by the counterintelligence department SMERSH of the 8th Guard Army. SMERSH… was the name of the NKGB departments within the army.’63 This misunderstanding led to confusing mistakes regarding SMERSH in the memoirs of many foreign former prisoners of SMERSH.
One of SMERSH’s last important tasks was its involvement in the International Nuremberg Trial.64 Abakumov’s investigators proposed five prisoners as possible defendants at Nuremberg. However, the Politburo chose only one of the people on SMERSH’s list: the relatively unimportant Hans Fritzsche, an official of Paul Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, who was ultimately acquitted. It’s possible that Stalin settled on Fritzsche because he did not want his former allies to know that important generals such as Mohnke were in his hands.
The NKVD also brought one defendant from its POW camps, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander of the German Navy until 1943. He was sentenced to life in prison. The main testimony presented by Soviet prosecutors consisted of excerpts from the recorded interrogations of many SMERSH prisoners, but the prisoners themselves were not produced.
Colonel Sergei Kartashov, head of the 2nd Department of SMERSH, which was in charge of the interrogation of important German POWs and Soviet servicemen who had been in German captivity, was the first to arrive in Nuremberg. His assignment was to do an initial evaluation of the situation. Then a special team of three SMERSH officers headed by Mikhail Likhachev, a deputy head of SMERSH Investigation Department, brought Fritzsche to Nuremberg. However, the main task of this team was to monitor the Soviet delegation—the prosecutors, judges, translators, and so forth. They were also tasked with preventing any discussion at the trial of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact or of Soviet responsibility for the massacre of 22,000 captured Polish officers executed in 1940 in the Katyn Forest and two other places.65
After one of the Soviet military prosecutors, General Nikolai Zorya, was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head in his hotel room during the trial, it became evident that problems existed within the Soviet delegation. The official Soviet statement claimed that the death was due to ‘the incautious usage of a fire-arm by General Zorya’.66 But according to Zorya’s son, Likhachev or one of his men killed Prosecutor Zorya to prevent a discussion of the Katyn Forest massacre.
At the same time, in early 1946, SMERSH prepared a series of trials in Moscow against a number of old White Russian generals who had been captured in Europe and Manchuria, including former Soviet General Andrei Vlasov. The most important defendants were tried in closed sessions of the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court. Only a few short sentences announcing the generals’ executions were published in the press. However, these trials took place after the end of SMERSH and will be discussed in another book.
The formal end of SMERSH came in May 1946, when it was merged with the former NKGB, which was now renamed the MGB (State Security Ministry). Abakumov became head of the MGB, and key personnel from SMERSH headquarters in Moscow and from the front directorates took over the key positions in the MGB. As MGB minister, Abakumov supervised not only military counterintelligence but also foreign intelligence and civilian domestic counterintelligence within the USSR, which were the main functions of the former NKGB. He continued to report directly to Stalin, and the MGB became the primary tool for carrying out Stalin’s purges and repressions from 1946 until 1951, when Abakumov himself was arrested. The famous Leningrad Case and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Case were only two of the important prosecutions prepared by Abakumov and the MGB in the late 1940s.
In Eastern Europe, the former SMERSH front directorates were converted into the MGB directorates of the Soviet occupation armies. Their function remained the same as during the war—finding spies and traitors within Soviet troops and purging local areas of Soviet political enemies. Hundreds of people were arrested or kidnapped and sent to the Soviet Union. Many times they were simply grabbed off the streets, and their family and friends never knew what had happened to them. Abakumov’s first deputy, Nikolai Selivanovsky, supervised the purges in Poland. One of Abakumov’s assistants, Pyotr Timofeev, controlled the situation in Romania. The former head of one of SMERSH’s front directorates, Mikhail Belkin, oversaw events in Hungary.67 In Western Europe, SMERSH operatives worked under the cover of the staff of the Plenipotentiary on Repatriation, Colonel General Fyodor Golikov.
Former SMERSH officers also worked in Eastern Europe as MGB advisers to the local, newly organized pro-Soviet state security services and participated in the preparation of East European show trials. Belkin and Kartashov were responsible for arrests and trials in Budapest, while Likhachev interrogated prisoners in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Since these officers reported directly to Abakumov, and Abakumov reported to Stalin, Stalin’s control over these trials was assured.
The majority of the important SMERSH prisoners captured during and just after the war were kept and interrogated in Moscow investigation prisons until 1948, when they were sentenced. The rest remained in these prisons until 1950–52, when they were finally tried. Many of them, including former foreign diplomats, were accused of spying; the bizarre paragraph 4 of Article 58, ‘assistance to the world bourgeoisie’, was also frequently used. The luckiest spies and traitors were tried between May 26, 1947 and January 12, 1950, during a period when the death sentence was replaced by 25-year imprisonment in labor camps. There was a practical, not a humane, reason behind this abolition: with the loss of many millions of men during the war, Stalin needed unpaid workers to help restore industry.
In February–March 1948, special labor camps (at first six, later four more) with especially harsh conditions of life and work were created for ‘especially dangerous prisoners’, i.e. prisoners sentenced under Article 58.68 The political prisoners were separated from criminals and moved to these special camps, while the most important political prisoners, especially with 25-year terms, were put in three special prisons—Vladimir, Verkhne-Uralsk and Aleksandrovsk. New convicts convicted under Article 58 were assigned to these special labor camps and prisons exclusively. As in the Nazi concentration camps, prisoners in special camps had numbers attached to their clothes.69 Therefore, most of the important SMERSH prisoners ended up in this special penal system. In January 1953, there were 221,727 political prisoners in special camps, and 1,313 prisoners in special prisons.70
Although SMERSH existed for only three years, from 1943 to 1946, the two years prior to its formal organization (when Abakumov was chief of its direct predecessor, the UOO), and the five years after its demise (when Abakumov was head of the MGB), must be considered as part of its history. There is a continuous thread, during those ten years, of Abakumov’s special relationship with Stalin.
Until now, there has been a lack of understanding, in the historical literature, of the part played by Abakumov. Abakumov’s role as head of the UOO, SMERSH, and then the MGB was shrouded in secrecy. He was not a member of the Communist Party or Soviet government leadership, and portraits of him were not publicly displayed anywhere in the Soviet Union. Until recently, even the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, which keeps all documentary films and numerous photos of the Soviet period, did not have Abakumov’s picture. There are perhaps only seven or eight photographs of him in existence, and I know of only one occasion, in March 1946, when the newspaper Pravda published a photograph of him—sitting next to Marshal Georgii Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin. Even in the Soviet Union, very few people knew that the MGB, the most feared security service, was headed by Abakumov and not by Beria.71
In contrast, two books have been published in English about Lavrentii Beria, who was quite famous during his time in Moscow.72 Every Soviet citizen was familiar with Beria’s appearance because photographs of him were frequently published in newspapers. Also, his portraits, along with those of the other Politburo members, were posted on buildings in every city and town during official Soviet holidays—the 1st of May (International Labor Day) and the 7th of November (Bolshevik Revolution Day). Yet the period during which Beria was head of all the security services only lasted for five years, from 1938 until 1943. After the creation of SMERSH, Beria had to compete with Abakumov for influence.
From 1943 on, as NKVD Commissar, Beria was formally in charge of managing the NKVD labor camps and prisons, but through his close associate, Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria also effectively controlled the NKGB, which was responsible for foreign intelligence and internal counterintelligence. However, after 1943 he was never again, during Stalin’s life, the all-powerful security chief he had once been.
On December 29, 1945, Beria, who was still a deputy chairman of the Council of Commissars, was appointed head of the Soviet Atomic Project, while Sergei Kruglov, his devoted and rather colorless deputy, became the head of the MVD (Internal Affairs Ministry, the successor to the NKVD). Therefore, contrary to what is generally believed, from the beginning of 1946 until Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Beria did not head any of the Soviet secret services. As a member of the Politburo, each of which was assigned a group of ministries to supervise, for the next year Beria oversaw the work of the MGB and MVD, as well as that of ten other ministries, although this supervision was primarily administrative. In February 1947 even this supervisory role was taken away. In July 1947 Abakumov refused to follow Beria’s orders regarding the construction of facilities by the MGB for the atomic project.73
By September 1947 it was clear that Beria had lost all control over the state security services. Abakumov, on the contrary, continued to amass power, managing to get several MVD directorates incorporated into his MGB. In terms of his control over state security, Abakumov was far more powerful from 1946 to 1951 than Beria had been from 1938 to 1943.
In 1947, Abakumov’s MGB lost responsibility for foreign intelligence (its 1st Main Directorate) when Stalin merged it, along with military intelligence (GRU or the Main Intelligence Directorate) and diplomatic and Party intelligence services, into a new organization called the Committee on Information. Undaunted, in October 1949, Abakumov established a new 1st Directorate, charged with counterintelligence on foreigners and on Soviet personnel abroad. It was headed by Colonel Georgii Utekhin, who had headed departments in SMERSH headquarters that were in charge of capturing enemy agents in the Red Army rear and sending SMERSH agents to the German intelligence schools.
As he had done to so many people before, Stalin decided to purge Abakumov, and on July 12, 1951, he was arrested. Many high-ranking SMERSH officers, including Selivanovsky, Likhachev, Belkin, and Utekhin, were also detained. By the beginning of 1953 Stalin pretended that he had nothing to do with the appointment of Abakumov as MGB minister. Stalin told those investigating Abakumov’s case that in 1946 Beria had insisted on Abakumov’s appointment and that was why he ‘did not like Beria and did not trust him’.74 Apparently, Stalin was preparing to use the Abakumov case as a tool against Beria.
Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as the Soviet leader soon after Stalin’s death in March 1953, played a big part in concealing Abakumov’s real role. During the de-Stalinization campaign that started with Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress in 1956 and continued at the Twenty-second Congress in 1961, as well as in a series of speeches at other Party meetings, Khrushchev repeatedly mentioned Abakumov as ‘an accomplice’ of Beria. Apparently, Khrushchev wanted to make Beria the primary villain of the Stalin period in order to expedite Beria’s speedy trial and execution at the end of 1953. By the way, the text of Khrushchev’s speech of 1956, published in many languages that same year, appeared in press in the Soviet Union only in 1989.
After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Beria was appointed first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Interior Affairs (MVD). This was a new MVD that included both previous ministries, the MGB and the MVD. In other words, Beria restored the monolithic NKVD structure that had been in effect from 1941–43. However, the new MVD was much bigger than the NKVD of 1941–43, and Beria acquired enormous power.
To counter this threat, Georgii Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Khrushchev united, and on June 26, 1953, with the help of Georgii Zhukov, first deputy Defense Minister, Beria was arrested as an alleged spy and enemy of the people. On December 23, 1953, the Special Session of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced Beria to death and he was executed. Beria’s longtime colleagues—Vsevolod Merkulov, Vladimir Dekanozov, Bogdan Kobulov, and Sergei Goglidze, whom he brought from the Caucasus in 1938, as well as Pavel Meshik and Lev Vlodzimersky, who became his trusted men in Moscow—were also convicted and shot.
The investigation of Abakumov continued for a year after Beria’s execution. When Roman Rudenko, the newly appointed Soviet chief prosecutor, was interrogating Abakumov in 1953–54, he tried in vain to connect Abakumov with Beria. Abakumov firmly stated: ‘I’ve never visited Beria’s apartment or his dacha. We had a strictly official, working relationship, and nothing else.’75
Abakumov and his devoted men—Aleksandr Leonov, former head of the SMERSH Investigation Department, and two of his deputies, Likhachev and Vladimir Komarov, as well as Ivan Chernov, former head of SMERSH’s Secretariat, and his deputy Yakov Broverman—were tried by a special session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court in Leningrad from 12–19 December, 1954.76 As ‘a member of Beria’s gang’, Abakumov was accused of treason against the Motherland, terrorism, counter revolutionary acts, and so forth. None of these accusations made any sense. Abakumov pleaded not guilty, stating that ‘Stalin gave instructions, and I only followed them’.77 This was true. As Chernov recalled, during the announcement of the death verdict ‘not a muscle moved in Abakumov’s face, as if the announcement did not concern him’.78 Abakumov, Leonov, Likhachev, and Komarov were executed on December 19, 1954, immediately after the trial. Chernov and Broverman were sentenced to imprisonment in labor camps, for 15 and 25 years respectively.
At that time, Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party and, no doubt, approved the indictments and outcome of the trial. Having been a member of Stalin’s inner circle, Khrushchev had, of course, signed off on many of Stalin’s orders between 1937 and 1953. According to some sources, when Khrushchev came to power, he also ordered the destruction of archival documents pertaining to his role in the Great Terror, during which, as first Party secretary of Moscow and the Moscow Province (oblast), he sanctioned thousands of arrests and executions.
Abakumov was one of the few people who, because of his close relationship with Stalin in 1943–51, knew the intimate details of how decisions were made by Stalin and the Politburo, including Khrushchev. Also, Abakumov and his leading investigators received personal instructions from Stalin and Politburo members regarding whom to arrest and what torture to apply. Obviously, Abakumov was a man who knew too much. After his trial, he was determined to share his knowledge. According to the memoirs of the executioner, he shot Abakumov in the back of the head while Abakumov was screaming, ‘I will write about everything to the Politburo.’ He was dead before he finished pronouncing the word ‘Politburo’.79
But even before Beria was arrested, soon after Stalin’s death political prisoners who had managed to survive the purges began to be released from labor camps and prisons.80 This process continued for a few years. However, in order to receive a residency permit to live in Moscow or Leningrad, or obtain a professional job, former prisoners needed to be ‘rehabilitated’.
Being rehabilitated constituted an official recognition that the political prisoner had been convicted unlawfully and restored the person’s civil rights.81 By April 1, 1954, 448,344 prisoners sentenced for committing ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ were still in the labor camps and prisons.82In May 1954 the specially created Central Commission for reconsidering the cases of those sentenced for ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ started work, and the Military Collegium also began to reconsider many political cases even before Khrushchev’s historical speech about Stalin’s crimes in February 1956. Soon it appeared that in thousands of cases, including military ones, there was no family member to whom the Military Collegium could report the rehabilitation, since the whole family had perished in purges.83 As for imprisoned foreigners, they were released and repatriated, mostly in 1954–56.
The following statistics cast light on the enormous work of rehabilitation: from 1918 to 1958, 6,100,000 arrestees were convicted in the Soviet Union of committing anti-Soviet (political) crimes, of whom 1,650,000 were executed.84 Of the total number, approximately 1,400,000 political convicts had in fact committed the alleged crimes (for instance, those who joined the Nazi troops and security services during the war), and 4,700,000 were absolutely innocent. Additionally, there were between 2.5 and 7.0 million people, spetspereselentsy (special deportees), sent into exile before and during the war.
In 1960 the infamous ‘political’ Article 58 was abolished, but it did not disappear completely. The new, ‘Khrushchev’ Criminal Code included separate articles on treason, espionage, terrorism, sabotage, and wrecking. But paragraph 58-10 (anti-Soviet propaganda) was transformed into Article 70: ‘Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda being carried out in order to undermine or weaken the Soviet power…and dissemination, production or keeping works of the same content in the written, printed or other form for the same purpose is punished by imprisonment from six months to seven years and an additional exile from one to five years.’ Article 72 stipulated the same punishment for being a member of an anti-Soviet organization. As before, the NKVD/MGB, now the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or State Security Committee; Table 1-1), investigated such crimes.
In 1966, after Leonid Brezhnev (Communist Party leader from 1964–82) replaced Khrushchev, Article 190-1 was additionally introduced in the code. It stated that ‘a systematic dissemination of undoubtedly false fabrications that slander the Soviet power… is punished by imprisonment up to three years’. Since the 1960s, Soviet political dissidents were sentenced mostly under Article 70 or 190-1. However, some writers and poets were tried as ‘social parasites’ (tuneyadtsy).
In 1983–84, during the short tenure of Yurii Andropov, a long-time KGB chairman before he became general (first) Party secretary (Table 1-1), a new paragraph was included in Article 70 that made financial support of political prisoners and their families from abroad a crime, and Paragraph 3 was additionally introduced in Article 188, stating that ‘intentional disobedience’ to the camp’s administration—which could be, for instance, an undone button on the prisoner’s shirt—was punished by up to five years’ imprisonment. Potentially this article meant that a political prisoner would not ever be released.
Of course, the number of prisoners sentenced in the 1960s–80s for committing ‘anti-Soviet crimes’ was small compared with the political convicts of Stalin’s time, but political charges existed until 1989, when Articles 70 and 190-1 were finally abolished. For example, in 1976 there were 851 political prisoners in labor camps and Vladimir Prison, and of those, 261 were sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 70).85 Additionally, the KGB warned up to 36,000 potential perpetrators whom it suspected of anti-Soviet activity.
The rehabilitation process stopped for a few years during Brezhnev’s time, but then it continued. By January 1, 2002, more than 4,000,000 former political prisoners had been rehabilitated. Except for a small group of Nazi collaborators like General Andrei Vlasov and his confidants, some White Russians, leaders of Soviet security services and real Nazis, all Soviet and many foreign prisoners mentioned in this book were rehabilitated. In other words, almost every serviceman, as well as most of the foreigners arrested by Soviet military counterintelligence during World War II and just after it, were innocent.
In the 1990s–2000s, there were even attempts to rehabilitate Beria and Abakumov. In May 2000, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused an application by the members of Beria’s family to overturn the 1953 conviction.86The court ruled that Beria and his accomplices could not be politically rehabilitated because of their crimes against the Soviet people. But the court found Dekanozov, Meshik, and Vlodzimersky guilty of abuse of authority, rather than of crimes against the state covered by Article 58 of Stalin’s time, and the sentence for them was posthumously changed from death to 25 years’ imprisonment.
A few years later, following the trend of security services-affiliated historians toward glorifying Stalin and his men, a 798-page book entitled Beria: The Best Manager of the 20th Century was published in Russia.87 It not only glorifies Beria, but also tries to persuade the reader that the crimes Beria committed were necessary for the progress of the Soviet economy, winning the war against Hitler, and successfully fighting the Cold War.
During the 1990s, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation twice considered Abakumov and his co-defendants’ political rehabilitation.88 In July 1997, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court found Abakumov, Leonov, Likhachev, Komarov, and Broverman guilty of abuse of authority, but not of political crimes. In December 1997, the Presidium of the Russian Federation Supreme Court posthumously changed the death sentence for these four to 25 years imprisonment in labor camps, and rescinded confiscation of property for all defendants. Chernov was totally rehabilitated in 1992.
The historians and officers of the current FSB (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti or the Federal Security Service) are fond of Viktor Abakumov. One of his biographers, Oleg Smyslov, called him in the press ‘a Knight of State Security’, while the politician and former KGB Major General, Aleksei Kondaurov, maintains that Abakumov was ‘one of the KGB’s most democratic leaders’.89
The legacy of SMERSH continued with the notorious KGB, which was created in 1954. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, military counterintelligence remained within the KGB. Pyotr Ivashutin, former head of one of the SMERSH field directorates, was a KGB deputy chairman between 1954 and 1956, and then, until 1963, its first deputy chairman. Sergei Bannikov, who began his career in the OO of the Baltic Fleet and then served in the SMERSH Directorate of the Navy Commissariat, headed the 2nd KGB Main Directorate (counterintelligence) from 1964 to 1967.90 Grigorii Grigorenko, one of the radio-games organizers in the 3rd SMERSH Department (he participated in 181 games), headed the same 2nd KGB Main Directorate from 1970 to 1978, and then became KGB deputy chairman, from 1978 to 1983. When Grigorenko died in 2007, an obituary in the FSB-connected newspaper Argumenty nedeli (Arguments of the Week) identified fourteen foreign spies discovered and arrested under Grigorenko’s supervision, and called him ‘a genius of Russian counterintelligence’.91
The sinister Filipp Bobkov, head of the notorious 5th KGB Directorate from 1969 to 1984, which was in charge of persecuting political dissidents, graduated from SMERSH’s Leningrad School in 1946.92 Bobkov served as a deputy, then as first deputy KGB chairman, until the end of the KGB in 1991.
During the transition of the Soviet KGB into the Russian Federation Security Ministry, the Federal Security Committee and, finally, the FSB (Table 1-1), military counterintelligence did not change much.93 In 1997, Colonel General Aleksei Molyakov, head of the FSB Military Counterintelligence Department (UVKR), told the press: ‘The situation in the Russian Federation Armed Forces is under our strong control… Military counterintelligence… has clear orders to uncover and prevent extremist and other dangerous tendencies in time… [Its] staff consists of 6,000 officers.’94 After resigning from the service, Molyakov and Lieutenant General Vladimir Petrishchev, who succeeded him as head of the UVKR in 1997 and served until 2002, joined the siloviki (‘men of power’)—a group of former highlevel KGB and military officers who became part of President Vladimir Putin’s ruling elite. Molyakov presided over the National Military Fund, which assists retired KGB/FSB and military officers, and is personally supported by Putin.
In 2005, Petrishchev was elected a member of the Highest Council of Officers or VOS.95 This eleven-member council represents the mostly retired ultra-nationalist high-ranking military, FSB, Foreign Intelligence Service, and MVD (Interior Affairs Ministry) officer community, as well as leaders of the Cossacks. Most probably, Petrishchev, a military counterintelligence professional, is not a genuine member of VOS but is just keeping an eye on its activities from the inside. He is also a member of the thinktank Fund for Development of Regions, which helps the government with economic and political decisions and the distribution of governmental funds.96
There is a representative of military counterintelligence in the Administration of the current Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev: Colonel General Vladimir Osipov, who made his career in various KGB military counterintelligence directorates, including the Moscow Military District.97From 1991 till 1998, Osipov worked at the Federal Agency for Governmental Communication and Information (formerly part of the KGB), mostly as head of its Personnel Directorate. From 1998, Osipov headed the Personnel Directorate of the administrations of all three Russian presidents: Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and, finally, Dmitrii Medvedev. In other words, from 1998 onwards, the selection of administration staff members was controlled by the siloviki, a group of former high-level KGB officers currently in power in Russia, with Vladimir Putin at their forefront. In 2009, while restructuring his administration, President Medvedev appointed Osipov head of the Administration’s Directorate for Governmental Awards, which had previously been part of the Personnel Directorate.
In 2008, Russian President Medvedev appointed a new FSB Director: Army General Aleksandr Bortnikov, a former KGB man (from 2003 to 2004, he headed St. Petersburg’s FSB branch) who was closely connected to Putin. However, the new director did not make any serious changes in the FSB, and by 2011, Colonel General Aleksandr Bezverkhny still continued to head the Military Counterintelligence Department of the FSB, as the UKVR has been called since 2001. On May 25, 2005, Bezverkhny unveiled a monument entitled ‘The Glory of Military Counterintelligence’ in the yard of a mansion occupied by the Military Counterintelligence Directorate of the Moscow Military District, at 7 Prechistenka Street in central Moscow.98 There is also a small, private military counterintelligence history museum in this building. According to the press, most of its exhibition is devoted to SMERSH. Obviously, the Russian security services are proud to claim SMERSH and its brutal activities as part of their history.
Notes
1. General information in Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, translated from the Russian by Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit Books, 1986).
2. SNK Protocol (transcript) No. 21, dated December 20, 1917. Document No. 1, in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. Organy VCheKa–OGPU–NKVD–NKGB–MGB–MVD–KGB. 1917–1991. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2003), 302–3 (in Russian).
3. Details in E. Rozin, Leninskaya mifologiya gosudarstva (Moscow: Yurist, 1996) (in Russian).
4. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
5. VCheKa Order, dated September 2, 1918. Document No. 2, in GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) 1917–1960, edited by A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov (Moscow: Materik, 2000), 14–15 (in Russian).
6. SNK Decree, dated September 5, 1918. Document No. 3 in ibid., 15; on the VCheKa history see, for instance, George Legett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operatrions from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1990), 38–64; changes in the VCheKa structure in 1917–21 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 14–24.
7. Nicolas Werth, ‘The Red Terror in the Soviet Union,’ in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repressions, edited by Stepane Curtois et al., translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, 71–81 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
8. On Dzerzhinsky’s activity see, for instance, F. E. Dzerzhinsky—predsedatel’ VChK–OGPU 1917–1926, edited by A. A. Plekhanov and A. M. Plekhanov (Moscow: Materik, 2007) (in Russian).
9. On the creation of the Red Army, see Aleksandr Melenberg, ‘Krasnyi Podarok,’ Novaya Gazeta, No. 18, February 18, 2011 (in Russian), http://www.novgaz. ru/data/2011/018/19.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
10. Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 17. On the early period of the VO/OO see A. A. Zdanovich, ‘Kak L. D. Trotsky i Revvoensovet Respubliki ‘poteryali’ kontrrazvedku,’ Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal (hereafter VIZh), no. 3 (1996): 65–73, no. 5 (1996), 75–82 (in Russian). A short overview of the OO history from 1918 to 1983 was given in Amy W. Knight, ‘The KGB’s Special Departments in the Soviet Armed Forces,’ ORBIS 28, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 257–80.
11. The first network of military counterintelligence was created in the czarist army in June 1915, during World War I. Each front (a group of armies), army, and military district had its KRO or Counterintelligence Department within the headquarters, and the network reported to the KRO within the Main Directorate of the General Staff. Details in A. A. Zdanovich, Otechestvennaya kontrrazvedka (1914–1920): Organizatsionnoe stroitel’stvo (Moscow: Kraft+, 2004), 19–62 (in Russian). On military counterintelligence (later military intelligence) abroad see B. A. Starkov, Okhotniki na shpionov. Kontrrazvedka Rossiiskoi imperii 1903–1914 (St. Petersburg: SiDiKom, 2006) (in Russian).
12. The czarist secret police consisted of three parts, details in Ch. A. Ruud and S. A. Stepanov, Fontanka, 16. Politicheskii sysk pri tsaryakh (Moscow: Mysl’, 1993), 81–172 (in Russian); Z. Peregudova, Politicheskii sysk v Rossii (1880–1917 gg.) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000).
13. Joined order of Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky and the Soviet government, dated February 3, 1919. Document No. 20, in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 330–1. In 1929, gubernii (administration regions) were renamed oblasti (provinces), and the regional OGPU branches became Provincial GPUs.
14. Instruction on the Special Departments of the VCheKa, dated February 8, 1919. Document No.21, in ibid., 331–2.
15. Details in A. G.Kavtaradze, Voennye spetsialisty na sluzhbe Respublike Sovetov (Moscow: Nauka, 1988) (in Russian).
16. Figures from tables 69 and 70 in Rossiya i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil. Statistichesloe issledovanie, edited by G. F. Krivosheev (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2001) (in Russian).
17. On Stalin’s activity during the Civil War, see, for instance, Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, edited and translated from the Russian by Harold Shukman (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 38–52, and Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2004), 163-74.
18. In 2004, after analyzing old medical records, a group of western neurologists concluded that most likely Lenin suffered and died of syphilis. V. Lerner, Y. Finkelstein, and E. Witztum, ‘The enigma of Lenin’s (1870-1924) malady,’ European Journal of Neurology 11, no. 6 (June 2004), 371–6; also, Helen Rappaport, Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 306, 355.
19. In 1948, imprisoned Trotskyists who were still alive were transferred to new camps, MVD Order No. 00219, dated February 28, 1948. Document No. 41 in GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), 135–7.
20. Detailed biography of V. P. Menzhinsky in Oleg Mozokhin and Teodor Gladkov, Menzhinskii—intelligent s Lubyanki (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005) (in Russian).
21. Details in A. A. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti i Krasnaya armiya (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2008) (in Russian).
22. Short biography of G. G. Yagoda (1891–1938) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 159–60, and details in Mikhail Il’insky, Narkom Yagoda (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005) (in Russian). Contrary to the historical facts, the author of this book, an FSB-affiliated historian, presents Yagoda as a real plotter.
23. Artuzov headed the KRO from 1922 to 1927, and from 1931 to 1935, he headed the INO. Biography of A. A. Artuzov (1891–1937) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 93–94.
24. In October 1923, Ulrikh was appointed deputy chairman of the Military Collegium. Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 34.
25. Biography of Y. K. Olsky (1891–1938) in Vadim Abramov, Kontrrazvedka. Shchit i mech protiv Abvera i TsRU (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2006), 85–101 (in Russian).
26. Stalin’s telegram to Menzhinsky dated June 23, 1927. Quoted in Aleksandr Yakovlev, ‘Glavnokomanduyyushchii predal armiyu,’ Nezavisimaya gazeta, No. 63, August 28, 2003 (in Russian), http://2003.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/2003/63n/n63n-s23.shtml, retrieved September, 2011.
27. L. P. Belyakov, ‘Shakhtinskoe delo,’ in Repressirovannye geologi, edited by L. P. Belikov and Ye. M. Zabolotsky, 395–8 (Moscow: Ministerctvo prirodnykh resursov, 1999) (in Russian). Recently the OGPU files of this case were declassified and the first volume of these materials was published: Shakhtinskii protsess 1928 g. Podgotovka, provedenie, itogi. Kniga 1, edited by S. A. Krasil’nikov et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011) (in Russian).
28. On the career of Ye. G. Yevdokimov (1891–1940) and his role in the Shakhtinskoe delo see Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ‘Agency and Terror: Evdokimov and Mass Killing in Stalin’s Great Terror,’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 53, no. 1 (March 2007), 26–43.
29. V. Goncharov and V. Nekhotin, ‘Dela “Prompartii” i “Trudovoi krest’yanskoi partii (TKP)” (1930–1932)’ in Prosim osvobodit’ iz tyuremnogo zaklyucheniya, edited by V. Goncharov and V. Nekhotin (Moscow: Sovremennyi pisatel’, 1998), 173–7 (in Russian).
30. Krylenko’s speech on December 4, 1930. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn discusses Krylenko’s role in the promotion of confessions in political cases in Archipelago Gulag, Vol. 1.
31. A. Ya. Vyshinsky, Teoriya sudebnykh dokazatel’stv v sovetskom prave (Moscow: Yuridicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1941), 180–1 (in Russian).
32. Details in Ya. Yu. Tinchenko, Golgofa russkogo ofitserstva v SSSR. 1930–1931 gody (Moscow: Moskovskii obshchestvennyi nauchnyi fond, 2000) (in Russian), N. Cherushev, ‘Nevinovnykh ne byvaet…’ Chekisty protiv voennykh, 1918–1953 (Moscow: Veche, 2004), 147–99 (in Russian), and a review in Degtyarev and Kolpakidi, SMERSH, 55–59; Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 376–93.
33. Ibid., 370–2.
34. Biography of I. M. Leplevsky (1896–1938) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 270–1.
35. Politburo decision P55/26/3, dated August 10, 1931. Document No. 274 in Lubyanka. Stalin i VChK–GPU–OGPU–NKVD. Yanvar’1922–dekabr’ 1936, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 280 (Moscow: Materik, 2004) (in Russian).
36. Zdanovich, Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 507.
37. S. A. Kropachev, ‘Politicheskie repressii v SSSR 1937–1938 godov: prichiny, masshtaby, posledstviya’ (2007) (in Russian), http://www.kubanmemo.ru/library/Kropachev01/repress37_38.php, retrieved September 4, 2011. On the Tukhachevsky case, see N. Cherushev, 1937 god: elita Krasnoi Armii na Golgofe (Moscow: Veche, 2003) and Yuliya Kantor, Voina i mir Mikhaila Tukhachevskogo (Moscow: Vremya, 2005) (both in Russian)..
38. In 1937–38, Stalin personally ordered beatings, signing an order on January 10, 1939 to apply ‘physical treatment’ (torture) to the arrested ‘enemies of people.’ Document No. 8 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR ‘Smersh.’ 1939–mart 1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 14–15 (Moscow: Materik, 2006) (in Russian).
39. A short biography of G. G. Yagoda (1897–1938) in N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934–1941. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya 1999), 459–60 (in Russian). Details in Mikhail Il’insky, Narkom Yagoda (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005) (in Russian). Contrary to the facts, the author, an FSB-affiliated historian, presents Yagoda as a real plotter.
40. Data from O. F. Suvenirov, Tragediya RKKA. 1937-1938 (Moscow: Terra, 1998), 317 (in Russian). Additional information on the mechanism of repressionsions in the Red Army and Navy in Vladimir Khaustovand Lennart Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD i repressii 1936-1938 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 189–227 (in Russian).
41. Data from Table 2 in Michael Parrish, Sacrifice of the Generals: Soviet Senior Officer Losses, 1939–1945 (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press. Inc., 2004), xvii.
42. Perepiska Borisa Pasternaka, edited by Yelena V. Pasternak and Yevgenii B. Pasternak (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1990), 160 (in Russian).
43. On Stalin’s presumed paranoia, see, for instance, Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin. A Psychoanalytic Study (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1988). In his last biography of Stalin, Robert Service cautiously characterized Stalin in the 1930s as a person with ‘a deeply disordered personality’ (Stalin: A Biography [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2005], 344).
44. Oleg Khlevnyuk, Khozyain. Stalin i utverzhdenie stalinskoi diktatury (Moscow: Rosspen, 2010), 302 (in Russian).
45. Photo of this document with Stalin’s editorial notes in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i arkhivnye materialy, edited by V. S. Khristoforov, V. K. Vinogradov, O. K. Matveev, et al. (Moscow: Glavarkhiv Moskvy, 2003), 67 (in Russian).
46. GKO (State Defense Committee) Order No. 3222ss/ov on the creation of GUKR ‘SMERSH,’ dated April 21, 1943. Document No. 151, in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 623–6.
47. Daniil Fibikh, ‘Frontovye dnevniki 1942–1943 gg.,’ Novyi Mir, no. 5 (2010) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/2010/5/fi2.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
48. Nicola Sinevirsky, SMERSH (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950); ‘Romanov,’ Nights Are Longest There.
49. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 121–6.
50. In the military history literature, a Soviet ‘front’ is sometimes called ‘an army group.’ See Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, 426.
51. See details in Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia, 1944–47 (London: Deutsch, 1974); Nikolai Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977); J. Hoffmann, Istoriya vlasovskoi armii (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1990), 231–62 (in Russian, translated from the German).
52. Count Bethlen died in the Butyrka Prison Hospital in 1946, while Antonescu and several of his ministers were handed over to Romanian state security. In May 1946, they faced trial in Bucharest and were condemned to death and executed on June 1, 1946.
53. The literature on Raoul Wallenberg is vast, and many documents about his activities in Hungary have been published. See for instance Jeno Levai, Raoul Wallenberg. His Remarkable Life, Heroic Battles and The Secret of His Mysterious Disappearance, translated into English by Frank Vajda (Melbourne, Australia: The University of Melbourne, 1989). Unfortunately, the description of Wallenberg’s captivity is given incorrectly in all his biographies in English, because the authors used old and unreliable sources.
54. For a brief discussion of Wallenberg’s incarceration and death in Moscow, see V. B. Birstein, ‘The Secret of Cell Number Seven,’ Nezavisimaya gazeta, April 25, 1991, 4; ‘Interrogations in Lubyanka,’ Novoe vremya, no. 1 (1993), 42–43; and ‘Raoul Wallenberg: The Story of Death,’ Evreiskie novosti, no. 2 (July 2002), 6. All in Russian, but the English version of these articles is available at http://www.vadimbirstein.com.
55. Texts of several testimonies written by Stolze, Pieckenbrock and Bentivegni in 1945–47 while being detained by SMERSH and MGB are given in Julius Mader, Hitlers Spionagegenerale sagen aus (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1977).
56. The Rote Kapelle: The CIA’s History of Soviet Intelligence and Espionage Networks in Western Europe, 1936–1945 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, Inc., 1979), 110, 126–8, and others.
57. A book by Irina Bezborodova entitled Wehrmacht Generals in Captivity, published in Russian in 1998 (Generaly Vermakhta v plenu [Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet]), unfortunately introduced some misunderstandings of the fate of a number of German general POWs in the Soviet Union.
58. Mohnke’s Archival–Investigation File H-21144, FSB Central Archive, a photocopy at the USHMM Archive, RG-06.052.
59. See details in Vladimir A. Kozlov, ‘Gde Gitler?’ Povtornoe rassledovanie NKVD-MVD SSSR obstoyatel’st ischeznoveniya Adolfa Gitlera (1945–1949) (Moscow: Modest Kolyarov, 2003) (in Russian).
60. Rehabilitated in 1994. Rasstrel’nye spiski. Moskva 1935–1953, 340.
61. Data from Shun Akifusa’s Prisoner Card in the Vladimir Prison Archive.
62. Vasilevsky’s order, dated August 22, 1945, and Beria’s order, dated August 23, 1945, Document Nos. 474 and 475 in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Sovetsko-yaponskaya voina, T. 18 (7-2) (Moscow: TERRA, 2000), 102–3 (in Russian).
63. L. G. Mishchenko, Poka ya pomnyu… (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2006), 80 (in Russian).
64. The Soviets participated only in the International Military Tribunal and the Trial of the Major War Criminals (November 1945–October 1946), which I call here ‘the International Nuremberg Trial.’ Most Russians are not aware of the twelve American Subsequent Nuremberg Trials that followed from 1946–49.
65. The most updated description of the Katyn Forest massacre is given in Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, edited by Ann M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
66. Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 417.
67. In some Western sources, Belkin is identified with the first name ‘Fyodor’ or ‘Fedor’ instead of Mikhail. See, for instance, George H. Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954 (New York: Praeger, 1987), 30.
68. Document Nos. 41 and 42 in Kokurin and Petrov, GULAG, 136–41.
69. Document No. 132 in ibid., 555–67.
70. Quoted in A. S. Smykalov, ‘’Osobye lagerya’ i ‘osbye tyur’my’ v sisteme ispravitel’no-trudovykh uchrezhdenii sovetskogo gosudarstva v 40–50-e gody,’ Gosudarstvo i pravo, no. 5 (1997), 84–91 (in Russian).
71. For example, the memoir of a Soviet Nuremberg Trial translator written in the 1990s mistakenly claims that the SMERSH group in Nuremberg was supervised by Beria rather than Abakumov. T. S. Stupnikova, ‘Nichego krome pravdy:’ Niurenberg–Moskva. Vospominaniya (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1998), 60 and 101 (in Russian).
72. Thaddeus Wittlin, Commissar: The Life and Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (New York: Macmillan, 1972); this book, written before archival revelations, contains a lot of incorrect information. Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); also, Chapter 8 in Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (New York: Random House, 2004), 341–87.
73. Arkhiv noveishei istorii Rossii, T. IV. ‘Osobaya papka L. P. Berii.’ Iz materialov Sekretariata NKVD–MVD SSSR 1946–1949 gg. Katalog dokumentov, edited by V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenko, 254 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1996) (in Russian).
74. A letter of V. N. Zaichikov to the Central Committee, dated July 16, 1953, quoted in Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 129 (in Russian).
75. Cited in Kirill Stolyarov Palachi i zhertvy (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1997), 88 (in Russian).
76. Biographies of Ya. M. Broverman (1908–?), V. I. Komarov (1916–1954), A. G. Leonov (1905–1954), M. T. Likhachev (1913–1954), and I. A. Chernov (1906–1991) in Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gosbezopasnosti, 220, 479, 541–2, 548, and 906.
77. Cited in Stolyarov Palachi i zhertvy, 104.
78. Chernov’s recollections in ibid., 98.
79. The executioner Colonel Talanov’s words cited in Stolyarov, Palachi i zhertvy, 106.
80. V. P. Naumov, ‘K istorii sekretnogo doklada N. S. Khrushcheva na XX s’ezde KPSS,’ Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, no. 4 (1996), 147–68 (in Russian).
81. The legal aspect in V. N. Kudryavtsev and A. I. Trusov, Politicheskaya yustitsiya v SSSR (St. Petersburg: Yuridicheskii tsentr Press, 2002), 343–58 (in Russian) and A. G. Petrov, Reabilitatsiya zhertv politicheskikh repressii: opyt istoricheskogo analiza (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo INION RAN, 2005) (in Russian).
82. O. B. Mozokhin, Pravo na repressii. Vnesudebmyepolnomochiya organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (1918-1953) (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2006), 243 (in Russian).
83. A. Muranov and V. Zavenyagin, Sud nad sud’yami (osobaya papka Ulrikha) (Kazan: Kazan, 1993), 60–61 (in Russian).
84 Kudryavtsev and Trusov, Politicheskaya yustitsiya, 329–35.
85. Leonid Mlechin, in Vladimir Kozlov, Neizvestnyi SSSR. Protivostoyanie naroda i vlasti 1953–1985 (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2006), 13–14 (in Russian).
86. Andrei Sukhomlinov, Kto vy, Lavrentii Beria? (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2004), 449–52 (in Russian).
87. Sergei Kremlev [apparently, a pen name made up from the word ‘the Kremlin’], Beria. Luchshii menedger XX veka (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2008) (in Russian); the second edition was published in 2011.
88. Vadim Abramov, Abakumov—nachal’nik SMERSHa—Vzlyot i padenie lyubimtsa Stalina (Moscow: Yauza, 2005), 205–6 (in Russian).
89. Oleg Smyslov, ‘Rytsar’ GB,’ Rossia, June 9-15, 2005, 8 (in Russian).
90. Biography of S. G. Bannikov (1921-1989) in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 254.
91. Stanislav Lekarev, ‘Umer genii rossiiskoi kontrrazvedki,’ Argumenty nedeli, no. 22 (56), May 31, 2007, http://www.argumenti.ru/espionage/2007/06/34624/, retrieved September 4, 2011.
92. Biography of F. D. Bobkov (b. 1925) in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 256–7.
93. The current FSB structure in Andrei Soldatov and Irina Bogoraz, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and The Enduring Legacy of the KGB (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 243–6.
94. Molyakov’s interview in Igor Korotchenko, ‘Voennaya kontrrazvedka ne dopustit vooruzhennogo myatezha,’ Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 19, 1997 (in Russian).
95. ‘Obrazovan Vysshii Ofitserskii Sovet,’ http://rusk.ru/st.php?idar=103107, retrieved September 4, 2011.
96. Vladimir Petrishchev, ‘Rossii nuzhna svoya ideya,’ Vremya novostei, No. 98, June 6, 2005 (in Russian).
97. ‘Kadroviku prezidenta porucheno sosredotochit’sya na nagradakh,’ Pravo. ru, October 15, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.pravo.ru/news/view/18706, retrieved September 4, 2011.
98. ‘V Moskve otkryt monument slavy voennoi kontrrazvedki,’ Interfax-AVN, May 5, 2005 (in Russian), http://www.chekist.ru/?news_id=742, retrieved March 16, 2011.