CHAPTER 22
Within a year of its creation, SMERSH was more powerful than the NKGB and NKVD. The growing power of Abakumov and SMERSH made Beria determined to restore his own power over all security services. On May 5, 1944, Beria was promoted to deputy chairman of the GKO, which made him Stalin’s deputy. He was also chairman of the Operational Bureau of the GKO in charge of routine GKO work. Beria thus became responsible for the work of all branches of the defense industry, the NKVD, the NKGB, and the daily work of the GKO. By 1945, he also received partial control over SMERSH.
Beria Gains Control
On January 11, 1945, the activities of NKVD, NKGB, and SMERSH were newly coordinated under Beria as a system of NKVD plenipotentiaries (upolnomochennye, meaning representatives) and their staffs at the fronts.1 Seven such plenipotentiaries were appointed ‘to cleanse the rears of Red Army fronts of enemy elements.’ High-level officials from the NKVD, NKGB, and SMERSH were chosen to be the plenipotentiaries (Table 22-1).
Abakumov became NKVD Plenipotentiary to the 3rd Belorussian Front, Abakumov’s first deputy, Nikolai Selivanovsky, became Plenipotentiary to the 4th Ukrainian Front, and Pavel Meshik was appointed Plenipotentiary to the 1st Ukrainian Front. Heads of UKRs and of the NKVD rear guard troops at the fronts were automatically made deputy plenipotentiaries. This move subordinated Abakumov, two of his deputies, and the heads of UKRs to Beria. Ivan Serov, Beria’s deputy, was appointed Plenipotentiary to the 1st Belorussian Front, and he soon became one of Abakumov’s principal enemies. Through Serov, Beria controlled events in Poland until April 1945, when Selivanovsky was put in charge of the country.
Table 22-1. NKVD PLENIPOTENTIARIES AND THEIR DEPUTIES, JANUARY 11–JULY 4, 1945¹
A Special Operational Group was created in Moscow to coordinate and oversee the activities of the NKVD plenipotentiaries.2 Boris Lyudvigov, deputy head of the NKVD Secretariat and a devoted Beria man, was appointed as its head.
There were reasons for coordinating the three Soviet security services, beyond Beria’s desire to gain control over them. At the beginning of 1945, the activity of groups of German terrorists in the rear of advancing Soviet troops intensified.3 On February 8, 1945, Aleksandr Vadis, head of the UKR of the 1st Belorussian Front, reported to Moscow that ‘of 184 [German] agents discovered by “SMERSH” during January 1945, 124 agents had orders to carry out sabotage and terrorist acts.’4 According to other SMERSH reports, the German intelligence services had tried unsuccessfully to replicate what the Soviet partisan movement did in the rear of the German armies in the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories. Small SMERSH operational groups became prey for the German terrorists. However, Soviet troops were advancing so fast that the German secret services did not have enough time to organize a widespread partisan movement.
After appointing plenipotentiaries, the NKVD–NKGB–SMERSH joint operations got under way immediately. On January 15, 1945, Abakumov reported to Beria on the organization of special NKVD groups at the 3rd Belorussian Front:
1. Six operational groups were created for Chekist work [i.e., the arrest and screening of Germans] at the areas of each army of [the 3rd Belorussian] Front.
The groups consist of a head, two deputy heads (one in charge of the NKVD troops), twenty operatives, and two translators. Each group is supported by an NKVD regiment.
Additionally, a reserve consisting of operatives [SMERSH officers] and NKVD troops was created for special tasks.
Detailed instructions were given to every member of the group… They were told to find and immediately arrest spies, saboteurs, and terrorists of the intelligence organs of the enemy; members of the bandit-insurgent groups; members of fascist and other organizations; leaders and operational staff of the police, and other suspicious individuals; and also to confiscate depots of weapons, radio transmitters, and technical equipment left by the enemy for [sabotage] work.
The operational groups were instructed to pay special attention to these measures in the towns and big villages, train stations, and industrial plants.
On January 16 of this year, the operational groups, together with the NKVD troops, will be sent to their destination.
Each group received 10 trucks for the transportation of the arrestees and for operational needs…
[…]
Additionally, [I] asked Headquarters to intensify the guarding of water reservoirs and wells to prevent enemy agents from poisoning them…
3. We are preparing a prison to hold the arrestees to be transported from East Prussia.5
The activity of such NKVD operational groups (their staffs included NKVD, NKGB and SMERSH officers) was also described in the order by Lavrentii Tsanava, Plenipotentiary to the 2nd Belorussian Front:
January 22, 1945
Top Secret
No. 10 s/s
To: Commanders of all NKVD operational groups
Heads of all OKR SMERSH of the armies
Commanders of all regiments of the NKVD Troops Guarding the Rear of the 2nd Belorussian Front
[…] We suggest:
1. During the movement of Red Army troops an NKVD group should move along with the advancing detachments so, after the troops enter a town or a built-up area, the group would be able to immediately capture [all spies, agents, terrorists, etc., ‘despite their nationality or citizenship’]6, weapons, lists, archives and other documents.
An operational group should be led by its commander or his deputy, together with a battalion of the NKVD troops.
2. An operational group that follows the advancing Red Army detachments should be located near SMERSH departments…
3. For cleansing the towns and their suburbs taken over by the Red Army from the enemy elements, it is necessary to leave operational groups supported by the necessary number of troops and to have constant connection with these groups.
The experienced operational officers should be commanders of such groups.
4. Persons arrested by the operation groups and those received from SMERSH organs should be concentrated in specially organized detaining places with reliable military guards which would exclude the opportunity of escape efforts.
The most important prisoners should be [immediately] investigated to discover the underground counterrevolutionary organizations and arrest their participants in time.
5. The most important arrestees—spies, saboteurs, terrorists, leaders of various insurgent or bandit organizations, official members of the intelligence and counterintelligence organizations of the enemy—should be handed over to the Investigation Department of the Counterintelligence Directorate SMERSH of the Front.
[…]
NKVD Plenipotentiary at the 2nd Belorussian Front,
Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank L. Tsanava
Deputy NKVD Plenipotentiary at the 2nd Belorussian Front,
Lieutenant General [Ya.] Yedunov
Deputy NKVD Plenipotentiary at the 2nd Belorussian Front,
Major General [V.] Rogatin.7
Actually, the activity of these groups almost repeated what the German Abwehrgroups did in Soviet territory in 1941.
East Prussia
In February 1945, on Stalin’s order, Abakumov and his operatives inspected the remains of Hitler’s Wolfschanze HQ in Rastenburg in the conquered part of East Prussia.8 SMERSH operational groups from the 3rd Belorussian Front and the 57th Rifle Division of the NKVD Interior Troops participated in this operation. Although not much was left after the bunkers were blown up following Hitler’s departure on November 20, 1944, Abakumov reported to Moscow: ‘I think our specialists would be interested in inspecting Hitler’s headquarters and seeing these well-organized bunkers.’9 A few months later Abakumov and a team of SMERSH investigators returned to Rastenburg with a German prisoner, Major Joachim Kuhn, a participant in the military plot against Hitler. With Kuhn’s guidance, SMERSH investigators found the plotters’ hidden plans to kill Hitler, as well as other documents.
East Prussia was occupied by the troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front under Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky’s command (which included Abakumov’s SMERSH Directorate). Its capital, Koenigsberg, was besieged and finally taken over on April 6–9. Paul Born, a German veteran, described a Soviet attack in East Prussia:
[Our] experienced veterans…knew that after the third whistle the Russians would attack. And as proof, a shouting crowd emerged from the forest and ran toward us…
When there were only 100 meters between us, [our] commander ordered us to open fire…We stood up against the first attack…
The next time two crowds were already rushing at us from the forest after the third whistle. Even after our heavy machine gun opened fire at them at a distance of 100 meters, we could not stop them…
Everyone was firing without interruption and aiming at the middle of a slowly approaching crowd of completely drunk, shouting people.10
During the occupation, numerous Red Army units committed unspeakable atrocities against the civilian German population. Soviet Lieutenant Leonid Rabichev, who later became a writer and artist, recalled a typical scene on the Prussian roads:
In carts, cars, and on foot, old men, women, and children—entire huge families—slowly moved along all the roads and highways of the country to the west.
Our tank crews, infantrymen, artillerists, and members of the Signal Corps caught up to them and, to clear the way, threw them into the ditches on the sides… They pushed aside old people and children and, forgetting about honor and dignity and the retreating German troops, assaulted women and girls by the thousands.
Women, mothers and their daughters, lay to the right and left of the highway, and a crowd of laughing men with half-lowered pants stood in front of each of them.
Those who were already bleeding and fainting were pulled aside, and the children who rushed to their aid were shot on the spot. Loud laughter, roars, cries, and moaning were heard. Commanders, majors, and colonels, stood along the highway laughing or directing…each of their soldiers to participate [in the rapes]. This was not revenge on the damned invaders, but hellish deadly gang rape, an opportunity to do anything without punishment or personal responsibility…
The colonel, who at first was just directing, joined the line himself, as the major shot witnesses, children, and old people who were hysterical.11
This was a common attitude toward the Germans. The head of a political department of the NKVD border guard corps reported to his superiors: ‘The medical doctor of the 1st Rifle Battalion reported that…the servicemen… told her, “It is a pleasure to see a pretty German girl crying in your arms.”’12 Neither Vasilevsky nor Abakumov stopped the atrocities.
Apparently, Stalin did not care what was going on in East Prussia because it was a territory targeted to become part of Russia after being cleansed of the German population. On April 20, 1945, after the troops of the 1st Belorussian (Zhukov, commander in chief) and the 1st Ukrainian (Konev, commander in chief) fronts entered the territory that would become East Germany, Stalin signed a directive to the military councils of these fronts:
The Stavka of the Supreme Command orders:
1. Try to change the attitude [of troops] toward the Germans—toward POWs, as well as civilians. The Germans must be treated better. The cruel treatment of the Germans forces them to fear [the troops], and creates obstinate resistance and a refusal to be taken prisoner. The civilian population is organizing gangs because it fears [Soviet] revenge. This situation is not in our favor. A more humane attitude toward the Germans will facilitate our military actions in their territory and, undoubtedly, will diminish the persistence of the German defense.
[…]
J. Stalin
Antonov [head of the General Staff].13
No such order was issued to the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian fronts that fought in East Prussia and Pomerania—another region of Germany later cleansed of the German population.
To implement the transition of East Prussia into a Russian territory, a special post of NKVD Plenipotentiary for the Zemland Operational Group (former 1st Baltic Front, disbanded on February 24, 1945 and turned into this group, which was now subordinated to the 3rd Belorussian Front) was created (Table 22-1). After February 1945, the title became NKVD Plenipotentiary for East Prussia, and Abakumov was acting Plenipotentiary in addition to his other duties. The HQ of this Plenipotentiary, called apparat, consisted of 40 Chekists and included six departments (operational, investigation, archival, administrative, transportation, and supplies departments, secretariat, commandant, and translators). Also, there were 17 regional and eight city groups of 8 to 14 men each, which conducted operational work, and four prisons located in old German prisons.
In East Prussia, SMERSH continued to routinely arrest Soviet field officers. On February 9, 1945, Captain Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—commander of a battery and later author of The Gulag Archipelago—was arrested.14 The NKGB seized Solzhenitsyn’s letters to his friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, along with Vitkevich’s replies to Solzhenitsyn. Both officers criticized Stalin and discussed the possibility of creating an organization after the war that would restore ‘authentic’ Leninism.
Since the case involved a serviceman, the NKGB transferred the documents to the GUKR SMERSH, and on February 2, Abakumov’s deputy Babich ordered Solzhenitsyn’s immediate arrest. Solzhenitsyn remembered that ‘the SMERSH officers at the brigade command point tore off…shoulder boards, and took my belt away and shoved me along to their automobile.’15 This was the beginning of a long trip to Moscow along with other prisoners. After a four-month investigation by the 2nd NKGB Directorate (counterintelligence) in Moscow, the OSO sentenced Solzhenitsyn to eight years of imprisonment in the labor camps.
Among other responsibilities, NKVD plenipotentiaries supervised the so-called mobilization—that is, the arrest and deportation—of the civilian population of Soviet-occupied German territory.16 In 1943–44, the academician Ivan Maisky, Soviet Ambassador to England and Molotov’s deputy, developed the concept of forced work of the mobilized population as war reparation, and it was widely implemented.17 On February 3, 1945, the GKO ordered the total mobilization of ‘all male Germans from 17 to 50 years old capable of working and serving in the army’ on the territories occupied by the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Belorussian fronts and the 1st Ukrainian Front. The order stated: ‘The Germans who had served in the German army or in the “Volkssturm” troops, should be considered prisoners of war and sent to the NKVD camps for POWs. All of the other Germans should be organized into work battalions of 750–1,200 individuals to be used for work in the Soviet Union, primarily in the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSR.’18
From February 10, 1945 onwards, plenipotentiaries were obliged to report daily to Moscow on mobilization progress.19 The results of arrests and mobilization of Germans, especially in East Prussia, were impressive. In March, after taking over Koenigsberg and an additional SMERSH/NKVD operation for mopping up German agents and soldiers in the ruined city on April 11–19, Abakumov reported to Beria:
The operational groups have arrested 22,534 spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and other hostile elements at the territory occupied by the 3rd Belorussian Front [in East Prussia].
All arrestees were sent by 11 special trains to the Kalinin and Chelyabinsk NKVD camps.
113 active German terrorists and saboteurs, who tried to kill Red Army commanders and servicemen, were shot on the spot.
After the arrests and operative checking…35,150 persons were left [in 1939, the East Prussian population was 2.49 million inhabitants], mostly old men and women, children, invalids, and sick people. All of these Germans now live in special settlements, where they are under the surveillance of local [Soviet] military commandants.
1,500 Germans were mobilized in two battalions and all were sent by special trains to the station Yenakkievo [in the Donbass region in Russia] to be used by Narkomchermet [the Commissariat for Iron Production] and Narkomstroi [the Commissariat for Construction].
The cleansing of the rear from spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and other hostile elements at the territory of the 3rd Belorussian Front has been mainly fulfilled. Arrests have declined sharply because no German population remains within which we can conduct operational work [i.e., make arrests]…
I ask for your permission to return [to Moscow], and to make Comrade Zelenin, head of the Directorate ‘SMERSH’ of the 3rd Belorussian Front, or Comrade BABICH, my deputy in the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH,’ responsible for the current operational work…
I will return to this front again if you deem it necessary.
I await your orders.
ABAKUMOV.20
Suicides became common among the arrested East Prussians. On March 11, 1945, Beria forwarded Stalin and Molotov a report from Prussia:
The women arrestees talking among themselves say that they have been collected for sterilization… Many Germans say that all German women left in the rear of the Red Army in East Prussia were raped by servicemen of the Red Army… Previously, a considerable part of the German population had not believed Nazi propaganda about the brutal treatment of the German population by the Red Army, but because of the atrocities committed by some Red Army soldiers, part of the population has committed suicide… Suicides of Germans, especially women, are becoming more and more frequent.21
On May 5, 1945, Beria ordered a team of three generals to replace Abakumov in East Prussia.22 It included Colonel General Arkadii Apollonov, head of the NKVD Main Directorate of Interior Troops and deputy NKVD Commissar, Lieutenant General Ivan Gorbatyuk, head of the Main Directorate of the NKVD rear guard troops, and Lieutenant General Fyodor Tutushkin, head of the SMERSH Directorate of the Moscow Military District. Zelenin was ordered to send 400 SMERSH operatives from his SMERSH Directorate to assist the team. Apollonov and his team were charged with the final cleansing of East Prussia, to eliminate the remaining ‘spies, terrorists, and saboteurs acting in the Red Army’s rear.’ It is likely that the replacement of Abakumov as a Plenipotentiary by Beria’s deputy Apollonov meant that Beria wanted to keep this newly conquered country under his control.
As for Abakumov, in March 1945 he went to Moscow and did not participate in the conquest of Berlin. Probably, this was one of the main reasons for Abakumov’s hatred of Ivan Serov—Beria’s man and Plenipotentiary to the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Zhukov’s command, that eventually conquered Berlin. It is likely that this was also a reason why after the war Abakumov enthusiastically organized a campaign against Zhukov.
Within the territory occupied by the 1st Belorussian Front, 202 operational SMERSH groups were subordinate to Plenipotentiary Serov, who on February 18, 1945, ordered that every German on Polish territory be found.23 Using local Poles and Russians as informers to report on the Germans resulted in the arrests of 4,813 suspects, of whom 2,792 were investigated and found to be Germans.
Finally, on April 16, 1945, the mass arrests and deportations of the German population stopped. The next day Beria personally reported to Stalin on the results of the joint work of the NKVD–NKGB–SMERSH operational groups under the plenipotentiaries. A total of 215,540 individuals were arrested, of whom 138,200 were Germans (8,370 intelligence officers, terrorists, etc.), 38,660 were Poles, and the rest were Soviet citizens (of these, 17,495 were considered traitors). Five thousand arrestees died ‘in the course of operations and on the way to the [concentration] camps.’24
Two days later Beria sent new instructions to the plenipotentiaries of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Belorussian, and the 1st and 4th Ukrainian fronts.25 All captured servicemen of the German Army; members of the Volkssturm, SS, and SA; and staff members of German prisons, concentration camps, and so forth, were to be sent to the new concentration camps set up for this contingent, while former members of the Russian Liberation Army were detained in the vetting camps.26 By September 1945, nine new camps had opened for the arrestees in Germany. Three were old Nazi concentration camps—Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Jamlitz.27 Additionally, Beria ordered the setting up of camps for those interned in Poland (1st Belorussian and 4th Ukrainian fronts) and Germany (2nd and 3rd Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian fronts).28
Beria also tried to establish NKVD control over prisoners who potentially had intelligence information and were important to SMERSH: ‘Arrestees who may be interesting in operational terms can be transported only with NKVD approval.’29 But Abakumov’s men did not follow this order. All important people arrested by SMERSH operatives continued to be sent to Moscow upon the approval of Abakumov or his deputy.
Officers of SMERSH, NKVD, and NKGB received awards for their work on the plenipotentiary staff. Three plenipotentiaries, Abakumov, Serov, and Tsanava, were awarded the Order of Kutuzov of the 1st Class, one of the highest Soviet military awards.
For unknown reasons, Beria did not send plenipotentiaries to the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts (Table 22-1). Possibly, he had decided that the countries liberated by these fronts were less important than Germany and Poland. The UKRs of these fronts continued to report directly to the GUKR. On April 4, 1945, the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front took Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and on March 31, 1945, troops of both fronts took Vienna. After the war, Vienna became the location of the UKR of the Central Group of Soviet troops in Europe that controlled the Soviet occupational zone in Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
Operation in Helsinki
In the meantime, one of the oddest SMERSH operations was taking place in formally independent Finland. From June 26, 1941 onwards, Finland was at war with the Soviet Union. On September 4, 1944, an armistice ended the conflict, and on September 19, 1944, a Finnish delegation signed a temporary peace agreement in Moscow.
Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov was sent to Helsinki to head the Soviet part of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) in Finland.30 Although officially the ACC consisted of 150 Soviet and 60 British staffers, in fact Zhdanov’s staff reached 1,000 men and he used this enormous Soviet presence in Helsinki to intervene in Finnish internal affairs. On September 27, 1944, Finland declared war against Germany. A few days before the end of this war, on April 27, 1945, a group of SMERSH operatives transported twenty Finnish and former Russian citizens from Helsinki to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.
On the evening of April 20, 1945, Yrjö Leino, the newly appointed Finnish Home Secretary, was called to Hotel Torni in Helsinki, where Zhdanov’s office was located. Zhdanov’s deputy, Lieutenant General Grigorii Savonenkov, handed Leino a letter, signed by Zhdanov, containing a demand to arrest twenty-two persons and hand them over to SMERSH representatives.31 These twenty-two individuals were allegedly ‘guilty of war crimes, espionage for Germany, and terrorist acts against the Soviet Union.’ Leino, a devoted Communist and son-in-law of Otto Kuusinen, a leader of the Finnish Communists and member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, followed Moscow’s order without consulting the Finnish government. Abakumov’s report to Beria makes it clear that the Soviet Union operated with impunity in the supposedly sovereign state of Finland:
I am reporting that, following the instruction of Comrade STALIN, a special group of the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’ under the Soviet Control Commission in Finland, through the Finnish police arrested 20 White Guardists and agents of German and Finnish intelligence services, who have been conducting hostile activity against the Soviet Union.
The arrests of these persons, according to the plan approved by the Stavka, were made as follows:
The Head of the Operational Group of SMERSH in Finland, Major General KOLESNIKOV [possibly, Kozhevnikov],32 reported to Comrade ZHDANOV the evidence against those targeted for arrest. On behalf of the Soviet government, he made a statement to the Finnish government demanding that they be arrested and handed over to us.
After this the Finnish police, under the control of our [military] counterintelligence, arrested these persons and handed them over to us.
On April 21 [1945], the arrestees were brought to the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH.’
Information on the arrest of the White Guardists and intelligence operatives (along with their testimonies at the preliminary interrogations) has been reported to Comrade STALIN.33
On Leino’s order, the Finnish State Police arrested twenty people from the list, but two managed to escape. Ten of those arrested were Finnish citizens, nine had Nansen passports, and one was a Soviet citizen (Appendix III, see http://www.smershbook.com for details of arrestees). Nansen passports, the internationally recognized identity cards, were given by the League of Nations (the predecessor of the United Nations) to refugees after World War I, and Fridtjof Nansen—a famous explorer and the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1933—was High Commissioner of the League until his death in 1930.
One of those holding a Nansen passport, Vladimir Bastamov, was a member of the ROVS branch in Finland.34 In January 1940, he volunteered for the Russian People’s Army (created on the initiative of Boris Bazhanov, a former member of Stalin’s secretariat, who in 1928 defected to the West). This army included about 300 volunteers recruited in POW camps. At the end of the Winter War, the 1st Detachment of this army, in which Bastamov served, participated in a military operation against Soviet troops near Lake Ladoga. Therefore, Bastamov was a real enemy. But another Russian detainee, Vasilii Maksimov, was arrested by mistake because a person with the same name, who had left Finland at the time, was on the Soviet list. Maksimov was sent back to Finland only after spending ten years in a Soviet prison.
Another arrestee, Stepan Petrichenko, had just been released from a Finnish prison when Zhdanov requested his rearrest. Born in 1892, he was drafted into the Russian Navy in 1913.35 In 1917, Petrichenko joined the Bolshevik Party, but in March 1921, he became one of the leaders of the military uprising of approximately 27,000 sailors and soldiers in the town of Kronstadt near Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called from 1914 to 1924). The main demand of the insurgents was to abolish Bolshevik political departments in the fleet and army and to give real power to the newly elected councils, without Bolshevik control. The uprising was suppressed by 45,000 Red Army troops under Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s command, and during the fight 130 commanders and 3,013 Red Army servicemen were killed. Petrichenko, along with 8,000 insurgents, escaped to Finland. By the summer of 1921, 2,103 of those who had been captured by the Red Army were sentenced to death, and 6,459 were imprisoned.
In August 1927, Petrichenko reported to the Soviet Legation that he would like to restore his Soviet citizenship. He also described in detail the Kronstadt Uprising and the activity of the Russian emigrant community in Finland. Stalin ordered Petrichenko to work as a Soviet agent and from that time on, Petrichenko was, possibly, the main agent reporting on Russians living in Finland. In 1941, the Finnish authorities arrested him, and he was imprisoned until September 25, 1944. Apparently, since Petrichenko had been exposed in Finland as a Soviet agent, he was no longer useful as a spy and SMERSH probably arrested him for his part in the Kronstadt Uprising.
The Finnish police handed over the arrestees and their personal files to a group of SMERSH operatives. Zhdanov personally supervised the loading of the arrestees, handcuffed in pairs, onto two planes at the Helsinki-Malmi Airport. Unto Boman-Parvilahti, a Finnish businessman and former Finnish Liaison Officer in Berlin, recalled later that inside the plane ‘soldiers with machine pistols were now sitting in the airplane like sphinxes, with the barrels of the pistols pointed at us and their fingers on the triggers.’36 In Moscow, the arrestees were taken from the airport straight to Lubyanka Prison.
Leino told Marshal Carl Mannerheim, the Finnish president, about the SMERSH operation only after it had already been completed.37 Mannerheim was outraged, but it was too late to do anything about it. The Russian émigré colony was in a panic. The architect I. N. Kudryavtsev wrote in his memoirs:
Alarming rumors started circulating that an arrest list for the second group had been prepared. The news that Soviet agents had visited several Russian families was especially depressing. During interrogations, the agents demanded information in written form on the behavior and activity of certain persons over several of the past years. This resulted in the flight of many Russians to Sweden, just in case.38
At the end of 1945, SMERSH finished investigating the ‘Finns’ as they became known among prisoners in Russia; in Finland, they were called ‘Leino’s Prisoners.’ On November 17, the OSO of the NKVD sentenced Petrichenko to ten years in labor camps ‘for participating in a counter-revolutionary organization and as a member of the Finnish intelligence service.’ 39 He was sent to the Solikamsk Labor Camp, where he died on June 2, 1947. The OSO also sentenced the other ‘Finns’ as spies and ‘assistants to the international bourgeoisie’ to various terms in labor camps (Appendix III, see http://wwwsmershbook.com).
The fate of the 64-year-old White Major General Severin Dobrovolsky was different. During the Russian Civil War, Dobrovolsky was a military prosecutor in General Yevgenii Miller’s army in the Archangel Province.40 In Finland, Dobrovolsky worked as an editor of a Russian émigré newspaper and he headed a group of Russian fascists. He also organized a channel for ROVS terrorists to cross the Soviet–Finnish border. But General Nikolai Skoblin, a contact person between Finland and the ROVS headquarters in Paris, compromised this channel. From 1930 onwards, he served as an OGPU/NKVD secret agent and reported to Moscow about the coming terrorists. In 1935, Dobrovolsky warned General Miller, at the time head of ROVS, that Skoblin might be a Soviet agent, but General Miller disagreed.41 Miller’s trust in Skoblin cost him his life. On September 22, 1937, with Skoblin’s participation, a team of NKVD agents kidnapped Miller in Paris and brought him to Moscow. As already mentioned, Miller was secretly executed in May 1939.
On November 27, 1945 the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District sentenced Dobrovolsky under Article 58-4 (participation in a counter revolutionary organization) to death. On January 26, 1946 he was executed.
On July 26, 1947, after inquiries regarding the fate of the arrestees were made in the Finnish Parliament, the OSO of the MGB changed imprisonment of the ‘Finns’ in labor camps to imprisonment in Vladimir Prison, a much harsher punishment (Appendix III, see http://www.smershbook.com). Imprisonment in this completely secret prison obviously minimized chances that rumors about Finnish prisoners might be spread and eventually reach Finland. Five ‘Finns’ died either in the labor camps before they were transferred to Vladimir or after the transfer. Of the twenty ‘Finns’ arrested, eleven survivors returned to Finland in 1954–56. Two applied for Soviet citizenship after their release, possibly because they had nowhere else to go.
After returning home, ‘Leino’s Prisoners’ received compensation from the Finnish government of about five million Finnish marks each. However, two of the former prisoners had problems with the Finnish Security Police (SUPO). Vladimir Bastamov was put under SUPO surveillance in 1955 because of his contacts with the emigrant anti-Soviet organization NTS. Obviously, the Finns wanted no trouble with the Soviets.
The same year, Kirill Pushkarev changed his last name to Kornelius and joined the SUPO. In fact, he continued the job he had before 1945, when he had worked in the Russian Department of the Finnish Police for twenty-five years. Now he began collecting information on NTS members. In 1958, a KGB agent Grigorii Golub approached ‘Kornelius’ and made threats against his relatives in the Soviet Union, thus forcing ‘Kornelius’ to provide him with information on NTS members and former ‘Leino’s Prisoners.’ In 1961, the Finnish police arrested ‘Kornelius’ as a Soviet spy. He was sentenced to a year and six months in prison.
According to the 1944 peace agreement, Finland was obliged to return Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union, and twenty-two ‘Leino’s Prisoners’ were a small group compared to over 100,000 people that Finland, pressed by the ACC, handed over to the Soviets by January 1945.42 Among them there were thirty-one German doctors and medical nurses who, according to international agreements, should have been released. When Finnish officials raised this question, General Savonenkov responded: ‘In this case, the Red Cross and international agreements do not play any role [for us].’43 In 1948, Yrjö Leino was dismissed from his post after a special Constitutional Commission of the Finnish Parliament concluded that he was wrong to hand over Finnish citizens to the Soviets without the official sanction of the Finnish government. Later Leino divorced Kuusinen’s daughter, Hertta.
Notes
1. NKVD Order No. 0016, dated January 11, 1945. Document No. 1 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD SSSR v Germanii. 1945–1950 gg. Sbornik dokumentov i stsatei, edited by S. V. Mironenko, 11–14 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001) (in Russian).
2. N. V. Petrov, ‘Apparat upolnomochennogo NKVD–MGB SSSR v Germanii (1945–1953 gg.),’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 349–66.
3. On the Nazi underground resistance see Perry Biddiscombe, The SS Hunter Battalions: The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944–45 (Tempus, 2006).
4. Quoted on page 311 in V. A. Kozlov, ‘Deyatel’nost’ upolnomochennykh i operativnykh grupp NKVD SSSR v Germanii v 1945–1946 gg.,’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 311–30.
5. Abakumov’s report, dated January 15, 1945, quoted in Kozlov, ‘Deyatel’nost’ upolnomochennykh,’ 315.
6. According to the above-cited NKVD Order No. 0016, dated January 11, 1945.
7. Tsanava’s Order No. 10ss, dated January 22, 1945. Document No. 4 in Apparat NKVD-NKGB v Germanii, 1945–1953, edited by N. Petrov and Ya. Foitsekh, 62–63 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2009) (in Russian).
8. Abakumov’s report, dated February 15, 1944, cited in Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Viking, 2002), 96–98.
9. Quoted in ibid., 98.
10. Paul Born, Smertnik Vostochnogo fronta, 1945. Agoniya III Reikha (Moscow: Yauza-Press, 2009), 79–80 (in Russian, translated from the German).
11. Leonid Rabichev, ‘Voina vse spishet,’ Znamya, no. 2 (2005) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2005/2/ra8-pr.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
12. Quoted in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 44.
13. Stavka’s directive No. 11072, dated April 20, 1945. Quoted in Mark Solonin, Net blaga na voine (Moscow: Yauza-Press, 2010), 242–3 (in Russian).
14. Details of the Solzhenitsyn case, including a number of documents from his file, in Kirill Stolyarov, Palachi i zhertvy (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1997), 333–49 (in Russian).
15. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volumes One and Two, translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 164.
16. Details in Pavel Polyan, Ne po svoei vole…Istoriya i geografiya prinuditel’nykh migratsii v SSSR (Moscow: OGI-Memorial, 2001), 191–216 (in Russian).
17. Details in ibid., 189–90.
18. GKO Order No. 7467-ss, dated February 3, 1945. An excerpt quoted in ibid., 211.
19. Ibid., 213–6.
20. A photo of Abakumov’s report to Beria, dated March 10, 1945 in SMERSH, 91.
21. Tkachenko’s report to Beria, dated March 17, 1945. Document No. 301 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR ‘Smersh.’ 1939–mart 1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 502–4 (Moscow: Materik, 2006) (in Russian).
22. NKVD Order No. 00453, dated May 5, 1945. Document No. 4 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 18–19.
23. M. I. Semiryaga, Kak my upravlyali Germaniei: politika i zhizn’ (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1995), 161–2 (in Russian).
24. Beria’s report No. 438/b, dated April 17, 1945. Document No. 2 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 14–16.
25. V. A. Kozlov, ‘Deyatel’nost’ upolnomochennykh i operativnykh grupp NKVD SSSR v Germanii v 1945–1946 gg.,’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 321.
26. NKVD Order No. 00315, dated April 18, 1945. Document No. 3 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 16–18.
27. A. Von Plato (253–254), ‘Sovetskie spetslagerya v Germanii,’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 245–87.
28. NKVD Order No. 00461, dated May 10, 1945. Document No. 5 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 19–25.
29. The above-cited NKVD Order No. 00315.
30. Alfred J. Reiber, ‘Zhdanov in Finland,’ The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1107 (1995), 1–81.
31. Edvard Hamalainen, ‘Uzniki Leino,’ Russkaya mysl’ (Paris), no. 4371, July 5, 2001 (in Russian), http://www.kolumbus.fi/edvard.hamalainen/docs/uzniki. htm, retrieved September 8, 2011. From 1948 to 1951, G. M. Savonenkov (1898–1975) was Soviet Ambassador to Finland.
32. Major General Sergei Kozhevnikov was Abakumov’s assistant in charge of the Leningrad Front and head of the Inspection (SMERSH group) at the Allied Control Commission in Finland. N. V. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gosbezopasnosti 1941–1954 (Moscow: Zven’ya, 2010), 471–2 (in Russian). Possibly, Kolesnikov was Kozhevnikov’s operational name.
33. Abakumov’s report to Beria, dated May 1945; a photo of the letter in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 143.
34. Kirill Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty Vermakhta. Geroi ili predateli (Moscow: Yauza/Eksmo, 2005), 31 and 37 (in Russian). Aleksandrov refers to numerous documents from the Military Archive in Helsinki.
35. Abramov, SMERSH, 219–20.
36. Parvilahti, Beria’s Gardens, 21.
37. Eleonora Ioffe-Kemppainen, ‘Karl Gustav Emil Mannerheim—marshal i prezident,’ Zvezda, no. 9 (1999) (in Russian), http://karelkurs.narod.ru/files/kgm. en.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
38. Quoted in Hamalainen, ‘Uzniki Leino.’
39. Dmitrii Prokhorov, ‘Tragediya kronshtadtskogo “myatezhnika”,’ Sovershenno sekretno—versiya v Pitere, no. 8 (March 3, 2002) (in Russian).
40. P. Bazanov, ‘Prokuror i ruka s ruporom,’ Rodina, no. 4 (2009) (in Russian), http://www.istrodina.com/rodina_articul.php3?id=2976&n=141, retrieved January 24, 2011.
41. W. G. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 209.
42. Jussi Pekkarinen and Juha Pohjonen, Poshchady ne budet. Peredacha voennoplennykh i bezhentsev iz Finlyandii v SSSR, 1944–1981 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), 39 (in Russian).
43. Ibid., 29.