The famous poster ‘Don’t Chatter’ created during the first days of the Great Patriotic War. By Nina Vatolina (the author’s aunt). © ANNA BIRSTEIN, MOSCOW
NKVD Commissar Lavrentii Beria. © MEMORIAL ARCHIVE, MOSCO
NKGB Commissar and Beria’s close associate Vsevolod Merkulov. © MEMORIAL ARCHIVE, MOSCOW
General Heinz Guderian (centre) and Kombrig Semyon Krivoshein (right) at joint Nazi-Soviet parade in Brest, September 1939. © BUNDESARCHIV
Hitler and Mussolini visiting the Russian front near the town of Uman (with Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group South), August 1941. © BUNDESARCHIV
Moscow, September 1941. Building barricades in the streets. © RUSSIAN STATE DOCUMENTARY FILM & PHOTO ARCHIVE (RGAKFD/ROSINFORM), KRASNOGORSK
Josef Stalin giving a speech at a Communist Party meeting in the Mayakovskaya metro station in November 1945. Behind Stalin, in front row: Georgii Malenkov (left) and Semyon Budennyi (right). © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
The area of the Front, summer 1941. Villages were destroyed by both the Germans and the Red Army. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Head of the Partisan movement Panteleimon Ponomarenko (seated centre) instructing Partisans. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Aerial view of Stalingrad from a German bomber, September 1942. © BUNDESARCHIV
Kiev is recaptured, November 1943. The centre of the city was destroyed by fighting and bombs left by the NKVD sabotage groups. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Stalingrad, February 1943. German prisoners of war. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Viktor Abakumov, head of SMERSH, at the Front, March 1945. © PHOTO ITAR-TASS, MOSCOW
Vienna is taken, April 1945. It will soon become a centre of SMERSH activity in Europe. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Stalin and the GKO members at the Trophy German Equipment Exhibition in Gorky Park, Moscow, 1944 © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
A SMERSH Arrest Order. Text says: ‘Order No. 786, July 31, 1944. To Deputy Head of the 4th Section of the SMERSH Counterintelligence Department (OKR) of the 7th Army, Captain Com.[rade] [name blanked out] for the arrest and search of Abudikhin Nikolai Semenovich. Head of the Special Department Colonel [signature; name blanked out]. Head of the Operational Registration Section [signature]. Arrest was sanctioned by the Military Prosecutor of the 7th Army [the name is blanked out].’ Although the name of the SMERSH Department’s head was blanked out, according to the signature, this was, in fact, A. A. Isakov, who headed the OKR SMERSH of the 7th Army from April 1944 to January 1945. Note that an old NKVD form was used instead of an NKO form.
General Helmuth Weidling and other German officers captured by SMERSH. In front of the German Chancellery, May 2, 1945. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Other prisoners of war taken in Berlin, May 1945. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Russian women working as forced labourers in Germany waiting to be sent home, May 1945. They are unaware they will be vetted by SMERSH and the NKVD on their return. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Nuremberg, Soviet prosecutor Yurii Pokrovsky. Boris Solovov, a member of the SMERSH team, sits to the left. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Soviet prosecutor Nikolai Zorya addressing the Nuremberg tribunal (he would soon die of a gunshot wound to the head under mysterious circumstances). © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
Nuremberg. Defendant Hans Fritzsche (he was brought from Moscow by a SMERSH team). © OFFICE OF THE US CHIEF OF COUNSEL/HARRY S. TRUMAN LIBRARY
Victors in the Kremlin, 1945. Stalin is in the front; behind him, left to the right: Anastas Mikoyan, Nikita Khrushchev, Georgii Malenkov, Lavrentii Beria, and Vyacheslav Molotov. © RGAKFD/ROSINFORM, KRASNOGORSK
SMERSH ID card of Major Anatolii Nikolaevich Fetisov. © MUSEUM OF WWII, NATICK, MA