CHAPTER 5
The period from mid-1939 to mid-1941 was the time of mutual understanding between two dictators, Stalin and Adolf Hitler, and their division of Europe. As a result, Germany acquired part of Poland and most of Western Europe, while the Soviet Union included another part of Poland and occupied the Baltic States, part of Romania and tried to conquer Finland. Soviet propaganda called the Soviet annexations ‘the acts of assistance’ to the supposedly oppressed Ukrainians, Belorussians and other working people. Even now most of the Russians do not consider these occupations part of World War II and think that the war began only on June 22, 1941, the day of the German attack against the Soviet Union.
During this period of Soviet expansion, military counterintelligence in general and Viktor Abakumov in particular gained valuable experience. Techniques developed by the NKVD and its Special Department (OO) to eliminate all opposition in the new territories were later continued and refined by SMERSH.
Secret Agreement
In May 1939 Stalin replaced Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish, pro-British Foreign Affairs Commissar, with Vyacheslav Molotov.1 Beria’s man Vladimir Dekanozov became deputy Commissar. These were steps toward making a deal with Hitler.
On August 23, 1939, the infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, containing a secret agreement to divide Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, was signed in Moscow.2 Poland was divided between the two countries, and Germany agreed that Finland, Estonia, and Latvia were in the sphere of Soviet interests. The division of Poland was like the final word in Stalin’s old dispute with now dead Marshal Tukhachevsky: Hitler received Warsaw, which was almost taken over by Tukhachevsky’s troops in 1920, while Stalin got Lvov, which he unsuccessfully tried to conquer during that time.
The pact with the fascist Nazis, the deadly enemy of German Communists, did what even the Great Terror could not—it caused millions of dedicated but naive Communists worldwide to finally drop their support for Stalin’s Soviet Union. Time magazine voiced the outrage of many worldwide when it referred to the agreement as the ‘Communazi Pact’ and called the signatories ‘communazis’.3 Two weeks after the signing, Stalin explained to Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, his Machiavellian reasons for signing the covenant (a division into paragraphs is added):
A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries… for redividing the world, for the domination of the world! We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if at the hands of Germany the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken. Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system…
We can maneuver, pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible. The non-aggression pact is to a certain degree helping Germany. Next time we’ll urge on the other side…
Now [Poland] is a fascist state… The annihilation of that state under current conditions would mean one fewer bourgeois fascist state to contend with! What would be the harm if as a result of the rout of Poland we were to extend the socialist system on the new territories and populations?4
This explanation clearly reveals Stalin’s long-term plan for the Sovietizing of Europe, beginning with the division of Poland and continuing after World War II with the creation of the Soviet bloc.
Strictly speaking, the division of Europe was a step within Stalin’s doctrine of the offensive war, i.e., the need to rapidly carry the war into enemy territory and achieve a victory at ‘little cost’, which was repeated in the Red Army’s Field Regulations (Ustav) from 1929 onwards.5 In vain Valentin Trifonov—one of the Red Army organizers and the first Military Collegium’s Chairman (before Vasilii Ulrikh)—tried to call Stalin’s attention to the strategy of defense. On June 17, 1937, four years before Hitler’s attack, Trifonov wrote to Stalin: ‘Most probably, Germany will be our mighty enemy in the future war and [the Germans] will have the serious advantage of a sudden attack. This advantage can be neutralized only by creating a system of efficient defense along the border… Defense is the strongest method of carrying out a war and, therefore, a plan for defending our state borders will be less costly than a plan for an offensive war.’6 Five days later, Trifonov was arrested, and he was executed on March 15, 1938. The Ustavof 1939 repeated the doctrine of the offensive war.
Poland
On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland, and World War II began. A week later, nine days before the Red Army advanced into Poland, Beria ordered the creation of two NKVD operational groups in Kiev and Minsk, each of which would consist of 300 hand-picked Ukrainian and Belorussian NKVD officers and NKVD operatives from Moscow and Leningrad. Their goal was simple: to purge all opposition in Poland to the Soviet military takeover. They were under the command of NKVD commissars Ivan Serov of Ukraine and Lavrentii Tsanava of Belorussia, who specialized in purging Soviet-occupied territories from this time until the end of World War II.7 The groups had additional operational support from units of NKVD Border Guard Troops.
To coordinate NKVD actions in the newly acquired territories, Beria’s first deputy Vsevolod Merkulov was sent to Kiev and Viktor Bochkov (at the time, still OO head), to Minsk. Official documents referred obliquely to this operation as ‘measures in connection with ongoing military training’.
Beria’s dispatch of September 15, 1939, clarified the plan: ‘Following our troops after the occupation of towns, provisional administrative groups… will be created; heads of the NKVD operational groups will be included.’8
By September 16, 1939, the Germans occupied most of their part of Polish territory, as defined in the Non-Aggression Pact, although Warsaw put up a brave defense. The next day, the Red Army invaded Poland on the flimsy pretext of protecting Belorussians and Ukrainians living in Polish territory.9 German and Soviet troops met near Lvov, Lublin, and Bialystok at the end of September, and even held a joint parade in the city of Brest.10The parade inspectors, the German General of Tank Troops Heinz Guderian and the Soviet Kombrig (Brigade Commander) Semyon Krivoshein (a famous tank commander during the Spanish Civil War who, ironically, was a Jew), chatted in French. They had met before, in 1929, when Guderian inspected the Kazan Tank School in the Soviet Union. Two years later, during the German invasion, Guderian used Lev Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana mansion as his headquarters.
On September 28, 1939, Warsaw surrendered. On the same day Merkulov reported to Moscow that NKVD Operational Group No. 1 had arrested 923 Polish officers, policemen, landowners, ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’, Ukrainian nationalists, and so forth, in the newly acquired territory.11 A second NKVD operational group arrested an additional 533 men. Mass arrests and exiles of Polish citizens continued through 1940.12 A new organization, the UPVI (NKVD Directorate for POWs and Interned Persons), was created two days after the Soviet invasion of Poland to manage the new prisoners. It had its own system of concentration camps.
On March 3, 1940, Stalin and five Politburo members, along with Beria himself, approved Beria’s proposal to execute Polish officers interned in POW camps as well as officers and members of ‘various spy and diversion organizations of the former land and factory owners’ held in NKVD prisons. 13 The result was the infamous Katyn Forest massacre: the execution, in April 1940, of approximately 22,500 Polish officers and prisoners in the Katyn forest near Smolensk and in prisons in Kharkov and Kalinin (currently, Tver). Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, and Leonid Bashtakov, head of the 1st NKVD Special Department (registration and statistics), were in charge of organizing the executions. The local OOs actively participated in the preparation of the executions.14Altogether, the NKVD killed almost half the Polish officer corps and many members of the Polish intelligentsia, including medical doctors. Only 395 men were spared, mostly those of interest to the foreign intelligence department (Pavel Sudoplatov, the notorious organizer of terrorist acts, compiled the list of names).
On March 20, 1940 Beria ordered eleven NKVD killing squads to be sent to the newly acquired parts of Ukraine and Belorussia.15 Thirty-year-old Pavel Meshik, one of Beria’s most devoted men, headed the group dispatched to Lvov, where the main atrocities took place. In December Beria reported to Stalin that from September to December 1940 in these parts of Ukraine and Belorussia ‘up to 407,000 people were arrested… and [additionally] 275,784 people were sent to Kazakhstan and the northern regions of the USSR’.16
The massacre continued in June and July of 1941. As the Germans advanced and the Soviets retreated from the former Polish territories, NKVD guards executed at least 10,000 local prisoners who were being held without trial.17 In the callous NKVD jargon, these were known as ‘losses of the first category’.
On August 12, 1941, the Politburo amnestied Polish prisoners and ordered their release, as well as that of the deported Polish citizens.18 By October 1, the NKVD was ready to release 51,257 of the convicted Poles and the arrested Poles who were awaiting trial, and 254,473 of the deportees.19 Soon many of these people joined the Anders Army commanded by the released General Wladislaw Anders. Until the German attack on June 22, 1941, Anders was kept in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow after he had refused to join the Red Army.20 However, 12,817 of the Polish prisoners and 33,252 of their family members remained in the NKVD camps and in exile in the Soviet Union. The Anders Army moved to Iran, at the time occupied by Soviet and British troops.
The Invasion of Finland
On September 28, 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, made a second visit to Moscow. In a rushed early meeting at 5 a.m., he signed the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which contained a secret protocol that finalized the division of Poland and ceded Lithuania to Stalin. Stalin’s translator Valentin Berezhkov recalled: ‘When a map with the just agreed upon border between the German possessions and the Soviet Union was brought in, Stalin put it on the desk, took one of his big blue pencils and, allowing his emotions to come out, wrote his signature with a flourish in gigantic letters that covered the newly acquired territories of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine.’21 Now all three Baltic States, plus Finland and eastern Poland, would be under Soviet control. Two days later, in a long speech supporting the German war against Britain and France, Molotov blamed the Allies: ‘It is senseless and criminal to conduct such a war, a war “to destroy Hitlerism.”’22
Like the Nazi invasion of Poland, which began on the German–Polish border with a provocation organized by the German secret services, the Soviet war with Finland began with the NKVD’s artillery shelling of its own Soviet troops, which was then blamed on the Finns.23 Aleksandr Shcherbakov, the Party propaganda chief, explained the Soviet aggression: ‘Lenin’s theory teaches us that in favorable international circumstances a Socialist country must—and is obliged to—initiate a military offensive against the surrounding capitalist countries for the purpose of widening the front of Socialism.’24
Stalin was so confident that he would win a fast victory over Finland that he did not even inform Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff, who was on vacation, about the beginning of military actions.25 According to Soviet plans, the whole operation would take twelve days.26 To Stalin’s chagrin, Finland was able to withstand his appetite for ‘widening the front of Socialism’. This was not surprising. In early 1940 General Konstantin Pyadyshev courageously wrote to his wife from the front: ‘Our commanding officers are extremely poorly trained, many are not even able to use maps. They are incapable of commanding, and they have no authority among privates. The Red Army men are also poorly trained and many of them do not want to fight. This is why the desertion is so high.’27 This and other letters to his wife ended up in the general’s OO file, but he was arrested later, in September 1941, at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.
The morale of the troops and the coordination of fighting units were so bad that during the first ten days of January 1940 alone, the OOs of these Red Army units sent Stalin 22 reports complaining about the poor efficiency of the troops.28 As for discipline, NKVD zagradotryady (zagraditel’nye otryady, literally ‘fence detachments’ or barrage units) were created for the first time in Red Army history. The joint order of the NKO and NKVD commissars stated:
To prevent the desertion and to purge the rear of the fighting army of enemy elements, we order:
1. To form control-barrage detachments from the operational NKVD regiments… and put them under the command of Special Departments.
2. The task of control-barrage detachments should be to organize covering force, raids in the rear of the fighting army, checking documents of single servicemen and civilians going to the rear, and capturing deserters.
3. The detainees should be sent to the Special Departments…
4. Each control-barrage detachment should consist of 100 men and include three rifle platoons, as well as an operational group of the Special Department of 3–5 men…
5. The best personnel of the Special Departments should be mobilized [for these detachments]…
6. … The deserters should be immediately transferred under military tribunals and tried within 24 hours.29
From January to March 1940, zagradotryady arrested 6,724 Red Army men.30 Of them, 5,934 were sent back to the fighting units, and 790 were tried by military tribunals. Of the latter number, only six servicemen were acquitted. Later, during the war with Germany, the barrage units became one of the main tools of the NKVD and SMERSH.
During the five months of the Winter War, from November 1939 to March 1940, the Finns’ preparation, tactics, and determination were far superior to those of the Soviets, who suffered 131,500 casualties to the Finns’ 21,400.31 Stalin was so outraged by the unprofessional performance of Kliment Voroshilov as NKO Commissar that in May 1940 he replaced Voroshilov with Semyon Timoshenko.
Nikita Khrushchev recalled a quarrel between Stalin and Voroshilov just after the war:
One day Stalin angrily criticized Voroshilov in our [Politburo members’] presence at the nearby dacha. He was very nervous, and viciously attacked Voroshilov. Voroshilov also became angry; he stood up with a red face and snapped at Stalin: ‘You are to blame. You have exterminated the military [during the Great Terror].’ Stalin shot back an angry reply. Then Voroshilov picked up a platter with a small boiled pig on it and smashed it on the floor. This was the only time that I witnessed such a situation. Stalin definitely felt elements of defeat in our victory over the Finns in 1940.32
But the new appointment was not a demotion for Voroshilov. Despite Voroshilov’s unprofessionalism, Stalin promoted him Defense Committee head (in this capacity, Voroshilov supervised both the new Defense Commissar Timoshenko and the Navy Commissar Nikolai Kuznetsov) as well as deputy chairman of Sovnarkom in charge of military industry. Contrary to the physically short Voroshilov and Semyon Budennyi, two of Stalin’s pals from the Civil War, Timoshenko, whom Stalin called a muzhik(literally, a real man), was very big and tall. As Timoshenko used to say, ‘Stalin…liked huge guys’.33 Later, in 1945, Stalin forced his son Vasilii to marry Timoshenko’s daughter.
The terms of the March 12, 1940 peace agreement stipulated that Finland would lose a small but densely populated part of its territory along with important nickel mines, but would maintain its sovereignty and independence. 34 The aggression against Finland caused the Soviet Union’s expulsion from the League of Nations.
Of more than 6,000 Soviet POWs taken by Finnish troops, about 100 refused to return to the Soviet Union.35 Those who returned were vetted in the Yuzhskii NKVD Camp by NKVD—most likely OO—investigators. On June 29, 1940, Beria presented Stalin with a list of 232 repatriated servicemen, proposing that the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court sentence them to death.36 In many cases this was unnecessary, since 158 had already been executed. It is possible that these were the Soviet POWs who volunteered for Boris Bazhanov’s small anti-Soviet Russian People’s Army in Finland during the Winter War.37
Punishment of commanders arrested by the OOs continued after the war. In July 1940 Beria reported to Stalin:
On March 3, 1940, KONDRASHOV Grigorii Fyodorovich, commander of the 18th Rifle Division… was arrested for treason…
The investigation by the NKVD Special Department established that because of KONDRASHOV’s negligent actions his division was encircled by the enemy… KONDRASHOV left the column and ran away…
The NKVD considers it is necessary for KONDRASHOV Grigorii Fyodorovich, who has admitted his guilt, to be tried by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court for treacherous actions…
I await your instructions.38
Stalin wrote on the first page of the report: ‘He should be tried, and harshly. St[alin].’ On August 12, the Military Collegium sentenced Kondrashov to death, and on August 29, he was executed.
The Baltic States, Bessarabia, and Western Ukraine
The Baltic States were the next victims of Soviet expansion. In June 1940, the Red Army invaded Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania under the ruse of ‘mutual assistance pacts’.39 Again, NKVD troops played a special role in the occupation. On June 17, 1940, with Soviet troops still on the march, NKO Commissar Timoshenko described the steps to be taken:
1. Our border guards should immediately occupy the border with Eastern Prussia and the Baltic coast to prevent spying and diversion activity from our western neighbor.
2. (Initially), one regiment of NKVD troops should be moved to each of the occupied republics to keep order.
3. The question of the ‘government’ of the occupied republics should be decided as soon as possible.
4. The disarmament and disbanding of the armies of the occupied republics should begin. The population, police, and military organizations should be disarmed.40
Some details of the annexation became publicly known fifty years later. In January 1991, on the order of Mikhail Gorbachev’s government, Soviet tanks fired at civilians in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Fourteen civilians were killed and 600 wounded. After this, first the government-independent radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) transmitted a speech by Georgii Fedorov, who had served in the Red Army troops which had occupied Lithuania in 1940 and later became a prominent historian. Fedorov appealed to the tank crews, asking them not to follow further criminal orders from Moscow. He compared the situation with the events in 1940:
Before we crossed the border [in 1940], our political officers told us that we would see all the horrors of capitalist slavery in Lithuania: poor peasants,
terribly exploited workers weak from hunger, and a small group of rich people exploiting the poor.
Instead, we saw a blooming, abundant country…
Our people in power—criminals and scoundrels—robbed Lithuania… Executioners called… ‘officers of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs’… acted with enormous brutality… And we, soldiers of the Red Army, covered this revelry of robbery, violence, and killings that was cynically called ‘acts of will of the Lithuanian people’.41
In 1940, Stalin sent three special watchdogs, officially plenipotentiaries for the Soviet government, to supervise events in the Baltics: Party ideologue Andrei Zhdanov to Estonia; infamous former USSR prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky to Latvia; and Beria’s man, Vladimir Dekanozov, to Lithuania. Later Merkulov, Abakumov, and Serov went to Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, respectively, to organize and supervise the arrests and deportations.
Irena Baruch Wiley, the wife of the American Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Latvia and Estonia, witnessed the deportation: ‘The long trains with curtained windows left every night for Russia. I had thought that in the unspeakable brutality of the Nazi invasion of Austria I had witnessed the depths of horror, but there was something even more nightmarish, more terrifying in watching, weary and helpless, this silent nightly exodus. The Nazis committed their atrocities night and day; the Russians, more surreptitious, only under cover of darkness.’42Here then, in 1940, was a template for taking over a foreign state, a template that was expanded upon and used successfully, with SMERSH’s help, in the East European countries at the end of the war.
By July 21, 1940, Soviet-controlled governments had taken power in the three republics. Members of the Baltic governments were taken to the Soviet Union. A year later, after the beginning of war with Germany, former Latvian and Estonian officials and their wives were jailed without trial and held in solitary confinement. They were not sentenced until 1952, when they became nameless secret political prisoners, held in strict isolation in the infamously inhuman Vladimir Prison, identified only by numbers.43
The arrests continued through 1941. On May 16, 1941, Merkulov sent Stalin the final deportation plan for the former Baltic States.44 The plan stipulated the arrests of prominent members of ‘counter revolutionary’ parties; members of Russian emigrant organizations; all policemen, landowners, and owners of industrial plants; army officers; and so on. The arrestees ‘should be placed in [labor] camps for five to eight years and after their release they should be exiled to distant areas of the Soviet Union for twenty years’. In addition, their family members were to be banished to distant parts of the Soviet Union for twenty years. Incredibly, in 2009 Viktor Stepakov, the FSB-connected historian, wrote: ‘This document… was an example of true humanism [emphasis added]. During that complicated time, enemies… could [simply] be shot to death.’45
But for many, this was a death sentence. For instance, during June– September 1942, 9,080 Lithuanian deportees, plus ethnic Finns and Germans exiled from Leningrad, were relocated to Yakutia (currently the Sakha Republic within Russia), a Siberian area with an extremely severe climate, as ‘fishermen’. Of these, only 48 per cent could work and 36 per cent were children under 16. The deportees were provided with no housing, food, boats or fishing-gear and were forced to live in dug-outs, each for 60 deportees. Only 30 per cent of them survived.46 By June 1941 Merkulov was able to report to the Central Committee that almost all the members of the intelligentsia of these small countries were in Soviet labor camps, and the number of the arrested and deported was about 66,000.47 However, the current Baltic States consider this number to have been underestimated:
Deportees |
||||
Country |
Total population |
Russian sources48 |
Baltic sources49 |
|
Lithuania |
2,879,000 |
28,533 |
35,000 |
|
Latvia |
1,951,000 |
24,407 |
35,000 |
|
Estonia |
1,133,000 |
12,819 |
15,000 |
Simultaneously, mass purges were organized in the other territories occupied by the Red Army. May 1941 saw the deportations of approximately 12,000 family members of ‘counter revolutionaries and nationalists’ from Western Ukraine, formerly a part of Poland.50 Purges also took place in Bessarabia, previously a part of Romania, now renamed the Soviet Republic of Moldavia. There were deportations from several other areas of Romania and Belorussia as well. On the whole, the number of the deported during 1940-41 was approximately 380,000–390,000, and of them, 309,000–325,000 were former Polish citizens.51
The Soviets had a different attitude toward ethnic Germans in the same states. Special Soviet–German agreements allowed ethnic Germans to move from the Baltic States to Germany, while ethnic Lithuanians, Russians, and Belorussians living in the Polish territory now occupied by Germany were forced to move to Soviet-occupied Lithuania.52 The Soviets even paid substantial sums of money to the Baltic Germans for property losses.
On June 26, 1940, during the Baltic campaign, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet introduced new working rules, apparently in connection with the preparations for a big war. The Presidium’s decree established a seven-day working week and an eight-hour instead of seven-hour working day.53 Now quitting a job without permission of the administration or being late for work by 20 minutes were punished by imprisonment for two to six months. This meant that people became attached to particular working places and could not change jobs. On December 26, 1942 an additional decree increased the punishment to two to five years. Before the war, 2,664,472 perpetrators were sentenced under the June 26 decree, and during the war, their number was 7,747,405.54
In 1941–42, five more decrees introduced additional restrictions. The number of people who fell foul of the working rules during the war reached 8,550,799; of these, 2,080,189 served terms in labor camps, making these convicts a majority among all prisoners. Probably, the feeling of slavery had an impact in the low morale of just-drafted soldiers during the first disastrous period of the war with Germany. The June 26 decree was abolished only in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death; overall, from 1940 to 1956, 14,845,144 perpetrators were convicted under it.55
Three Security Services
After the expansion, Stalin tried to maintain a good relationship with Hitler. In November 1940, Molotov, Merkulov, and Dekanozov arrived in Berlin for economic and political negotiations with the Nazis.56 Not everything went smoothly, but Dekanozov stayed in Berlin as Soviet Plenipotentiary and Bogdan Kobulov’s brother Amayak, who had no experience in intelligence, became NKVD chief rezident (head of a spy network) in the Soviet Legation. These appointments gave Beria and the NKVD a great deal of control over diplomats, especially those who were stationed in Berlin.
With the new workload occasioned by the western expansion, it became clear that the NKVD was too monolithic to function efficiently. In January 1941, Beria proposed separating the intelligence and counterintelligence functions from the more mundane domestic terror organs by removing the GUGB from the NKVD and turning it into the State Security Commissariat, or NKGB.57 The NKGB would include three important directorates: foreign intelligence, domestic counterintelligence, and secret political directorate. From this time onwards, during almost all of the many subsequent reorganizations of the Soviet security services, foreign intelligence was called the 1st (or 1st Main) Directorate, and interior counterintelligence the 2nd (or 2nd Main) Directorate.
GUGB head Merkulov became head of the new NKGB, with Beria remaining head of the now smaller NKVD, whose main function was to manage the countless Soviet labor camps and prisons with a population of 2,417,000 prisoners and an additional population of 1,500,000 people in labor and special settlements, including those transported from the Baltic States and other occupied territories.58 Although not the direct head of the NKGB, Beria still controlled it through Merkulov. On January 30, 1941, with Beria’s promotion to the rank of State Security General Commissar, speculation was rife that he would eventually succeed Stalin.59
The OO, the 4th GUGB Department, was not incorporated into the new NKGB, but instead was split into three parts.60 One part, which handled military counterintelligence in the border guards and other NKVD troops, remained within the NKVD and became its 3rd department.61 In his first affiliation with military counterintelligence, on February 25, 1941 Abakumov became NKVD deputy Commissar in charge of supervising this and several other departments. The second and most significant part went to the Defense Commissariat (the NKO), becoming its 3rd Directorate.62 Now every military district (called fronts in wartime), army, corps, and division had a 3rd department whose heads reported jointly to a 3rd department superior and to their unit’s military commander.63 The third part of the OO became the Navy Commissariat’s (the NKVMF) 3rd Directorate.
But even though two parts of military counterintelligence were formally moved to the NKO and NKMF, Beria still controlled all secret services. The staff of the new 3rd directorates remained on the sixth floor of the NKVD Lubyanka building, and a special Central Council consisting of the NKGB and NKVD commissars, along with heads of the two 3rd directorates and the NKVD 3rd department, coordinated all military counterintelligence. Additionally, new deputy head positions were created within the 3rd directorates and their subordinate departments, which Merkulov filled with members of his staff.64 Finally, the NKGB had the right to transfer any investigation conducted by the 3rd directorates to its own investigation unit. In addition, the NKVD maintained a central archive through which it was able to keep detailed tabs on whatever happened in the other secret services.65
The three-part organization of security services—the 3rd NKO Directorate, NKGB and NKVD—from February to July 1941 is remarkably similar to that Stalin established in April 1943, when for the Soviets the war started to turn from the defensive to offensive. In fact, this three-part structure made sense only if the Red Army was on the offensive. Military counterintelligence was moving with the front line and made the first arrests of real and potential anti-Soviet enemies in the new territories. Then the NKGB continued this job in the occupied territories, while the NKVD was primarily in charge of policing and keeping the arrested enemies and POWs. Most probably, the change in the year 1941 was part of Stalin’s general preparation for moving Soviet troops westward beyond the newly acquired territories.
Notes
1. Details in Yevgenii Gnedin, Vykhod iz labirinta (Moscow: Memorial, 1994), 11–20 (in Russian). Molotov (1890–1986) headed the Foreign Affairs Commissariat from May 1939 to May 1949.
2. Details in Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1988), 246–60.
3. ‘Moscow’s Week,’ Time, October 9, 1939.
4. Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934–1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives, edited by Alexandr Dallin and F. I. Firsov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 151–2. Similar Stalin’s political views are discussed in V. L. Doroshenko, I. V. Pavlova, and R. C. Raack, ‘Ne mif: rech’ Stalina 19 avgusta 1939 goda,’ Voprosy istorii 8 (2005): 3–20 (in Russian).
5. Amnon Sella, ‘Red Army Doctrine and Training on the Eve of the Second World War,’ Europe-Asia Studies 27, no. 2 (April 1975), 245–64.
6. Cited in Aleksandr Shitov, ‘Stalin khotel bol’shoi i dolgoi voiny,’ Novaya gazeta. ‘Pravda Gulaga,’ no. 7, June 16, 2010 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/gulag07/00.html, retrieved September 4, 2011. 2010.
7. NKVD Order No. 001064, dated September 8, 1939. Document No. 29, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 1 (1), 70–73. I am using the spelling ‘Belorussia’ and ‘Belorussian,’ as it was used in the Soviet Union, and not the current spelling ‘Belarus’ and ‘Belarusian’.
8. NKVD Directive, dated September 15, 1939. Document No. 33, in ibid., 79–81.
9. Details in Mikhail Mel’tyukhov, Sovetsko-pol’skie voiny (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 463–566 (in Russian).
10. Heinz Guderian, Vospominaniya soldata (Smolensk: Rusich, 1999), 114 (in Russian, translated from the German). On the cooperation of the NKVD and Gestapo see Hans Schafranek, Zwischen NKWD und Gestapo. Die Auslieferung deutscher und osterreichischer Antifaschisten aus der Sowietunion und Nazideutschland 1937–1941(Frankfurt/Main: ISP–Verlag, 1990).
11. Merkulov’s report to Beria, dated September 28, 1939. Document No. 42, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 1 (1), 96.
12. NKVD Instruction No. 1042/B, dated March 20, 1940. Document No. 78, in ibid., 165–66.
13. Politburo decision P13/144, dated March 5, 1940. Document No. 1, in Katyn. Mart 1940 g. –sentyabr’ 2000 g. Rasstrel. Sud’by zhivykh. Ekho Katyni. Dokumenty, edited by N. S. Lebedeva, N. Petrosyan, B. Woszcynski et al., 43–4 (Moscow: Ves’ Mir, 2001) (in Russian).
14. Dmitrii Tokarev, former head of the Kalinin NKVD Directorate, a statement on March 20, 1991. Katyn. Dokumenty zbrodni. Tom 2. Zagłada marzec—czerwiec 1940, edited by W. Materski, B.Woszcyński, N. Lebiediewa, and N. Pietrosowa (Warszawa: Wydawn ‘TRIO,’ 1998), 432–70.
15. Nikita Petrov (Memorial, Moscow), in Igor Mel’nikov, ‘Kto povinen v smerti tysyach pol’skikh grazhdan,’ Belarus’ segodnya, December 18, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.sb.by/post/78592, retrieved September 5, 2011.
16. Beria’s report, dated December 12, 1940 (from the Presidential Archive), in Nataliya Lebedeva, ‘Chetveryi razdel Pol’shi,’ Novaya gazeta, no. 102, September16, 2009, http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/102/00.html, retrieved September 5, 2011.
17. NKVD report, dated January 22, 1942, in Nikita Petrov, Istoriya imperii ‘Gulag.’ Glava 9 (in Russian), http://www.pseudology.org/GULAG/Glava09.htm, retrieved September 5, 2011.
18. Politburo decisions P34/332 and P34/333. Announced as the Joint Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet and TsK VKP(b), dated August 17, 1941.
19. Document No. 87, in Istoriya stalinskogo GULAGa. Konets 1920-kh—pervaya polovina 1950-kh godov. Tom 5. Spetspereselentsy v SSSR, edited by T. V. Tsarevsaya-Dyakina, 324–5 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004) (in Russian).
20. Details in Wladislaw Anders, An Army in Exile (London: MacMillan & Co., 1949).
21. V. M. Berezhkov, Kak ya stal perevodchikom Stalina (Moscow: DEM, 1993), 48 (in Russian).
22. Molotov’s speech at the session of the USSR Supreme Council on October 31, 1940. Pravda, November 1, 1940 (in Russian).
23. Molotov’s note dated November 26, 1939, published in Izvestia, no. 273 (7043), November 27, 1939 (in Russian).
24. Quoted in M. I. Meltyukhov, ‘Ideologicheskie dokumenty maiya-iyunya 1941 goda o sobytiyakh vtoroi mirovoi voiny,’ in Drugaya voina: 1939-1945 (Moscow: RGGU, 1996), 76-105 (in Russian).
25. Page 171 in V. A. Novobranets, ‘Nakanune voiny,’ Znamya, No. 6 (1990), 165–192 (in Russian).
26. N. N. Voronov, Na sluzhbe voennoi (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1963), 136 (in Russian).
27. Quoted in Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy, 113.
28. Note 33 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR ‘SMERSH.’1939–1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 569 (Moscow: Materik, 2006) (in Russian).
29. Joint NKO and NKVD Order No. 003/0093, dated January 24, 1940, in Klim Degtyarev and Aleksandr Kolpakidi, SMERSH (Moscow: Eksmo, 2009), 106 (in Russian).
30. Ibid., 106–7.
31. Anatolii Tsyganok, ‘Mify i pravda o Sovetsko-Finlyandskoi voine,’ Polit.ru, February 8, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.polit.ru/analytics/2006/02/08/finn. html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
32. N. S. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya. Kniga 1 (Moscow: Moskovskie Novosti, 1999), 258 (in Russian).
33. Quoted in Yulian Semenov, Nenapisannye romany, Chapter 15, http://virlib.ru/read_book.php?page=18&file_path=books/9/book04207.gz, retrieved September 5, 2011.
34. For instance, Stalin and the Soviet-Finnish War, 1939, translated by Tatyana Sokokina, edited by Ye. N. Kulkov (London: F. Cass, 2002).
35. Kirill Aleksandrov, Russkie soldaty Vermakht’a: Geroi ili predateli (Moscow: Yauza, 2005), 26–44 (in Russian).
36. Beria’s letter to Stalin, dated July 29, 1940. Document No. 121, in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR, 181.
37. Boris Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, translation and commentary by David W. Doyle (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990), 212–4. Bazhanov was a former member of Stalin’s secretariat.
38. Beria’s report to Stalin, dated July 20, 1940. Document No. 118 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR, 178–9.
39. Details in, for instance, M. I. Mel’tyukhov, Upushchennyi shans Stalina. Sovetskii Soyuz i bor’ba za Evropu: 1939–1941 (Moscow: Veche, 2000), 176–211 (in Russian).
40. Timoshenko’s report No. 390-ss, dated June 17, 1940, in ibid., 206.
41. Georgii Fedorov, Bruschatka. Dokumental’nye povesti i rasskazy (Moscow: Libr, 1997), 57 (in Russian).
42. Irena Wiley, Around the Globe in Twenty Years (New York: David McKay Company, Inc.: 1962), 104.
43. Prisoner cards in the Vladimir Prison Archive.
44. NKGB Report No. 1687/M, dated May 16, 1941. Document No. 207, in Organy gosudarstvenoi bezopasnosti, 1 (2), 144–6. Also, Document Nos. 107–108 in Istoriya stalinskogo GULAGa. Konets 1920-kh–pervaya polovina 1950-kh godov. Tom 1. Massovye repressii v SSSR, edited by S. V. Mironenko and N. Werth, 394–400 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004) (in Russian).
45. Viktor Stepakov, ‘Apostol’ SMERSHa (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2009), 75 (in Russian).
46. Politburo decision P35/407, dated January 6, 1942. By October 2, additional groups of deportees were sent to five other Siberian areas as ‘fishermen’. On the whole, of the total number of 52,664 ‘fishermen’, only 35,684 were able to work physically. NKVD reports in Yurii Bogdanov, Ministr stalinskikh stroek. 10 let vo glave MVD (Moscow: Veche, 2006), 106–9 (in Russian).
47. Document Nos. 2.73–2.101, in Stalinskie deportatsii 1928–1953, edited by N. L. Pobol’ and P. M. Polyan, 215–72 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2005) (in Russian).
48. NKGB Report No. 2288/M, dated June 17, 1941 and signed by Merkulov; Kobulov’s report, dated July 13, 1941; reports of Konradov, dated June 17, 1941 and September 15, 1941. Document Nos. 110, 112–114, in Istoriya stalinskogo GULAGa. Tom 1, 401, 404–7. Also, Moldavian NKGB Report No. 908, dated June 19, 1941; Document No. 260, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnost v Velikoi Otechstvennoi voine. Sbornik dokumentovi. Nakanune, T. 1 (2) (Moscow: Kniga i bizness, 1995), 260–1 (in Russian).
49. Data from Table 1 in The White Book: Losses Inflicted on the Estonian Nation by Occupation Regimes, 1940–1991 (Tallinn: Estoniam Encyclopedia Publishers, 2005), 37.
50. A. E. Gur’yanov, ‘Pol’skie spetspereselentsy v SSSR v 1940–1941 gg.,’ in Repressii protiv polyakov i polskikh grazhdan, edited by A. E. Guriyanov, 114–36 (Moscow: Zven’ya, 1997) (in Russian); figures for all deportations from the Baltics and other territories, in Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Civil Wars in the Soviet Union,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 4, no. 1 (Winter 2003), 129–62.
51. Figures from Istoriya stalinskogo GULAGa. Tom 5, 56.
52. Agreements between the USSR and Germany, dated January 10, 1941. Document Nos. 641 and 642, in Dokumenty vneshnei politiki. Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, T. 23 (2, pt. 1) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1998), 303–17 (in Russian).
53. Published in Izvestia, June 27, 1940. Details in Bochkov’s report, dated December 16, 1940. Document No. 117, in Istoriya stalinskogo GULAGa. Tom 1, 411–4.
54. Figures from Document Nos. 131 and 229, in Istoriya stalinskogo GULAGa. Tom 1, 446–8 and 623–4.
55. However, this decree concerned mostly the workers. The majority of peasants, forced to be members of kolkhozes (collective farms) could not leave their villages because the administration of kolkhozes kept their passports.
56. Read and Fisher, The Deadly Embrace, 510–33.
57. Beria’s reports to Stalin, dated January 1941 and February 3, 1941. Document Nos. 146 and 150, in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 224–6, 233.
58. The number of prisoners in 1941 from Oleg V. Khlevnyuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 328.
59. V. I. Vernadsky, ‘Korennye izmeneniya neizbezhny… Dnevnik 1941 goda,’ Novyi mir, no. 5 (1995) (in Russian), http://victory.mil.ru/lib/books/memo/vernadsky_vi/01.html, retrieved September 5, 2011.
60. Joint Decree of the Central Committee and Council of Commissars, dated February 8, 1941. Document No. 155, in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 240–2.
61. NKVD/NKGB Order No. 00151/003, dated February 12, 1941. Document No. 142 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka (2003), 608–9.
62. Joint decision of the Central Committee and Council of Commissars, dated February 8, 1941. Document No. 155 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 240–2.
63. On the Red Army structure, see Roger R. Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917–1991 (London: Routledge, 2000).
64. Politburo decision P31/132, dated April 19, 1941. Document No. 162, in Lubyanka: Stalin i NKVD, 262–63.
65. NKVD Order No. 00232, dated February 28, 1941. Document No. 143, in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka (2003), 609–14.