The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  That near miss didn’t end Khokhlov’s career as a risk taker. According to the younger Maklyarsky, Khokhlov, despite his unprepossessing appearance, would prove to be “remarkably brave and cold-blooded.” He became a fluent German speaker and was dropped behind enemy lines, successfully passing as a German officer in order to organize the assassination of Wilhelm Kube, Hitler’s commissioner general in Belorussia, otherwise known as the “butcher” of the province. After the war, Khokhlov repeatedly tried to break free of the secret services, but his bosses refused to release him. Instead, they trained him for work abroad that would include sabotage and “the physical liquidation of our enemies.” As he would put it, he was ordered “to become a murderer—a murderer in the interests of the Soviet State.”

  But Khokhlov was increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system. Later in the war, he learned the true story of his father, whom he didn’t know that well since his parents had divorced when he was very young. His father served as a commissar in an army battalion during the battle for Moscow, and he made the mistake of confiding in one of his soldiers that Stalin was to blame for the disorder and collapse on the front when the Germans attacked. He added that it was hard to figure out who was the lesser evil, Hitler or Stalin. Convinced that he was being tested, the soldier immediately reported the remarks. The result was that Khokhlov’s father was transferred to a penal battalion, the kind of unit that was sent into battle first with the expectation that almost everyone would perish. Which is what happened to Khokhlov’s father very quickly.

  Khokhlov’s stepfather—“an excellent lawyer who probably did not know how to hold a rifle,” as Khokhlov put it—volunteered to defend Moscow and died in action almost immediately, too. “The army needed cannon fodder,” Khokhlov noted bitterly. “Zhukov achieved all his victories by slaughtering millions. The slaughter was unprecedented.”

  In 1954, when the Cold War was already in full swing, Khokhlov’s Lubyanka superiors dispatched him on an assignment to organize the murder of a prominent Russian émigré in West Germany. Instead, he warned his intended target of his mission, cooperated with U.S. intelligence agents in intercepting other members of his team, and defected to the West. He later wrote his memoirs, In the Name of Conscience: The Testament of a Soviet Secret Agent, and ended up teaching psychology at California State University in San Bernardino until his retirement in 1992. That was also the year that President Boris Yeltsin pardoned him, and he was able to return to Moscow for the first time, even dropping in on the Lubyanka, the famed headquarters of his former employers.

  As of this writing, Khokhlov is still living the quiet life of a professor emeritus in sunny Southern California. Looking back at the scheme Maklyarsky had cooked up for his group of performers, he didn’t hesitate in his response to the question whether they could have succeeded in their plot if the Germans had occupied Moscow. “No, never,” Khokhlov said. “The Germans would have immediately located us and all of us would have been hanged.” He pointed out that members of the artistic community all traded gossip and everyone quickly found out what everyone else was doing, which meant informers could have easily learned all there was to know. The fact that they had been spending the funds they had been allocated also would have made them easily identifiable. “It really was a charade that never would have worked,” he added.

  At the time, though, he and the others believed they could pull it off. “The most important trait of a Soviet citizen was naïveté,” Khokhlov continued. “We lived in a fog created not only by the weather but by Soviet propaganda. At that time people did not talk about danger.”

  Aside from Khokhlov’s very special group, the NKVD deployed an assortment of operatives to be left behind for undercover work in the city. A handwritten, top-secret memo to Beria from Naum Eitingon, one of the top NKVD officials in charge of those activities, on October 14 offered a partial list along with assignments. The first “diversionary, terror group,” identified only by the initials Z.R., consisted of three subgroups, each with two fighters and one munitions specialist. “There are dead drops with explosives and weapons,” the memo reported. “Apart from that, explosives are kept outside Moscow in the Agriculture National Commissariat test site. The group commander has two radios—one of them is in reserve in case the first one malfunctions. Radio operators for both radios have been selected and trained. All the group members have cover stories and secret apartments. The group members liaise with the group commanders individually via special agents.”

  These were the groups that were supposed to carry out Stalin’s directive, issued a day later on October 15, to blow up factories and other installations that could not be evacuated. Other groups of agents mentioned in the Eitingon memo carried names such as Fishermen, the Old Men, the Faithful Ones, the Wild Ones and the Little Family.

  The report also included brief descriptions of some of the individual agents, identified by their code names, and their more specialized assignments. Agent Markov, the commander of the Wild Ones, for instance, was an ex-burglar. His group’s mission was “acts of terror against German army officers.” Agent Grip Vice, a member of the Little Family, is described as “an engineer, a sportsman, of noble origin.” The report noted that his mother was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag because she had affairs with German embassy staffers in Moscow, but Grip Vice “is a faithful agent.” His assignment was “to join fascist sport and youth organizations in order to get some managing position to conduct some big act of terror.” Agent Poet, commander of ex–Red Army officers with combat experience, “will conduct diversions in the railway transport system.”

  Aside from explosives, the groups had various tools at their disposal. A female member of the Old Men by the name of Gerasimova “is assigned to publish anti-fascist leaflets and she was allotted a typewriter for that.” Agent Iron Ore, an engineer and former officer in the tsarist army, was also supposed to publish leaflets and “conduct intelligence operations.” “He has been allotted a typewriter and a photo camera,” the report pointed out. Agent Kako, a restaurant owner, was expected “to conduct intelligence and terror operations” using his restaurant “for secret meetings and weapons storage.” To make his job easier, the report added, “Kako was allotted alcohol.” Other sites used as covers for the operatives included a sculptor’s workshop, the office of a notary, a medical clinic, and a theater.

  As always, the NKVD was particularly eager to identify Soviet citizens who weren’t loyal to the cause. Agent Builder, described as a railway engineer and highly successful businessman of noble origin, “has lots of connections among White émigrés, former generals in the tsarist army and dukes.” His assignment was to gather members of the intelligentsia “who do not believe we will win the war” and to prepare them “to greet the Germans.” He would then start a construction company and move in high social circles under the occupation regime. “He will have intelligence and more active tasks,” the report noted tersely. It did not specify whether those “more active tasks” included the assassination of the collaborators or whether that would be left to other agents.

  Another report discussed how the operatives should be alerted to evacuate the NKVD offices and set fire to buildings at the moment that the Germans were on the verge of taking the city. One option, it said, was to have ten buglers sound a signal. But the report added that some people might not understand what the signal meant and that there was a risk that German agents would learn of the plan. The other option, which was clearly preferred, was to equip the targeted buildings with radios to make sure the signal would be received and everyone would know this was the moment for the arson attacks on the buildings and their speedy evacuation.

  As the German offensive came closer and closer, the NKVD was increasingly preoccupied with planting the explosives and mines necessary to achieve their objectives. In his recollections dated April 4, 1994, Sergei Fedoseyev, head of the Moscow region’s NKVD counterintelligence section, explained that factories that could still be
used to produce armaments were a priority target. Despite the enormous effort to move key industries to the east, that job was far from completed. Fedoseyev also mentioned the need for twenty tons of explosives to blow up twelve city bridges.

  From an intelligence briefing, Fedoseyev and other NKVD officials heard that Otto Skorzeny, the SS officer who was already developing a reputation for ruthless efficiency and later in the war would snatch Benito Mussolini from captivity, was in charge of a “technical section” of the approaching German forces. His mission: to seize and secure Communist Party buildings in the city, the NKVD’s Lubyanka, the Central Telegraph and other high priority facilities before they could be destroyed. With this in mind, the NKVD dispatched specialists to double check that everything was arranged to thwart those plans.

  Igor and Natalya Shchors are among the last surviving members of the NKVD teams that were prepared for undercover work in an occupied Moscow. They are also a true NKVD couple, since they began their assignments in 1941 as strangers instructed to play the roles of husband and wife, and gradually the role-playing became reality. In 1944, they formally tied the knot and a year later started a family. After all this time, they still feel a little awkward discussing how an NKVD mission blossomed into a full-fledged romance. “In the beginning it was difficult,” Natalya recalled, sitting in their cramped apartment on the Garden Ring Road in central Moscow. Her blue eyes sparkled as she looked over at Igor, sitting stiffly in his armchair by the window. “But from that time on, we’ve been together.”

  One of six children, Igor was born in 1913 and grew up in the Ukraine, where Stalin unleashed his terror campaign of forced collectivization, which resulted in an artificially induced famine that claimed millions of lives. Igor remembers it well. Although his family would get ration coupons for bread, the shops often had no bread at all for days at a time. “People would storm the shops to get bread, and we would eat it right away so that nobody could grab it from us,” he says. “There were even cases of cannibalism.”

  Still, he managed to be a top student at school, particularly in math, and he was chosen to study at Leningrad’s Mountain Engineering Institute, where, as he vividly recalls, “I would get more bread.” As a mountain engineer, he learned all about explosives, and he took a two-year artillery course that allowed him to graduate with the rank of an officer. In March 1940, he was called to serve in the NKVD and told to report to the Lubyanka in Moscow. From there he was assigned to a special NKVD school in a wooded area outside the city. The wooden house that served as a school was ringed by barbed wire, and the students weren’t allowed to leave the premises without informing their superiors exactly where they would be and who they would be visiting.

  The school was primarily geared to teaching the future agents foreign languages, but it also was designed to make them familiar with the customs and behavior of the countries where they might be sent so that they could blend in as much as possible. And of course, they learned basic spycraft. By the end of the course, they were supposed to be ready to operate as illegal agents in a foreign country.

  Igor arrived in late August 1940, and he recalls the early drills on outdoor surveillance, safecracking and the skills they’d need to elude capture. (For their final exam, they had to give the slip to instructors who tailed them.) The students used false last names and weren’t allowed to question each other about their background. Igor was given the last name Shlegov, but he was allowed to keep using his real first name.

  He was assigned to a group of twelve students learning French. There were also similar groups studying English, German, and Italian—forty-eight trainees in all, male and female. He remembers one of his instructors as “a talented criminal who was released and made a tutor.” At a time when food shortages were still common, Igor learned how to eat oysters and fois gras. “We were supposed to know how to eat such food in case we went to some fancy event in France,” he says. They also learned how to sip wine and other drinks that required a different approach from the normal bottoms-up vodka-drinking in Russia. To be prepared for the other end of the social spectrum, one of the instructors specialized in teaching his charges rude colloquial French. The students were told that once they reached France, they would open a beauty salon, a pub, or a hotel, using it as cover for their spying operations.

  Igor formally completed the course on June 21, 1941, graduating with the rank of lieutenant in the NKVD. The next day, when he and a fellow graduate went to the market to buy some food and wine for a small celebration, a shop assistant rushed out to tell them about Molotov’s announcement of the beginning of the war. Returning to the school, they received instructions to stay put until they received a new posting. A week later, Igor was assigned to OMSBON, the NKVD’s special forces.

  As part of that unit, he underwent more military training, but he was impatient to get into action and pleaded for a new assignment. After Stalin’s speech on July 3 that called on people to join the resistance, Igor sent a telegram directly to Pavel Sudoplatov, the NKVD boss in charge of “special tasks,” who responded by inviting him to the Lubyanka. Sudoplatov advised the eager, freshly minted lieutenant to be patient, assuring him that he’d find a way to use him soon. “The war will last a long time,” Sudoplatov added.

  Igor then found himself in a small group of men who were instructed to prepare for journeys that might take them directly into the fighting. Two of the men were sent to Smolensk, but one of them stepped on a mine and died immediately, while the other lost a leg. Igor was also supposed to head west, but the rapid advance of the German forces prompted his bosses to change his orders. He was brought back to Moscow, where his path would cross with Natalya’s.

  Born in 1919 in the village of Pavelkovo, about 150 miles south of Moscow, Natalya was no stranger to hardship either. She was the twelfth child in her family, and when she was only two, her mother died. Raised by her eldest sister, she loved sports and from 1937 to 1941 studied at the Joseph Stalin Institute of Physical Fitness in Moscow. She practiced all kinds of sports, from gymnastics to ice hockey, and took courses in sports medicine, physiology, anatomy, massage, and math and physics. In 1940, she took part in the annual sports parade in Red Square. She fondly recalls standing on a motorcycle and carrying flowers as her contingent paraded past Stalin and the rest of the Soviet leadership. Was she nervous? “I was never afraid of anything,” she claims. Later, when the Germans starting dropping small incendiary bombs on the city, Natalya was among the young people who monitored the roofs and tossed away unexploded bombs so that they wouldn’t set fire to the buildings.

  When she completed her studies in the summer of 1941, Natalya was eager to join the army, but the director of her institute told her that she had been summoned to the Komsomol office downtown. There she and four other young women found themselves in a meeting with an NKVD officer, who asked them pointedly, “Aren’t you afraid of going to the war?” All of them, including a soon-to-be-legendary teenager by the name of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, responded that this was exactly what they wanted. On the spot, they filled out their applications to join the NKVD.

  A day later, Maklyarsky, the man who directed the entertainers preparing their assassination plot, assigned Natalya to an OMSBON unit. She was to work as a nurse in Stroitel, a town in the Moscow region. She had already learned first aid while doing part-time work in a medical institute (“I wasn’t afraid of blood,” she notes). As part of her OMSBON training, she was also taught to shoot and make explosives.

  In early October, a hospital supervisor told the nurses that a senior NKVD officer was arriving to conduct interviews with them. The officer turned out to be Maklyarsky, who greeted her with a smile and called her Natalie instead of Natalya, which is the more common form of her name. “Natalie, we would like you to carry out a special order of Stalin,” he told her, adding that she should come to Moscow.

  The very next day, Natalya and two other women found themselves in room 1212 of the prestigious Hotel Moskva, the brooding, mass
ive building next to the Kremlin where explosives were discovered in 2005. They were issued new uniforms, but Natalya’s boots were four sizes too large for her. Struggling along in them, she was escorted by Maklyarsky to the Lubyanka office of Bogdan Kobulov, Beria’s right-hand man. Kobulov sat behind a huge desk, with several officers seated around it.

  “What can you do?” Kobulov asked her. “Can you drive?”

  Natalya responded that she could but she had a driver’s license only for a motorcycle. “I also play hockey and do sports,” she added.

  Kobulov had his mind on other things. “What if we make you a fictitious wife?” he asked. In preparation for undercover assignments, the NKVD sometimes put male and female agents in fake marriages, which allowed them to work together without arousing suspicion. The brass assumed that a married young couple would attract less attention than a single man or woman.

  Natalya still smiles at the memory. “I felt my heart sink for a moment and I turned red. But I said, ‘If I need to do this for my country, I’ll do it.’” Her lack of enthusiasm was understandable since she had a boyfriend named Dmitry, who had already proposed to her. He had been called up in 1939, and they had kept writing letters to each other. But she felt she had no choice but to agree to pretend to be the wife of a man she hadn’t yet even met.

  She was sent back to room 1212 at the Hotel Moskva, where the NKVD supplied her with “beautiful dresses, shoes and bedding,” she recalls. Then the phone rang, and she was instructed to report to room 525. There she was introduced to Igor and told that a driver would take them to the apartment assigned to him in the Rublevo section on the outskirts of Moscow. It was hardly a romantic beginning to their life together. Since even the NKVD driver wasn’t supposed to know that they weren’t truly a married couple, Igor put his arm around Natalya in the car, but she stiffened, leaving no doubt how uncomfortable she felt.