As Stalin shared the spoils of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler, taking control of first Western Ukraine and Belarus and then the Baltic states and the Romanian provinces of Moldavia and Bukovyna, Bandera led a revolt against the old leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and offered the services of his faction of the OUN to Germany. The German-Soviet alliance turned out to be short-lived. On June 22, 1941, the German armies crossed the Soviet border and began their movement eastward, pushing the retreating Red Army out of Western Ukraine. On June 30, 1941, a week after Germany’s attack on its former ally, Bandera and his people declared the creation of an independent Ukrainian state.
But an independent Ukraine had no place in German plans: they wanted Lebensraum (living space)—a territory cleansed of the local population and made ready for German settlement. The Gestapo arrested Bandera and his associates, demanding that they rescind their declaration. Bandera refused and spent most of the war in the German concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. Two of his brothers died in Auschwitz. “It’s true that when Bandera realized that the Hitlerites did not intend to keep their promise to sponsor an independent Ukraine he turned his units against them,” recalled Khrushchev. “But even then he did not stop hating the Soviet Union. During the second half of the war he fought both against us and the Germans.”3
By 1944, the Ukrainian nationalists had organized a guerrilla force numbering as many as 100,000 men. Formally, they constituted the Ukrainian Insurgent Army; informally, they were known as Banderites. “As we pushed the Germans west, we encountered an old enemy—Ukrainian nationalists,” recalled Khrushchev. “The Banderites were setting up partisan detachments of their own.” After his release from Sachsenhausen, Bandera fled to Austria. The insurgency was run by others, who had little, if any, contact with their faraway leader, but Bandera’s name remained closely linked with the underground. All aspects of guerrilla warfare, good and bad, became associated with Bandera—the self-sacrifice of young men and women who gave their lives for the cause of Ukrainian independence as well as the ethnic cleansing of Poles in Western Ukraine, the participation of the individual members of the nationalist underground in the Holocaust, and the gruesome assassinations of Soviet “collaborators” such as Yaroslav Halan.4
The Soviets employed tens of thousands of regular troops, thousands of members of special detachments, and locally formed militias to fight the nationalist underground. They reported killing more than 100,000 “bandits” and arresting another quarter of a million in 1944–1946. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were deported from Western Ukraine to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The commanders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which now numbered fewer than 5,000 soldiers, switched to small-scale attacks on Soviet government institutions and military installations. Individual terror against representatives of Soviet rule and local “collaborators” became the new modus operandi. The insurgents understood that they could not win in a pitched battle. Their only remaining hope for personal survival and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state was a new global war, this time between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Slowly but relentlessly, Soviet counterinsurgency operations and terror against the local population delivered results. By 1948, Ukrainian nationalist resistance had weakened sufficiently to allow the Soviets to begin the mass collectivization of agriculture—the centerpiece of their program of socialist transformation. Soviet agents penetrated many of the remaining insurgent units and tried to gain control over communications between local insurgents and Bandera’s émigré followers, who were headquartered in Munich, the center of the American occupation zone in Germany. Still, the Soviet secret police could not reach the leadership of the Insurgent Army or prevent assassinations of regime supporters like Yaroslav Halan.5
Nikita Khrushchev had known Halan personally. In 1946, Halan had represented the Soviet Ukrainian media at the Nuremberg Trials of major war criminals, where he had demanded the extradition of Stepan Bandera from the American occupation zone of Germany. Back home, he attacked the Ukrainian nationalists with his fiery pamphlets. Halan also targeted the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Its hierarchs were arrested and its priests forced to accept the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church as part of the Soviet struggle against the Vatican and its political, religious, and cultural influences in the Soviet-controlled part of Europe. The church’s faithful were driven underground. Halan’s vitriolic attacks on the church did not go unnoticed in Rome, and in July 1949 Pope Pius XII excommunicated him. Halan responded with a new pamphlet, in which he wrote: “I spit on the pope.” Many believed that the phrase sealed Halan’s fate in the eyes of the insurgents, who allied themselves with the persecuted Ukrainian Catholic Church.6
Khrushchev was immediately informed of Halan’s death and called Moscow to let Stalin know what had happened in Lviv. The aging and ever more paranoid Soviet dictator was not pleased. The assassination left no doubt that more than five years after the Red Army had recaptured Western Ukraine from the retreating Germans, and more than four years after the red banner had been flown atop the Reichstag building in central Berlin, the Ukrainian underground was still fighting the victorious Soviet superpower. And not somewhere on the periphery of the communist world, but in its very heart, within the borders of the USSR. Stalin dispatched his best secret police forces to Ukraine. They were told that “Comrade Stalin has rated the work of the security organs combating banditry in Western Ukraine as highly unsatisfactory.” They were ordered to find the assassins and crush the remaining Ukrainian resistance.7
Khrushchev knew that his job was on the line. That is why he not only came to Lviv in person to oversee the investigation, but also brought along a full team to help increase police and party control over locals: the minister of the interior, the secretaries of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and even the first secretary of the Ukrainian branch of the Komsomol—the Young Communist League. Khrushchev wanted his underlings to turn Lviv and Western Ukraine into a fortress. According to one account, he was prepared to introduce drastic measures to remove the recruitment base for the underground: he would round up young men and send them to the Donbas Mines or to trade schools in Eastern Ukraine, or even, perhaps, place the population under strict control through a system of internal passports, a step that would have turned the whole region into a huge prison camp outside of Soviet laws. Khrushchev dropped that idea only after Stalin’s security experts protested his plans. One of them believed that Khrushchev’s proposed measures would drive Ukrainian youth into the forests, directly into the hands of the insurgents.8
Upon receiving a call from the Kremlin, Khrushchev put his plans on hold and flew to Moscow, as ordered. “I did not know what my status would be when I returned to Ukraine—or even if I would return at all,” he remembered later. The trip turned out to be the most fateful of his career. Instead of being reprimanded or arrested, Khrushchev was promoted. The aging dictator wanted Khrushchev by his side in Moscow, and he gave him control of the city’s party organization to fight internal enemies. Stalin was purging party cadres of real and alleged supporters of the “Leningrad group” of Soviet officials, who were accused of attempting to form a separate Russian Communist Party—a potential threat to the unity of the All-Union Communist Party led by Stalin. Khrushchev, the longtime leader of Ukraine, seemed a natural ally in the struggle against Russian particularism, which threatened to topple the empire.
Khrushchev was more than relieved. He thanked Stalin for his trust in him. “I’ve been treated well, and I am thankful to everyone who has helped with the supervision of Ukraine,” he told the dictator. “But I will nonetheless be glad to get back to Moscow.” Stalin wanted him to go back to Ukraine, wrap up unfinished business there, and return to the Soviet capital in time for the lavish celebration of his seventieth birthday, scheduled for December 21, 1949. On that day, Stalin seated Khrushchev next to himself. On Stalin’s other side was the leader of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
Khrushchev had begun his assent to the summit of Soviet power. But he would never forget the scare caused by Stalin’s unexpected summons and the person he believed responsible for Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets, Stepan Bandera.9
2
MASTER KILLER
As Khrushchev took part in the celebrations for Stalin’s birthday in Moscow, his former subordinates in Ukraine continued their hunt for the leaders of the Ukrainian underground. Many of them celebrated New Year’s Day 1950 in Lviv instead of returning to Kyiv or Moscow and spent months after that in Western Ukraine. Among them was General Pavel Sudoplatov, the most senior security official to be sent from Moscow to Lviv with the task of destroying the leadership of the armed resistance. Sudoplatov followed his orders. Killing leaders of the Ukrainian movement was in fact his specialty.
Sudoplatov had been given his first assignment in that line of work in November 1937, when he was a thirty-year-old foreign intelligence officer. He was first summoned to the office of Stalin’s people’s commissar (minister) of the interior, Nikolai Yezhov, and then taken to meet Stalin himself. At the time, Sudoplatov, a native of Ukraine and a fluent Ukrainian speaker, had infiltrated Ukrainian émigré circles in Europe by posing as a representative of the Ukrainian underground based in the Soviet Union. Stalin, eager for a status report on relations among the leaders of the various Ukrainian organizations, had summoned Sudoplatov to his office. Sudoplatov revealed that they were all competing with one another for positions in the future government of independent Ukraine, but the most dangerous of all was Yevhen Konovalets, the head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Konovalets was then the superior of Stepan Bandera, and the OUN had the backing of German military intelligence, the Abwehr.
“What are your suggestions?” asked Stalin. Sudoplatov had none. Stalin gave him a week to prepare a plan for combating Konovalets and his organization. A week later, Sudoplatov came back to Stalin’s office with a plan for penetrating the Abwehr by means of Soviet agents in Konovalets’s organization.
This plan was clearly not what Stalin had in mind. Stalin gave the floor to Hryhorii Petrovsky, an old Bolshevik and one of the leaders of Soviet Ukraine, who had been invited to sit in on the meeting. As Sudoplatov later recalled, Petrovsky “solemnly announced that the Ukrainian socialist state had, in absentia, condemned Konovalets to death for grave crimes against the Ukrainian proletariat”—that is, assassination, albeit couched in political justification. He referred specifically to Konovalets’s role in the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv in 1918, during which Konovalets had served as a military commander for a short-lived government of independent Ukraine. Stalin spoke up in support of Petrovsky’s suggestion: “This is not just an act of revenge, although Konovalets is an agent of German fascism. Our goal is to behead the movement of Ukrainian fascism on the eve of the war and force the gangsters to annihilate one another in a struggle for power.”
Stalin obviously had assassination in mind when he first summoned Sudoplatov: he simply did not want to be the first to suggest it to the potential assassin. When Sudoplatov failed to guess the leader’s wish, Stalin had Petrovsky step in to suggest assassination and provide legal justification for the killing. The idea was wholly Stalin’s, not Petrovsky’s—only a few days before their meeting, Sudoplatov had met with Petrovsky individually, and he had suggested nothing of the sort. Now, with the idea of assassination on the table, Stalin pressed his intelligence agent. “What are the personal tastes of Konovalets? Try to exploit them,” said Stalin. Sudoplatov, who had met with Konovalets more than once in the course of his work abroad, told Stalin that wherever they went, the Ukrainian leader would always buy a box of chocolates. “Konovalets is overly fond of chocolate candies,” he told his Kremlin host. Stalin suggested that Sudoplatov think about that.
Before parting ways, Stalin asked the future assassin whether he understood the political importance of the mission entrusted to him. Sudoplatov assured Stalin that he did and that he was prepared to give his life to fulfill the task. Stalin wished him success and shook his hand. Konovalets’s activities during the revolution provided legal justification for the proposed act of individual terror, his ties with the Abwehr the political rationale, and the characterization of his nationalist movement as fascist the ideological excuse. The latter would become a major weapon in the Soviet effort to discredit the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which was radical and rightist in ideological orientation, but branded fascist only by its Soviet opponents. Stalin was getting ready for the coming war with Germany and wanted confusion in the ranks of his enemies. Konovalets had to die.
The Soviet secret police followed Stalin’s suggestion to exploit Konovalets’s weakness. Technical experts constructed a bomb disguised as a box of chocolates. Turning the box from a vertical position to a horizontal one would start the clock mechanism, with a thirty-minute countdown to detonation. On May 23,1938, Sudoplatov met with Konovalets in downtown Rotterdam in the restaurant of the Hotel Atlanta and gave him the box. The assassin then left the restaurant and went into a shop on a nearby street, where he bought a hat and a raincoat to disguise his appearance. Shortly after noon, he heard the explosion and saw people running in the direction from which he had just come. Sudoplatov went to the railway station and boarded a train for Paris. “The gift was presented. The parcel is now in Paris, and the tire of the car in which I traveled had a blowout while I was shopping,” read the encoded telegram sent that day from Paris to Moscow.1
Konovalets was killed on the spot, as Sudoplatov would learn from a newspaper. Immediately after the assassination, Sudoplatov developed an excruciating headache, but he never regretted what he had done. “The prospect of war was regarded as inevitable by the spring of 1938, and we knew that he would fight for the Germans,” wrote Sudoplatov later about his victim. The assassination he carried out was considered a classic by generations of KGB officers: elegant, efficient, and politically expedient. As Stalin had planned, the death of Konovalets produced a power struggle in the nationalist underground. Two years after the assassination, the young and ambitious Stepan Bandera led his radical allies in revolt against Konovalets’s longtime aide and successor, Colonel Andrii Melnyk. Bandera managed to wrest control of most of the organization from Melnyk, but the split between the two factions, which resulted in open conflict between them, would last for decades, weakening the nationalist camp.2
The assassination made Pavel Sudoplatov a celebrity in the ranks of the Soviet secret police and gave his career a significant boost. His status was further enhanced during the war, when he found himself in charge of all diversionary and assassination activity behind the German lines. His skills remained in high demand after the war. In September 1946, he entered the compartment of a train car heading from Saratov to Moscow. His victim was Oleksandr Shumsky, the people’s commissar of education of Ukraine in the 1920s, who had been accused of Ukrainian nationalism and, after years of imprisonment and internal exile, had insisted on his right to return to Ukraine. Along with Sudoplatov was one of his subordinates, Colonel Grigorii Mairanovsky, the head of the special secret-police poison lab. “At night the members of the group led by Sudoplatov entered the compartment and covered Shumsky’s mouth, after which Mairanovsky injected the poison,” read a later report about the assassination. The autopsy conducted afterward found no trace of the poison used by Mairanovsky—curare, a plant extract. The cause of death was given as a stroke.
Sudoplatov and Mairanovsky’s next victim was an archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Teodor Romzha. He was the head of the church in Transcarpathia, which had belonged to Czechoslovakia before World War II. According to Sudoplatov, in 1947 Soviet intelligence received reports that the Vatican was lobbying the United States and Britain to support Ukrainian Catholics and their allies in the nationalist underground. Romzha was the last unimprisoned Ukrainian Catholic bishop, and thus exceedingly dangerous. In February 1947, a plan to kill Romzha was submitted to Mosco
w by the Ukrainian minister of security. The first attempt took place in late October 1947, when the carriage in which the archbishop was riding was hit by a truck. Romzha survived the attack and was taken to a local hospital. Sudoplatov and Mairanovsky finished the job when a nurse recruited by the secret police injected the bishop with poison supplied by Mairanovsky.
Sudoplatov’s memoirs and Soviet secret-police archives indicate that all the killings committed by Sudoplatov and Mairanovsky, his “Dr. Death,” were done with Stalin’s personal approval. No one else had the authority to decide the fate of the secret victims of Sudoplatov’s death squad. But the initiative to put people on the list could come from other members of the Soviet leadership as well. Sudoplatov claimed that the killings of Shumsky and Romzha were carried out at the insistence of Nikita Khrushchev, who allegedly met with Mairanovsky on his way to Uzhhorod. Sudoplatov claims to have been present during a telephone conversation between General Sergei Savchenko, the Ukrainian security minister, and Khrushchev in which the latter gave the final go-ahead for the operation to kill Romzha. Whether that is true or not, there is no doubt that the original plan to assassinate Romzha was drafted in Kyiv, not Moscow, and could not have been submitted there without Khrushchev’s personal approval.3
The Man with the Poison Gun Page 2