Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII

by Vadim Birstein

  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 Ustav of 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.14 Altogether, 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