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

by Vadim Birstein

  There was a good guy in our company, a sharp-sighted observer, a Kazakh by origin.17 I was thunderstruck when it came to light that he put a bullet through his own arm. It was easily recognized. That’s all—military tribunal and death by shooting. As a rule, the execution was performed in front of the regiment’s formation.

  There was another episode in the regiment. Several soldiers formed a circle and one of them threw a grenade in the center to wound everyone in the leg…

  I heard about one more way to evade participating in combats—to raise your hand over the parapet of the trench [soldiers facetiously called this method of self-inflicted injury golosovanie, or ‘voting’]…

  The special group in our regiment that prevented desertion and exposed the samostreltsy…was [called] Osobyi otdel and its staff numbered some five men… Everybody tried to keep their distance from them. We also knew that there were secret Osobyi otdel informers in all of the regimental detachments.18

  Most of the Red Army men hated the osobisty. Here is a song written by members of an unknown tank crew (my translation):

  The first shell ignited fuel

  And I escaped from the tank not remembering how

  Then I was questioned in the Osobyi otdel:

  ‘Son of a bitch, why didn’t you burn along with the tank?’

  And I answered, and I said:

  ‘In the next attack I’ll certainly be dead.’19

  Zyama Ioffe, a member of a military tribunal during almost the whole war who dealt with the osobisty on a daily basis, explicitly stated in 2009:

  Every osobist looked at the surrounding people with the arrogant and impudent conviction that he could send any soldier or officer, despite rank and file, to a penal detachment or ‘make him knuckle under’, or shoot him to death, or ‘grind him into the dust of labor camps’ [Beria’s favorite expression], or organize a special vetting for him, etc…

  The power over people and complete impunity, especially when the ‘worker of the organs’ [as the NKVD/MGB officers called themselves] was constantly told [by his superiors] that potential enemies and traitors existed everywhere while he was the only specially trusted person, used to turn him into a real piece of shit…

  Very few had guts to withstand the osobisty.20

  Another veteran, Izo Adamsky, an artillery officer, recalled that at the front line the hatred of the osobisty (who became SMERSH officers) continued until the end of the war:

  On the Oder River [near Berlin, in May 1945], a drunken osobist slept in my dug-out all the time because he was afraid of going out alone and getting a bullet in his back. The osobisty even had an order about ‘self-guarding’ that forbade them to move around without guards at any time.

  This was because many wanted to get even with the osobisty when they had an opportunity. I remember such occasions very well.21

  In the numerous memoirs of the NKVD/SMERSH veterans published in the late 2000s, military counterintelligence officers typically wrote about themselves that ‘our authority was very high’ among servicemen.22 Obviously, even more than 65 years after the war they were not ready to face the real attitude of fighting soldiers toward them. As Ioffe put it, ‘almost everyone hated the osobisty’.

  Only once did Ioffe see an osobist who was fighting the enemy. During a disastrous retreat from the Northern Caucasus in the autumn of 1942, Goldberg, head of the Army’s OO, ‘grabbed a machine gun from the hands of a guard soldier of the tribunal, and rushed to head off the running crowd. He stopped the retreating soldiers, turned them around, and led them back to the positions they had just left’.23

  Stalin’s Order No. 270

  The high number of Red Army servicemen who were taken prisoner (POWs), especially in Belorussia and Ukraine, was unprecedented. The German Army Group South, supported by several Italian, Hungarian and Slovak divisions, occupied Belorussia and most of Ukraine, while Romanian troops occupied the former Bessarabia and the region near Odessa. By the end of September 1941, in the area around Kiev (the capital of Ukraine) alone, 665,000 Soviet servicemen had been encircled and taken prisoner. The POWs became the main focus of Stalin’s anger and a target of military counterintelligence.

  According to current Russian data, from June to December 1941, between 2 million and 3.8 million servicemen were taken prisoner.24 At the end of 1941 only about eight percent of the servicemen listed on June 22, 1941 remained in uniform.25 The Germans recorded higher numbers for 1941–43 than the Russian sources typically give. On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared that the German troops had captured 3,806,865 prisoners. 26 In February 1942 Alfred Rosenberg, the German minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and the main ideologist of Nazi racial theory, wrote: ‘Currently, of 3.6 million POWs, only a few hundred thousand are capable of work. Most of them died of hunger and bad weather. Thousands are sick with typhus. In most camps the commandants… consider death to be the best solution for them.’27

  In mid-1942, the number of prisoners continued to grow. By May 1942, the German and Romanian forces jointly conquered the Crimea, and 150,000 Red Army men were captured in the Crimea; 240,000 were taken the same May near Kharkov; 80,000 men were captured in June during the battle on the North Donets River; and about 95,000 men were taken in July near Sevastopol. Here is the number of Russian servicemen taken prisoner for the years 1941 to 1945 from both Russian and German sources:

  Year Russian sources28 German sources29

  1941 Approx. 2,000,000 3,355,000

  1942 1,339,000 1,653,000

  1943 487,000 565,000

  1944 203,000 147,000

  1945 40,600 34,000

  Total 4,069,000 5,754,000

  At the end, only about 1.7 million Soviet POWs were still alive in German hands.30

  Not all prisoners were taken because of military defeat or encirclement. In the autumn of 1941, changing sides and going over to the enemy occurred on a large scale. To prevent this, the heads of OOs attached to troops defending Moscow took measures even against their own subordinates. One order from the 16th Army’s OO head stated: ‘I warn all operational workers [the word “officer” was not used until early 1943] of Special Departments that if the acts of treason against the Motherland continue, the operational worker who is responsible for the unit in which such an act took place, as well as the OO head and deputy head of this unit, will be court-martialed.’31

  Stalin’s harsh personal attitude toward Soviet POWs is evident in his infamous Order No. 270, dated August 16, 1941. Four days before that, NKO Commissar Timoshenko brought a draft of the order to Stalin and Stalin substantially edited it. The order included examples of three generals—Vladimir Kachalov, Commander of the 28th Army (Western Front), Nikolai Kirillov, Commander of the 13th Rifle Corps, and Pavel Ponedelin, Commander of the 12th Army (both at the Southern Front)—who supposedly panicked and deserted. It introduced the slogan ‘Cowards and deserters must be liquidated!’ The order concluded:

  I order that:

  1. Anyone who removes his insignia during battle and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter, whose family is to be arrested as the family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot.

  2. Those who find themselves surrounded are to fight to the last and try to reach their own lines. And those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means, and their families deprived of all state allowances and assistance.

  3. Bold and brave people are to be more actively promoted.

  4. This order is to be read to all companies, squadrons, [and] batteries.32

  Although Stalin wrote in the text ‘I order’, Molotov (GKO’s deputy chairman), four marshals (Semyon Budennyi, Kliment Voroshilov, Semyon Timoshenko, and Boris Shaposhnikov), and Army General Georgii Zhukov signed the order as well.

  Soviet propaganda never mentioned that generals Nikolai Kirillov and Pavel Ponedelin were taken prisoner along with 103,000 servicemen (according to the German data) in one of th
e most devastating defeats of the Red Army in 1941, near the Ukrainian town of Uman.33 Hitler, on the contrary, widely publicized this victory and even invited Benito Mussolini, the Italian Duce, to visit the troops in the Uman pocket. On August 26, 1941, the two dictators boarded a plane at Hitler’s HQ Wolfschantze in East Prussia, and flew to Uman. In Uman, they inspected an Italian division that was fighting alongside the Germans.34 Not until 2010 did a Russian author finally publish a book about the Uman disaster.35

  The Military Collegium condemned Generals Kachalov, Kirillov, and Ponedelin in absentia to death as traitors (paragraph 58-1b), not being aware that one of them, Kachalov, had already been killed in action. But Stalin, apparently, did not forget the humiliating visit of the two fascist leaders. In May 1945, SMERSH arrested Kirillov and Ponedelin, who had survived Nazi imprisonment, and in August 1950 the Military Collegium sentenced them to death for the second time and they were executed. Stalin personally approved the executions.

  The Fallout from Order No. 270

  After Order No. 270, Stalin signed an additional order that required commanders, commissars, and OOs of corps and divisions to report the names of all servicemen taken prisoner, as well as the names of their family members.36 The wives of Kachanov, Kirillov, and Ponedelin were arrested and sentenced to exile (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com).

  Essentially, Order No. 270 was just the continuation of Stalin’s longstanding policy toward POWs. For instance, in 1938, most of the Russian soldiers who had been in German or Austrian captivity during World War I were persecuted, despite the passage of twenty years. In March 1938, Stalin made a note on an NKVD report concerning the arrest of former POWs: ‘Former Russian [underlined in the original] prisoners of war should be counted and examined. J. St[alin].’37 A prisoner recalled: ‘In 1938, workers and simple kolkhoz [Communist collective-farm] peasants started appearing in the prison cells [of NKVD investigation prisons], all utterly unable to imagine why they had been arrested. It turned out that they had been prisoners of war.’38

  A new word began to be used, okruzhenets, meaning a serviceman who had been encircled (okruzhenie in Russian) by Germans. On September 6, 1941, the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda published for the first time an editorial article about POWs, but without a reference to Order No. 270. David Ortenberg, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, later recalled the main statement of the article: ‘It is a shame to be taken prisoner by the German-fascist scoundrels, a shame toward the people, comrades, families, children, and it is a crime against the Motherland.’39 Following this trend, the Leningrad Front commander, Georgii Zhukov, went even further than Stalin. In a ciphered cable of September 28, 1941, he ordered: ‘All servicemen should know that the families of anyone who has surrendered to the enemy will be shot, and all survivors of the surrender will be shot upon their return from captivity.’40

  Following the directives of Order No. 270, in autumn 1941, field OOs focused their arrests on both low-level personnel and high-ranking officers. 41 Additionally, the order was used for the execution of an enormous number of mid-level commanders, as well as privates, without trial, on the order of the army military council or a front commander. Lev Mekhlis personally ordered executions although he wasn’t even a member of a military council. After he and Kirill Meretskov arrived at the headquarters of the Northwestern Front as Stavka representatives in September 1941, Mekhlis simply wrote an order to execute General Vasilii Goncharov, Artillery Commander of the 34th Army, without trial.42 Goncharov was shot in front of the staff formation. Viktor Bochkov, OO head of the front, reported to Mekhlis on those officers who dared to complain about this execution. Then Mekhlis ordered the front tribunal to sentence Major General Kuz’ma Kachanov, Commander of the 34th Army, to death. Kachanov was executed in Mekhlis’s presence.

  Though preoccupied with executions, Mekhlis did not forget that he, as head of the GlavPURKKA, was also in charge of troop morale. The commander of the 163rd Rifle Division of the same front received a cable from Mekhlis: ‘I’m sending a good military band to join [your] division…The enemy must tremble at the sound of the Soviet march.’43

  In these complicated circumstances some military prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to remind commanders and heads of OOs about the law. For example, in October 1941 Boris Alekseev, Prosecutor of the 43rd Army (Western Front), found out that 30 commanders and privates had been executed in a few days without trial, only on the order of the Military Council of this army. He immediately ordered the divisional prosecutors to increase their supervision over such cases. Additionally, he told Major General Stepan Akimov, Commander of the 43rd Army, that he would not tolerate executions without trial, and reported to the Chief Military Prosecutor Nosov, ‘I’ve pointed out to the Army high command and the OO head that it is necessary to follow proper regulations.’44 But Georgii Zhukov, Commander of the Western Front, continued ordering executions without trial. In November 1941, on Zhukov’s order Lieutenant Colonel A. G. Gerasimov and Commissar G. F. Shabalov were shot in front of formation.45

  As for Mekhlis, in May 1942, after the defeat of the Red Army in the Crimea (where he represented the Stavka), he lost his posts of deputy NKO Commissar and head of the GlavPURKKA and was demoted to Corps Commissar, two ranks lower. However, Mekhlis remained a member of military councils until the end of the war. With Stalin’s approval, he moved among nine fronts, denouncing commanders and HQ members to Stalin. After visiting the Bryansk Front in 1943, a correspondent for the military newspaper Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star) described Mekhlis: ‘He is feared, disliked, and even hated.’46

  Notes

  1. GKO Order No. 187ss. Document No. 146, in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. Organy VCheKa–OGPU–NKVD–NKGB–MGB–MVD–KGB. 1917–1991. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2003), 616–7 (in Russian).

  2. NKVD Instruction No. 169, dated July 18, 1941. Quoted in Gosudarstvennaya bezopasnost’ Rossii: istoriya i sovremennost’, edited by R. N. Baiguzin, 554 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004) (in Russian).

  3. NKVD Order No. 1024, cited in Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, ‘NKVD–NKGB–SMERSH: Struktura, funktsii, kadry. Stat’ya tret’ya (1941–1943),’ Svobodnaya mysl, no. 8 (1997), 118–28 (in Russian).

  4. GKO Decision No. 1120-ss, dated January 10, 1942. Document No. 775, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine. Tom 3. Kniga 1. Krushenie ‘Blitskriga,’ 1 yanvarya–30 iyunya 1942 goda (Moscow: Rus’, 2003), 27 (in Russian).

  5. Politburo decision P34/259, dated July 21, 1941, and the decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council that followed. Document No. 186, in Lubyanka: Stalin i NKVD, 298–9; also, Beria’s report to Stalin, dated July 30, 1941. Document No. 191, in ibid., 306–8.

  6. Pages 276–8 in Document No. 27 (NKVD structure on May 20, 1942) in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. VChK–OGPU–NKVD–NKGB–MGB–MVD–KGB. 1917–1960. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 1997), 271–304 (in Russian).

  7. Data from V. P. Artemiev et al., Political Controls in the Soviet Army: A Study Based on Reports by Former Soviet Officers (New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1954), 56.

  8. See the special State Security (NKVD) ranks and their military equivalents in Appendix III.

  9. Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy, 132.

  10. Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti (Moscow: Vysshaya shkola KGB, 1977), edited by V. M. Chebrikov et al., 351 (in Russian), http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/documents.htm, retrieved September 5, 2011.

  11. Peter Prigov, Why I Escaped (London: The Harvill Press, 1950), 67.

  12. Interview with Daniil El’kin, former infantryman, July 28, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.iremember.ru/pekhotintsi/elkin-daniil-arnoldovich.html, retrieved September 5, 2011.

  13. Interview with Nikolai Safonov, former infantryman, April 30, 2008, http://www.iremember.ru/pekhotintsi/safonov-nikolay-ivanovich/stranitsa-4.html, retrieved September 5, 2011.

  14. Directive No. 0367, Special Department, th
e Northwestern Front, dated July 22, 1941, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine. T. 2. ‘Nachalo’, Kniga 1 (22 iyunya –31 avgusta 1941 goda) (Moscow, 2000), 394–5 (in Russian).

  15. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 27.

  16. GKO decree No. 377ss, dated August 2, 1941. Quoted in N. Ya. Komarov and G. A. Kumanyov, Bitva pod Moskvoi. Prolog k velikoi pobede (Moscow: Molodaya gvariya, 2005), 54 (in Russian).

  17. Many servicemen from Central Asia and the Caucasus did not understand why they were fighting against the Germans because they even did not speak Russian. GKO decrees, dated October 13, 1943 and October 25, 1944, stated that men from these regions of the Soviet Union should not be drafted. A. I. Vdovin, ‘Natsional’naya politika v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,’ Doklady Akademii Voennykh Nauk. Voennaya istoriya, no. 3 (15) (2005), 122–39 (in Russian).

  18. Interview with Georgii Minin, former mortarman, July 14, 2006, http://www.iremember.ru/minometchiki/minin-georgiy-ivanovich/stranitsa-4.html, retrieved September 5, 2011.

  19. Quoted in Ye. S. Senyavskaya, 1941–1945: Frontovoe pokolenie. Istorikopsikhologicheskoe issledovanie (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii RAN, 1995), 148–9 (in Russian).

  20. Interview with Zyama Ioffe, former military prosecutor, February 5, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.iremember.ru/drugie-voyska/ioffe-zyama-yakovlevich/stranitsa-5.html, retrieved September 5, 2011.

  21. Interview with Izo Adamsky, an artillery officer, September 12, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.iremember.ru/minometchiki/adamskiy-izo-davidovich/stranitsa-8.html, retrieved September 5, 2011.

  22. A. A. Baranov, a member of the SMERSH Department of the 96th Separate Guard Mortar Regiment, quoted in Vadim Abramov, SMERSH: Sovetskaya voennaya kontrrazvedka protiv razvedki Tret’ego Reikha (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2005), 89.