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

by Vadim Birstein

There is no documentary evidence that Podvoisky adopted Abakumov; in fact, he did adopt two sons, but Abakumov wasn’t one of them. The adoption of children, especially those of other Party colleagues, was common among the Old Bolsheviks. For instance, Mikhail Kedrov, the first head of the OO and Podvoisky’s brother-in-law, raised Iogan (Ivan) Tubala, a son of friends of Kedrov’s wife.15 However, if Abakumov was Podvoisky’s protégé, this would have given him extraordinary opportunities.

  Although Podvoisky did not serve in the VCheKa/OGPU, he was connected with the leaders of that organization. Through his marriage to Nina Didrikil, Podvoisky was related to the members of the OGPU/NKVD elite. One of her sisters, Olga, was married to Mikhail Kedrov.16 Another, Augusta, was married to Christian Frauchi. Their son, Artur Artuzov (surname at birth: Frauchi), became one of the most important leaders of the OO, Counterintelligence Department (KRO), Foreign Intelligence (INO), and Military Intelligence (RU).17 Podvoisky was also well acquainted with Genrikh Yagoda, OGPU head, and then the first NKVD Commissar. In 1918–19, before Yagoda was transferred to the OO in the VCheKa, he was Podvoisky’s secretary (upravlyayushchii delami).

  The EKU controlled all branches of industry, agriculture, and foreign trade, and it constantly discovered ‘spies and saboteurs’ among the foreign specialists working in the Soviet Union and among members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia.18 While serving in the EKU, Abakumov met Pavel Meshik, who was working as an assistant investigator in the 1st Section of the EKU. Later, from mid-1943, Meshik was one of Abakumov’s three deputies in SMERSH.

  In 1934, Abakumov was involved in EKU general operational activities, such as supervising informers. However, his superiors had a problem with his character: ‘Sometimes he does not think over the possible consequences of his [secret] agents’ work. Although he is disciplined, he needs moral guidance.’19 These notes evidently refer to Abakumov’s reputation as a playboy.

  Among his colleagues, Viktor Abakumov was known as being quite gregarious and a keen dancer, earning the nickname Vitya-fokstrotochnik (‘Vik-foxtrot dancer’; Vitya is a diminutive of Viktor).20 This detail is interesting because in 1924, OGPU head Yagoda sent an order to all regional OOs and other OGPU departments banning the foxtrot, shimmy, and other new Western dances in public places.21 They were considered ‘bourgeois society’s imitations of a sex act’ and in 1930, the dances were officially prohibited in the Soviet Union. However, big bands became popular again in the Soviet Union in 1944, after the Western Allies opened the Second Front in Europe. Even the Dzerzhinsky NKVD Club in the city of Kuibyshev (currently, Samara), where the main Moscow organizations, including embassies, were evacuated, had its professional ‘NKVD Jazz Orchestra’.22 In 1948, the word ‘jazz’ was prohibited as part of a campaign against the ‘bourgeois culture’ and ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ [a euphemism for the Jewish intelligentsia] and many jazz musicians were persecuted. The NKVD Jazz Orchestra was reduced to a small group called the ‘MVD Variety Orchestra’.

  Shreider describes another incident that also sheds light on Abakumov’s character. Showing up one day at a ‘safe’ apartment used by NKVD officers for meetings with their informers (in secret-service jargon, such apartments were called kukushki, or ‘cuckoos’, referring to the fact that a cuckoo leaves its eggs in other birds’ nests), Shreider found Abakumov in the company of a young woman, who was supposedly one of his informers. She did not conceal the fact that she had an intimate relationship with Abakumov and that Abakumov wrote ‘her’ reports to the NKVD by himself, and she only signed them. Later Shreider found out that Abakumov’s other female informers did the same.

  Womanizing was very common behavior within the NKVD, especially as the powerful secret service officers could easily blackmail their female informers with threats of arrest. Some NKVD leaders did not bother with seduction and simply raped female informers or women they picked up or arrested.23 The most infamous example was Beria. Every Muscovite (including myself, when I was a child) was aware of the special Beria team headed by Colonel Rafael Sarkisov, head of Beria’s bodyguards, who would simply snatch attractive women and girls off the street and bring them to Beria.24 Beria was also brazen enough to attack women among the nomenklatura. According to Abakumov’s former deputy, Abakumov stopped gathering secret reports on Beria’s affairs after it became clear that ‘the wives of so many high-level functionaries were mentioned in the reports that the leak of this information would have made Abakumov an enemy not only of Beria, but of half of the party and country leaders’.25 The list of hundreds of women whom Beria raped became evidence at his trial in 1953.

  Womanizing even ended the successful career of one of the cronies Beria brought from the Caucasus—Vladimir Dekanozov. In contrast with the physically big Abakumov, Dekanozov was ‘short, almost a dwarf, stocky, with a barrel-like chest, nearly bald head and bushy red eyebrows’.26 In 1953, his driver testified: ‘Dekanozov used women in the car. Trips with women occurred almost daily. Sometimes Dekanozov, traveling in the car day and night, picked up several women.’27 On March 19, 1947, the Politburo discharged Dekanozov from the post of deputy foreign minister because of a sex scandal: he had seduced a daughter of Molotov’s close co-worker.28

  As for Abakumov, after he became MGB Minister in 1946, he ordered the arrest of the popular Soviet movie star, Tatyana Okunevskaya, after she rejected his advances.29 It is possible that Abakumov was particularly interested in her because his rival, Beria, had previously drugged and raped her. In Abakumov’s investigation file there is an undated letter from his common-law wife, Tatyana Smirnova, saying that sometimes Abakumov beat her up and that he had had a love affair with a female co-worker, who later became his legal wife.30

  Abakumov’s dalliances were also well known in the NKVD/MGB: ‘Abakumov was a regular nighttime visitor to the [NKVD/MGB] club, playing snooker with his cronies and having sex with his numerous mistresses in a private room, which he kept stocked with a great variety of imported liqueurs and French perfumes.’31 Although prostitution was outlawed in the Soviet Union, Abakumov may also have patronized prostitutes. Ivan Serov, a Beria associate who feuded with Abakumov for years, reported to Stalin in 1948 that ‘during the difficult days of war [Abakumov] used to stroll along the city streets [in Moscow], searching for easy girls [prostitutes] and taking them to the Hotel Moscow’.32 According to Peter Deryabin, a former MGB officer, Abakumov ‘maintained a string of private brothels’.33

  However, in 1933, Abakumov was not yet powerful enough to get away with such flagrant womanizing. A furious Shreider wrote a report about Abakumov’s behavior to the EKO head, and the next day Abakumov was fired. Somebody’s ‘strong hand’ (possibly Deich or Podvoisky) helped him again, and he was appointed, as Mikhail Shreider put it, ‘an inspector at the Main Directorate of [Labor] Camps’—that is, the GULAG, the NKVD directorate headed by Matvei Berman that administered the slave labor of convicted prisoners in camps and prisons.34 The 3rd section of the GULAG, where Abakumov worked, managed camp guards. It was reorganized twice (Table 17-1, middle column) and in August 1935, when the section was renamed the Department of Guards, Abakumov was promoted to Operational Investigator. On December 20, 1936, he was also promoted to State Security Junior Lieutenant, which was quite a high rank for a 28-year-old Chekist. It is possible that Deich was instrumental in this promotion because at the time he held the high position of Yezhov’s secretary.35

  In the GUGB

  On April 15, 1937, while still listed on the organizational chart of the GULAG in the Secret-Operational Section, Abakumov was transferred to a much more prestigious job in the Secret-Political Department (SPO) of the GUGB, the predecessor of the NKGB.36 It’s possible that this promotion, too, was achieved with someone’s protection. The SPO was in charge of fighting anti-Soviet elements and members of political parties, and Abakumov arrived at a very important time. The Great Terror was in full swing and the SPO was investigating the case of Genrikh Yagoda, the first NKVD Commissar, working to connect him to ol
d Chekists and Party functionaries.

  Abakumov was personally involved in the investigation of at least three Great Terror cases. On June 21, 1937, Valentin Trifonov, who supervised the activity of foreign concessions in the USSR, was arrested. An Old Bolshevik, from December 1917 to January 1918 Trifonov was a VCheKa member, at a time when the VCheKa consisted of only eleven people.37 Later he worked under Podvoisky, and during the Civil War he commanded a Special Expeditionary Corps that conducted punitive operations against the Don Cossacks. Then from 1924 to 1925, Trifonov was first chairman of the Military Collegium. Abakumov interrogated Trifonov from June to September 1937.38 On March 5, 1938, Stalin and four other Politburo members signed a list of names (a ‘death list’) of individuals, including Trifonov, who the NKVD had suggested should be executed.39 Ten days later the Military Collegium sentenced Trifonov to death and he was shot.

  Another case involved Semyon Korytnyi, a secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee, who was arrested on June 26, 1937. His main ‘crime’ was that his wife, Izabella Yakir-Belaya, was Iona Yakir’s sister. A high-ranking military leader, Yakir was arrested a month before Korytnyi, and was tried and executed with Tukhachevsky on June 11, 1937. Nikita Khrushchev recalled the Korytnyi couple in his memoirs: ‘Korytnyi was a Jew, a very efficient man, a good organizer and orator. He was married to Yakir’s sister, who was also a devoted Party member. She spent the whole Civil War at Yakir’s side, and was a Party functionary [in the Red Army].’40 Khrushchev did not mention that, as first Party secretary of Moscow, he was required to approve the arrest of Korytnyi and his wife. He also didn’t mention that after Korytnyi’s daughter Stella was released from a labor camp in 1956, he cried in her presence and repeatedly claimed that he was unable to do anything to help when the Korytnyis were arrested.41

  In 1954, Roman Rudenko, the USSR Chief Prosecutor, wrote in his rehabilitation request to the Central Committee:

  During the two months after his arrest, Korytnyi did not admit his guilt. On August 21, 1937, Abakumov…received Korytnyi’s personal testimony that, since 1934, Korytnyi had been one of the leaders of the Moscow Regional Center of a counterrevolutionary Trotskyist organization [i.e., supporters of Leon Trotsky]…

  During the subsequent interrogations conducted by Abakumov, Korytnyi gave detailed testimony about the counterrevolutionary activity of the Trotskyist organization and its members.

  During the session of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, Korytnyi pleaded not guilty and stated that during the preliminary investigation, the investigators had forced him to give invented testimony and to make false statements about other persons.42

  Despite his plea, in August 1939 the Military Collegium sentenced Korytnyi to death and on September 1, 1939, he was executed.

  The third case Abakumov worked on involved Nathan Margolin, a Moscow City Party functionary arrested in November 1937. In 1955, Rudenko’s successor, Pyotr Baranov, wrote:

  After investigation, it was concluded that the accusation against Margolin was falsified by former NKVD workers—Abakumov, Vlodzimersky, and Glebov-Yufa (all of whom have been convicted)…

  During the investigation, unlawful methods and force were applied to Margolin. As a result, on November 27, 1937, he attempted to commit suicide in his cell by trying to suffocate himself by pulling with his hands a loop [around his neck] made of two handkerchiefs.43

  The expression ‘unlawful methods’ is a euphemism for ‘torture’. In February 1938, the Military Collegium sentenced Margolin to death and two days later he was executed.

  An official evaluation of Abakumov’s performance at the time of the three investigations stated: ‘He mercilessly fights spies and wreckers, as well as fascist agents.’44 In March 1938, Abakumov was promoted to assistant head of a section, apparently in recognition of his investigative work. Two months later he also received his first award, the Honored VCheKa-GPU Worker medal.

  In September 1938, Abakumov was promoted again, this time to head of the 2nd Section, after Bogdan Kobulov, Beria’s closest man, was appointed head of the SPO (Table 17-1). Abakumov became involved in the even more important case of Yakov Serebryansky, a legendary figure in the OGPU/NKVD, who created NKVD killing squads throughout the whole of Europe. After inspecting the transcript of Serebryansky’s first interrogation on November 12, 1938, Beria wrote on the first page: ‘Comrade Abakumov! He [Serebryansky] should be strenuously interrogated.’45 Then Abakumov, Kobulov, and Beria himself interrogated Serebryansky on November 16. As Serebryansky later stated, he was mercilessly beaten and, as usual, forced to sign testimony that the interrogators had prepared for him.

  In his memoir Pavel Sudoplatov mentions one more arrested foreign intelligence officer, Pyotr Zubov, in whose investigation Abakumov participated. 46 As a result of torture, Zubov became an invalid. Like Serebryansky, at the beginning of the war, on Sudoplatov’s request to Beria, Zubov was released from imprisonment and became part of Sudoplatov’s terrorist department.

  In the Rostov Province NKVD

  In December 1938, as Abakumov wrote in his biography, ‘the leaders of the NKVD promoted me to the high Chekist post of UNKVD Head of the Rostov Province’.47 Interestingly, a year before that, Abakumov’s protector Yakov Deich had been appointed to that post, which he held for five months. For Deich, contrary to Abakumov, this appointment was not a promotion, but rather the beginning of his downfall after his career had peaked as head of Yezhov’s NKVD Secretariat. Deich was arrested in March 1938 and six months later he died in prison while still under investigation; most probably, he was killed during an interrogation. Abakumov’s appointment was perhaps the first time Stalin became aware of the capable young Chekist, since this level of appointment was approved by the Politburo. The Rostov Province, populated by Don Cossacks, was so politically important that before Abakumov’s appointment, Stalin sent one of his own secretaries, Boris Dvinsky, to head the Party organization there. The Don Cossacks were one of the main anti-Bolshevik forces during the Civil War, and they strongly resisted collectivization (the organization of collective farms called kolkhozy) in the 1930s.

  From 1930 to 1937, Dvinsky, a Party functionary, was deputy head of the Secret Sector of the Central Committee, as Stalin’s secretariat was called.48 He was also Stalin’s personal secretary. While working in Rostov, Dvinsky remained very influential in Party circles: he was a Central Committee member and was still in direct contact with Stalin. In 1938, along with Abakumov’s predecessor German Lupekin, Dvinsky asked for the Politburo’s approval to execute 3,500 people and to sentence an additional 1,500 to ten or more years in labor camps. Earlier the Politburo had already ordered the execution of 5,000 people in the province as well as the sentencing of 8,000 to long-term imprisonment.49

  In 1939, Dvinsky and Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, head of Stalin’s secretariat and Stalin’s personal secretary, wrote an obsequious article entitled The Teacher and Friend of Mankind for a book honoring Stalin’s sixtieth birthday.50 Therefore, in Rostov, Abakumov was working with one of Stalin’s most devoted personal confidants.

  As usual, at first Abakumov was working as acting head of the Rostov Province NKVD branch. Three weeks after his appointment, on December 28, 1938, he was promoted to State Security Captain, two ranks above his previous rank of state security lieutenant.51 It was quite unusual to skip a rank, and this promotion meant that the NKVD leaders wanted to encourage the young appointee.

  Five months later, in April 1939, Abakumov finally became head of the Rostov Province NKVD Directorate. Almost nothing is known about Abakumov’s activity in Rostov. During the Soviet–Finnish Winter War (December 1939–March 1940), Abakumov’s directorate managed to arrest a group of sixteen alleged Finnish spies, supposedly led by a local Gypsy.52 The case was obviously phony since Rostov-on-Don is nowhere near Finland and Finnish spies would hardly consent to being led by a Gypsy. It is difficult to imagine how NKVD investigators explained what these Finnish spies were doing in this southern area of Russi
a. Most likely they were arrested simply because they were of Finnish and Karelian ethnicity. From 1937–38, the NKVD arrested 11,066 Finns throughout the whole country, and of these, 9,078 were executed.

  In his biography Abakumov proudly wrote: ‘While heading the Rostov UNKVD, I was elected a delegate of the 18th VKP(b) [Communist Party] Congress [in 1939].’53 To be a delegate of a Party Congress, the highest organ of the Communist Party, was considered extremely prestigious in Soviet society and Abakumov’s election could have happened only if Dvinsky was supporting him.

  On March 14, 1940, the 31-year-old Abakumov was promoted to State Security Senior Major, equivalent to Major General in the army, in recognition of his ‘service eagerness and industriousness’—once again skipping a rank. This promotion is especially surprising because he had just been investigated in connection with the allegations of an informer. According to a secret report, in the late 1920s, before he joined the NKVD, Abakumov ‘was observed using anti-Semitic expressions’.54 But the report included even a more incriminating detail: in 1936 Abakumov had supposedly had an affair with the wife of a German citizen named Nauschitz, an alleged German spy.

  Abakumov denied the affair. However, he admitted that ‘he was acquainted with a citizen-woman MATISON [names were always typed in caps in NKVD documents], whom he met twice at a business club in Moscow’.55 The NKVD investigation found that the woman’s first husband had been executed for counter revolutionary activity, and her second husband lived abroad. In fact, someone named Abram Matison, a former Soviet trade representative in Persia, was arrested in Moscow in June 1939. In February 1940, he was sentenced to death and executed.56

  The investigation had no repercussions for Abakumov. On the contrary, soon after his promotion Abakumov received an important military award, the Order of the Red Banner.