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

by Vadim Birstein

  As previously mentioned, in March 1940 Meshik headed an operational NKVD group that arrived in the just-occupied Lvov Province.84 This was one of eleven NKVD groups sent to the former Polish territory to ‘cleanse’ (an NKVD term) it of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. A month later Meshik was decorated with the military Red Star Order, possibly for this action.

  In February 1941, Meshik was appointed NKGB Commissar of Ukraine even though, like Abakumov, he was only thirty-one years old. Meshik reported to Moscow on the nationalistic underground Ukrainian movement in the newly acquired former Polish territories and on the movements of German troops in the Nazi-occupied part of Poland.85 Apparently, Moscow was impressed by Meshik’s activity because in May 1941, he received the Honored NKVD Worker medal.

  The day after Operation Barbarossa began, Meshik was able to give Nikita Khrushchev, then Ukrainian first Party secretary, detailed information from secret informers regarding the local reaction to the invasion.86 A few days later, the Ukrainian NKGB began to arrest people who had criticized the response of Soviet leaders to the German invasion. During the first days of the war, 473 political prisoners, whose executions Merkulov approved in Moscow on Meshik’s request, were shot to death in Kiev’s prisons.87

  In July 1941, in the middle of the battle for Kiev, Meshik went back to Moscow, where he was appointed head of the Economic Directorate (EKU) of the new NKVD.88 In February 1943, he was promoted to State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank and, finally, on April 19, 1943, he became deputy head of SMERSH.

  It is possible that Abakumov was forced to choose Meshik as a deputy since a difficult relationship developed almost immediately between them. Much later, in August 1948, Ivan Serov, first deputy MVD minister, reported to Stalin that ‘in 1943, Abakumov told me that he would eventually shoot Meshik, no matter what’.89 No doubt Abakumov considered Meshik to be Beria’s spy. In turn, Meshik despised Abakumov. After Abakumov was arrested in 1951, Meshik called him ‘an adventurer’.90

  In December 1953, Meshik was tried along with Beria and five of his men, including Merkulov and Kobulov. All of them were sentenced to death and executed on December 23, 1953.

  Isai Babich

  Abakumov’s third deputy, Isai Yakovlevich Babich, was born in 1902 to a Jewish family in the small Ukrainian town of Borislav.91 Although Babich was the only person of Jewish origin close to Abakumov, in the 1990s the German historian Joachim Hoffmann mistakenly wrote that Abakumov ‘surrounded himself with a whole group of Jewish collaborators’.92

  In 1920, Babich joined the local branch of the CheKa in the city of Nikolaev and made a slow but steady advance within the CheKa, and then the NKVD of Ukraine. From December 1936 till August 1937, he headed the OO of the NKVD Directorate of Kiev Province, and in January 1938, Babich was promoted to acting head of this directorate. In other words, Babich supervised all arrests of military personnel during the Great Terror in Kiev Province, and in December 1937 he was awarded the Red Banner Order—apparently for this activity. In February 1938, he was transferred to the OO in Moscow, where he headed several sections.

  Finally, in September 1940, Babich was appointed head of the OO of the Baltic Military District, which was created from the territory of the three just-annexed Baltic States: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. As head of military counterintelligence, he was in charge of the numerous arrests of high-ranking officers of the former armies of these states.

  At the beginning of the war, Babich was a deputy head, and from May 1942 onwards, head of the OO of the Northwestern Front. In February 1943, he was promoted to State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank (Major General). As Abakumov’s deputy, Babich was responsible for SMERSH operations that sent agents behind enemy lines. The summer and autumn of 1945, when he headed SMERSH units in the Russian Far East during the short military campaign against Japan, were the highest point in his SMERSH career. After the war Babich became deputy head of the 3rd MGB Main Directorate (as SMERSH was called after it became part of the MGB in 1946), and he held that position until his death in 1948.

  Besides the three operational deputies, Stalin appointed a fourth deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Vradii, to head the SMERSH Personnel Department.93 In Abakumov’s MGB, Vradii also headed the Personnel Directorate. After Abakumov’s arrest in 1951, Vradii was demoted to head of the labor department in the Ukhto-Izhemsk Labor Camp Directorate attached to the USSR Justice Ministry. In 1954, Vradii was accused of embezzling 26,000 rubles for the renovation of his apartment and transferred to the reserve.

  On May 26, 1943 the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia published an order signed by Stalin assigning all SMERSH leaders actual military ranks.94 Selivanovsky, Meshik, Babich, and Pavel Zelenin became lieutenant generals, while Vradii and thirty-four of Abakumov’s assistants, along with the heads and deputy heads of SMERSH front directorates, became major generals.95 Curiously, only Abakumov was not given military rank during the war, even though he often wore a Red Army uniform. He remained State Security Commissar of the 2nd Rank, equivalent to Colonel General in the army.

  The Personnel

  Many officers of the GUKR SMERSH, especially investigators, were former mid-level OO officers. They had participated in the fabrication of cases during the Great Terror and survived the purges of that period, which wiped out the OO leadership. For instance, almost all low-level members of Izrail Leplevsky’s investigation team of about thirty officers, who created the 1937 Tukhachevsky case, continued their service.96 Two of Abakumov’s deputies, Selivanovsky and Babich, were veterans of the old OO.

  The career of Vladimir Kazakevich, who from 1943 to 1945 was deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 2nd Belorussian and then of the 4th Ukrainian fronts, was typical of mid-level SMERSH officers.97 Nicola Sinevirsky recalled Kazakevich at the end of the war: ‘He was a tall man, heavyset of frame. His twisted nose gave his face a fierce look, and made almost everybody afraid of him. He was a severe and exacting officer.’98 In 1928, Kazakevich started working for the Ukrainian GPU as a secret agent, reporting on his fellow students at the Kharkov Institute of People’s Industry. As he wrote in 1948, ‘they were imprisoned due to my reports as an agent’.99 Later he joined the Ukrainian NKVD, but in 1937 he was transferred to Moscow, to the 4th GUGB (secret-political) Department. Then, in 1938, he was moved to the 5th GUGB (OO) Department.100

  Before long, Kazakevich became known in Beria’s NKVD as one of the most efficient and ruthless investigators.101 Over a short period, he falsified at least eleven cases against high-level military men, including Marshal Aleksandr Yegorov and Komandarm Ivan Belov, who were sentenced to death. One of them, Komdiv N. F. Sevastiyanov, described Kazakevich’s methods in a letter to Stalin: ‘Captain Kazakevich used to hit me in the face so badly that I flew through the room. He punched me in the chin, under my ribs, and hit my knees with the heels of his boots… He forced me to lie down on a chair and then beat me with a rubber truncheon while knowing well that I had an inflamed liver… Also he beat me up with a truncheon while I was lying on the floor… During the three months that I was in Lefortovo Prison, I slept not more than an hour a day.’102 Other victims also made statements about the torture Kazakevich inflicted on them. The arrested Corps Commissar A. I. Zabirko wrote: ‘Kazakevich told me that he would beat me up until my ribs were broken or I became insane.’103 Most probably, Kazakevich used these torture methods later, in SMERSH.

  The Military Collegium sentenced Sevastiyanov to death in July 1941, after the war had begun. At the time, Kazakevich was deputy head of the 3rd NKVD Department and then deputy head of OOs and, later, UKRs of various fronts. In November 1944, Kazakevich, together with Abakumov, cleansed the Bialystok region of Poland of members of the underground Armija Krajowa. For his activity, he received twenty-four military awards. Kazakevich retired in 1948.

  In 1956, while being asked in the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office about Sevastiyanov, Kazakevich refused to admit that he had tortured him. As a result of the prosecutor’s reinvestigation of the Sevastiyanov
case, Kazakevich was expelled from the Party, and two years later, his military pension was reduced by half as a punishment for his falsification of cases, although he had never been criminally charged.

  This was quite typical. Kazakevich’s superior, Nikolai Kovalchuk, head of the UKR SMERSH of the 4th Ukrainian front, was also a brutal torturer. In 1937, in Tbilisi, Aslamazov, the arrested Komsomol secretary, jumped out a window during terrible beatings by Kovalchuk, a member of the Secret-Political Department in the Georgian NKVD.104 Soon Kovalchuk continued his successful career in Moscow, then in the UOO and SMERSH. After the war he even rose to deputy state security minister. Only in 1954 was Kovalchuk forced to retire and deprived of his lieutenant general rank for the ‘activity of discrediting an officer’, a Party euphemism that described torture used by a high-ranking security officer.

  To prepare the new personnel, special schools for teaching SMERSH officers were opened in 1943: two in Moscow, for 600 and 200 students respectively, and four more in the cities of Tashkent (300 students); Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg; 200 students); and one each in the Siberian cities of Novosibirsk and Khabarovsk (200 and 250 students, respectively).105 These schools were established by GKO order and may have represented Stalin’s solution to the problem of unprofessional investigators.106 Later, special military counterintelligence courses in Leningrad and Saratov were also reorganized into schools. Depending on the school, the training lasted from four to nine months. Reserve groups of 50–100 graduates were created at each field SMERSH directorate and at the GUKR in Moscow. Despite these efforts, SMERSH officers remained poorly educated. Nikolai Mesyatsev, one of the SMERSH investigators, recalled in 2005 that ‘investigators were usually recruited from among poorly educated, uncultured people’.107 Everyone who worked in SMERSH was sworn to secrecy. Sinevirsky recalled that before he was allowed to work as a translator in the UKR SMERSH of the 4th Ukrainian Front, he was forced to sign three copies of this pledge:

  I hereby promise that never and at no place, even under the threat of capital punishment, will I mention anything of my work in the headquarters of the counterintelligence SMERSH of the Fourth Ukrainian Front. I am aware that should I fail to carry out this promise I will become subject to the severest penalties including the highest measure of punishment—shooting.108

  Since SMERSH was formally part of the army, SMERSH officers had the ranks and uniforms of military officers.109 Romanov, a former SMERSH officer, wrote that ‘this was a camouflage measure to make it impossible to distinguish them from the rest of the armed forces’.110 In contrast, the ranks of NKGB and NKVD officers and their special insignias differed from those of the military. Therefore, NKGB and NKVD officers could be identified by their uniforms during World War II but SMERSH officers could not. What made it more confusing was that NKVD troops transported SMERSH prisoners. Typically, foreign POWs did not understand that they were being investigated by SMERSH, a special military counterintelligence service. The only secret service group known at that time in the West was the NKVD, and this has led to a lot of misidentification of SMERSH investigators as NKVD operatives in the memoirs of former POWs.

  Notes

  1. Abakumov’s description in a questionnaire (anketa) in his Investigation File. Cited in Kirill Stolyarov, Palachi i zhertvy (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1997), 12 (in Russian).

  2. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 185.

  3. A photo of Abakumov’s handwritten autobiography in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.

  4. Yevgenii Tolstykh, Agent Nikto. Iz istorii ‘SMERSH’ (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 2004), 150 (in Russian).

  5. If Abakumov doctored information in his biography, he was not the only one. Nikolai Yezhov hid the fact that his mother was not a Russian, but a Lithuanian. Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), 2.

  6. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 234.

  7. B. V. Sokolov, Narkomy strakha. Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Abakumov (Moscow: Ast-Press Kniga, 2001), 304–7 (in Russian).

  8. Details in V. L. Krotov, ‘Chonovtsy’ (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1974) (in Russian), http://www.biografia.ru/cgi-bin/quotes.pl?oaction=sh ow&name=material73, retrieved September 7, 2011.

  9. Detailed biography of N. I. Podvoisky (1880–1948) in Leonid Mlechin, Russkaya armiya mezhdu Trotskim i Stalinym (Moscow: Tsetropoligraf, 2002), 170–207 (in Russian).

  10. Biography of M. N. Tukhachevsky (1893–1937) with new archival materials in Yuliya Kantor, Voina i mir Mikhaila Tukhachevskogo (Moscow: Ogonyok, 2005) (in Russian).

  11. Quoted in ibid., 255.

  12. Details in Boris Sokolov, Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Zhizn’ i smert’ ‘Krasnogo Marshala’ (Smolensk: Rusich, 1999), 206–28 (in Russian). Tukhachevsky also planned to use chemical weapons against insurgents in March 1921 during the Kronstadt anti-Bolshevik uprising.

  13. Mikhail Shreider, NKVD iznutri: zapiski chekista (Moscow: Vozrozhdenie, 1995), 60–61 (in Russian).

  14. Boris Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, translation and commentary by David W. Doyle (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990), 167.

  15. I. F. Tubala (1897-1938) joined the VCheKa in 1918; in 1937, was head of the 1st Department, Main Directorate of the Border Guards. He was arrested on October 19, 1937 and executed on June 22, 1938. Klim Degtyarev and Aleksandr Kolpakidi, Vneshnyaya razvedka SSSR (Moscow: Eksmo, 2009), 587 (in Russian).

  16. Detailed biography of M. S. Kedrov (1878–1941) in I. V. Viktorov, Podpol’shchik, voin, chekist (Moscow: Politizdat, 1963) (in Russian). A short biography of Nina (Antonina) Didrikil’ (1882–1953) (in Russian) at http://www.oval.ru/enc/55323.html, retrieved September 7, 2011.

  17. On the Frauchi family and Artuzov, see Teodor Gladkov, Nagrada za vernost’—kazn’ (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2000) (in Russian)..

  18. Oleg Mozokhin, VCheKa–OGPU. Na zashchite ekonomicheskoi bezopasnosti gosudarstva i v bor’be s terrorizmom (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 79–80 and 264–95 (in Russian).

  19. An excerpt from Abakumov’s reference written by the 1st Section of the EKO in 1934; quoted in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.

  20. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 60–62.

  21. Yagoda’s cable, dated July 16, 1924. Document No. 107, in Genrikh Yagoda. Narkom vnutrennikh del SSSR, General’nyi komissar gosbezopasnosti. Sbornik dokumentov (Kazan, 1997), 323 (in Russian).

  22. Igor Voshchnin and Yurii Khmelnitsky, ‘Jazz v Samare: vchera i segodnya’ (in Russian), http://www.vkonline.ru/toprint/15015.html, retrieved September 7, 2011.

  23. Already in the 1920s, guards and OGPU officers of the first Soviet labor camp for political prisoners on Solovetsky Island, the so-called Solovki, as well as visiting Soviet officials, used female political prisoners as prostitutes or raped them during frequently organized orgies. A. Klinger, ‘Solovetskaya katorga. Zapiski bezhavshego’ (first published in 1927), in Zarya sovetskogo pravosudiya (London: Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd., 1991), edited by Mikhail Heller, 157–262 (in Russian).

  24. Testimony of Nikolai Shatalin, MVD first deputy minister, in July 1953. Pages 176–7 in Document No. II-11 in Lavrentii Beria. 1953. Stenogramma iyul’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty, edited by V. Naumov and Yu. Sigachev, 87–218 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 1999) (in Russian).

  25. Cited in Yevgenii Zhirnov, ‘Na doklady v Kreml’ on ezdil v mashine Gimmlera,’ Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 19 (472), May 21, 2002 (in Russian), http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=322678&print=true, retrieved September 7, 2011.

  26. A contemporary, quoted in Mikhail Tumshis, VChK. Voina klanov (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 288–9 (in Russian).

  27. Driver Buzin’s testimony during an investigation, 1953, cited in Sukhomlinov, Kto vy, Lavrentii Beria? (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2004), 188 (in Russian).

  28. Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky, translated from the Russian by Jan Butler (New York: Grove Weiden
feld, 1991), 353–4.

  29. Tatyana Okunevskaya, Tat’yanin den’ (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 227–8, 265 (in Russian).

  30. A letter of Abakumov’s wife in his Investigation File, cited in Tolstykh, Agent Nikto, 148.

  31. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB:The Inside Story (New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 1990), 342.

  32. Serov’s letter to Stalin, dated February 8, 1948. Document No. 29 in Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 268–73 (in Russian).

  33. Peter Deryabin and Frank Gibney, The Secret World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1959), 232.

  34. Shreider, NKVD iznutri, 62.

  35. Biography of Ya. A. Deich (1898–1938) in N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD. 1934–1941. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya 1999). 167 (in Russian).

  36. The GULAG structure on April 15, 1937. Document No. II-59 in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) 1917–1960 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2000), 235–48 (in Russian). The Secret-Operational Section with Abakumov’s name is on page 239.

  37. Protocol No. 21 of the Sovnarkom meeting on December 20, 1917. Document No. 1 in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 302.

  38. Abramov, Abakumov, 29–30.

  39. The list at http://stalin.memo.ru/spiski/pg07005.htm, retrieved Sptember 7, 2011.

  40. N. S. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya (Kniga 1) (Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999), 27 (in Russian).

  41. Izabella Yakir-Belaya was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. Her daughter Stella was raised in an NKVD foster home and arrested in 1948. She committed suicide in 1969. Korytnyi’s son, Vladimir, committed suicide in 1960, after he found out about the fate of his parents. Three brothers of Korytnyi were also arrested from 1940-43 and shot. Ye. Sokolova and E. Veniaminova, ‘Ionocka, za chto?’ (in Russian), http://world.lib.ru/e/ewgenija_s/yakir.shtml, retrieved September 7, 2011.