Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII
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42. A letter of R. A. Rudenko to the Central Committee, dated December 9, 1954. Document No. III-42 in Reabilitatsiya: kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materialy. Mart 1953–fevral 1956, edited by A. Artizov et al., 184–5 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2000) (in Russian).
43. A letter of P. V. Baranov to the Central Committee, dated March 24, 1955. Document No. IV-14 in ibid., 208–9.
44. Abakumov’s official biography quoted (page 87) in Vladislav Kutuzov, ‘Mertvaya petlya Abakumova,’ Rodina, No. 3 (1998), 86–90 (in Russian).
45. Quoted in A. Kolpakidi and D. Prokhorov, KGB. Prikazano likvidirovat’. Spetsoperatsii sovetskikh cpetssluzh 1918–1941 (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 437 (in Russian).
46. Pavel Sudoplatov, Spetsoperatsii. Lubyanka i Kreml’. 1930-1950 gody (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1998), 392 (in Russian).
47. A photo of Abakumov’s handwritten autobiography in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.
48. Biography of B. A. Dvinsky (1894–1973) in K. A. Zalessky, Imperiya Stalina. Biograficheskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Veche, 2000), 138 (in Russian).
49. Mikhail Frinovsky’s report, dated July 20, 1937, and the Politburo decisions P51/442, dated July 31, 1937, and P61/149, dated May 13, 1938. Document Nos. 151, 152 and 325, in Lubyanka. Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD. 1937–1938, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov and N. S. Plotnikova, 273–82 and 538 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2004) (in Russian).
50. K shesrtidesyatiletiyu so dnya rozhdeniya tovarishcha Stalina, edited by M. I. Kalinin (Moscow: OGIZ, 1939) (in Russian).
51. Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 80.
52. V. N. Stepakov, Narkom SMERSHa (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 32–34 (in Russian).
53. A photo of Abakumov’s handwritten autobiography in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.
54. Attachment to the Memo dated March 1, 1940. A photo on pages 197–8 in I. Linder and N. Abin, Zagadka dlya Gimmlera. Ofitsery SMERSH v Abvere i SD (Moscow: Ripol klassik, 2006) (in Russian). A third of the text is blacked out.
55. Ibid., 198.
56. See http://www.memo.ru/memory/DONSKOE/d40.htm, retrieved September 7, 2011.
57. Nikolai Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty moei zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 142 (in Russian).
58. Leonid Mlechin, Predsedateli KGB. Predsedateli organov bezopasnosti. Rassekrechennye sud’by (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2006), 270 (in Russian).
59. Fedoseev’s memoirs. Document No. I-105 in Moskva voennaya, 1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty, edited by K. I. Bukov, M. M. Gorinov, and A. N. Ponomarev (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995), 232 (in Russian).
60. Lyudmila Kafanova, ‘Palach’-zhertva,’ Chaika [Seagull] (Boston), no. 24, December 16 (2005), 28–42 (in Russian).
61. Page 301 in Aleksandr Liskin’s memoir ‘Rasskazhet ostavshiisya v zhivykh,’ in Abramov, Abakumov, 273–329.
62. Transcript of Kochergin’s interrogation on April 24, 1952. Pages 411–2 in Document No. 206 in Lubyanka. Stalin i MGB SSSR. Mart 1946–Mart 1953, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 408–23 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2007) (in Russian).
63. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gozbezopasnosti, 777–8. For an unknown reason, ‘Romanov’ described Selivanovsky under the name of ‘Chernyshov.’ Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 60, 69, 165, and 192.
64. Details in V. Rogovin, 1937 (Moscow: Moskva, 1996), Chapter 39 (in Russian), http://web.mit.edu/people/fjk/Rogovin/volume4/xxxix.html, retrieved September 7, 2011; W. G. Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 147–9.
65. Vadim Abramov, Kontrrazvedka. Shchit i mezh protiv Abvera i TsRU (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2006), 70–71 (in Russian).
66. Details, for instance, in Kolpakidi and Prokhorov, KGB prikazano likvidirovat’, 322–41.
67. N. Cherushev, 1937 god: elita Krasnoi Armii na Golgofe (Moscow: Veche, 2003), 205–7 (in Russian).
68. Boris Syromyatnikov, Tragediya SMERSHa. Otkroveniya ofitsera-kontrrazvedchika (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2009), 358–9 (in Russian).
69. Quoted in ibid., 359.
70. Recollections of Mikhail Belousov, head of a department in the OO directorate of the Stalingrad Front, in ibid., 359–60.
71. Details of the case of generals Vasilii Gordov, Grigorii Kulik, and Filipp Rybal’chenko in Rudolf Pikhoya, Moskva. Kreml’. Vlast’. Sorok let posle voiny 1945–1985 (Moscow: AST, 2007), 59–62 (in Russian).
72. Cited in Emmanuil Ioffe, ‘Lichnoe delo chekista Selivanovskogo,’ Belarus’ segodnya, No. 139, July 22, 2005 (in Russian), http://www.sb.by/post/45172, retrieved September 7, 2011.
73. An interview with Meshik’s son, in Irina Ivoilova, ‘Smertnyi prigovor otmenit’. Posle rasstrela,’ Trud, No. 145, August 8, 2000 (in Russian).
74. Short biography of P. Ya. Meshik (1910–1953) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 297.
75. Yezhov’s report, dated February 8, 1938. Document No. 290 in Lubyanka. Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie, 471–84.
76. Biography of S. N. Mironov (1894–1940) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 301–2.
77. M. M. Yakovenko, Agnessa. Ustnye rasskazy Agnessy Ivanovny Mironovoi-Korol’ (Moscow: Zven’ya, 1997), 29–31 (in Russian).
78. Georgii Yakovlev, ‘’Delo’ otsa i syna,’ Pravda, no. 48 (25766), February 17, 1989 (in Russian).
79. Testimonies of P. I. Miroshnikov and N. F. Adamov, quoted in Andrei Sukhomlinov, Kto vy, Lavrentii Beriya? (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 2003), 195–203 (in Russian).
80. Ibid., 197.
81. Pages 414–5 in N. Mil’chakova, ‘Pisat’ vsye-taki nado!’ in Reabilitirovan posmertno, Vypusk 2, 380–433 (in Russian).
82. Page 58 in B. S. Popov and V. T. Oppokov, ‘Berievshchina,’ ViZh, no. 10 (1991), 56–62 (in Russian).
83. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 151.
84. Nikita Petrov, in Igor Mel’nikov, ‘Kto povinen v smerti tysyach pol’skikh grazhdan,’ Belarus’ segodnya, December 18, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.sb.by/post/78592, retrieved September 8, 2011.
85. Meshik’s Instruction No. A-1282, dated April 10, 1941; a report to Nikita Khrushchev, Ukrainian Party Secretary, dated April 15, 1941, and Instruction No. A-1760, dated May 31, 1941; Reports to the Ukrainian Central Committee Nos. A-1250/sn and A-1292/sn, dated April 9 and 12, 1941. Document Nos. 180-181, 184-185 and 223 in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnost v Velikoi Otechstvennoi voine. Sbornik dokumentovi. Nakanune, T. 1 (2) (Moscow: Kniga i bizness, 1995), 82–85, 95–100, 188–92 (in Russian).
86. Excerpts cited in Genrikh Sikorsky, ‘Kak eto bylo. Nachalo ispytanii,’ Kievskie vedomosti, no. 127 (3513), June 22, 2005 (in Russian).
87. Ibid.
88. The new NKVD structure in Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka, 74–77.
89. The above-mentioned letter from Serov to Stalin regarding Abakumov, dated February 8, 1948. Page 270 in Document No. 29 in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 268–73.
90. Page 59 in Popov and Oppokov, ‘Berievshchina,’ ViZh, no. 10 (1991).
91. A short biography of I. Ya. Babich (1902-1948) in Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 95–96.
92. Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941–1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation, translated by William Deist (Capshaw, AL: Theses & Dissertation Press, 2001), 197.
93. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 75. Biography of I. I. Vradii (1906–1984) in Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami bezopasnosti, 267–8; also, Yevgenii Zhirnov, ‘Chisto chekistskaia chistka,’ Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 36 (690), September 11, 2006 (in Russian).
94. A photo of this order in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 75.
95. On September 25, 1955, Ivan Vradii was promoted to Lieutenant General.
96. I. M. Leplevsky (1896–1938) headed the 5th GUGB department from December 25, 1936 till July 14, 1937. He was arrested on April 26, 1938, sentenced to death by the Military Collegium on July 28, 1938, and shot the
same day. Petrov and Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 270–1.
97. N. S. Cherushev, Udar po svoim. Krasnaya Armiya 1938–1941 (Moscow: Veche, 2003), 417–23 (in Russian); Abramov, SMERSH, 591.
98. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 140.
99. Quoted in Cherushev, Udar po svoim, 423.
100. In the 4th Department, Kazakevich participated, for instance, in the falsification of the case against high-level Party members who allegedly planned terrorist acts against Stalin. V. A. Agranovsky, Poslednii dolg: Zhizn’ i sud’ba zhurnalistskoi dinastii Agranovskikh (Moscow: Academia, 1994), 19–22 (in Russian).
101. Testimony of V. I. Budarev, former OO investigator, in Cherushev, Udar po svoim, 191.
102. Cited in ibid., 421.
103. Ibid., 422.
104. An excerpt from the transcript of an interrogation of Sergei Goglidze, 1953, quoted in Sukhomlinov, Kto vy, Lavrentii Beria, 175. A short biography of N.K. Kovalchuk (1902–1972) in Abramov, SMERSH, 504–5.
105. Details in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 78–80.
106. GKO Order dated June 15, 1943, in ibid., 78.
107. Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty, 126.
108. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 57.
109. NKO Order No. 1-ssh, signed by Stalin and dated April 29, 1943. A photo in SMERSH, 72.
110. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There, 67.
Part VI. SMERSH in Action: 1943–44
CHAPTER 18
General Activity
Although SMERSH continued working on identifying real and imagined Soviet military traitors and deserters, as the UOO had done before, its primary focus now shifted to countering German intelligence and counterintelligence. All operational SMERSH officers in the field were provided with a long instruction entitled Organization of Search for and Liquidation of Enemy Agents.1 Since German agents generally possessed forged Soviet documents and military awards, GUKR also published secret reference booklets for verifying military documents (Materials for Identification of Forged Documents, May 1943) and awards (Materials for Identification of Forged USSR Awards and Medals, September 1943). Additionally, it became easier to identify German agents with false documents because in December 1943 a unified system of officer IDs was introduced in the Red Army.2Now the IDs were created at special printing houses and had numbers that could be checked.
Near the front line, SMERSH initiated new tactics for capturing German agents, using operational groups of three members who constantly checked the documents of all suspicious-looking individuals.3 Two members of each group were SMERSH officers, and the third was a recruited former German agent who could identify other agents. But with the transformation of the UOO into SMERSH, Abakumov failed to take control of counterintelligence in the partisan (guerrilla) movement in the rear of the German troops.
In Partisan Detachments
With the creation of SMERSH it became unclear which organization was in charge of the Special Departments (OOs) within the partisan movement. While Panteleimon Ponomarenko, the influential first Party secretary of Belorussia, headed the partisan movement, the NKVD—under Lavrentii Beria—supervised the OOs in the partisan detachments created in 1942.4
The Soviet partisan movement had a long history. In the 1920s and 1930s, special schools attached to the OO trained terrorists and saboteurs for future war, and similar schools in the Red Army were part of the 5th Department of the General Staff.5 During the Great Terror of 1937–38, most of the sabotage specialists were arrested, convicted, and executed. They were considered unnecessary because of Stalin’s doctrine that future military actions would take place in the enemy’s territory.
On June 29, 1941, a week after the German invasion, the Council of Commissars (Sovnarkom) and the Central Committee ordered the creation of partisan detachments in the German-occupied territories.6 On July 5, the NKVD formed its own special sabotage group, which reported directly to Beria.7 Pavel Sudoplatov, who had successfully overseen the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, was appointed its head. This group later became the 4th NKVD Directorate in charge of terror and sabotage in enemy-occupied territory. In April 1943, Sudoplatov’s directorate was transferred to the NKGB (State Security Commissariat), and its activities now partly overlapped those of SMERSH.
Paralleling the measures in Moscow, in 1941, local NKVD, NKGB, and Party functionaries in the German-occupied territories of Ukraine and Belorussia, as well as the OOs, political and military intelligence departments of the armies and fronts created their own partisan detachments.8 At the end of the summer of 1941, Ponomarenko sent Stalin a detailed plan for centralizing control over all partisan groups. The following December, Stalin summoned Ponomarenko to the Kremlin, where, after a two-hour discussion, he approved the establishment of the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement (TsShPD).9
It was not until May 30, 1942, that the State Defense Committee (GKO) ordered that the TsShPD should be attached to the Stavka—in other words, directly subordinated to Stalin, with Ponomarenko appointed as its head.10 Beria tried to oppose this decision, believing that Sudoplatov’s department in Moscow should control all partisans. In a compromise move, Vasilii Sergienko, NKVD Commissar of Ukraine and Beria’s protégé, was made Ponomarenko’s deputy, thus essentially leaving Beria in charge of the partisans.
The fighting unit of the partisan movement called otryad (a detachment) consisted of varying numbers of men. By January 1942, NKVD operational groups that had OO functions were created within all otryady.11 Official reports attest to their efficiency: for example, from 1942 to 1944, counterintelligence in the Ukrainian partisan detachments exposed and arrested 9,883 spies and traitors, of whom 1,998 were Gestapo spies.12
Not all of those arrested were real German spies. For example, there was a bizarre but widespread belief among partisan commanders and heads of the partisan OOs that many local Jews who, having escaped Nazi extermination efforts, tried to join the partisans, were Gestapo spies. On August 10, 1943, the commander of the Osipich partisan detachment reported to Moscow: ‘Recently, the Gestapo has started to use Jews as spies. The Gestapo offices in Minsk and Borisovo have established a nine-month course for the Jews. Spies have been sent to apartments in the city and to partisan detachments, and supplied with poison to kill their commanders and other partisans. Several of these spies were unmasked near Minsk.’13
Based on this belief, many Jewish escapees were arrested and executed as spies in partisan detachments.14 The truth was that the Abwehr had opened numerous schools to train local Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Russian volunteers as saboteurs, propagandists, and translators, while the Jews were hunted down by the Gestapo and SS-Einsatzgruppen, and had nothing to do with these schools.15
But anti-Semitism was not the only reason for false accusations. Another report reads: ‘In August 1943, the head of the Special Department of the Chkalov Brigade of the Baranovichi Partisan Detachment (Belorussia) personally shot to death nineteen-year-old Yelena Stankevich, a scout in this brigade’s “For the Soviet Motherland” unit, accusing her of being a Gestapo spy. In fact, she simply refused to be his lover.’16 Such executions were quite common. In the same year, Ivan Belik, head of the OO of the ‘Assault’ Partisan Brigade in Belorussia, shot a woman partisan, Verkhovod’ko, who was pregnant by Boris Lunin, commander of the brigade, on the false charge that she was a German spy.17 The real reason for her execution was that Lunin, who had a small harem in the brigade, did not want to deal with a pregnant girlfriend. In 1957 Belik and Lunin were sentenced to seven years in labor camps for this crime.
Some of the ‘spies’ captured by partisans ended up in the GUKR’s Moscow headquarters. On March 18, 1943, Henri Czaplinski (in Russian documents, Genrikh Maksimovich Chaplinsky), a 53-year-old Polish Jew and professor at the Krakow and Lvov conservatories, joined the Donukalov Partisan Brigade near Minsk.18 As an internationally known violinist, he had performed in many countries before the war, and also spoke several languages. From 1922 to 1923, he was a professor at the Hamburg Conservatory in T
oronto, and from 1925 to 1927, he was first violinist with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.
Czaplinski told his OO interrogators that in 1940 he was arrested by the NKVD in Lvov and spent seven months in the Byelostok NKVD prison, from which he escaped during a German bombardment. On July 13, 1941, The New York Times published information about Czaplinski’s successful escape.19 After his escape, the multilingual Czaplinski worked as a translator at the headquarters of various Luftwaffe units stationed in Belorussia, which caused the OO officers of the partisan brigade to conclude that Czaplinski was an important German spy. Czaplinski was sent to Moscow, and on May 15, 1943, Ponomarenko and Lavrentii Tsanava, NKGB Commissar of Belorussia, reported to Stalin:
Preliminary interrogations of Czaplinski suggest that he might have been a German intelligence agent sent to the Donukalov partisan detachment with the task of getting to the rear of Soviet troops. He may also have worked in various countries as a longtime German intelligence agent. Czaplinski has already been transferred to the Main Directorate of SMERSH to Comrade Abakumov.20
Unfortunately, I have no information about what happened to Czaplinski at the hands of Abakumov’s subordinates.
In the autumn of 1943, Ponomarenko and Tsanava, and not GUKR SMERSH, still controlled the OOs in partisan detachments. On August 20, 1943, Abakumov sent a strong missive to Ponomarenko:
The organs of counterintelligence (‘SMERSH’) are charged with fighting against enemy agents penetrating headquarters and detachments of partisans. However, in many cases the unmasked spies, saboteurs, terrorists, members of the so-called Russian Liberation Army and other detachments created by the Germans, who have given themselves up to partisan detachments, are transferred to our [Soviet] territory, but the organs of counterintelligence ‘SMERSH’ are not informed. They are interrogated by members of the headquarters of the partisan movement who are incapable of investigating such cases. Documents brought from the partisan detachments and protocols of interrogations of the unmasked spies are copied and sent to various addresses. As a result, a wide circle of persons has knowledge of serious [secret] operational measures.21