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

by Vadim Birstein

  On January 31, 1945, the Red Army liberated the camp, and prisoners were ordered to the town of Landsberg for vetting. Timofeeva put on a coat given to her by fellow British prisoners, attached her military awards to it, and started on her way, hardly able to walk. Soon SMERSH operatives picked her up and brought her to their headquarters. She recalled:

  During the first night, two soldiers with machine guns took me to the second floor for interrogation. I could hardly move my legs because with every motion the thin skin that had just developed over the burned areas cracked and blood oozed when I bent my arms and legs. Every time I stopped, a soldier pushed me in the back with the butt of his machine gun.

  They brought me into a bright room with pictures on the walls and a big rug on the floor. A major sat at the table. He looked friendly. But first, he took my awards and my party ID away from me and studied them with a magnifying glass. For a long time he did not allow me to sit down. I thought I would fall to the floor, but I managed to keep myself conscious and begged for permission to be seated. Finally, he allowed me to sit down. I thought I wouldn’t be able to rise from the chair by any means. Suddenly the ‘friendly’ major yelled at me, ‘Stand up!’ and I jumped up from the chair. Then he shouted at me:

  ‘Where did you get the awards and the party ID?’

  ‘Why did you allow yourself to be taken prisoner?’

  ‘What [German] task did you have?’

  ‘Who gave you the task?’

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Whom were you ordered to contact?’

  The major continued to ask these and similar questions until dawn. To all my answers, he shouted: ‘You are lying, Alsatian dog!’

  This continued for many nights… They insulted me with every unprintable word… My name was not used anymore. Now I was ‘a fascist Alsatian dog…’

  On the tenth day in SMERSH I lost my patience. I stood up from the trestle bed and, without saying a word, walked to the exit and up the stairs, right to the major on the second floor.

  ‘Stay still, you whore! I’ll shoot!’ shouted the guard, rushing toward me. But I continued to walk, I almost ran upstairs…

  I opened the door quickly and shouted, or I only thought that I shouted: ‘When will you stop your insults? You can kill me, but I won’t let you insult me anymore!’25

  Timofeeva was lucky. Finally, Major Fedotov released her. However, only in 1965 did she receive the highest military award for bravery, the Hero of the Soviet Union Star.

  Timofeeva’s story was quite typical because air forces were especially targeted by SMERSH. Technically ignorant themselves, osobisty considered any technical failure as sabotage, and commanders frequently hid pilots from SMERSH officers while accident investigations were in progress. From 1943 till the end of the war, at least 10,941 pilots and crew members were taken prisoner by the Germans or were missing in action.26 Many wounded pilots who escaped from the enemy experienced beatings at the hands of SMERSH; in addition, investigators crushed their fingers with boots, staged executions, and so forth, not to mention that SMERSH prisoners were not fed or allowed to use a bathroom.27

  Sometimes pilots used force to free their fellows from the clutches of osobisty. When Aleksandr Pokryshkin, commander of the 9th Guard Air Division and the most famous Soviet flying ace, saw what SMERSH officers did in a vetting camp to Ivan Babak, he almost shot to death the camp’s commandant.28 During the war, Babak shot down 37 enemy planes before he was shot down himself in April 1945. In the vetting camp, he was terribly tortured, and osobisty refused to believe that he was a Hero of the Soviet Union. Pokryshkin took Babak with him and Babak returned to his corps. However, military counterintelligence did not forget about him, and he was arrested after the war, in 1947. Again Pokryshkin’s intervention saved Babak, but Babak was forced to resign from the air force.

  According to FSB historian Stepakov, 5,416,000 Soviet servicemen and civilians went through SMERSH’s vetting, and of these, 600,000 were selected and tried as war criminals and collaborators.29 General Aleksandr Bezverkhny, head of the current Russian military counterintelligence, believes that on the whole, SMERSH dealt with more than ten million people.30

  Operations at Home: Deportations

  On March 4, 1944 Abakumov was awarded the Order of Suvorov of the 2nd Class, along with Beria and Merkulov, who received the Order of Suvorov of the 1st Class and Order of Kutuzov of the 1st Class, respectively.31 Beria’s deputies Kruglov, Serov, and Arkadii Apollonov, and Merkulov’s first deputy, Bogdan Kobulov, also received awards. It is ironic that these security leaders received the highest Soviet military awards for their nonmilitary actions against Soviet civilians—organizing the deportations of four ethnic groups, or ‘nations’ in Soviet terminology, into exile. Besides the above-mentioned Kalmyks, the Karacharovs, Chechens, and Ingush were transported from the Caucasus to Central Asia and Siberia. In Stalin’s opinion, these small nations were Germany’s collaborators and traitors to the Soviet Motherland.

  The deportations were Stalin’s reprisals for actions by insurgents of these nations in mid-1942 to early 1943 in the rear of the Red Army as it fought the Germans in the foothills of the Caucasus. With access to oil posing a constant problem for them, the Germans were determined to seize the oil fields in Azerbaijan and Chechnya. Furthermore, the Germans considered the conquest of this area the first step toward conquering the Middle East. With the German success in 1941, many people in the Northern Caucasus saw an opportunity to free themselves of their traditional enemies, the Russians.32 Russia had waged a war of conquest against the mainly Muslim Northern Caucasians from 1816 to 1865. In 1936, more than 1,000 families of the kulaks (prosperous peasants) were deported from the Northern Caucasus and most mosques were closed.33 In answer, a guerrilla war began. In some form this terrible conflict continues today.

  In November 1941, insurgents in that area totaled approximately 5,000, and in the summer of 1942, this figure increased by 300 percent.34 In February 1942, there were 6,540 anti-Soviet fighters in only twenty Chechen villages. Many Chechens and Ingush left the Red Army to join the insurgents in the mountains. In January 1942, most of the insurgents joined the Special Party of Brothers of the Caucasus (OPKB) with the goal of fighting for the defeat of Russia in the war with Germany and later creating a Muslim state.35 This party established contacts with the Germans and from July 1942 to July 1943, the Germans parachuted numerous groups of Caucasian saboteurs, mostly Soviet POW volunteers, into Chechnya and Dagestan.36

  Groups of insurgents also appeared in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The Abwehr helped anti-Soviet emigrants to cross the Soviet border to join the insurgents. Pro-German sentiments ran high among the population of the German-occupied areas of the Northern Caucasus because they were under the control of General Ernst Köstring, the former German attaché in Moscow from 1931–33 and 1935–41. Köstring and most of his HQ officers belonged to the military resistance group that hated Hitler and tried hard to ameliorate the Nazi racial policy in those areas.37 In February 1943, the Red Army counteroffensive began, and in October 1943 the Germans were defeated in the Caucasus.

  Beria was sent to the Caucasus as a Stavka representative twice, in August– September 1942 and March 1943.38 Of course, he brought Merkulov and other cronies with him. Beria created a formation of NKVD troops consisting of 121,000 men, separate from the Red Army units. However, most of these troops were not involved in the fight against the Germans. During his trial in 1953, Beria testified: ‘I didn’t allow the NKVD troops to participate in the defense of the Caucasus…[because] the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush was planned.’39

  Stalin’s reprisal for the insurgency was truly terrible.40 On January 31, 1944, the GKO issued two top secret orders to deport the Chechen and Ingush populations to Kazakhstan and Kirgizia.41 In total, about 650,000 men, women, and children were deported by 19,000 SMERSH, NKVD, and NKGB operative officers backed up by 100,000 NKVD troops, and 714 officers were given military awards. As
an NKVD officer recalled, during professional training the security officers were shown an educational documentary film about the arrests and deportations of the kulaks and their family members from Russia in the late 1920s–early 1930s.42 Therefore, the NKVD and SMERSH were well trained for such actions.

  The deportations were executed with extreme cruelty. People who could not be transported, such as patients in hospitals, were burned, buried alive, or drowned in lakes.43 Mikhail Gvishiani, former head of Beria’s guards whom Beria brought to Moscow, supervised the burning alive of 700 inhabitants in the village of Khaitoba.44 Like Abakumov, he received the Order of Suvorov of the 2nd Rank for the operation.

  Similarly, in March 1944 the Kabardins and Balkars were deported from the neighboring regions of the Caucasus; Beria personally commanded the action.45 Then, in May–June 1944, the Crimean Tatars (a population of 180,000), Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians were deported from the Crimea to Central Asia.46 Interestingly, Hitler had the same idea as Stalin, to completely evacuate the population of the Crimea, which Hitler wanted to turn into a German Gibraltar.47 At the end of 1944, the Turks-Meskhetians and Kurds living in Georgia were also deported to Central Asia.48

  Notes

  1. ‘Ognennaya duga’: Kurskaya bitva glazami Lubyanki, edited by A. T. Zhadobin, V. V. Markovchin, and V. S. Khristoforov, 25 (Moscow: Moskovskie uchebniki, 2003) (in Russian).

  2. Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy, 558.

  3. Report of A. S. Shcherbakov to Stalin, dated May 22, 1943. Document No. 238 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD–NKGB–GUKR ‘Smersh.’ 1939–March 1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova, 377–85 (Moscow: 2006) (in Russian).

  4. Ibid., 382–3.

  5. Yakov Aizenstadt, Zapiski sekretarya voennogo tribunala (London: Overseas Publication Interchange Ltd., 1991), 69 (in Russian).

  6. The above-cited Shcherbakov’s report, 383.

  7. Ibid., 384.

  8. NKO Order No. 0089-ss, dated May 31, 1943. Document No. 240 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 385–6.

  9. Ibid., 384.

  10. Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy, 294.

  11. Lidiya Golovkova, Sukhanovskaya tyur’ma. Spetsob’ekt 110 (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2009), 96–97 (in Russian).

  12. Details of Paulus’s surrender in I. A. Laskin, Na puti k perelomu (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1977), 322–34 (in Russian).

  13. From unpublished memoirs by Ivan Laskin, quoted in Aleksandr Rud’, ‘Moi general,’ Literaturnyi Krym, no. 17–18 (164–165), May 27, 2005 (in Russian), http://lit-crimea.narod.ru/164-167/rud17-20.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

  14. ‘Ivan Laskin’ (in Russian), http://militarytimes.com/citations-medalsawards/recipient.php?recipientid=22918, retrieved September 8, 2011.

  15. Aleksei Teplyakov, ‘Chekist dlya Soyuza pisatelei,’ Politicheskii zhurnal, no. 11-12 (154-155), April 2, 2007 (in Russian).

  16. An excerpt fromTeplinsky’s letter to Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, dated June 4, 1953. Quoted in Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Tribunal dlya ‘stalinskikh sokolov’ (Moscow: Terra, 2008), 356 (in Russian).

  17. Abakumov’s report, dated April 1, 1944. Quoted in B. V. Sokolov, Razvedka. Tainy Vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Ast-Press, 2001), 196–201 (in Russian).

  18. Quoted in ibid., 202–3.

  19. Quoted in ibid., 180.

  20. Soviet biographers of Marshal Vasilii Sokolovsky do not mention Sokolovsky’s failure. See M. Cherednichenko, ‘Marshal Sovetskogo Soyuza Vasilii Sokolovskii,’ in Polkovodtsy i voennonachal’niki Velikoi Otechestvennoi. Vypusk 1 (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1971), 331–71 (in Russian), http://militera.lib.ru/bio/commanders1/10.html, retrieved September 8, 20011.

  21. NKO Order No. 0379, dated November 23, 1944. Document No. 268, in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2-3), 332 (in Russian).

  22. P. G. Grigorenko., V podpol’e mozhno vstretit’ tol’ko krys… (New York: Detinets, 1981), 294–306 (in Russian).

  23. V. M. Shatilov, A do Berlina bylo tak daleko… (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1987), 324 (in Russian).

  24. Page 741 in Mikhail Shmulev, ‘Pochemu ya ne prazdnuyu Den’ pobedy,’ Golosa Sibiri. Vypusk vtoroi (Kemerovo: Kuzbassvuzizdat, 2005), 738–49 (in Russian).

  25. Pages 299–300 in Anna Timofeeva-Yegorova, Nebo, ‘shturmovik,’ devushka. ‘Ya—“Beryoza”! Kak slyshite menya?…’ (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2007) (in Russian).

  26. Zvyagintsev, Tribunal dlya ‘stalinskikh sokolov,’ 130.

  27. Recolections by Nikolai Bogdanov, in M. I. Veller, Kavaleriiskii marsh (St. Petersburg: Lan’, 1996) (in Russian), Chapter 7, http://militera.lib.ru/prose/russian/veller1/01.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

  28. Zvyagintsev, Tribunal dlya ‘stalinskikh sokolov,’ 136–8. A. I. Pokryshkin (1913–1985) was the only pilot who became a Hero of the Soviet Union three times.

  29. V. N. Stepakov, Narkom SMERSHa (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 95.

  30. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 6.

  31. A. Kokurin and N. Petrov, ‘NKVD–NKGB–SMERSH: struktura, funktsii, kadry. Stat’ya chetvertaya (1944-1945),’ Svobodnaya mysl’, No. 9 (1997), 97–101 (in Russian).

  32. B. V. Sokolov, Beria. Sud’ba vsesil’nogo narkoma (Moscow: Veche, 2003), 167–70 (in Russian).

  33. Valerii Yaremenko, ‘“I kolesa stuchat, i telegarmmy letyat…” K godovshchune deportatsii chechenskogo naroda,’ Polit.ru, February 23, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.polit.ru/article/2006/02/23/checheviza/, retrieved Septmber 8, 2011.

  34. Eduard Abramyan, Kavkaztsy v Abvere (Moscow: Yauza, 2006), 116 (in Russian).

  35. Details in Yaremenko, ‘I kolesa stuchat, i telegarmmy letyat…’

  36. Abramyan, Kavkaztsy v Abvere, 118–28.

  37. Details in Hans von Herwarth and Frederick Starr, Against Two Evils (New York: Rawson & Wade, 1981), 228–39.

  38. Sokolov, Beria, 152–64.

  39. Quoted in ibid., 162.

  40. Document Nos. 156–165 in Istoriya Stalinskogo GULAGa. Tom 1, 481–94, and Nos. 3.111-3.136 in Stalinskie deportatsii, 443–76.

  41. GKO Order Nos. 5073-ss and 5074-ss dated January 31, 1944. Document Nos. 3.111 and 3.112 in ibid., 443–7.

  42. Interview with Nikolai Tolkachev, former NKVD officer, on May 25, 2009, http://www.iremember.ru/drugie-voyska/tolkachev-nikolay-fomich.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.

  43. Excerpts from various NKVD reports in Yurii Stetsovsky, Istoriya sovetskikh repressii, T. 1 (Moscow: Znak-SP, 1997), 460–4 (in Russian).

  44. Sokolov, Beria, 165–6.

  45. Document Nos. 156–169 in Istoriya Stalinskogo GULAGa. Tom 1, 481–6, and Nos. 3.136–3.145 in Stalinskie deportatsii, 477–91.

  46. Document Nos. 166–174 in Istoriya Stalinskogo GULAGa. Tom 1, 494–505, and Nos. 3.146–3.170 in Stalinskie deportatsii, 494–522.

  47. Herwarth and Starr, Against Two Evils, 238.

  48. Document Nos. 3.172–3.183 in Istoriya Stalinskogo GULAGa. Tom 1, 525–40.

  CHAPTER 20

  First Trials of War Criminals

  With the retaking of Soviet territory by the Red Army, SMERSH also undertook the arrest and investigation of German war criminals and Russian collaborators who had committed atrocities during the occupation. The public trials continued after the war.

  First Public Trial

  On July 5, 1943, Abakumov reported to Stalin on the investigation by the UKR SMERSH of the North Caucasian Front into the atrocities committed by Sonderkommando SS 10a (SK10a) in the city of Krasnodar during the German occupation.

  The SK10a, a sub-unit of Einsatzgruppe D commanded by Otto Ohlendorf, consisted of about 120 men. From June 1941 to August 1942, it operated under SS-Standartenführer Heintz Seetzen, first in the Ukraine, where it exterminated the Jewish population in the towns of Berdyansk, Melitopol, Mariupol, and Odessa, and then in the cities of Taganrog on the Sea of Azov and Rostov-on-Don.1 In August 1942, SS-Obersturmbannführer Dr. Kurt Christmann succeeded Seetzen, who received the War Service Cross (first class
) with Swords for his extermination activity. The SK10a continued operations until July 1943, when the German troops began to retreat. According to Abakumov’s report, under Christmann’s command the unit exterminated 4,000 inhabitants of Krasnodar. The SK10a killed its victims using the gas van known as the dushegubka (soul-killing machine) in Russia.

  Abakumov described how, after the Red Army had liberated Krasnodar, seven inhabitants had come forward claiming they had been members of an underground Communist organization fighting against the occupation. However, they related so many details of the German atrocities that SMERSH operatives began to suspect that these individuals had participated in the executions. The investigation revealed that, in fact, they were Soviet members of the SK10a unit. With the help of local witnesses, the UKR SMERSH arrested eleven former SK members and investigated their crimes. Abakumov suggested putting these individuals on open trial in Krasnodar.

  Georgii Malenkov ordered that the Krasnodar report be considered by a commission consisting of Nikolai Shvernik, Chairman of the Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Atrocities Perpetrated by the German Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices (ChGK); Andrei Vyshinsky, deputy foreign Commissar; Nikolai Rychkov, USSR Justice Commissar; Viktor Bochkov, USSR Prosecutor; and Abakumov.2 The ChGK was created after Stalin declined participation in the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes proposed in October 1942 by the British and U.S. governments.