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

by Vadim Birstein

  The cleansing of the rear from spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and other hostile elements at the territory of the 3rd Belorussian Front has been mainly fulfilled. Arrests have declined sharply because no German population remains within which we can conduct operational work [i.e., make arrests]…

  I ask for your permission to return [to Moscow], and to make Comrade Zelenin, head of the Directorate ‘SMERSH’ of the 3rd Belorussian Front, or Comrade BABICH, my deputy in the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH,’ responsible for the current operational work…

  I will return to this front again if you deem it necessary.

  I await your orders.

  ABAKUMOV.20

  Suicides became common among the arrested East Prussians. On March 11, 1945, Beria forwarded Stalin and Molotov a report from Prussia:

  The women arrestees talking among themselves say that they have been collected for sterilization… Many Germans say that all German women left in the rear of the Red Army in East Prussia were raped by servicemen of the Red Army… Previously, a considerable part of the German population had not believed Nazi propaganda about the brutal treatment of the German population by the Red Army, but because of the atrocities committed by some Red Army soldiers, part of the population has committed suicide… Suicides of Germans, especially women, are becoming more and more frequent.21

  On May 5, 1945, Beria ordered a team of three generals to replace Abakumov in East Prussia.22 It included Colonel General Arkadii Apollonov, head of the NKVD Main Directorate of Interior Troops and deputy NKVD Commissar, Lieutenant General Ivan Gorbatyuk, head of the Main Directorate of the NKVD rear guard troops, and Lieutenant General Fyodor Tutushkin, head of the SMERSH Directorate of the Moscow Military District. Zelenin was ordered to send 400 SMERSH operatives from his SMERSH Directorate to assist the team. Apollonov and his team were charged with the final cleansing of East Prussia, to eliminate the remaining ‘spies, terrorists, and saboteurs acting in the Red Army’s rear.’ It is likely that the replacement of Abakumov as a Plenipotentiary by Beria’s deputy Apollonov meant that Beria wanted to keep this newly conquered country under his control.

  As for Abakumov, in March 1945 he went to Moscow and did not participate in the conquest of Berlin. Probably, this was one of the main reasons for Abakumov’s hatred of Ivan Serov—Beria’s man and Plenipotentiary to the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Zhukov’s command, that eventually conquered Berlin. It is likely that this was also a reason why after the war Abakumov enthusiastically organized a campaign against Zhukov.

  Within the territory occupied by the 1st Belorussian Front, 202 operational SMERSH groups were subordinate to Plenipotentiary Serov, who on February 18, 1945, ordered that every German on Polish territory be found.23 Using local Poles and Russians as informers to report on the Germans resulted in the arrests of 4,813 suspects, of whom 2,792 were investigated and found to be Germans.

  Finally, on April 16, 1945, the mass arrests and deportations of the German population stopped. The next day Beria personally reported to Stalin on the results of the joint work of the NKVD–NKGB–SMERSH operational groups under the plenipotentiaries. A total of 215,540 individuals were arrested, of whom 138,200 were Germans (8,370 intelligence officers, terrorists, etc.), 38,660 were Poles, and the rest were Soviet citizens (of these, 17,495 were considered traitors). Five thousand arrestees died ‘in the course of operations and on the way to the [concentration] camps.’24

  Two days later Beria sent new instructions to the plenipotentiaries of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Belorussian, and the 1st and 4th Ukrainian fronts.25 All captured servicemen of the German Army; members of the Volkssturm, SS, and SA; and staff members of German prisons, concentration camps, and so forth, were to be sent to the new concentration camps set up for this contingent, while former members of the Russian Liberation Army were detained in the vetting camps.26 By September 1945, nine new camps had opened for the arrestees in Germany. Three were old Nazi concentration camps—Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Jamlitz.27 Additionally, Beria ordered the setting up of camps for those interned in Poland (1st Belorussian and 4th Ukrainian fronts) and Germany (2nd and 3rd Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian fronts).28

  Beria also tried to establish NKVD control over prisoners who potentially had intelligence information and were important to SMERSH: ‘Arrestees who may be interesting in operational terms can be transported only with NKVD approval.’29 But Abakumov’s men did not follow this order. All important people arrested by SMERSH operatives continued to be sent to Moscow upon the approval of Abakumov or his deputy.

  Officers of SMERSH, NKVD, and NKGB received awards for their work on the plenipotentiary staff. Three plenipotentiaries, Abakumov, Serov, and Tsanava, were awarded the Order of Kutuzov of the 1st Class, one of the highest Soviet military awards.

  For unknown reasons, Beria did not send plenipotentiaries to the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts (Table 22-1). Possibly, he had decided that the countries liberated by these fronts were less important than Germany and Poland. The UKRs of these fronts continued to report directly to the GUKR. On April 4, 1945, the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front took Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, and on March 31, 1945, troops of both fronts took Vienna. After the war, Vienna became the location of the UKR of the Central Group of Soviet troops in Europe that controlled the Soviet occupational zone in Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

  Operation in Helsinki

  In the meantime, one of the oddest SMERSH operations was taking place in formally independent Finland. From June 26, 1941 onwards, Finland was at war with the Soviet Union. On September 4, 1944, an armistice ended the conflict, and on September 19, 1944, a Finnish delegation signed a temporary peace agreement in Moscow.

  Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov was sent to Helsinki to head the Soviet part of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) in Finland.30 Although officially the ACC consisted of 150 Soviet and 60 British staffers, in fact Zhdanov’s staff reached 1,000 men and he used this enormous Soviet presence in Helsinki to intervene in Finnish internal affairs. On September 27, 1944, Finland declared war against Germany. A few days before the end of this war, on April 27, 1945, a group of SMERSH operatives transported twenty Finnish and former Russian citizens from Helsinki to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.

  On the evening of April 20, 1945, Yrjö Leino, the newly appointed Finnish Home Secretary, was called to Hotel Torni in Helsinki, where Zhdanov’s office was located. Zhdanov’s deputy, Lieutenant General Grigorii Savonenkov, handed Leino a letter, signed by Zhdanov, containing a demand to arrest twenty-two persons and hand them over to SMERSH representatives.31 These twenty-two individuals were allegedly ‘guilty of war crimes, espionage for Germany, and terrorist acts against the Soviet Union.’ Leino, a devoted Communist and son-in-law of Otto Kuusinen, a leader of the Finnish Communists and member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, followed Moscow’s order without consulting the Finnish government. Abakumov’s report to Beria makes it clear that the Soviet Union operated with impunity in the supposedly sovereign state of Finland:

  I am reporting that, following the instruction of Comrade STALIN, a special group of the Main Directorate ‘SMERSH’ under the Soviet Control Commission in Finland, through the Finnish police arrested 20 White Guardists and agents of German and Finnish intelligence services, who have been conducting hostile activity against the Soviet Union.

  The arrests of these persons, according to the plan approved by the Stavka, were made as follows:

  The Head of the Operational Group of SMERSH in Finland, Major General KOLESNIKOV [possibly, Kozhevnikov],32 reported to Comrade ZHDANOV the evidence against those targeted for arrest. On behalf of the Soviet government, he made a statement to the Finnish government demanding that they be arrested and handed over to us.

  After this the Finnish police, under the control of our [military] counterintelligence, arrested these persons and handed them over to us.

  On April 21 [1945], the arrestees were brought to the Main Directorate
‘SMERSH.’

  Information on the arrest of the White Guardists and intelligence operatives (along with their testimonies at the preliminary interrogations) has been reported to Comrade STALIN.33

  On Leino’s order, the Finnish State Police arrested twenty people from the list, but two managed to escape. Ten of those arrested were Finnish citizens, nine had Nansen passports, and one was a Soviet citizen (Appendix III, see http://www.smershbook.com for details of arrestees). Nansen passports, the internationally recognized identity cards, were given by the League of Nations (the predecessor of the United Nations) to refugees after World War I, and Fridtjof Nansen—a famous explorer and the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1933—was High Commissioner of the League until his death in 1930.

  One of those holding a Nansen passport, Vladimir Bastamov, was a member of the ROVS branch in Finland.34 In January 1940, he volunteered for the Russian People’s Army (created on the initiative of Boris Bazhanov, a former member of Stalin’s secretariat, who in 1928 defected to the West). This army included about 300 volunteers recruited in POW camps. At the end of the Winter War, the 1st Detachment of this army, in which Bastamov served, participated in a military operation against Soviet troops near Lake Ladoga. Therefore, Bastamov was a real enemy. But another Russian detainee, Vasilii Maksimov, was arrested by mistake because a person with the same name, who had left Finland at the time, was on the Soviet list. Maksimov was sent back to Finland only after spending ten years in a Soviet prison.

  Another arrestee, Stepan Petrichenko, had just been released from a Finnish prison when Zhdanov requested his rearrest. Born in 1892, he was drafted into the Russian Navy in 1913.35 In 1917, Petrichenko joined the Bolshevik Party, but in March 1921, he became one of the leaders of the military uprising of approximately 27,000 sailors and soldiers in the town of Kronstadt near Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was called from 1914 to 1924). The main demand of the insurgents was to abolish Bolshevik political departments in the fleet and army and to give real power to the newly elected councils, without Bolshevik control. The uprising was suppressed by 45,000 Red Army troops under Mikhail Tukhachevsky’s command, and during the fight 130 commanders and 3,013 Red Army servicemen were killed. Petrichenko, along with 8,000 insurgents, escaped to Finland. By the summer of 1921, 2,103 of those who had been captured by the Red Army were sentenced to death, and 6,459 were imprisoned.

  In August 1927, Petrichenko reported to the Soviet Legation that he would like to restore his Soviet citizenship. He also described in detail the Kronstadt Uprising and the activity of the Russian emigrant community in Finland. Stalin ordered Petrichenko to work as a Soviet agent and from that time on, Petrichenko was, possibly, the main agent reporting on Russians living in Finland. In 1941, the Finnish authorities arrested him, and he was imprisoned until September 25, 1944. Apparently, since Petrichenko had been exposed in Finland as a Soviet agent, he was no longer useful as a spy and SMERSH probably arrested him for his part in the Kronstadt Uprising.

  The Finnish police handed over the arrestees and their personal files to a group of SMERSH operatives. Zhdanov personally supervised the loading of the arrestees, handcuffed in pairs, onto two planes at the Helsinki-Malmi Airport. Unto Boman-Parvilahti, a Finnish businessman and former Finnish Liaison Officer in Berlin, recalled later that inside the plane ‘soldiers with machine pistols were now sitting in the airplane like sphinxes, with the barrels of the pistols pointed at us and their fingers on the triggers.’36 In Moscow, the arrestees were taken from the airport straight to Lubyanka Prison.

  Leino told Marshal Carl Mannerheim, the Finnish president, about the SMERSH operation only after it had already been completed.37 Mannerheim was outraged, but it was too late to do anything about it. The Russian émigré colony was in a panic. The architect I. N. Kudryavtsev wrote in his memoirs:

  Alarming rumors started circulating that an arrest list for the second group had been prepared. The news that Soviet agents had visited several Russian families was especially depressing. During interrogations, the agents demanded information in written form on the behavior and activity of certain persons over several of the past years. This resulted in the flight of many Russians to Sweden, just in case.38

  At the end of 1945, SMERSH finished investigating the ‘Finns’ as they became known among prisoners in Russia; in Finland, they were called ‘Leino’s Prisoners.’ On November 17, the OSO of the NKVD sentenced Petrichenko to ten years in labor camps ‘for participating in a counter-revolutionary organization and as a member of the Finnish intelligence service.’ 39 He was sent to the Solikamsk Labor Camp, where he died on June 2, 1947. The OSO also sentenced the other ‘Finns’ as spies and ‘assistants to the international bourgeoisie’ to various terms in labor camps (Appendix III, see http://wwwsmershbook.com).

  The fate of the 64-year-old White Major General Severin Dobrovolsky was different. During the Russian Civil War, Dobrovolsky was a military prosecutor in General Yevgenii Miller’s army in the Archangel Province.40 In Finland, Dobrovolsky worked as an editor of a Russian émigré newspaper and he headed a group of Russian fascists. He also organized a channel for ROVS terrorists to cross the Soviet–Finnish border. But General Nikolai Skoblin, a contact person between Finland and the ROVS headquarters in Paris, compromised this channel. From 1930 onwards, he served as an OGPU/NKVD secret agent and reported to Moscow about the coming terrorists. In 1935, Dobrovolsky warned General Miller, at the time head of ROVS, that Skoblin might be a Soviet agent, but General Miller disagreed.41 Miller’s trust in Skoblin cost him his life. On September 22, 1937, with Skoblin’s participation, a team of NKVD agents kidnapped Miller in Paris and brought him to Moscow. As already mentioned, Miller was secretly executed in May 1939.

  On November 27, 1945 the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District sentenced Dobrovolsky under Article 58-4 (participation in a counter revolutionary organization) to death. On January 26, 1946 he was executed.

  On July 26, 1947, after inquiries regarding the fate of the arrestees were made in the Finnish Parliament, the OSO of the MGB changed imprisonment of the ‘Finns’ in labor camps to imprisonment in Vladimir Prison, a much harsher punishment (Appendix III, see http://www.smershbook.com). Imprisonment in this completely secret prison obviously minimized chances that rumors about Finnish prisoners might be spread and eventually reach Finland. Five ‘Finns’ died either in the labor camps before they were transferred to Vladimir or after the transfer. Of the twenty ‘Finns’ arrested, eleven survivors returned to Finland in 1954–56. Two applied for Soviet citizenship after their release, possibly because they had nowhere else to go.

  After returning home, ‘Leino’s Prisoners’ received compensation from the Finnish government of about five million Finnish marks each. However, two of the former prisoners had problems with the Finnish Security Police (SUPO). Vladimir Bastamov was put under SUPO surveillance in 1955 because of his contacts with the emigrant anti-Soviet organization NTS. Obviously, the Finns wanted no trouble with the Soviets.

  The same year, Kirill Pushkarev changed his last name to Kornelius and joined the SUPO. In fact, he continued the job he had before 1945, when he had worked in the Russian Department of the Finnish Police for twenty-five years. Now he began collecting information on NTS members. In 1958, a KGB agent Grigorii Golub approached ‘Kornelius’ and made threats against his relatives in the Soviet Union, thus forcing ‘Kornelius’ to provide him with information on NTS members and former ‘Leino’s Prisoners.’ In 1961, the Finnish police arrested ‘Kornelius’ as a Soviet spy. He was sentenced to a year and six months in prison.

  According to the 1944 peace agreement, Finland was obliged to return Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union, and twenty-two ‘Leino’s Prisoners’ were a small group compared to over 100,000 people that Finland, pressed by the ACC, handed over to the Soviets by January 1945.42 Among them there were thirty-one German doctors and medical nurses who, according to international agreements, should have been released. When Finnish officials raised
this question, General Savonenkov responded: ‘In this case, the Red Cross and international agreements do not play any role [for us].’43 In 1948, Yrjö Leino was dismissed from his post after a special Constitutional Commission of the Finnish Parliament concluded that he was wrong to hand over Finnish citizens to the Soviets without the official sanction of the Finnish government. Later Leino divorced Kuusinen’s daughter, Hertta.

  Notes

  1. NKVD Order No. 0016, dated January 11, 1945. Document No. 1 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD SSSR v Germanii. 1945–1950 gg. Sbornik dokumentov i stsatei, edited by S. V. Mironenko, 11–14 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001) (in Russian).

  2. N. V. Petrov, ‘Apparat upolnomochennogo NKVD–MGB SSSR v Germanii (1945–1953 gg.),’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 349–66.

  3. On the Nazi underground resistance see Perry Biddiscombe, The SS Hunter Battalions: The Hidden History of the Nazi Resistance Movement 1944–45 (Tempus, 2006).

  4. Quoted on page 311 in V. A. Kozlov, ‘Deyatel’nost’ upolnomochennykh i operativnykh grupp NKVD SSSR v Germanii v 1945–1946 gg.,’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD, 311–30.

  5. Abakumov’s report, dated January 15, 1945, quoted in Kozlov, ‘Deyatel’nost’ upolnomochennykh,’ 315.

  6. According to the above-cited NKVD Order No. 0016, dated January 11, 1945.

  7. Tsanava’s Order No. 10ss, dated January 22, 1945. Document No. 4 in Apparat NKVD-NKGB v Germanii, 1945–1953, edited by N. Petrov and Ya. Foitsekh, 62–63 (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2009) (in Russian).

  8. Abakumov’s report, dated February 15, 1944, cited in Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Viking, 2002), 96–98.

  9. Quoted in ibid., 98.

  10. Paul Born, Smertnik Vostochnogo fronta, 1945. Agoniya III Reikha (Moscow: Yauza-Press, 2009), 79–80 (in Russian, translated from the German).