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

by Vadim Birstein

  Czechoslovakia was more fortunate: by December 1, 1945, both the Soviet and American troops (the latter had occupied the western part of the country) were withdrawn from its territory. However, Czechoslovakia was not left without an oversight of Soviet security services: on April 15, 1945, Ivan Chichaev, a long-term and experienced NKVD/NKGB agent, was appointed Soviet Envoy to Prague.

  The TsGV’s HQ was located in the picturesque town of Baden, 26 kilometers from Vienna, while the HQ’s branch was in Budapest. Marshal Ivan Konev became TsGV commander in chief and Supreme Commissar of Austria. In April 1946, Konev was called back to Moscow, and in May 1946, Army General Vasilii Urasov replaced Konev in Vienna. Nikolai Korolev, former head of the UKR of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, headed the Military Counterintelligence Directorate (UKR) of the TsGV (Table 27-1). For secrecy, until 1946 the whole TsGV was called ‘Konev’s outfit,’ and its UKR was known as ‘Korolev’s outfit.’52

  The HQ in Baden (its mailing address was ‘Army Unit No. 32750’) occupied a former high school building in the center of the town, while the Counterintelligence Directorate was located in several neighboring villas. An operational NKVD battalion, attached to the UKR, was stationed in another part of the town.53

  The basements of the UKR buildings were turned into investigation prisons. Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, a former 18-year-old prisoner who had survived previous imprisonment in Auschwitz, later recalled:

  The prison in Baden was very primitive, but very carefully done, in a former sanatorium-hotel, with a basement. Upstairs were the investigation cells with the officers, and they put you down in the basement when the examination was over…

  The cells were of various sizes, but always overflowing. Regardless of how big or small they were, there were always more people than there were supposed to be.54

  During a 59-day investigation, Nagy-Talavera was mercilessly tortured. ‘I still have scars from this torture—burns,’ he said in 1971.55

  In Budapest, the OKR SMERSH/MGB was located in a notorious building at 60 Andrássy Boulevard, previously occupied by the HQ of the dreadful Fascist Arrow Cross Party and then by the equally feared Communist security service, the AVO/AVH. Currently, this building houses a museum called ‘House of Terror,’ which reminds Hungarians of the totalitarian past of their country, and of the Soviet occupation.

  In addition to the UKR of the TsGV, there were two separate operational SMERSH/MGB groups permanently based in Budapest and Vienna. These groups had names of inspectorates attached to the Allied Control Commissions (ACCs). These international commissions were established, in theory, to orchestrate the Allied control of postwar management in the defeated former Axis countries. In fact, Soviet military representatives dominated the ACCs, and the commissions became a tool of the Sovietization of the East European countries. SMERSH officers of the inspectorates were called ‘inspectors.’

  In Hungary the ACC was organized in March 1945 and was formally chaired by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. However, the marshal remained in Moscow for the most part, leaving his deputy, Lieutenant General Vladimir Sviridov, in charge of all ACC affairs.56 Mikhail Belkin, former head of the UKR of the 3rd Baltic Front, headed the Inspectorate in Budapest. Later Nikolai Velikanov, former head of the OKR SMERSH of the 52nd Army (1st Ukrainian Front), replaced Belkin. Georgii Yevdokimenko, formerly Belkin’s deputy at the 3rd Baltic Front, was deputy head of the Inspectorate in Budapest. Later, from June 1947 to March 1950, Belkin headed the UKR MGB of the TsGV, and in this capacity he supervised the organization of the show trial of the prominent Hungarian Communist politician Laszlo Rajk, in Budapest in 1949.57

  In Vienna, the ACC for Austria was established later, on July 24, 1945. Before June the Soviets simply did not allow Allied military forces to enter the city. In April, the new provisional government headed by the Austrian socialist leader Karl Renner was formed under Soviet supervision. During July 1945, the Allied governments accepted the division of Vienna and the whole of Austria into four zones: Soviet, American, British and French. The central part of Vienna became an International Zone with its Allied Commandants’ Office stationed in the historical Palace of Justice. Not until October 1 did the Western Allies recognize Renner’s government.

  Colonel General Zheltov, deputy Supreme Commissar of Austria, headed the Soviet part of the ACC.58 He placed his headquarters in the Hotel Imperial, while his staff lived in the requisitioned Grand Hotel. These were the most luxurious hotels in the city. Grigorii Bolotin-Balyasnyi and then Nikolai Rozanov, both continuing to be Abakumov’s assistants, headed the Inspectorate of Zheltov’s ACC group. This inspectorate mostly collected information from agents about the garrisons in the American and British zones of the city. Interestingly, in October 1945, Yurii Pokrovsky, head of the Legal Department of Zheltov’s group, was appointed deputy Soviet Chief Prosecutor in Nuremberg.

  To entertain Red Army officers in Vienna, the Soviet Officers Club (Dom Ofitserov) was opened in a wing of the Schönbrunn Palace. In 1830, Emperor Franz Josef I was born in this wing and he died there in 1916. The Soviet military authorities left intact the interior decoration in the wing, and used it for big parties given to impress Western diplomats and for meetings. Ernst Kolman, a Czech mathematician who became a Soviet Communist Party functionary, recalled that at the end of 1945 he gave a lecture on the political situation in Czechoslovakia to a military audience, including SMERSH officers, in Vienna.59 The lecture took place in Franz Josef’s throne hall.

  Poland

  At the end of the war Poland was occupied by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front, which on May 29, 1945 became the Northern Group of Military Forces (Severnaya gruppa voisk or SGV).60 On June 24, Rokossovsky commanded the Victory Parade at Red Square in Moscow. Later, from 1949 to 1956, he was Polish Minister of Defense, Deputy Chairman of the Polish Council of Ministers, and a member of the Politburo of the Polish Communist Party. In June 1945, Yakov Yedunov, former head of the UKR of the 2nd Belorussian Front, became head of the Military Counterintelligence Directorate of the SGV. The SGV headquarters were in the town of Legnica (formerly German Liegnitz), an area soon called ‘Little Moscow’ by the local Poles.

  Until March 1946, there were additional SMERSH and NKVD structures in Poland. Up to July 4, 1945, Abakumov’s deputy Meshik was NKVD Plenipotentiary to the 1st Ukrainian Front and deputy commander in charge of civilian administration for this front in the part of Poland occupied by the 1st Ukrainian Front’s troops. From March to August 1945, Meshik was also Adviser to the Ministry of Public Administration of the Provisional Polish Government. At the same time, in March–April 1945, Serov, NKVD Plenipotentiary to the 1st Belorussian Front, was also NKVD Adviser to the newly formed Polish Ministry of Public Security.61

  On August 20, 1945, Meshik’s SMERSH career ended with his appointment as deputy head of the 1st Main Directorate subordinate to the Sovnarkom.62 This Directorate, headed by former Commissar for Munitions Boris Vannikov, was charged with building the atomic bomb.

  In Poland, Nikolai Selivanovsky continued as NKVD Plenipotentiary of the 4th Ukrainian Front until July 1945, with fifteen NKVD regiments at his disposal. In addition, on April 27, he replaced Serov as NKVD Adviser to the Polish Ministry of Public Security. Selivanovsky, who was responsible for the final destruction of the Armija Krajowa, had sent Beria eighteen detailed reports about his activities up to October 1945.63 He also helped to create a Soviet-type security service in Poland.

  During Selivanovsky’s presence in Poland, SMERSH and the NKVD used the infamous Auschwitz as a concentration camp for German POWs and Soviet repatriates. Nicola Sinevirsky, who in June 1945 visited the camp with a group of operatives of the 2nd Department of the UKR of the 4th Ukrainian Front, recalled:

  In the ‘brick camp,’ the first gas chamber was still intact… Today the ‘brick camp’ is the home of German war prisoners. The ‘wooden camp’ [with its four gas chambers] serves as the home of Russian repatriates—about twenty thousand of them. They are tig
htly guarded by sentries, marching day and night around the camp. SMERSH men, commanded by about fifty officers, were also working among them around the clock. The attitude of SMERSH men, which represented the real attitude of the Soviets toward these people, became worse and more degraded every day.64

  Between October 1945 and March 1946, Selivanovsky’s deputy, Semyon Davydov, signed all reports to Beria, and on March 20, 1946, Selivanovsky sent his last report from Poland. In April 1946, Selivanovsky, now back in Moscow, was reinstalled as Abakumov’s deputy, while Davydov became the MVD/MGB Adviser in Poland.65

  Bulgaria and Romania

  After Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front was relocated from Austria to Bulgaria and Romania, it became the Southern Group of Troops (Yuzhnaya gruppa voisk or YuGV), with headquarters in Sofia.66 Tolbukhin also chaired the ACC in Bulgaria and Romania.67 Major General Aleksei Voul, former deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 3rd Ukrainian Front and now deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the YuGV, also headed the Inspectorate in Sofia (Table 27-1). The Soviet staff of the ACC included four generals, a vice admiral, and 100 officers; the rest were rank-and-file staffers—a total of 270 members.68 By comparison, the British section consisted of 110 members; of these, 24 were officers, and the head of the section, Major General Walter Hayes Oxley, was the only general. The American ACC section consisted of 60 members with the only general, Major General John A. Crane, as its head. It arrived in Sofia in November 1944, and in March 1946, Major General Walter M. Robertson replaced General Crane.

  In fact, Colonel General Sergei Biryuzov, commander of the 37th Army stationed in Bulgaria and Tolbukhin’s deputy chair, was in charge of the ACC work in Bulgaria. Lieutenant General Aleksandr Cherepanov, Tolbukhin’s assistant in the ACC and the Soviet military adviser to the Bulgarian Army (who later served as ACC chair from May 1947 till May 1948), wrote in his memoirs:

  Biryuzov…was a decisive, tough and demanding commander, sometimes rigorous, complementing well the restrained and gentle F. I. Tolbukhin…

  S. S. Biryuzov was considerably younger than Oxley, Crane, and Robertson. However, his official position was much higher than that of these generals and he was much more mature. At first General Crane tried to stress his own ‘importance.’ Biryuzov, on the other hand, behaved with natural dignity. This forced the Anglo-American representatives to admit that Biryuzov was the de facto ACC head.

  After work, the Soviet and western ACC members used to meet unofficially. S. S. Biryuzov liked to invite everybody to the concerts of our military ensemble of dancers and singers. Also, we used to watch together documentary films and movies sent from the Soviet Union, United States, and England.69

  The American ACC members remembered Soviet receptions differently: ‘Efforts were made to get an American drunk in order to pump him. The most familiar tactic was to have a Russian group at a reception insist that the American drink separately with each, or at a table a Russian might be served water in a liquor glass while the American got vodka.’70 Undoubtedly, SMERSH officers, whom the Americans could not identify since they wore no special insignias, attended the receptions.

  William Donovan, OSS Director, and other American officials conducted long negotiations with Pavel Fitin, head of the NKGB’s Foreign Intelligence, on the possibility of attaching OSS teams in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to the American ACC delegations.71 Biryuzov was against the presence of the American and especially British intelligence groups in Bulgaria, and in December 1944 a small new OSS team that arrived along with the ACC section a month earlier was forced to leave Sofia.

  Stalin used Biryuzov and his ACC as a tool for reducing the involvement of the former Allies in Bulgarian politics, which were completely controlled by the Soviet Politburo through Bulgarian Communists.72 In November 1944, Biryuzov wrote to the Bulgarian prime minister: ‘From now on, any contact between the Allied countries and the Bulgarian government…will go only through the…[Soviet] heads of the Allied Control Commission… Any other appeal [to the Bulgarian government]…including the appeals from the other members of the Allied countries, is not allowed [to proceed].’73 A few years later, from 1953–54, Biryuzov was appointed commander and chief Commissar of Austria.

  Lieutenant General Vladislav Vinogradov, ACC deputy chair, chaired the ACC in Bucharest. Pyotr Timofeev, one of Abakumov’s assistants, headed the Inspectorate of this ACC (Table 27-1). Vinogradov’s deputy, Colonel General Ivan Susaikin, used to tell his Red Army subordinates about the task of the ACC: ‘The world revolution is moving to the west. Our [Soviet] troops are here to help the Romanian people to follow the Socialist way of developing their country.’74

  Unusually for a Red Army general, Vinogradov was well educated and knew several languages—German, English, French, Romanian, and even Latin and Greek—and, therefore, could easily converse with the Allied members of the ACC. Also, he was an accomplished chess master and had authored articles about the game of chess. However, like Biryuzov, Vinogradov had no problem giving orders to the local government. In December 1944, following the GKO order, he handed a draft of the decision written in the name of the Romanian government, to the Romanian prime minister.75 In fact, this was an order to intern the whole adult population of German civilians in Romania in preparation for sending them to the Soviet Union for forced labor.

  The American ACC section in Bucharest was formed in early November 1944. After the arrival on November 23 of its head, Brigade General Courtland Van Rensselaer Schuyler, the OSS team that had arrived there in September became its sub-section.76 As in the Baltics in 1940, in 1944 American witnesses were horrified by the deportation ordered now by the intellectual Vinogradov. Many years later the widow of Frank Wisner, head of the OSS group in Bucharest, told an interviewer: ‘My husband was brutally, brutally shocked. It was what probably affected his life more than any other single thing. The herding-up of those people and putting them in open boxcars to die on their way as they were going into concentration camps. While they were being hauled off as laborers by the carload in the middle of winter.’77 Robert Bishop, a member of Wisner’s OSS group, recalled in his memoirs that trains ‘loaded full of human freight—thirty to a box car—[were] carrying them to slavery and death.’78

  On the whole, 69,332 German civilians were deported from Romania, and 73 were deported from Bulgaria (the German population in Bulgaria was very small).79 Similar deportations were conducted throughout Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, with a total number of 112,480 German men and women deported to the Soviet Union. One hundred and six specially created SMERSH operational groups assisted the NKVD troops in conducting the deportation.

  Before Wisner left Bucharest in January 1945, he and Robert Bishop had for months been reading cables from Moscow to the Romanian Communist Party, which they obtained with the assistance of the Romanian Security Service, the Sigurantza.80 Additionally, through Theodore Mannicatide (a veteran of the Romanian General Staff whom Wisner provided with the alias ‘Tonsillitis’), the OSS team received copies of Soviet military orders. Robert Bishop also reported on the NKGB’s and NKVD’s activities in Romania, as well as on SMERSH teams in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Greece—all the countries where the ACCs or Soviet military missions were established.81 Strangely, he called SMERSH ‘GUGBZ’ (Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti or Main State Security Directorate) and mistakenly thought that it was a sub-section of the NKVD.

  Apparently, Bishop’s activity was noticed by the Soviet Inspectorate and in retaliation, in September 1945 the OSS sub-section of the US/ACC was closed. Additionally, the whole previous cooperation between the OSS and NKGB came to an end.82 After this, General Van Schuyler supervised cover operations.

  UKR Directorates in Action

  The UKR of each of the military groups consisted of four departments. 83 The 1st was in charge of controlling the headquarters; the 2nd was in charge of finding foreign agents among the troops of the military group and checking former POWs; the 3rd was t
asked with fighting against foreign agents and terrorists, as well as finding anti-Soviet elements and traitors; and the 4th was an investigation department. Romanov, who worked in the SMERSH/TsGV headquarters in Baden and Budapest, described the main goal of his directorate: spying on the secret services, military, and Western members of the ACC:

  In its internal operations Smersh took advantage of the services of Austrian civilians working for our allies… A particularly popular ‘key’ [for recruitment] was to promise an individual that any of his relatives who were prisoners in the USSR would be found and released as quickly as possible… Another way was to obtain work with the western allies for persons who were known to have pro-communist views… We even recruited allied personnel themselves. Smersh took into account the strong pro-Soviet feelings which were then current among citizens of the western democracies.84

  Romanov continued: ‘For external surveillance, or spying, Smersh used…members of the Austrian Communist Party… We would provide them with documents, which would guarantee that they were left alone by both the Soviet occupation authorities and the Austrian police.’ In 1945, a special political police was even formed in Austria, consisting mostly of local Communists, to help the Soviet occupational authorities.85 However, the former Nazis were as useful as the Communists:

  Smersh exploited for the same purpose former Nazis, insignificant functionaries of Hitler’s NSDAP. Many of them were people, who, according to Soviet law, ought to have been in prisons and concentration camps… It’s true that in this kind of case we really needed to have hostages who could be used as leverage for blackmail. An individual’s wife, children or elderly parents, if they lived in the Soviet Occupation Zone, could be used for this purpose. The local Smersh bodies in the place where these relatives lived kept them under permanent secret surveillance to prevent them escaping to the west.86