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

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Transliteration and Archival Materials

  Introduction

  Part I. The Big Picture

  Chapter 1 - Soviet Military Counterintelligence: An Overview

  Part II. The Roots of SMERSH

  Chapter 2 - Stalin’s Ruling Mechanism

  Chapter 3 - Laws and Tribunals

  Chapter 4 - Highest Courts

  Chapter 5 - Division of Europe

  Chapter 6 - On the Verge of the War

  Chapter 7 - The Scapegoats: Hunting for Generals

  Chapter 8 - Directorate of Special Departments (UOO)

  Part III. Military Counterintelligence: July 1941–April 1943

  Chapter 9 - At the Moscow Gates

  Chapter 10 - More About OOs

  Chapter 11 - Alleged New Traitors (Late 1941–Early 1943)

  Chapter 12 - Special Tasks of the OOs

  Part IV. German Intelligence Services at the Eastern Front

  Chapter 13 - German Military Intelligence at the Eastern Front

  Chapter 14 - Abwehr’s Failures and Successes

  Chapter 15 - German Intelligence and Occupation

  Part V. The Birth of SMERSH

  Chapter 16 - The Birth of SMERSH

  Chapter 17 - Leaders of SMERSH

  Part VI. SMERSH in Action: 1943–44

  Chapter 18 - General Activity

  Chapter 19 - Against Our Own People

  Chapter 20 - First Trials of War Criminals

  Part VII. Toward Berlin

  Chapter 21 - Crossing the Border

  Chapter 22 - In the Heart of Europe

  Chapter 23 - Berlin and Prague Are Taken

  Chapter 24 - The End of Abwehr

  Part VIII. The End of WWII

  Chapter 25 - Investigations in Moscow

  Chapter 26 - War with Japan

  Part IX. SMERSH After the War: 1945–46

  Chapter 27 - In Europe and at Home

  Chapter 28 - The SMERSH Team in Nuremberg

  Epilogue. The Road to the Top: Abakumov Becomes a Minister

  Index

  Plates

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  Extra web content located on http://www.smershbook.com:

  Appendix I. Red Army and Navy Officers Arrested During WWII

  Appendix II. Foreign Diplomats Arrested by SMERSH from 1944 to 1945

  Appendix III. Finnish Persons Arrested by SMERSH in April, 1945

  FOREWORD

  Ian Fleming purported in his first James Bond book, Casino Royale, published in April 1953, to report factually about SMERSH, described as part of the ‘MWD’, the successor to the NKVD, and headed by Lavrenti Beria. This particular passage is a curious overlap of error and accuracy, a confusion of the MGB, the Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, being the Ministry of State Security, and the MVD, the Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, which was the Soviet Ministry of Interior Affairs that had emerged from the old NKVD prior to the establishment of the KGB in 1954, following the death of Stalin the previous March, the same year that Casino Royale was published.

  Fleming’s dossier, supposedly prepared by Section S to brief Bond’s Chief M, gives an account of SMERSH, an organization concerned, as he correctly mentioned, with counter intelligence and executions which really had existed between April 1943 and March 1946. Although SMERSH had been disbanded and absorbed in the MGB’s Third Main Directorate by the time Fleming wrote about it, very few outside of the international intelligence community had any knowledge of the agency which had been created by Stalin to liquidate counter revolutionaries and those suspected of collaboration with the Nazis.

  That Fleming lacked any detailed understanding of the real SMERSH is suggested by his assertion that it had been responsible for the murder of Leon Trotsky in August 1940, at a time when it had not yet been created. In fact Trotsky’s assassination had been carried out by the NKVD, as is now well-documented, particularly by General Pavel Sudoplatov who had supervised the operation from Moscow, even if at the time the Kremlin publicly had professed innocence of the crime. Fleming’s mistake was entirely understandable because by April 1953 very little had been published openly about Soviet wartime or postwar intelligence activities. Indeed, the first book dedicated to the subject, David Dallin’s Soviet Espionage, would not be released in New York until 1955, so Fleming’s slightly inaccurate version almost certainly would have had to have come from official sources. Much information about the structure of Soviet intelligence and its activities would be revealed in 1954 upon the defections of Yuri Rastvorov, Piotr Deriabin, Nikolai Khokhlov and Evdokia and Vladimir Petrov, but when Fleming was writing Casino Royale, none of that was available. Certainly word had spread to Russian émigré communities, especially from postwar refugees, about SMERSH’s operations, but Fleming’s analysis, of only ‘a few hundred operatives of very high quality divided into five departments’, has a definite air of authenticity, as doubtless was intended. Although his breakdown of SMERSH’s five departments, being counter intelligence, operations, administration and finance, investigations and prosecutions, was not strictly accurate, it was close enough. In fact SMERSH was divided into five ‘administrations’, being personnel, operations, intelligence, investigations and prosecutions.

  In 1953, when 007 first was introduced, there was a widespread perception that intelligence agencies routinely murdered their adversaries, and there was good reason for people to believe the worst. Particularly during the period of the quadripartite occupation of Germany and Austria, the Soviets became notorious for abducting their victims, never to be seen again. Although the existence of SMERSH was not widely acknowledged, just such an organization had existed during the latter part of World War II to eliminate collaborators who had acted for the Nazis in ‘stay-behind’ networks. Smersh, the Russian acronym for ‘death to spies’, consisted of killers trained by the NKVD who moved into newly-liberated areas directly behind the front-line troops to mop up enemy spy-rings. Their tactics were deadly but effective, and although SMERSH had been disbanded soon after the war, the Soviets retained a group of experienced assassins who were deployed overseas to liquidate opponents of the state. Details of the NKVD’s 9th Section would emerge through the testimony of Nikolai Khokhlov in February 1954 when he confessed to having been commissioned to shoot the Ukrainian nationalist leader, George Okolovich, in Frankfurt, with an ingenious cyanide gas-gun concealed inside a pack of cigarettes. Khokhlov’s shocking revelations, of state-sponsored, institutionalized assassination, were given widespread publicity, so Fleming’s adoption of SMERSH as a sinister adversary in his fiction is unsurprising.

  Later, in the 1957 From Russia with Love, Fleming would insert an Author’s Note, insisting that SMERSH was still in existence, based at 13 Sretenka Ulitsa in Moscow, and employing 40,000 personnel. He claimed SMERSH was ‘the murder apparat of the MGB’, thereby introducing a further complication for between 1946 and 1953, the MGB had run the Soviet Union’s foreign intelligence operations.

  In his Thunderball, published in March 1961, Fleming would acknowledge that SMERSH ‘had been disbanded on the orders of Khruschev [sic] in 1958’ but then, inexplicably, assert that it had been ‘replaced by the Special Executive Department of the MWD’, thus repeating his original error in Casino Royale which the author had corrected in From Russia with Love.

  The first eye-witness account of SMERSH from the inside emerged in 1972 when Captain Boris Bak
lanov published his memoirs, The Nights Are Longest There, under the pseudonym A. I. Romanov. He had defected in Vienna in November 1947 and had been resettled in England as ‘Boris Haddon’ but news of the event was suppressed for more than two decades. In his autobiography Baklanov described how he had served in an NKVD demolition battalion during the war before attending an intelligence school in Babushkin and then being transferred to SMERSH.

  Whether Fleming was granted access by the security authorities to Baklanov is unknown, but much of his information did come from privileged sources, as can be seen by his brief reference in From Russia with Love to Grigory Tokaev, a Soviet aeronautical expert and a GRU military intelligence officer who had sought political asylum in England in 1947. The author referred to Tokaev’s defection as a major setback for the Soviets, but in 1961 Tokaev, who had by then begun a new career as an academic in London and a rocket guidance system designer in Texas, was hardly a household name even if his Betrayal of an Ideal had attracted considerable attention when it had been promoted in 1954 with covert support from the Foreign Office’s propaganda branch.

  During the Cold War denigration of the Kremlin’s policies was part of the West’s strategy, and both Baklanov and Tokaev were willing to collaborate by exposing SMERSH. Moscow continued to assassinate political opponents, as confirmed by two further defectors, Bogdan Stashinsky in 1961 and Oleg Lyalin in 1971. Indeed, the poisoning in November 2006 of Alexander Litvinenko in a London hotel with polonium-210, a rare radioactive compound, suggests that the topic of Russian governments resorting to extra-legal liquidation remains highly relevant more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

  Accordingly, it would appear in retrospect that thanks to Fleming’s imagination, and his access to certain Soviet defectors, SMERSH became one of the world’s best-known, and notorious, intelligence agencies. However, the truth is even more remarkable.

  Nigel West

  June 2011

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am very grateful to all my colleagues and friends who provided me with information, identified sources, made critical notes, discussed or edited the text and found materials and photos in Moscow archives:

  Dr. Vadim Altskan (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA), Professor John Q. Barrett (St. John’s University in New York City, USA), Ms. Susanne Berger (Washington, USA), Professor Jeffrey Burds (Northeastern University, Boston, USA), Professor Emil Draitser (Hunter College, New York, USA), Dr. Hildrun Glass (Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich, Germany), Dr. Andreas Hilger (Helmut-Schmidt-University of the Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg, Germany), Mr. Sergei Gitman (Moscow, Russia), Mr. Tony Hiss (New York, USA), Dr. Amy Knight (Summit, New Jersey, USA), Dr. Craig G. McKay (Uppsala, Sweden), Dr. Michael Parrish (Indiana University, Indiana, USA), Dr. Nikita Petrov and Mr. Arsenii Roginsky (Memorial Society, Moscow, Russia), and, finally, Ms. Lovice Ullein-Reviczky (Antal Ullein-Reviczky Foundation, Hungary).

  I am also grateful to Dr. Karl Spalcke (Bonn, Germany) for sharing with me some details of his terrifying experience of growing up in a Lefortovo Prison cell in Moscow, where he was put together with his mother and spent 6 years of his life, from 13 through 19 years old.

  I am also very thankful to my cousin, Anna Birstein (Moscow, Russia), for her permission to use the famous Soviet poster created by my aunt, Nina Vatolina, in June 1941, just after the Nazi invasion. The design of the cover of this book is based on a famous WWII poster depicting a Russian woman’s head with a finger at her lips emblazoned with the motto “Don’t chatter!”

  Finally, I am extremely indebted to my wife, Kathryn Birstein, for her constant support and interest in my research work as well as her extensive editorial assistance. Without her, this book would not have been possible.

  NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION AND ARCHIVAL MATERIALS

  In transliterating from Russian to English a modified version of the Standard Library of Congress system for the Russian vowels was used, especially in the initial positions:

  E = Ye (Yezhov, not Ezhov),

  Ia = Ya (Yagoda, not Iagoda),

  Iu = Yu (Yurii, not Iurii).

  In the final position of last names ‘ii’ becomes ‘y’ (Trotsky, not Trotskii), and ‘iia’ is usually given as ‘ia’ (Izvestia, not Izvestiia).

  On first usage, the names of institutions are given in transliterated Russian (in italics) followed by the English translation.

  The majority of documents translated and cited in this book come from the following Russian archives:

  APRF Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiskoi Federatsii [Presidential Archive]

  FSB Archive Tsentral’nyi arkhiv FSB Rossii [FSB Central Archive; FSB = Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti or Federal Security Service]

  RGVA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv [Russian State Military Archive]

  TsAMO Tsentral’nyi arkhiv Ministerstva Oborony Rossiskoi Federatsii [Defense Ministry Central Archive]

  GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [State Archive of the Russian Federation]

  If a document was published in a Russian book that includes a compilation of documents and could be found in many libraries, a reference to the document in this book is given, and the archival reference can be found in the book. For the documents published or cited in the Russian periodicals and found by the author, the complete reference to the document is given. Russian archival documents are cited and numbered by collection (Fond), inventory (Opis’), file (Delo), and page (List’ or L., or in plural, Ll.)

  Original documents were found in the RGVA (Moscow), GARF (Moscow), the archive of Vladimir Prison (Vladimir, Russia), the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA, Washington) and the Archives Branch of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM, Washington). Additionally, I used documents connected with the Raoul Wallenberg case available on the website of the Swedish Foreign Office and some documents available on the website of the British National Archives (Kew, Surrey).

  The work in the RGVA in Moscow needs a comment. In 1990–91, when I had access to the files of the former foreign prisoners kept in the RGVA (Fond 451), it was called the Special Archive, and only researchers cleared by the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or State Security Committee) could study documents there. I did not have security clearance and worked there as a representative of the International Commission on the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg. I had no access to the catalogues of the Special Archive and simply submitted to the head of the archive lists of names of foreigners who had been in Soviet captivity, in whom I was interested in connection with the Wallenberg case. After a while this man brought me archival personal files of most (but not all) of the listed people and I studied the files in his office. As a result, since I did not see catalogues, I do not have archival numbers for all files, and in the text I refer to the file of a particular person without a file number.

  There was a similar situation with the Vladimir Prison Archive. In the autumn of 1990, members of the International Wallenberg Commission were allowed to study archival prisoner cards (each prisoner had a special card filled in when he or she was brought to the prison). From a file (kartoteka in Russian) of about 60–70,000 cards a few hundred cards of political prisoners kept in Vladimir Prison in the 1940–50s were selected and filmed. Later a computer database was created and a printout of the card records is kept in the Memorial Society Archive in Moscow, which I used in this book.

  INTRODUCTION

  O, this fatal word SMERSH! … Everyone froze from fear when he heard it.

  -Nikolai Nikoulin, WWII veteran, 2007

  We fought not for the Motherland and not for Stalin. We had no choice: the Germans were in front of us, and SMERSH was behind.

  -Yelena Bonner, WWII veteran, widow of

  Academician Andrei Sakharov, 2010

  This book chronicles the activities of Soviet military counterintelligence just before and during World War II, with special emphasis on the origins, structure, a
nd activities of SMERSH—an acronym for the Russian words ‘Death to Spies’—which was the Soviet military counterintelligence organization from April 1943 to May 1946. In the Soviet Union, before and after these years, military counterintelligence was part of secret services generally known under the acronyms NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del or the Internal Affairs Commissariat), and, after the war until the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953, the MGB (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or State Security Ministry). Formed right after the all-important Soviet victory in Stalingrad, SMERSH was part of the Defense Commissariat (NKO, Narodnyi komissariat oborony). Its head, Viktor Abakumov, reported directly to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, at the time NKO Commissar.

  In Russia, the first archival information about SMERSH was released in 2003.1 While not mentioning SMERSH’s size directly, this data reveals that this organization was enormous for a counterintelligence service. SMERSH’s headquarters in Moscow consisted of 646 officers (at the same time, the HQ of the German military counterintelligence, Abwehr III, was comprised of 48 officers), while in the field there were at least 18–20,000 officers. In 1943, there were 12 fronts (army groups) and four military districts (army groups on the Soviet territory not involved in military actions) with their SMERSH directorates of 112–193 officers each; each front/military district consisted of between two and five armies with their SMERSH departments of 57 officers. Altogether, there were 680 divisions within all fronts with their departments of 57 SMERSH members; and five SMERSH officers were attached to each corps.2 Taking into consideration that the work of each SMERSH officer in the field was based on reports from several secret informers, the number of servicemen involved in SMERSH activity was several times higher than the number of SMERSH officers.

  SMERSH spied on its own servicemen, investigated and arrested even senior officers on Stalin’s orders and tirelessly vetted Soviet POWs. From June 1941 to May 1945, forty-seven Red Army generals arrested by military counterintelligence during the war were executed, or died in labor camps or in special investigation prisons while awaiting trial.3 Later, after Stalin’s death in March 1953, these generals were politically rehabilitated—in other words, it was officially admitted that they were innocent; the number of real collaborators with the Nazis among the high Soviet military, like General Andrei Vlasov, was very small. Overall, from 1941 to 1945, military tribunals sentenced 472,000 servicemen whose cases were investigated by military counterintelligence and of them, 217,000 were shot. About 5.4 million Soviet POWs and civilians sent by the Nazis to Germany as slave laborers went through SMERSH’s hands, and 600,000 of them ended up as convicts in the GULAG.4 In Eastern Europe, SMERSH cleansed newly-acquired land of any potential threat to Sovietization. Former Russian émigrés in these countries were specially targeted by SMERSH.