The fate of one, P. M. Gavrilov, who was among the very few survivors of the battle of Brest in 1941, would prove the quality of Soviet justice. Gavrilov was a real hero. Although he had been wounded, and although certain that he would die, he fought to his last bullet, saving one grenade to hurl at the enemy as he passed out from loss of blood. His courage so impressed the Wehrmacht (which was seldom given to sentimental acts) that German soldiers carried his almost lifeless body to a dressing station, whence he was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp. It was for this act of ‘surrender’ that he stood accused after the liberation of his German camp in May 1945. His next home was a camp again, this time a Soviet one. In all, about 1.8 million prisoners like him would end up in the hands of SMERSh.48
Building prisons to hold these ‘special’ veterans was a challenge when resources were stretched, but Soviet secret policemen were always willing to adapt. ‘The camp is located well outside the town,’ an NKVD report on a likely facility commented that summer. ‘It is enclosed with secure fencing, and has structures suitable for housing special contingent prisoners.’ Nazis had always known exactly how to build a jail. The site, just beyond the town of Oranienburg, was the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Thirty thousand people had been murdered there under the recently defeated Nazi regime. The Red Army had liberated it on 22 April, finding a few hundred survivors in conditions so desperate that many would die before doctors could save them. But though the gas chambers were empty and the guard-posts abandoned, it was a well-built and convenient prison. For years to come, it would house consignments of expatriates waiting for the attentions of SMERSh, the cells and darkness, and the train ride to the east.49
The most miserable fate was reserved for the so-called ‘Vlasovites’, most of whom had also been prisoners of war at some stage in their lives. They included the men who had caved in and agreed to fight for the Reich rather than face starvation in the camps. A minority were also active anti-Soviets, especially the leaders of the so-called national legions from the Caucasus, the Baltic and Ukraine. Some of these ended their war in western Europe, since they had been fighting in France and Belgium. Like tens of thousands of other Soviet citizens, they would be solemnly ‘repatriated’ by Stalin’s former European allies in the eighteen months that followed Berlin’s fall. In all, about 5.5 million Soviet citizens had been sent back to their former homeland by the end of 1946. Of these, something like a fifth were either executed at once or sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labour. Others took their own lives, and even those of their accompanying families, rather than face the mercy of Soviet military police.50
Detachments of Red Army guards whose job was to escort these men forgot about Soviet brotherhood. Their politruks told them that Vlasovites were the worst traitors, and soldiers treated their prisoners accordingly. Entire groups would be robbed, their cases opened and the soap, tobacco, razor blades and socks removed for sale. ‘I took his shirt to clean my gun,’ a soldier told military police. It happened all the time.51 ‘Specials’ were treated as convicts while they awaited filtration. The onus was always on them to prove their innocence. The process could take months, even years. SMERSh and its successors were still ‘filtering’ displaced persons in the 1950s.52 While they waited, the wretched prisoners faced insults and bullying, and the same treatment would continue when they were assigned to labour camps. By August 1945, just over half a million were already at work. Quotas of former prisoners and ‘traitors’ were assigned to the coal-mining and power industries, to construction work, timber, steel, fisheries, engineering, chemicals – anywhere labour was needed and money was scarce. The condemned were supposed to be grateful to Stalin for sparing their lives.
The conditions for the disgraced men, as one survivor remarked, rivalled the hardships of a Nazi camp. Ex-combatants were sent to the Caucasus to work in timber yards with neither outer clothing nor footwear. With no solid housing and no means of bathing, they had no defence against the endless plagues of lice.53 Others went hungry, and most worked without pay. ‘I won’t pay you a penny,’ one labour organizer told his team. ‘You were sent to us as betrayers of the motherland, as self-seekers, and you’re just here to work.’ The foreman of a Siberian mine assured a member of his work contingent that ‘a ton of coal is dearer to us than your life’.54 His hatred drew on bitter roots. Many of the toughs who managed former soldiers had originally been victims themselves. The camps and mines of Siberia were ruled by former kulaks, the peasants whom communism had dispossessed in the early 1930s. Now they could vent their rage on disgraced soldiers. ‘As soon as your officers’ backs are turned,’ one of them hissed, ‘we’re going to kill you with hunger and hard labour. And you deserve it because in 1929/30 you were the ones who dekulakized us.’55
The Soviet authorities pressed for the repatriation of the ‘specials’ for several reasons. They wanted to make examples of some traitors, and in almost every case they feared, as Richard Overy puts it, that Vlasovites in western Europe would prove to be ‘undesirable witnesses against communism’.56 But on their journey home, the prisoners would often turn out to be equally undesirable advocates of capitalism. There was always some contact between prisoners and their Red Army escorts. Thousands of these frontoviki had been impressed with the capitalist farms and private businesses they had seen, and they discussed it all with their new prisoners. ‘I never had enough to eat in my whole life,’ one young soldier declared. ‘So how come they live in such a cultured and orderly way in Poland, when we have none of that?’57 The former Vlasovites could laugh at such naïveté. Poland, they explained, was backward, war-ravaged, scarcely a place to envy. Some of them had seen France, Holland, even Belgium. An entire contingent of Georgian troops had been billeted on foggy Texel island; Ukrainians had been sent to fight in France. ‘Belgium is a country of high culture,’ one veteran told his audience. ‘It has a highly developed economy. You can live well there.’ When some smart komsomol snapped back that the Belgians had high rates of unemployment – a common Soviet defence when faced with the glamour of capitalism – the veteran’s reply was ready. ‘Oh yes,’ he agreed. ‘The women there have nothing to do, so they can exist exclusively for love.’58
The party’s answer was the usual combination of lectures and cold threats. Soldiers and prisoners alike were subjected to homilies with titles like ‘Comrade Stalin’s views on the goals of the Red Army and Soviet people and on relations with the population of Germany’, ‘The fundamental economic tasks of the USSR’ and ‘We must be more watchful on alien soil’.59 Meanwhile, SMERSh listened and watched for treacherous talk. ‘Filtration’ was to be the fate of every former prisoner of war or deportee, and many buckled under the weight of suspicion. But even good frontoviki were watched for signs of weakness. The only sanction that Stalin’s regime could use on a mass scale was the labour camp. During the war, the population of the Gulag had dropped sharply, mainly through hardship and death. By 1946, the camps were filling up again.