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.
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.
This book chronicles the activities of Soviet military counterintelligence just before and during World War II, with special emphasis on the origins, structure, and 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.