Immediately a politruk [political officer], a SMERSH officer, and a military tribunal start to work. One of the informers, plenty of whom are present in every unit, testifies: ‘Yes, in the presence of privates he [the officer] questioned our victory!’ After this a special printed form, where there is a space for a name, is filled in. Now everything is ready. The decision is: ‘Shoot him in front of formation!’ or ‘Send him to a punishment company!’—which is practically the same thing.
This is how the most honest and responsible people perished…
It was a stupid, senseless killing of our own servicemen. I think this [artificial] selection among the Russian people is a time bomb that will explode in a few generations, in the 21st or 22nd century, when the numerous scoundrels selected and raised by the Bolsheviks will give rise to new generations of those who are like them.49
Nikoulin died in 2009. Unfortunately, he lived to see his prediction coming true in the twenty-first century.
For me, writing this book was like talking to the people of my parents’ generation, such as Nikolai Nikoulin, Vasil’ Bykov, and many, many others. Our ‘conversations’ were very painful, and like my harrowing postwar memories, they will stay with me forever.
Notes
1. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki i dokumenty, edited by V. S. Khristoforov, et al. (Moscow: Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie, 2003; second edition 2005; and the third, 2010) (in Russian).
2. The number of divisions from Table 51 in G. F. Krivosheev et al., Velikaya Otechestvennaya bez grifa sekretnosti. Kniga poter’ (Moscow: Veche, 2009), 206–7 (in Russian).
3. I. I. Kuznetsov, Sud’by general’skie: Vysshie komandnye kadry Krasnoi Armii v 1940–1953 gg. (Irkutsk: Izdatel’stvo Irkutskogo universiteta, 2000), 180 (in Russian).
4. V. N. Stepakov, Narkom SMERSHa (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 93 (in Russian).
5. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 6.
6. Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1953), 10.
7. Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love (first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1957), 10, 28.
8. The Library of Congress World War II Companion, edited by David M. Kennedy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).
9. Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (New York: Vantage Books, 2007), 29–30 and 644.
10. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operatrions from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990), 342–3.
11. Michael Parrish, The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 111–45.
12. Nicola Sinevirsky, SMERSH (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950); A. I. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There: A Memoir of the Soviet Security Services, translated by Gerald Brooke (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1972). After the war, Mikhail Mondich (Sinevirsky) (1923–1969) lived in the United States, while Boris Baklanov escaped to the American sector in Vienna and went to live in London.
13. Vladimir Nikolaev, Stalin, Gitler i my (Moscow: Prava cheloveka, 2002), 155 (in Russian).
14. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney, Vols. I and II (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 23.
15. Vladimir Bogomolov, V avguste sorok chetvertogo (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1974) (in Russian).
16. Vladimir Bogomolov, ‘Ya reshil svesti do minimuma kontakty s gosudarstvom,’ Novaya gazeta, No. 33, May 17, 2004 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2004/33/25.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
17. Letter of the Party Central Committee, dated April 15, 1966, in A. Novikov and V. Telitsyn, ‘Mertvym—ne bol’no, bol’no—zhivym,’ Voprosy literatury, No. 6 (2004) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2004/6/nov15.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
18. V. V. Bykov, ‘Dolgaya doroga domoi,’ Druzhba narodov, No. 8 (2003) (in Russian), http://magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/2003/8/bykov.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
19. ‘Russia Unveils Stalin Spy Service,’ BBC News, April 19, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2960709.stm, retrieved September 4, 2011.
20. Vadim Telitsin, ‘SMERSH’: Operatsii i ispolniteli (Smolensk: Rusich, 2000) (in Russian).
21. Nikolai Poroskov, ‘Voennaya kontrrazvedka vchera i segodnya,’ Voennopromyshlennyi kur’er, No. 48 (264), December 10-16, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.vpk-news.ru/article.asp?_sign=archive.2008.264.articles.chronicle_03, retrieved September 4, 2011
22. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki.
23. V. N. Stepakov, Narkom SMERSHa (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 145 (in Russian).
24. Cited in Dmitry Oreshnikov, ‘Finskaya voina kak opyt sotsiologii. Chast’ tret’ya,’ Yezhednevnyi zhurnal, June 10, 2010 (in Russian), http://www.ej.ru/?a=note&id=10171, retrieved September 4, 2011.
25. Leonid Ivanov, Pravda o ‘SMERSH’ (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2009), 112 (in Russian).
26. M. B. Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR. 1923–1960. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya, 1998); N. V. Petrov and K. V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD. 1934–1941. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya 1999); A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. Organy VCheKa–OGPU–NKVD–NKGB–MGB–MVD–KGB. 1917–1991. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 2003); N. V. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami gosbezopasnosti, 1941–1954. Spravochnik (Moscow: Zven’ya, 2010). All in Russian.
27. Especially the sites http://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/, http://militera.lib.ru, and http://www.iremember.ru, all retrieved September 4, 2011.
28. Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy. Voina 1941–1945 gg. V materialakh sledstvenno-sudebnykh del (Moscow: Terra, 2006); Aleksandr Beznasyuk and Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Tribunal. Arbat, 37 (Dela i lyudi) (Moscow: Terra, 2006).
29. Anatoli Granovsky, I Was an NKVD Agent (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1962), 235–58.
30. Recollections by Aleksander Golovanov, in F. I. Chuev, Soldaty imperii. Besedy. Vospominaniya. Dokumenty (Moscow: Kovcheg, 1998), 229 (in Russian).
31. Krivosheev et al., Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 39–43.
32. Details in Boris Sokolov, Poteri Sovetskogo Soyuza i Germanii vo Vtoroi mirovoi voine: Metody podschetov i naibolee veroyatnye rezul’taty (Moscow: AIRO-XXI, 2011) (in Russian).