On March 30, 1944, Polozov was arrested and sent to the GUKR SMERSH in Moscow for investigation. On November 1, 1944, the OSO sentenced Polozov to twenty years in labor camps as a military traitor who worked for the Germans. In fact, as was established during the reevaluation of Polozov’s case, his achievements were impressive: ‘According to the information of the 4th Department of the GUKR SMERSH… Polozov released from [POW] camps, recruited, and persuaded to give themselves up to the Soviet counterintelligence… more than forty people.’76 After Stalin’s death (1953), Polozov was pardoned in September 1955.
Some other unlucky Soviet agents were simply shot to death on the spot by rabid officers and servicemen who indiscriminately killed anybody who crossed the line. On January 12, 1945, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian, 1st and 2nd Belorussian fronts assumed the offensive. Coded orders to move toward the Soviet troops were radioed to Soviet agents working in the enemy’s rear. Military intelligence and counterintelligence officers of the regiments, divisions, and corps of these fronts received the following instruction: ‘Intelligence officers who come out of the enemy’s territory should be provided with good food, medical help (if necessary), and clothing. It is categorically forbidden to take personal belongings, documents, weapons, and radio transmitters from them.’77
Four days later Soviet agents began to approach the Soviet troops. However, not all commanders welcomed them. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, Commander of the 2nd Belorussian Front, issued the following order:
On January 19, 1945, in the town of Mlave, Engineer-Captain Ch-ov [the name was shortened to conceal his identity], commander of the group of agents, approached the servicemen of the 717th Rifle Regiment of the 137th Rifle Division and asked them to show him the way to the intelligence headquarters of the front. They did not help Comrade Ch-ov, but instead, brutally killed him…
On January 18, 1945, a group of operational agents commanded by Lieutenant G-ov approached the servicemen of the 66th Mechanical Brigade near the town of Zechaune. The group was sent to Lt. Col. L-o, Commander of the 66th Mechanical Brigade. Instead of determining that the group consisted of intelligence officers, L-o called them ‘Vlasovites’ [i.e., solders of General Vlasov’s Army of Soviet POWs formed by the Germans], and ordered that they be shot. Luckily, they were not shot and, therefore, saved from death…
I have ordered the [Military] Prosecutor of the Front to investigate incidents of executions.78
The number of Soviet secret agents who were executed on the spot in similar incidents is unknown.
In 1943, the Abwehr opened special schools (Abwehr-209 and others) to train thirteen-to sixteen-year-old teenagers as agents; boys were selected from the German-occupied Soviet territories. On November 1, 1943, Abakumov forwarded to Stalin a report from Vladimir Baryshnikov, head of the 3rd GUKR SMERSH Department, concerning the arrest of twenty-nine such agents dropped mostly at the Kalinin and Western fronts.79 The young saboteurs were supplied with explosives disguised as pieces of coal. All of the teenage agents immediately found SMERSH or NKGB operatives and gave themselves up. Despite this, all of them were imprisoned in labor camps.
Notes
1. Directive of GUKR SMERSH No. 49519, dated September, 1943. Appendix 1 in Klim Degtyarev and Aleksandr Kolpakidi, SMERSH (Moscow: Eksmo, 2009), 527–33 (in Russian).
2. NKO Order No. 319, dated December 16, 1943. Document No. 185 in Russkii Arkhiv: Velikaya Otechestvennaya: Prikazy Narodnogo komissara oboroyy SSSR (1943–1945 gg.), T. 13 (2-3) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 233–4 (in Russian).
3. These tactics are described in Vladimir Bogomolov, V avguste sorok chetvertogo (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1974) (in Russian).
4. Biography of P. K. Ponomarenko (1902–1984) in K. A. Zalessky, Imperiya Stalina. Biograficheskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Veche, 2000), 365 (in Russian). After the war, Ponomarenko was a Central Committee secretary, then he became Soviet Ambassador to Poland, India, and the Netherlands. In 1961, Ponomarenko was deemed persona non grata after he participated in the kidnapping attempt of a Soviet female defector in Amsterdam and fought with Dutch police.
5. A. Yu. Popov, Diversanty Stalina: Deyatel’nost’ organov gosbezopasnosti na okkupirovannoi sovetskoi territorii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Yauza, 2004), 34–54 (in Russian). Later, the 5th Department of the General Staff became the RU and then the GRU.
6. Literature on the Soviet partisan movement in English is vast; for instance, A. Hill, The War Behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia 1941–44 (London: Frank Cass, 2005).
7. See the structure of Sudoplatov’s department (later directorate), in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, Lubyanka. VCheKa–OGPU–NKVD–NKGB–MGB–MVD–KGB. 1917–1960. Spravochnik (Moscow: Demokratiya, 1997), 275–76 (in Russian). and Aleksandr Kolpakidi, Likvidatory KGB. Spetsoperatsii sovetskikh spetssluzhb 1941–2004 (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004), 10–13 (in Russian).
8. Report by Ivan Syromolotnyi, head of the 8th Department of the Political Directorate of the Southern Front, dated March 6, 1942; quoted in Aleksandr Gogun and Anatolii Kentii, ‘…Sozdavat’ nevynosimye usloviya dlya vraga i vsekh ego posobnikov…’ Krasnye partizany Ukrainy, 1941–1944 (Kiev: Ukrainskii izdatel’skii soyuz, 2006), 12–13 (in Russian).
9. V. I. Pyatnitsky, Razvedshkola No. 005 (Moscow: AST, 2005) (in Russian), Chapter 1, http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/pyatnitsky_va/01.htmlm retrieved September 8, 2011.
10. Mentioned in NKO Order No. 00125, dated June 16, 1942. Document No. 208 in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2-2), 254.
11. Popov, Diversanty Stalina, 183–6.
12. Ibid., 91.
13. An excerpt cited in B. V. Sokolov, Okkupatsiya. Pravda i mify (Moscow: AST-Press, 2002), 291 (in Russian).
14. Kenneth Slepyan, ‘The Soviet Partisan Movement and the Holocaust,’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 2000), 1–27; Leonid Smilovitsky, ‘Antisemitism in the Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941–1944: The Case of Belorussia,’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20, no. 2 (Fall 2006), 207–234.
15. S. G. Chuev, Spetssluzhby III Reikha. Kniga 1 (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2003), 234–50 (in Russian).
16. V. I. Boyarsky, Partizany i armiya. Istoriya upushchennykh vozmozhnostei (Moscow: AST, 2001), 149 (in Russian).
17. Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy. Voina 1941–1945 gg. v materialakh sledstvenno-sudebnykh del (Moscow: Terra, 2006), 498–509 (in Russian).
18. Quoted in Sokolov, Okkupatsiya, 291–2.