Transferring thousands of political officers who had no legal training would not have made SMERSH departments more professional, but would have increased GlavPURKKA’s influence within SMERSH, which Stalin definitely did not want. He needed SMERSH to remain under Abakumov’s sole control, thus ensuring that, through Abakumov, SMERSH would be under his own exclusive control.
Denouncing High Commanders
In 1943, 60 percent of trials in the tribunals of the Leningrad Front involved charges of ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ (Article 58-10).10 For most of convicts terms of five to ten years in the labor camps were commuted to service in punishment battalions and companies. For convicted officers, three months in a penal battalion was equivalent to a ten-year prison term. Even generals were arrested at the front for ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ or treason (Appendix I, see http://www.smershbook.com). Here are a few examples.
In May 1943, SMERSH arrested Lieutenant General Vladimir Tamruchi, commander of tank troops at the Southwest Front, just after he left hospital. He was charged with treason and spent the next seven years in the inhuman Sukhanovo Prison in solitary confinement.11 In October 1950 he died, still awaiting trial.
Before long, another general became a long-term prisoner of Sukhanovo. In December 1943, Lieutenant General Ivan Laskin arrived in Moscow, ostensibly to be appointed to a new position. Head of the HQ of the Northern Caucasian Front, Laskin was an internationally known figure. On January 31, 1943, he headed the military operational group that took prisoner the staff members of Field Marshal von Paulus’s 6th Army in Stalingrad, and Paulus himself surrendered personally to Laskin.12 In Moscow, Aleksei Antonov, head of the General Staff, informed Laskin about his new appointment as HQ head of the 4th Ukrainian Front. Before going to this front, Laskin was sent to the sanatorium Arkhangelskoe near Moscow, supposedly to rest and relax for a few days. However, the very next day a major came to Laskin’s room, saying that he had been sent to bring Laskin to the Military Intelligence (RU) HQ in Moscow. This was a lie: the major and two other officers who accompanied him were actually SMERSH operatives, and a car brought Laskin and the officers not to the RU, but to Lubyanka Prison. In his memoirs, Laskin recalled what happened next:
The officers took my handgun away from me and searched my pockets… I was brought to a huge room without windows, where my general’s shoulder boards were pulled off, then military orders were removed from my chest. Two guards, after grabbing my wrists, pulled me along an iron stair to… Colonel General Abakumov.
[Abakumov] looked at me from my feet up to my face and demanded in a fierce voice:
‘Tell me about your crimes.’
I strongly answered that I had never committed or even thought about committing any crime against the Motherland…
He continued to shout at me:
‘Already in 1938 we wanted to arrest you… and it’s a pity that we didn’t. And since then you have tried to escape our organs. Now you’ll find out who we are!’13
The ‘organs’ was a typical way the Chekists referred to themselves. Laskin was charged with treason (Article 58-1b) and kept in Sukhanovo Prison. Ironically, on December 31, 1943 the American government awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross ‘for extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy, an action against our common enemy, Germany, in World War II’.14 Clearly, the Western Allies highly valued the capture of Field Marshal Paulus.
It wasn’t until December 1952 that the Military Collegium sentenced Laskin, now charged with not following his military duty (Article 193-1a), to ten years’ imprisonment. Allegedly, he violated his military oath in 1941, when, while he and his unit were surrounded by the Germans, he destroyed his Communist Party ID, got rid of his gun and exchanged his uniform for civilian clothes. Obviously, these ridiculous charges were trumped up to conceal the fact that Laskin had already spent almost ten years in Moscow investigation prisons without having committed any crime. The same December, Laskin was released.
Soon after Stalin’s death, during the process of rehabilitation, it was discovered what lay behind Laskin’s case: Mikhail Belkin, head of the UKR of the Northern Caucasian Front, denounced Laskin to Abakumov. Belkin greatly desired the Order of Lenin, and he asked Laskin to officially recommend him for that award. Laskin refused because he did not know Belkin well enough. Laskin’s arrest and the whole ‘case’ were a direct result of Belkin’s vengeance. In 1953 Laskin was rehabilitated, but only in 1966 did Soviet authorities present him with his Distinguished Service Cross.
The case of Major General Boris Teplinsky, head of the Operational Department of the Air Force of the Siberian Military District, was more personal for Abakumov. General Teplinsky was arrested in connection with his friend, high-ranking NKVD/NKGB official Viktor Il’in. According to some memoirs, Il’in confronted Abakumov with compromising information about one of Abakumov’s love affairs.15 However, Sudoplatov claimed that Il’in was arrested because he had notified Teplinsky about the preparations for his arrest in the GUKR SMERSH, and Abakumov used this as a reason for complaining about Merkulov and Beria and their subordinates to Stalin. Most probably, both events took place.
Anyway, on April 28, 1943 Abakumov personally arrested Teplinsky, and on May 3, 1943, Il’in was arrested in Merkulov’s office. Teplinsky and Il’in were accused of treason, conspiracy, and anti-Soviet propaganda. This was one of the cases that were without movement for years. During interrogations Teplinsky was tortured, and on eleven separate occasions he declared a hunger strike.16 It wasn’t until February 1952 that the OSO MGB sentenced Il’in to eight years of imprisonment for anti-Soviet propaganda, and he was then released because he had already spent this term under investigation. In March 1952, the Military Collegium sentenced Teplinsky to a 10-year imprisonment; he was released after Stalin’s death. Both were soon rehabilitated due to the lack of evidence that they had committed any crime.
On April 1, 1944, Abakumov presented Stalin with a long summary of reports from his subordinates concerning the Western Front headed by Vasilii Sokolovsky:
I report to you that agents of the Main Directorate SMERSH and the Counterintelligence Directorate of the Western Front reported to me that recently generals and officers of the Red Army General Staff and the Western Front have repeatedly stated that the Commander of the Western Front, Army General Sokolovsky, and his Head of Staff, Lieutenant General [Aleksandr] Pokrovsky, have not guided military operations appropriately.
For instance, Lieutenant General [A. I.] Shimonaev… said: ‘From 1942 to the present, the Western Front has been using two to three times more ammunition than any other front, but it has not achieved any result… Sokolovsky and Pokrovsky organized intelligence poorly. They did not have a clear understanding of the enemy or its fortifications—knowledge that is crucial in deciding where to break through the enemy’s defense…’
Col. Alekseev said: ‘On Pokrovsky’s order, Colonel Il’initsky, head of the Front’s Intelligence Department… falsifies estimates of the enemy’s force…’
In January of this year [1944], based on our information, Comrade [Fyodor] Kuznetsov, head of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate, sent a commission to inspect the Intelligence Department of the Western Front. [Deputy USSR Prosecutor] Lieutenant General [Afanasii] Vavilov headed the commission, which included Major Krylovsky. The commission discovered outrageous facts concerning the work of the Intelligence Directorate…