As previously in the OOs, SMERSH officers did not send all those returning from captivity to filtration camps. Some were executed on the spot. Mikhail Shmulev recalled: ‘I ran from the Germans twice. The first time I was unlucky—I was caught and punished. The second time I managed to get to our advancing troops. I was stopped twice by drunken officers who wanted to execute me on the spot as a spy or a Vlasovite before I got to the military komendatura [commandant’s office]. Then I was kept in a SMERSH cell for convicts sentenced to death. For fifteen days I shared a cell with those unfortunates who had failed to convince investigators they had not served the enemy and were not traitors of the Motherland. They were shot.’24
The story of a woman pilot, Anna Timofeeva-Yegorova, is even more shocking. At the end of 1944, her attack aircraft was shot down near Warsaw and fell to the ground, engulfed in flames. At the last moment she managed to parachute out, but she was taken prisoner and placed in Küstrin (Kostrzyn in Polish), the concentration camp for Allied soldiers (Stalag III-C Alt-Drewitz). Timofeeva had serious burns that were treated by doctor-prisoners in a camp hospital. Bravely, the fellow prisoners managed to salvage her numerous awards (two Red Banner orders, the Red Star Order, the medal ‘For Bravery’, and the medal ‘For Taking over the Caucasus’), as well as her Party ID, risking their lives to do so.
On January 31, 1945, the Red Army liberated the camp, and prisoners were ordered to the town of Landsberg for vetting. Timofeeva put on a coat given to her by fellow British prisoners, attached her military awards to it, and started on her way, hardly able to walk. Soon SMERSH operatives picked her up and brought her to their headquarters. She recalled:
During the first night, two soldiers with machine guns took me to the second floor for interrogation. I could hardly move my legs because with every motion the thin skin that had just developed over the burned areas cracked and blood oozed when I bent my arms and legs. Every time I stopped, a soldier pushed me in the back with the butt of his machine gun.
They brought me into a bright room with pictures on the walls and a big rug on the floor. A major sat at the table. He looked friendly. But first, he took my awards and my party ID away from me and studied them with a magnifying glass. For a long time he did not allow me to sit down. I thought I would fall to the floor, but I managed to keep myself conscious and begged for permission to be seated. Finally, he allowed me to sit down. I thought I wouldn’t be able to rise from the chair by any means. Suddenly the ‘friendly’ major yelled at me, ‘Stand up!’ and I jumped up from the chair. Then he shouted at me:
‘Where did you get the awards and the party ID?’
‘Why did you allow yourself to be taken prisoner?’
‘What [German] task did you have?’
‘Who gave you the task?’
‘Where were you born?’
‘Whom were you ordered to contact?’
The major continued to ask these and similar questions until dawn. To all my answers, he shouted: ‘You are lying, Alsatian dog!’
This continued for many nights… They insulted me with every unprintable word… My name was not used anymore. Now I was ‘a fascist Alsatian dog…’
On the tenth day in SMERSH I lost my patience. I stood up from the trestle bed and, without saying a word, walked to the exit and up the stairs, right to the major on the second floor.
‘Stay still, you whore! I’ll shoot!’ shouted the guard, rushing toward me. But I continued to walk, I almost ran upstairs…
I opened the door quickly and shouted, or I only thought that I shouted: ‘When will you stop your insults? You can kill me, but I won’t let you insult me anymore!’25
Timofeeva was lucky. Finally, Major Fedotov released her. However, only in 1965 did she receive the highest military award for bravery, the Hero of the Soviet Union Star.
Timofeeva’s story was quite typical because air forces were especially targeted by SMERSH. Technically ignorant themselves, osobisty considered any technical failure as sabotage, and commanders frequently hid pilots from SMERSH officers while accident investigations were in progress. From 1943 till the end of the war, at least 10,941 pilots and crew members were taken prisoner by the Germans or were missing in action.26 Many wounded pilots who escaped from the enemy experienced beatings at the hands of SMERSH; in addition, investigators crushed their fingers with boots, staged executions, and so forth, not to mention that SMERSH prisoners were not fed or allowed to use a bathroom.27
Sometimes pilots used force to free their fellows from the clutches of osobisty. When Aleksandr Pokryshkin, commander of the 9th Guard Air Division and the most famous Soviet flying ace, saw what SMERSH officers did in a vetting camp to Ivan Babak, he almost shot to death the camp’s commandant.28 During the war, Babak shot down 37 enemy planes before he was shot down himself in April 1945. In the vetting camp, he was terribly tortured, and osobisty refused to believe that he was a Hero of the Soviet Union. Pokryshkin took Babak with him and Babak returned to his corps. However, military counterintelligence did not forget about him, and he was arrested after the war, in 1947. Again Pokryshkin’s intervention saved Babak, but Babak was forced to resign from the air force.
According to FSB historian Stepakov, 5,416,000 Soviet servicemen and civilians went through SMERSH’s vetting, and of these, 600,000 were selected and tried as war criminals and collaborators.29 General Aleksandr Bezverkhny, head of the current Russian military counterintelligence, believes that on the whole, SMERSH dealt with more than ten million people.30
Operations at Home: Deportations
On March 4, 1944 Abakumov was awarded the Order of Suvorov of the 2nd Class, along with Beria and Merkulov, who received the Order of Suvorov of the 1st Class and Order of Kutuzov of the 1st Class, respectively.31 Beria’s deputies Kruglov, Serov, and Arkadii Apollonov, and Merkulov’s first deputy, Bogdan Kobulov, also received awards. It is ironic that these security leaders received the highest Soviet military awards for their nonmilitary actions against Soviet civilians—organizing the deportations of four ethnic groups, or ‘nations’ in Soviet terminology, into exile. Besides the above-mentioned Kalmyks, the Karacharovs, Chechens, and Ingush were transported from the Caucasus to Central Asia and Siberia. In Stalin’s opinion, these small nations were Germany’s collaborators and traitors to the Soviet Motherland.
The deportations were Stalin’s reprisals for actions by insurgents of these nations in mid-1942 to early 1943 in the rear of the Red Army as it fought the Germans in the foothills of the Caucasus. With access to oil posing a constant problem for them, the Germans were determined to seize the oil fields in Azerbaijan and Chechnya. Furthermore, the Germans considered the conquest of this area the first step toward conquering the Middle East. With the German success in 1941, many people in the Northern Caucasus saw an opportunity to free themselves of their traditional enemies, the Russians.32 Russia had waged a war of conquest against the mainly Muslim Northern Caucasians from 1816 to 1865. In 1936, more than 1,000 families of the kulaks (prosperous peasants) were deported from the Northern Caucasus and most mosques were closed.33 In answer, a guerrilla war began. In some form this terrible conflict continues today.