These actions triggered a flight of servicemen from the country. From October 1932 to June 1933 alone, twenty Red Army commanders and privates crossed the border and escaped to Poland.36 But the Vesna Case was only a rehearsal for the actions brought against the military elite, such as the well-known Mikhail Tukhachevsky case a few years later, during the Great Terror (1936–38).37 According to the official statistics, from 1937–38 1,344,929 persons were sentenced for ‘counterrevolutionary’ crimes and 681,692 of them were executed; other sources mention 750,000 executed. During this time physical torture for extracting the necessary ‘confessions’ became routine during NKVD investigations.38
Military commanders were persecuted in several stages, and after each wave the military counterintelligence heads and interrogators most actively involved in the purges were, in turn, arrested, tried, and executed (Table 1-2). Although unquestionably loyal, they—along with highlevel NKVD personnel—simply knew too much about Stalin’s methods. For instance, Stalin found it necessary to fabricate accusations against Genrikh Yagoda (a long-time head of the OO and OGPU who was also the first NKVD Commissar) and his team, accusing them of organizing a plot within the security services.39
Stalin’s purges of the military peaked during the years of the Great Terror, when 40,000 members of the military elite were persecuted, including approximately 500 high-ranking officers; of them, 412 were shot and 29 died under interrogation.40 This number is astonishing considering that only 410 generals and marshals died during the whole of World War II.41 As usual, Stalin read the interrogation transcripts of the main arrestees and directed investigations. Even during the desperate days of late 1941 Stalin continued to order the arrests of generals, blaming them for the disasters of the first months of the war—disasters that were largely a result of his own mistakes and miscalculations.
Olga Freidenberg, a cousin of the internationally-famous poet and Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak, noted a macabre practice in her memoirs. In those years radio news about show trials and announcements of death sentences for ‘enemies of the people’ were followed by broadcasts of the Russian folk melody ‘Kamarinskaya’ or the Ukrainian Cossack dance tune ‘Gopak’.42 In the Kremlin-controlled media of those times, the broadcast of these dances—the Kamarinskaya, traditionally performed by a drunken, joyful peasant, and the Gopak, a victory dance performed with sabers—conveyed a clear, and chilling, message.
Many American authors describe Stalin’s actions during the purges as symptomatic of a developing paranoia.43 In my opinion, Stalin was not mentally ill. Rather, his behavior can be likened to the actions of a Mafia boss who maintains his power and position in the criminal world by killing off all possible opposition. Chistki or purges and ‘unmasking’ enemies in the armed forces and the NKVD obviously played an important role for Stalin—most of the officers who had served prior to the Revolution or were active during the October Revolution and the Civil War had perished and were replaced by recruits from a young generation of devoted Communist and Komsomol (Communist Youth Union) members. These people grew up in Stalin’s Soviet Union and were personally devoted to the Leader and Teacher, as Stalin was called in the newspapers. The OO/SMERSH functionaries, including Viktor Abakumov, SMERSH’s head, who operated during World War II, belonged to this younger generation.
Between autumn 1939 and summer 1940, Stalin acquired a part of Poland, three Baltic States, and a portion of Romania by making opportunistic use of the secret appendices of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. The security services, including the OO, actively participated in the Soviet occupation of the new territory, purging former national and military leaders, politicians, intelligentsia, and industry owners—that is, everyone who could potentially oppose the Sovietization that followed.
In February 1941, Stalin reorganized the security services in response to the new circumstances. The huge, unwieldy NKVD was divided into three parts. Military counterintelligence was transferred to the NKO (Defense Commissariat); a new organization, the NKGB (State Security Commissariat), became responsible for foreign intelligence; and the KRO ran domestic counterintelligence, among other things. Possibly, if not for the war, the NKGB would have continued the mass arrests of the Red Terror period since by March 1941, it had a cardfile for 1,263,000 ‘anti-Soviet elements’ who potentially could have been arrested.44 The NKVD was left to manage the slave labor in the camps and provide special troops to support NKGB actions in the newly occupied territory. It was also tasked with creating a separate system of camps for foreign prisoners of war.
Stalin was now ready to order his troops to continue their march to the West, but the unexpected invasion of Russia by Adolf Hitler’s troops on June 22, 1941 scuttled all his plans. During the disastrous and chaotic first months of World War II, the focus of the state security services returned to controlling the Soviet Union’s own citizens, many of whom at first greeted the Germans as liberators. Stalin undid his February changes, and recreated a huge NKVD.
Military counterintelligence was transferred back to the NKVD in the form of the OO Directorate, or the UOO (the ‘U’ means ‘Directorate’, which indicated that the OO had become a larger organization), and was given a new chief, the rising star Viktor Abakumov. Abakumov had already demonstrated his efficiency early in 1941, when he participated in the purging of the Baltic States. During this first period of World War II, the main goal of military counterintelligence was to prevent desertions and to vet the vast numbers of servicemen who had been surrounded or captured by the fast-advancing Germans.
In the spring of 1943, with the success of the Red Army in Stalingrad, it became clear that the war was finally becoming an offensive one. The Red Army began to liberate Nazi-occupied Soviet territory and prepared to advance into Europe. At this point, Stalin returned to the tripartite organization of the secret services of early 1941, with the military counterintelligence directorate now rechristened SMERSH and formally made a part of the NKO. In essence, SMERSH was simply the UOO, renamed and made independent of the main body of secret services. Abakumov, the UOO’s head, became head of SMERSH, and most of the UOO’s personnel were also transferred. SMERSH’s staff was considerably larger than the UOO’s.
SMERSH differed from the UOO in another extremely important aspect—Abakumov reported directly to Stalin, because Stalin had special plans for SMERSH. The Soviet dictator needed an organization he personally controlled to help him politically consolidate the territorial gains he expected the Red Army to make in Eastern Europe and Germany. Therefore, SMERSH was truly Stalin’s secret weapon—a weapon that was even more effective than tanks and bombs in conquering new territory in the West.
By the time of SMERSH’s creation, Stalin was the all-powerful dictator of the Soviet Union. He was general secretary of the Communist Party, chairman of the Council of Commissars, chairman of the wartime GKO (State Defense Committee), Defense Commissar, and commander in chief of the armed forces.