The order from Stalin that created SMERSH on April 19, 1943 was marked ‘ss’ (two small Russian ‘s’ letters, an acronym for sovershenno sekretno or Top Secret).45 A quotation from the order detailing SMERSH’s responsibilities conveys a deep distrust of the Red Army, and its last point makes clear that SMERSH was to play a special role:
The ‘SMERSH’ organs are charged with the following:
a) combating spy, diversion, terrorist, and other subversive activity of foreign intelligence in the units and organizations of the Red Army;
b) combating anti-Soviet elements that have penetrated into the units and organizations of the Red Army;
c) taking the necessary agent-operational [i.e., through informers] and other (through commanding officers) measures for creating conditions at the fronts to prevent enemy agents from crossing the front line and to make the front line impenetrable to spies and anti-Soviet elements;
d) combating traitors of the Motherland in the units and organizations of the Red Army (those who have gone over to the enemy side, who hide spies or provide any help to spies);
e) combating desertion and self-mutilation at the fronts;
f) investigating servicemen and other persons who have been taken prisoner of war or have been surrounded by the enemy;
g) conducting special tasks for the People’s Commissar of Defense.46
Due to the secrecy surrounding SMERSH, at first even officers in the field did not know SMERSH’s real name. Daniil Fibikh, a journalist working for a military newspaper at the Northwestern Front, wrote in his diary: ‘Special detachments SSSh—“Smert’, smert’ shpionam” [“Death, death to spies”] (!) [an exclamation mark in the original] attached to the Special Departments have been organized.’47 In June 1943 Fibikh found out what this organization was about. SMERSH operatives arrested him for ‘disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda’ (Article 58-10 of the Criminal Code) after a secret informer reported on Fibikh’s critical remarks regarding the Red Army. Fibikh was sentenced to a ten-year imprisonment in the labor camps.
Soon the ruthlessness of SMERSH interrogators became legendary. The investigative officers, known as ‘smershevtsy’, tortured and killed thousands of people whether they were guilty of intelligence activity or not. Two Soviet defectors who served in SMERSH published littleknown English-language memoirs in which they described the horrific interrogation methods.48 In one of these books, Nicola Sinevirsky, a military translator, wrote how he was forced to witness a brutal beating by a female SMERSH officer:
The Pole did not answer. Galya moved closer to him. She moved the rubber hose slowly back and forth in front of his face. ‘Don’t make yourself a bigger fool than you are already. Is that clear?’
The Pole looked around helplessly and said, ‘I don’t understand you.’
I translated Galya’s words to the prisoner. As I did so, Galya broke in, ‘He lies! The son of a bitch! He understands, all right! There is more cunning in him than in all of Poland. Listen to me, you Polish pig!’ Galya screamed, raising the rubber hose above her head…
Galya beat the Pole across the face unceasingly. ‘I’ll beat you bloody. I’ll beat you until you confess or you die on this spot!’ A torrent of coarse oaths burst from Galya’s lips…
The Pole’s face was beaten into a formless mass of flesh and blood. Blood dripped in thin streaks over his chest and on his shirt. His badly bruised eyes showed no spark of life…
The work on him was resumed where she had left off before our short break for dinner. It was four o’clock in the morning before the sentries finally carried away the broken body of the dying Pole…
Like a drunken man, I stumbled to my quarters and collapsed on my bed without undressing. In a matter of seconds, it seemed that I had slipped quietly into a heavy coma.
It took days for me to recover from the bloody apparition.49
Each front had its own SMERSH directorate stationed at the front line with the Red Army troops, and SMERSH made wide use of informers on all levels of the Red Army and among former prisoners of war.50 SMERSH’s chain of command was completely independent of the military hierarchy, so a SMERSH officer was subordinate only to a higher-level SMERSH officer. Constant communication between SMERSH front-line units and Moscow headquarters was maintained, with Abakumov preparing daily reports for Stalin.
Becoming head of SMERSH was a big promotion for Abakumov. As the chief of SMERSH’s predecessor, the UOO, he had been a subordinate of Lavrentii Beria, the notorious NKVD head. Now he was Beria’s equal, and his relationship with Stalin was a direct challenge to Beria.
Abakumov soon proved his worth, scoring impressive victories against the Germans. SMERSH had hundreds of double agents working among the Germans, especially in Abwehr intelligence schools. Many German agents therefore were known to SMERSH even before they crossed the front line, and were immediately identified and arrested. SMERSH also identified high-ranking intelligence and counterintelligence officers among German POWs and sent them to Moscow for interrogation. The level of intelligence about the enemy thus increased enormously. Deceptive ‘radio games’ or ‘playbacks’, in which captured German intelligence men and radio operators created fake German military broadcasts, were also a great success. However, the screening (fil’tratsiya) of Soviet servicemen who had been in German captivity, and the identification of spies, mostly imagined, among Soviet servicemen remained an important part of SMERSH’s job.
The Red Army’s advances into Eastern Europe meant that there were whole new classes of people to arrest: active members of political parties, local officials, diplomats, and so forth. Numerous Russian-émigré and White Guard organizations that had dispersed throughout Europe after the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922 were also a target. SMERSH arrested members of these organizations in Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and later in the Chinese provinces freed from Japanese occupation. But the group that SMERSH pursued most passionately was the Russian Liberation Army (ROA), which was formed from Soviet POWs in German captivity under the leadership of the former Soviet general Andrei Vlasov and his staff. Following the Yalta agreements with Stalin, British and American Allies forcibly handed over many units of the ROA and other anti-Soviet Russian troops, some of whom were even British citizens, to SMERSH.51
People arrested by SMERSH were dealt with in a number of ways. Soviet servicemen were tried by military tribunals and then sent to punishment battalions or executed. Enemy agents of low importance were put in NKVD prisoner-of-war camps, while important prisoners were sent to SMERSH headquarters in Moscow, where they were intensively interrogated both during and after World War II. Among them were former leaders of European governments such as Count István Bethlen, the Hungarian prime minister from 1921 to 1930, and Ion Antonescu, the Romanian fascist dictator from 1941 to 1944, whose wife was also brought to Moscow.52
Among SMERSH’s actions was the arrest of numerous diplomats. Some of them were guilty of crimes, like the Germans Gustav Richter and Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, both of whom played a crucial role in the Holocaust in Romania and Bulgaria. However, SMERSH also arrested completely innocent Swiss and Swedish diplomats, who were representing neutral governments. This was particularly galling to the Swedes, who had represented Soviet interests in Nazi Germany and Hungary for several years.