On December 2, 1944 SMERSH operatives of the 3rd Ukrainian Front detained Bethlen, and at first the Count was kept in Hungary. On February 17, 1945, Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs Dekanozov reported to Foreign Affairs Commissar Molotov: ‘Count Bethlen is the most outstanding representative of the Hungarian reaction and a convinced advocate of pro-British orientation… Bethlen must be… arrested and transported to the Soviet Union, where he must be kept for a few months, after which the issue must be settled for good.’105 Molotov wrote on the report: ‘Carry out. March 20, 1945.’ After this Bethlen was flown to Moscow, imprisoned and on April 28, 1945 formally arrested. On October 5, 1946 the 72-year-old Count died in the Butyrka Prison Hospital in Moscow.
The Armija Krajowa
In late July 1944, the troops of the 1st Belorussian Front under Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky began the liberation of Poland; they were followed by the troops of the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian and the 1st Ukrainian fronts. Rokossovsky was one of the few Soviet commanders who was arrested in 1937 but later released. Of Polish origin, he was accused of spying for Poland, and was brutally tortured during interrogations by OO investigators. During World War II, Rokossovsky successfully commanded several fronts. In 1944, Rokossovsky’s 1st Belorussian Front included the 1st Polish Army under General Zygmund Berling, formed in the Soviet Union. It consisted of four infantry divisions, one cavalry brigade, and five artillery brigades. Counterintelligence was called the Informational Department and included SMERSH officers who did not know Polish.106
Rokossovsky’s troops were in the suburbs of Warsaw on August 1, 1944, when the Polish underground Armija Krajowa, subordinate to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London, began its tragic Warsaw Uprising.107 On Stalin’s order, Rokossovsky’s troops stopped advancing until the uprising was over. There is little doubt that Stalin’s reason for holding the Russian troops back was his desire to have the Germans destroy the Armija Krajowa for him. On August 25, 1944, the HQ of the NKVD rear guard troops of the 3rd Belorussian Front explicitly demanded that the troops disarm and detain every Armija Krajowa unit moving to Warsaw to help the insurgents.108
Stalin had his own plans for Poland. In an attempt to co-opt the Polish emigrant government in London, a Communist provisional government, the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PCNL), was created in Moscow on July 21, 1944. The PCNL agreed that all military operations in Poland would be conducted under Stalin’s control. The 1st Polish Army was merged with the Armija Ludowa, a group of pro-Communist partisans in Nazi-occupied Poland, and became the Ludowe Wojsko Polskie (People’s Army of Poland, or LWP). On August 1, 1944, the PCNL moved to the liberated city of Lublin.
From August to December 1944, Nikolai Bulganin represented Soviet interests at the PCNL, organizing local administrations on Soviet-occupied territory and coordinating the activity of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Belorussian fronts and the 1st Ukrainian front.109 He was also responsible for ‘cleansing the rear of the Red Army of various groups representing the emigrant [Polish] “government” and the armed units of the so-called Armija Krajowa… and detaining their officers via “SMERSH” organs.’110 NKVD troops under Beria’s deputy, Ivan Serov, collaborated with SMERSH operational groups to carry out the cleansing. Serov had prior experience, having cleansed the newly acquired Polish territories in 1939.111
Another unit was created within the LWP to conduct the cleansing—the Main Informational Directorate under Piotr Kozuszko (Kozhushko in Russian).112 This military counterintelligence unit at first consisted exclusively of SMERSH and NKVD operatives. On October 17, 1944, Beria reported to Stalin and Molotov: ‘To enforce the counterintelligence organs of the Polish Army [LWP], Comrade Abakumov will send 100 “SMERSH” workers. We will also send 15 comrades from the NKVD–NKGB to help the Polish security organs. Comrade Abakumov—“SMERSH”—and Comrade Serov will assist on sites of the Counterintelligence Directorate of the Polish Army and its head, Comrade Kozhushko.’113 The directorate had its own concentration camps for detaining arrested members of Armija Krajowa (or AK, in Chekist parlance).
On October 26, 1944, Serov reported to Beria:
Through the agents, operational SMERSH groups on the territory of the Bialystok Voevodstvo [Province] found out that… an ‘AK’ unit of 17,000 men is in the Bielovezhskaya Pushcha [forest]. Comrade MESHIK [Abakumov’s deputy] was sent to check this information. He reported that… the ‘SMERSH’ operational group of the 2nd Belorussian Front is performing actions against the AK members [i.e., arresting them]…
The investigation of 20 cases of active members of the ‘AK’ has been completed and in the near future they will be sentenced by the Military Tribunal.114
Investigations were conducted with the usual cruelty. A former member of the Armija Krajowa detachment, a woman partisan named Stanislava Kumor, recalled: ‘In the Bialystok Prison, the Chekists broke my arms, burned me with cigarettes, and lashed my face with a whip.’115
Apparently, the Armija Krajowa’s threat in the Bialystok Region was so serious that Abakumov and Lavrentii Tsanava, one of Beria’s men and later NKGB Commissar of Belorussia, were sent to clear up the situation. On October 29, 1944, Beria reported to Stalin:
To assist Comrades ABAKUMOV and TSANAVA in carrying out the measures, two NKVD regiments are being relocated to the town of Bialystok.
The troops will arrive on the evening of October 31, 1944.
Therefore, a total of three NKVD regiments and up to 4,000 men will be concentrated in Bialystok.
Major General KRIVENKO of the NKVD is being sent to Bialystok to command the NKVD troops.
All comrades being sent have already been instructed.116
General Mikhail Krivenko was deputy head of the NKVD Main Directorate of Border Guards. He had already participated in the anti-Polish action in 1940, when, as head of the NKVD Convoy Troops, he organized the transportation of captured Polish officers from the Ostashkov Camp, where they were being held, to the Katyn Forest, where they were massacred. Krivenko and other participants in the execution received high awards.117 From 1942 to 1943, Krivenko again headed the NKVD Convoy Troops.
Four days after Beria’s report to Stalin, Abakumov and Tsanava sent Beria a coded cable reporting on their first measures in Bialystok:
In this operation we are using 200 experienced SMERSH and NKGB operatives, as well as three NKVD regiments.
The operational groups have the following objectives:
To find and arrest: leaders and members of the ‘Armija Krajowa’; agents of the Polish emigrant government; leaders and members of other underground organizations undermining the work of the Committee of National Liberation, and, partly, of the Red Army; agents of the German intelligence organs ‘Volksdeutsch’ and ‘Reichsdeutsch’; members of gangs and groups hiding in the underground and forests; and persons opposing measures on the resettlement of the Belorussians, Ukrainians, Russians, and Rusyns [a small Slavic nation in the Carpathians] from Polish territory to the Soviet Union.118