After one of the Soviet military prosecutors, General Nikolai Zorya, was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head in his hotel room during the trial, it became evident that problems existed within the Soviet delegation. The official Soviet statement claimed that the death was due to ‘the incautious usage of a fire-arm by General Zorya’.66 But according to Zorya’s son, Likhachev or one of his men killed Prosecutor Zorya to prevent a discussion of the Katyn Forest massacre.
At the same time, in early 1946, SMERSH prepared a series of trials in Moscow against a number of old White Russian generals who had been captured in Europe and Manchuria, including former Soviet General Andrei Vlasov. The most important defendants were tried in closed sessions of the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court. Only a few short sentences announcing the generals’ executions were published in the press. However, these trials took place after the end of SMERSH and will be discussed in another book.
The formal end of SMERSH came in May 1946, when it was merged with the former NKGB, which was now renamed the MGB (State Security Ministry). Abakumov became head of the MGB, and key personnel from SMERSH headquarters in Moscow and from the front directorates took over the key positions in the MGB. As MGB minister, Abakumov supervised not only military counterintelligence but also foreign intelligence and civilian domestic counterintelligence within the USSR, which were the main functions of the former NKGB. He continued to report directly to Stalin, and the MGB became the primary tool for carrying out Stalin’s purges and repressions from 1946 until 1951, when Abakumov himself was arrested. The famous Leningrad Case and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee Case were only two of the important prosecutions prepared by Abakumov and the MGB in the late 1940s.
In Eastern Europe, the former SMERSH front directorates were converted into the MGB directorates of the Soviet occupation armies. Their function remained the same as during the war—finding spies and traitors within Soviet troops and purging local areas of Soviet political enemies. Hundreds of people were arrested or kidnapped and sent to the Soviet Union. Many times they were simply grabbed off the streets, and their family and friends never knew what had happened to them. Abakumov’s first deputy, Nikolai Selivanovsky, supervised the purges in Poland. One of Abakumov’s assistants, Pyotr Timofeev, controlled the situation in Romania. The former head of one of SMERSH’s front directorates, Mikhail Belkin, oversaw events in Hungary.67 In Western Europe, SMERSH operatives worked under the cover of the staff of the Plenipotentiary on Repatriation, Colonel General Fyodor Golikov.
Former SMERSH officers also worked in Eastern Europe as MGB advisers to the local, newly organized pro-Soviet state security services and participated in the preparation of East European show trials. Belkin and Kartashov were responsible for arrests and trials in Budapest, while Likhachev interrogated prisoners in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Since these officers reported directly to Abakumov, and Abakumov reported to Stalin, Stalin’s control over these trials was assured.
The majority of the important SMERSH prisoners captured during and just after the war were kept and interrogated in Moscow investigation prisons until 1948, when they were sentenced. The rest remained in these prisons until 1950–52, when they were finally tried. Many of them, including former foreign diplomats, were accused of spying; the bizarre paragraph 4 of Article 58, ‘assistance to the world bourgeoisie’, was also frequently used. The luckiest spies and traitors were tried between May 26, 1947 and January 12, 1950, during a period when the death sentence was replaced by 25-year imprisonment in labor camps. There was a practical, not a humane, reason behind this abolition: with the loss of many millions of men during the war, Stalin needed unpaid workers to help restore industry.
In February–March 1948, special labor camps (at first six, later four more) with especially harsh conditions of life and work were created for ‘especially dangerous prisoners’, i.e. prisoners sentenced under Article 58.68 The political prisoners were separated from criminals and moved to these special camps, while the most important political prisoners, especially with 25-year terms, were put in three special prisons—Vladimir, Verkhne-Uralsk and Aleksandrovsk. New convicts convicted under Article 58 were assigned to these special labor camps and prisons exclusively. As in the Nazi concentration camps, prisoners in special camps had numbers attached to their clothes.69 Therefore, most of the important SMERSH prisoners ended up in this special penal system. In January 1953, there were 221,727 political prisoners in special camps, and 1,313 prisoners in special prisons.70
Although SMERSH existed for only three years, from 1943 to 1946, the two years prior to its formal organization (when Abakumov was chief of its direct predecessor, the UOO), and the five years after its demise (when Abakumov was head of the MGB), must be considered as part of its history. There is a continuous thread, during those ten years, of Abakumov’s special relationship with Stalin.
Until now, there has been a lack of understanding, in the historical literature, of the part played by Abakumov. Abakumov’s role as head of the UOO, SMERSH, and then the MGB was shrouded in secrecy. He was not a member of the Communist Party or Soviet government leadership, and portraits of him were not publicly displayed anywhere in the Soviet Union. Until recently, even the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, which keeps all documentary films and numerous photos of the Soviet period, did not have Abakumov’s picture. There are perhaps only seven or eight photographs of him in existence, and I know of only one occasion, in March 1946, when the newspaper Pravda published a photograph of him—sitting next to Marshal Georgii Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin. Even in the Soviet Union, very few people knew that the MGB, the most feared security service, was headed by Abakumov and not by Beria.71
In contrast, two books have been published in English about Lavrentii Beria, who was quite famous during his time in Moscow.72 Every Soviet citizen was familiar with Beria’s appearance because photographs of him were frequently published in newspapers. Also, his portraits, along with those of the other Politburo members, were posted on buildings in every city and town during official Soviet holidays—the 1st of May (International Labor Day) and the 7th of November (Bolshevik Revolution Day). Yet the period during which Beria was head of all the security services only lasted for five years, from 1938 until 1943. After the creation of SMERSH, Beria had to compete with Abakumov for influence.
From 1943 on, as NKVD Commissar, Beria was formally in charge of managing the NKVD labor camps and prisons, but through his close associate, Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria also effectively controlled the NKGB, which was responsible for foreign intelligence and internal counterintelligence. However, after 1943 he was never again, during Stalin’s life, the all-powerful security chief he had once been.
On December 29, 1945, Beria, who was still a deputy chairman of the Council of Commissars, was appointed head of the Soviet Atomic Project, while Sergei Kruglov, his devoted and rather colorless deputy, became the head of the MVD (Internal Affairs Ministry, the successor to the NKVD). Therefore, contrary to what is generally believed, from the beginning of 1946 until Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Beria did not head any of the Soviet secret services. As a member of the Politburo, each of which was assigned a group of ministries to supervise, for the next year Beria oversaw the work of the MGB and MVD, as well as that of ten other ministries, although this supervision was primarily administrative. In February 1947 even this supervisory role was taken away. In July 1947 Abakumov refused to follow Beria’s orders regarding the construction of facilities by the MGB for the atomic project.73