SMERSH’s search for Genrikh Lyushkov, possibly the most wanted enemy among the Far Eastern Russians, failed because he was already dead. Lyushkov, State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank, was the highest NKVD officer who ever defected.38 From 1931 to 1936, Lyushkov held high posts within the Special Political Department of the OGPU/NKVD. Later he headed the Azov-Black Sea NKVD Directorate, before Abakumov succeeded him. After this, in 1937, Lyushkov was appointed head of the NKVD Far Eastern Directorate. Stalin personally instructed Lyushkov concerning the necessity of arrests there. As a result, 250,000 people were arrested, of whom 7,000 were shot. Lyushkov also supervised the exile of 175,000 Koreans and 7,000 Chinese, considered potential Japanese spies, from that area to Central Asia.39 In June 1938 Lyushkov was ordered to Moscow, but fearing his inevitable arrest, he defected to Japan.
In Japan, Lyushkov took the name Toshikazu Yamaguchi, became a Japanese citizen, and worked for the Japanese General Staff in Tokyo. Based on Lyushkov’s information, the Japanese reorganized their army in Manchuria. Richard Sorge, the Soviet spy in Tokyo, microfilmed part of a German report on Lyushkov’s interrogations by the Japanese and sent the microfilm to Moscow. Lyushkov also gave numerous interviews about ongoing terror in the Soviet Union.
Lyushkov offered Japanese intelligence a plan to assassinate Stalin at his dacha in the Caucasus. In 1939, a group of White Russian terrorists headed by Lyushkov arrived near the Turkish–Soviet border. It is possible that there was a Soviet agent in the group, because when it reached the border Soviet Border Guards were already on alert and prevented its penetration into Soviet territory.40 Later Lyushkov made a second attempt to assassinate Stalin, but it also failed.
In July 1945, Lyushkov was transferred to the Special Intelligence Agency of the Kwantung Army in the city of Dairen. On August 19, during the Soviet offensive, Captain Yutaka Takeoka, a member of this agency, killed Lyushkov after the latter refused to commit suicide. Japanese intelligence was probably afraid that if SMERSH or the NKVD captured him, Lyushkov would release too much information.
On November 25, 1945 SMERSH operatives captured Takeoka.41 In Moscow Abakumov personally interrogated him about Lyushkov. In April 1946, Takeoka was used as a witness at the show trial of Ataman Grigorii Semyonov, Konstantin Rodzaevsky and the others. In June 1948, Takeoka was sentenced to a 25-year imprisonment. He was kept in Vladimir Prison separately from the other Japanese prisoners, until released and repatriated in 1956.
The arrested General Yamada, commander in chief of the Kwantung Army, was sent to Kartashov’s GUKR SMERSH department in Moscow. During the 1949 Khabarovsk Trial, Yamada received a prison sentence of twenty-five years for his culpability in testing biological weapons on POWs, carried out by the infamous Unit 731 that was part of the Kwantung Army.42
Among the other Japanese routinely sent to Kartashov’s department were Colonel Saburo Asada, head of the 2nd (Intelligence) department of the staff of the Kwantung Army; his deputies, Lieutenant Colonels Tamaki Kumazaki and Hiroki Nohara; Yoshio Itagaki, a son of Seishiro Itagaki, war minister from 1938–1939; Lieutenant General Genzo Yanagita, head of the Japanese military mission in Harbin; Major Kinju Ishikawa, head of a sabotage group of that mission; and Hadjime Kanie, head of the Sakhalin military mission. Senior Lieutenant Prince Fumitaka Konoe, a son of the former Japanese Prime Minister, and Funao Miyakawa, former General Counselor in Vladivostok and then in Harbin, as well as some others, were held and interrogated for eight months in a camp for Japanese POWs in Manchuria, before being sent to Moscow.43
As in Europe, mass killings of Japanese and even Chinese civilians, looting, and rapes continued in Manchuria, Korea, and South Sakhalin after they were occupied by the Red Army. Corporal Hal Leith, a member of the OSS team Cardinal parachuted into a location near Mukden in Manchuria in order to rescue American POWs, recalled: ‘All they [Soviet soldiers] do is loot and kill, and they don’t stick to looting from the Japanese. Some soldiers wear as many as 10 watches.’44 Another member of the same team reported that as an explanation of the atrocities, a Soviet general told the Americans that the soldiers who committed atrocities belonged to the ‘shock troops’ made up of men whose families had been butchered by the Germans; they were eager for revenge, he said, adding that after Germany those vengeful soldiers were dispatched to the Far East. The general claimed: ‘Not being normal in their minds, they were bent on looting, killing, and rape.’45 Even if that had been true (and it was not), the Soviet general did not explain why atrocities were not stopped by the high command, or by SMERSH.
The End of the War
On September 2, 1945, Japan signed a formal surrender in a ceremony on board the USS Missouri. General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied powers, directed the signing. The Soviet delegation of two generals and an admiral was headed by Lieutenant General Kuzma Derevyanko, the Soviet representative at MacArthur’s headquarters.46 Derevyanko spoke both English and Japanese. After the signing, Derevyanko spent several days in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, taking photos and making detailed notes about the destruction of the city. On October 5, he reported to Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and three military leaders in the Kremlin on Japan’s capitulation and on his trip to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.47 Nine years later, on December 30, 1954, Derevyanko died due to the effects of radiation exposure.
In the meantime, on September 3, 1945, the Soviet Union officially declared the defeat of Japan. Since then, the Western Allies and China have considered August 15 the day of the Japanese surrender, while the Russians consider September 2 the day of Japan’s defeat. In 2010, September 2 became a Russian holiday to commemorate the last day of World War II.
SMERSH and NKVD operational groups continued making arrests after the end of the war. The memoirs of some arrestees reveal that in October 1945, Soviet military officials called meetings with the leaders of Russian organizations in Harbin and in other cities in Manchuria.48 Once the émigrés had assembled, they were simply surrounded by Soviet troops and arrested.
In Mukden, an operational group arrested the last Chinese and Manchurian emperor, 39-year-old Henry Pu Yi, along with the members of his family and his court.49 In all, 225 paratroopers landed in this city, and thirty SMERSH officers took part in arresting the former emperor. He was later held in Camp No. 27 and in a POW camp near Khabarovsk in Siberia. He wrote several letters to Stalin thanking the USSR for saving his life. Pu Yi intensively studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy as well as the history of the Soviet Communist Party, which he even wanted to join.50 The Soviets used Pu Yi as a witness at the trials of Japanese war criminals in Khabarovsk in September 1946 and in Tokyo in May 1946–November 1948. In July 1950, on Stalin’s order, officers of the GUPVI’s Operational Directorate turned over Pu Yi, along with fifty-seven of his relatives and former government members, to Chinese officials. Pu Yi wrote to Stalin: ‘I wish for the Soviet people to flourish forever and Generalissimo Stalin to be healthy and live for many years to come.’51 In China, Pu Yi was held in prisons and labor camps for ‘reeducation’ until 1959. After his release, Pu Yi worked in the botanical gardens of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published his memoirs.52 He died in 1967.
In Moscow, many of the Japanese prisoners and Russian émigrés caught in China spent years in investigation prisons. In 1948–51, most of the Japanese prisoners were sentenced to twenty-five years in special prisons, where some of them died.53 Shun Akifusa, former head of the Japanese military mission in Harbin, died in Vladimir Prison in March 1949, while Funao Miyakawa, former Japanese general counsel in Harbin, died in 1950 in Lefortovo Prison, still awaiting trial. Prince Fumitaka Konoe, a son of the former Japanese prime minister, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison in 1951. After spending four years in Aleksandrovsk and Vladimir special prisons, he died in a transit camp en route to Japan. General Otozo Yamada survived his imprisonment and returned to Japan.