The next day… I saw documents of [my] interrogation with the conclusion ‘To be interned.’ This is how the osobist took vengeance on me.
Gulin was sent to a ‘labor battalion,’ which was no different from being a prisoner in labor camps. He was released in December 1946.
Romanov described vetting from the point of view of a SMERSH officer:
The work of the PFKs took up a great deal of time. Camps for Soviet citizens from the west existed for several years, getting gradually smaller and closing one by one. The Chekist officers who worked in them were a sorry sight to see. They looked harassed, short on sleep, and pale, and their mood was permanently bad. There was too much work and… the entire responsibility for any persons set free after vetting lay on these officers. Their names figured in all the personal documents of the people who had passed through their hands. Those being vetted, however, were an even sorrier sight.97
Kidnappings were also common in the Allied occupation zones. For instance, in January 1946, General Mark Clark, commander of the American forces in Austria and head of the American delegation in the ACC, reported to Washington about one such operation. On January 23, 1946, several members of the Soviet Repatriation Mission (in fact, SMERSH officers) entered the house of a former German agent, now working for the Americans, who they wanted to kidnap. This was Richard Kauder, known also as Fritz Klatt and ‘Max’. However, Clark’s men had set a trap, and they arrested the entire Soviet team. One of the SMERSH officers was wearing the uniform of an American military policeman. Two others had civilian coats over their Red Army uniforms. All of them were armed. Enraged, General Clark informed TsGV Commander Marshal Konev that the next day the offenders ‘would be shoved over the line into the Russian Zone.’98
There was also a separate SMERSH operational group in Vienna subordinated to the 1st Department of the UKR headquarters in Baden.99 It was responsible for the political reliability of all Soviet civilians and servicemen in Vienna, including Zheltov’s group in the ACC. A small detachment of this group was also stationed in the town of Modling, not far from Vienna, where a branch (second echelon) of the TsGV’s HQ was located.
This operational group had plenty of work. Any contact between Soviet servicemen and the Austrians or other foreigners was strictly forbidden, and marrying a foreigner was the worst offense of all. Vitalii Nikolsky, an intelligence officer who served in the TsGV’s HQ, wrote in his memoirs:
All contacts with the Austrian offices and private persons were strictly official and scrutinized. Personal contacts, especially with women, were prohibited. It was also forbidden to visit local restaurants, cafes and entertaining places such as cinemas, theaters, clubs, etc. The violators… were immediately sent to the country’s border under a military convoy, regardless of their rank and position. Later, in the Motherland, harsh Party punishment was applied and measures at work were taken against them. Officers were commonly discharged from the army.100
Despite all draconian SMERSH measures, many officers risked going to restaurants and dancing halls. Colonel V. P. Babich, a signals officer who had served at the 3rd Ukrainian Front, recalled:
A huge army of [SMERSH] operatives took care of the ideological purity of Soviet citizens and spied on them… They also involved Austrians in spying on servicemen. In one of the guesthouses I saw a notice: ‘If a Soviet serviceman visits this guesthouse, please, call the Commandant’s Office at this number…’
One day I entered a restaurant with a girl. The waiter, who heard us speaking Russian, told us: ‘The commandant of the 2nd (Soviet) Sector [in Vienna] forbids us to serve the Russians’… After this we spoke German in public places.101
Military service in the ‘capitalistic’ Austria was considered so hard that officers of the Red Army (including SMERSH) were given two vacations per year of 45 days each. However, the way home was not safe. Partisans of the Ukrainian underground army, the UPA, were constantly blowing up trains between the city of Lvov and the Soviet border in the Carpathian Mountains. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that the Soviet secret services finally liquidated the West Ukrainian partisans.
Notes
1. A. I. Romanov, Nights Are Longest There: A Memoir of the Soviet Security Services, translated by Gerald Brooke (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 144. From July 1945 to October 1947, G. S. Yevdokimenko (1914–1996) was deputy head of the Inspection (SMERSH/MGB operational group) at the Allied Control Commission in Budapest.
2. Interview with Yevgenii Agapov, former intelligence officer, on Aprrill 6, 2009, http://iremember.ru/razvedchiki/agapov-evgeniy-fedorovich.html, retrieved September 9, 2011.
3. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 163–5.
4. Ibid., 165.
5. Nikolai Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty moei zhizni (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 212 (in Russian).
6. Abakumov’s letter to Beria, dated June 22, 1945, quoted in Nikita Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 60–61 (in Russian).
7. Beria’s report to Stalin No. 718/b dated June 22, 1945. Document No. 7 in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD SSSR v Germanii. 1945–1950 gg. Sbornik dokumentov i stsatei, edited by S. V. Mironenko, 27–28 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001) (in Russian).
8. NKVD Order No. 00780, dated July 4, 1945. Document No. 8 in ibid., 28–30; Beria’s report No. 1023/b, dated August 30, 1945. Document No. 319 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD-NKGB-GUKR ‘SMERSH.’ 1939–mart 1946, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikova (Moscow: Materik, 2006), 533–4 (in Russian).
9. Page 353 in N. V. Petrov, ‘Apparat upolnomochenogo NKVD-MGB SSSR v Germanii (1945–1953 gg.),’ in Spetsial’nye lagerya NKVD/MVD SSSR v Germanii, 349–66.
10. Serov’s report to Beria, dated July 22, 1945. Document No. 12 in Petrov, Pervyi predsedael’ KGB, 227.
11. Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Council, dated July 9, 1945, cited on page 99 in Aleksandr Kokurin and Nikita Petrov, ‘NKVD-NKGBSMERSH: Struktura, funktsii, kadry. Stat’ya chetvertaya,’ Svobodnaya mysl’, no. 9 (1997), 93–101 (in Russian).
12 Abakumov’s report No. 824/A, dated August 28, 1945, quoted in Petrov, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, 61.
13. Beria’s letter to Stalin No. 1023/b, dated August 29, 1945, quoted in ibid., 61–62.
14. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 129.
15. I. V. Bystrova, ‘Voenno-promyshlennyi kompleks SSSR,’ in Sovetskoe obshchestvo: vozniknovenie, razvitie, istoricheskii final (Moscow, 1997). T. 1, 150–89 (in Russian).
16. Stavka’s Directive No. 11095, dated May 29, 1945. Document No. 267 in Russkii Arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya, 15 (4–5), 420–1.
17. David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 31.