A ciphering section, supervised by the NKVD Special (Spetsial’nyi) Department, was in charge of sending and receiving cables. However, the most secret letters, including written Politburo decisions, were sent with secret couriers from the NKVD Courier Department (Administration Directorate). Clearly, Stalin thought the Communist Party was a conspiratorial organization. In 1924, when Party rule was first firmly established, he signed a directive declaring which Party documents should be considered secret.11 All lower levels of the Party structure—republic (a republican CC), province (obkom), city (gorkom), and regional (raikom) committees—had their own secret Special Sectors that communicated with the Special Sector in Moscow. Of all fifteen Soviet republics, only the Russian Federation did not have its own capital and a national Communist Party with its Central Committee because Stalin did not want to have a competing governmental structure within the Russian Federation. Only the lowest level, the partkom (a Party committee) of every institution, received instructions from its regional committee. Stalin liked to compare this structure to the army: ‘There are three or four thousand high-level members within our party… I would call them generals of the party. Then there are thirty to forty thousand middle leaders; these are our officers of the party. Then there are between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand lower-level party commanders. They are… our noncommissioned officers.’12
Stalin’s system of making decisions through the Politburo and distributing them secretly through the Party pyramid was technically illegal. Neither Lenin’s constitution of 1924 nor Stalin’s Soviet Constitution of December 1936 even mentioned the Politburo as a decision-making body. But the Party leaders did not care about legal issues. One of Stalin’s cronies, Lazar Kaganovich, bluntly declared in 1934: ‘Our Politburo… is the organ of leadership of all branches of socialist construction.’13
The Politburo either appointed or approved the appointments of almost all high-and mid-level Party and Soviet government functionaries such as leaders of the NKVD, including heads and their deputies of the Special Department (OO). These appointees, known collectively as the nomenklatura, often moved among positions. This policy resulted in some absurd situations.
In 1938, Semyon Dukelsky, a veteran of the OO, was appointed chairman of the Committee on Cinematography. Stalin used to say that ‘each film is of great public and political importance’.14 Therefore, the post of this committee’s chairman required a strong Party or NKVD controller. But in the film industry, Dukelsky became known as ‘a man of anecdotal stupidity and incompetence… He gave numbers to all film directors and playwrights, from No. 1 to No. 100. Dukelsky thought that movies should be made according to the following principle: Director No. 1 should use a script written by Playwright No. 1, Director No. 2 should use a script by Writer No. 2, No. 5 should work with No. 5, and so on’.15 Incompetence was no barrier to Dukelsky’s next appointments. In 1939, he became Merchant Marine Commissar, then from 1942 to 1943 he headed the ammunition production in the Chelyabinsk Region with its big tank plant and from 1943 to 1948, he was Justice Commissar/Minister of the Russian Federation.
By 1939, having gained absolute control of the Soviet Union, it was time for Stalin to embark on his long-cherished dream: westward expansion of the Soviet empire. Some historians still believe that Stalin had no intention of attacking the West, but recent comprehensive analyses of old sources and newly discovered archival documents reveal the truth—from the autumn of 1939 on, Soviet military leadership was organizing a strategic plan to conquer Europe.16 At the end of December 1940, Stalin wrote: ‘Defense is especially beneficial if one thinks of it as a measure to organize our offense, and not as an end in itself.’17
To accomplish this, Stalin would have to maintain an iron grip on the Red Army and control the opposition he would face in the newly acquired territory. For achieving these two goals, Stalin had to put devoted people in charge of the secret services. His first move in this direction was to bring in Lavrentii Beria, a man from his own southern homeland of Georgia.
Men from the Caucasus
In August 1938, 39-year-old Lavrentii Beria, first Communist Party secretary of Georgia, relocated to Moscow and within a few days was appointed first deputy NKVD Commissar. Stalin had known Beria for some time, and had personally recommended him for the first secretary position. In addition, Beria’s previous position as head of the Georgian GPU (and therefore head of the local OO) meant that he had significant secret service experience. Beria was careful to cultivate his personal relationship with Stalin, supplying him with wine from the vineyards of their southern homeland and installing his wife’s cousin as Stalin’s housekeeper.18 Stalin had used Beria’s predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov, to carry out mass persecutions during the Great Terror, but in April 1939 Yezhov was arrested and tried, and was subsequently executed on February 4, 1940. By November 1939, Beria was NKVD Commissar.
Stalin was in total control of the security services because since 1922, the GPU and its successors, the OGPU and NKVD, had reported directly to the Politburo. But now for the first time Stalin had someone he trusted completely heading the security service. SMERSH officer Romanov said of Beria: ‘He spoke Russian well, with far less of a Caucasian accent than, for example, Stalin had.’19 The brutal and extremely proficient Beria was well prepared for his position as head Chekist. As former head of the GPU in Georgia, he routinely ordered that prisoners be tortured during investigation and even after they had received death sentences.20 Beria’s brutality continued in Moscow. In 1953, his deputy Vsevolod Merkulov testified: ‘In my presence a few times Beria beat up arrestees in his office, as well as in prison, with his fists or a rubber truncheon.’21
Soon Beria had a well-deserved reputation as the face of political repression. In 1948, the American Time magazine wrote: ‘Beria seems to be a sane, well-balanced man. In that fact lays the deepening horror of Russia. For Beria, without shrieks or dark yearnings, plods along, like the efficient bureaucrat he is, in the bloody footsteps of [the founder of the CheKa, Felix] Dzerzhinsky.’22
To extend his power, Beria brought his own devoted team from the local NKVD branch in Tbilisi—Sergei Goglidze, Vladimir Dekanozov, Bogdan and Amayak Kobulov, Stepan Mamulov, Merkulov, Solomon Milshtein, and Lavrentii Tsanava, among others.23 Having known each other and worked together for years, they remained in key Moscow positions in the security service until after Stalin’s death. Beria affectionately called his cronies by nicknames such as ‘Merkulich’ (Merkulov), ‘Kobulich’ (Bogdan Kobulov), and ‘Mamulich’ (Mamulov); the ‘ich’ ending makes the last name sound like a patronymic, and therefore more intimate. This affectionate nicknaming seems especially incongruous in the case of Kobulov, Beria’s main torturer, who weighed over 300 pounds and covered his fat fingers with gold rings.