Of this group, Merkulov was the most educated.24 He was ‘a man with an athletic figure and a splendid head of thick dark hair flecked with grey’.25 Born in 1895 in Tbilisi (then Tiflis) to the family of a small nobleman and a czar’s army captain, he was four years older than Beria. Merkulov graduated from high school (gymnasium) with a gold medal and then attended the Department of Physics and Math of Petrograd University for three years. After serving in the army until 1918, in 1921 he joined the Georgian CheKa. Here Beria noticed Merkulov in 1923 after the latter published an article about the CheKa; since then, their careers were connected. In 1931, Stalin appointed Beria first secretary of Georgia, and Beria transferred Merkulov as his assistant to the staff of the Georgian Communist Party CC. Later Merkulov headed the Special (Secret) Sector (see above) and other departments of this committee. Merkulov helped Beria to write his official reports and published Beria’s glorifying biography in the Small Soviet Encyclopedia. In 1940, already in Moscow, Merkulov additionally published a 64-page-long even more glorifying book about Beria entitled Vernyi syn partii Lenina-Stalina (True Son of Lenin-Stalin’s Party).
In September 1938, the Politburo modified the NKVD structure, no doubt according to Beria’s suggestions.26 Beria restored the GUGB (Main State Security Directorate), the elite intelligence/counterintelligence unit that Yezhov had recently eliminated, as a separate entity, placing his men in the top positions. The brain trust of the NKVD, the GUGB consisted of seven departments, of which the Secret Political, Counterintelligence, Military Counterintelligence (OO), and Foreign Intelligence were the most important. Soon an unnumbered Investigation Unit, traditionally called Sledchast’, was added (Figure 2-1). NKVD officers had their own rank names (Table 2-1).
Military counterintelligence became the fourth GUGB Department, although everyone in the secret services still called it the OO as long as it remained in the NKVD (and I will follow that convention). Each of its twelve sections (Figure 2-1) was in charge of monitoring a particular branch of the army and navy, or, as it was known in Russian, the Military-Marine Fleet. A separate Commissariat for the Military-Marine Fleet, or NKVMF, existed from 1937 until 1946. (I will call it the Navy Commissariat from now on.) The 11th Section monitored the various NKVD troops—the Border Guards, Industrial Facility Guards, Convoy Troops, and Railroad Construction Guards. It’s important to note that all NKVD troops were regular military forces, like Waffen SS, and not paramilitary forces, as some historians have stated.27 In fact, even today when a young man is drafted he does not know whether he will be sent to the regular Russian Army or to MVD (Internal Affairs Ministry) troops. There was also an unnumbered sledchast’. OO officers in the Moscow headquarters wore NKVD uniforms, while in the field units they wore the uniforms of the units they were attached to (infantry, artillery, etc.), with insignia showing their NKVD rank—small metal rectangles or squares on the collars, depending on the rank. Political officers wore additional insignia: red stars on the sleeves.
In July 1938, just before Beria’s arrival, two important changes were made in the OO structure: (1) local OOs were now embedded in the various army and fleet formations, and were no longer part of the local NKVD office as in the old system; and (2) OO officers now reported only to higher OO officers, not to the head of the local NKVD branch.28 Now each military district, army and fleet had its OO, while a corps, a division and a brigade had a Special Division. By 1941, there were 16 military districts in the country. This new vertical structure gave Moscow OO headquarters more direct control over the armed forces. By January 1940, the OO headquarters consisted of 394 officers, the GUGB staff totaled 1,484 members, and the NKVD headquarters staff numbered an astonishing 32,642 people.29
In December 1938 Viktor Bochkov was appointed the new OO head—a surprising choice, since he had no experience in investigative work.30 With only a month of service at NKVD headquarters, where he was head of the Prison Directorate, he had worked mainly as a commander for various units of OGPU/NKVD troops. Even more surprising was his appointment on August 7, 1940 as chief USSR prosecutor, despite his complete lack of legal training. Making Bochkov chief prosecutor was clearly part of the effort by Stalin and Beria to extend secret service control over every aspect of a case, from arrest to final sentencing. Later, during the first two years of World War II, Bochkov even held simultaneous positions as chief USSR prosecutor and head of the OO at the Northwestern Front.
The 29-year-old head of the Kiev Military District OO, Anatolii Mikheev, replaced Bochkov as OO head.31 Amazingly, Mikheev’s NKVD career had begun only six months before. However, Mikheev proved up to the task. Only a year later, just before the war with Nazi Germany, Mikheev successfully unleashed a broad program of persecution targeting high-level Red Army officers.
To understand the mechanism of arrests by military counterintelligence and following persecutions it is necessary to know Soviet legal procedures and the work of military tribunals. These issues have never been detailed in historical sources that described Stalin’s regime.
Notes
1. The term ‘instrument of personal rule’ was coined by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46.
2. Three members of the Politburo, Mikhail Kalinin, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council; Andrei Andreev, Chairman of the Union Council; and Nikolai Shvernik, Chairman of the Council of Nationalities and first deputy of Kalinin, played ‘decorative’ roles as heads of the executive branch of the Soviet Government, the Supreme Council (consisting of the Union Council and the Council of Nationalities). The three were never members of Stalin’s ‘inner circle’.
3. G. Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor: Stalin smotrit kino (Moscow: Kinotsentr, 1992), 11 (in Russian).
4. On the routine of the Politburo records see J. Howlett, O. Khlevniuk, L. Rogovaia, ‘The CPSU’s Top Bodies Under Stalin: Their Operational Records and Structure of Command,’ SERAP Working Paper No. 1 (1996), http://www.utoronto.ca/ceres/serap/wp1.htm, retrieved September 4, 2011.
5. Recollections by Dmitrii N. Sukhanov (1904–?), former assistant to Georgii Malenkov (Politburo member and member of Stalin’s inner circle), in the Russian documentary I Worked for Stalin (Moscow, 1990).
6. Boris Yefimov, Desyat’ desyatiletii o tom, chto videl, perezhil, zapomnil (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000), 261 (in Russian).
7. Page 8 in A. M. Vasilevsky, ‘Nakanune 22 iyunya 1941 g. (Neopublikovannoe interv’yu marshala Sovetskogo Soyuza A. M. Vasilevskogo ot 20 avgusta 1965 g.),’ Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, no. 6 (1994), 8–11 (in Russian).