Paragraph 58-11 allows the investigator to consider ‘any organizational activity’ or ‘participation in an organization created to prepare or commit’ crimes covered by Article 58 as a plot, which led to the discovery of numerous supposed ‘military plots’ before and during the Great Patriotic War. Finally, paragraph 58-14 introduces punishment for sabotage, described as ‘conscious negligence of duties aimed to weaken the government’s power’. On the whole, there were 14 paragraphs in Article 58 and five paragraphs in Article 59 that described ‘counterrevolutionary’ or ‘political’ crimes. Later, in 1951, four more paragraphs were included in Article 58.
In July 1934, simultaneously with the creation of the NKVD, paragraph 58-1 (treason against the Motherland) was divided into four parts, 58-1a–d, which were widely used until Stalin’s death in 1953.4 Paragraph 58-1a detailed the crime of treason: ‘Actions USSR citizens commit to the detriment of the military might of the USSR… to wit: espionage, disclosure of a military or state secret, going over to the enemy, flight, or crossing the border.’ While paragraph 58-1b declared: ‘Commission of the same crimes by servicemen is punishable by the highest measure of criminal punishment—shooting, with confiscation of all property.’ Paragraph 58-1b was most frequently used by military counterintelligence just before and during the war because it covers a wide spectrum of vaguely described ‘political crimes’, including espionage and ‘going over to the enemy’. Although paragraph 6 in Article 58 already covered espionage, from 1934 onwards, paragraph 58-1b was applied to military ‘spies’, while 58-6 was used for charging civilians (58-6/I) and foreigners (58-6/II). Paragraph 58-1d stated that a serviceman who did not report to the authorities upon learning of a treasonous plan or the fact of treason was punished by ten years of imprisonment in labor camps.
Paragraph 58-1c was the most outrageous. It legalized the practice of using family members as hostages to prevent servicemen from becoming traitors. Now family members who knew about a treasonous plan were punished by a 5-to-10-year imprisonment and confiscation of property, and even adult family members who knew nothing of any alleged plan (i.e., who were completely innocent), were punished by exile into distant areas and were deprived of the right to vote. Following the text of this paragraph, such family members started to be called chsiry, an abbreviation from chleny sem’i izmennika Rodiny or ‘family members of a traitor against the Motherland’.
Although the total number of persecuted chsiry remains unknown, one of the NKVD reports to Stalin mentions that in 1937–38, ‘according to the incomplete data, more than 18,000 wives of the arrested traitors were repressed [i.e., arrested and sentenced], including more than 3,000 in Moscow and approximately 1,500 in Leningrad’.5 Small children classified as chsiry were kept in specially organized orphanages.6 Conditions in these orphanages were terrible. Anna Belova, arrested as a chsir (her husband, Komandarm Ivan Belov, commander of the Belorussian Military District, was executed in 1938), recalled that when her mother tried to find her three-year-old granddaughter in an NKVD orphanage, she was told: ‘Klementina had died of hunger… We do not bury enemies’ offspring… Do you see that trench? Go there, there are many of them. Dig out the bones; possibly, you’ll identify those of your kid.’7 In 1937–38, the NKVD sent 22,427 children of the ‘enemies of the people’ younger than fifteen years to orphanages.8
After the child-survivors reached fifteen, they were tried and usually sentenced to imprisonment in labor camps or even executed. Legally this became possible due to the decree issued just before the war, on May 31, 1941.9 It stated that children could be criminally charged after they reached fourteen years. However, in December 1941 deputy USSR chief prosecutor Grigorii Safonov suggested that children sentenced as spies or terrorists be executed after they reached sixteen years.10
For instance, on July 6, 1941, the Military Collegium under Ulrikh’s chairmanship sentenced four teenagers to death (the future executions had been pre-approved by the Politburo). The teenagers were a son and nephews of Nestor Lakoba, Chairman of the government of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia (part of Georgia), poisoned in December 1936 by Lavrentii Beria, at the time first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party’s Central Committee. From 1937 until 1941, they were kept in Moscow prisons. On July 27–28, 1941, they were shot.11
Adult children of traitors and other ‘enemies of the people’ were also frequently imprisoned as ‘socially dangerous elements’ or SOE (an acronym of the Russian term), defined as ‘persons connected with the especially important criminals’ (Articles 7 and 35); in other words, people who did not commit any crime at all, although their relatives supposedly did. In August 1940, the Politburo ordered the Military Collegium to send materials on relatives of military defectors to other countries for their immediate arrest and punishment.12 The new draconian measures against the family members of military traitors were introduced in June 1941 and July 1942.
If a person was arrested under Article 58, but there were no incriminating materials apart from reports from secret informers about that person’s anti-Soviet conversations, Article 19 of the Criminal Code allowed the investigator to still apply Article 58. Article 19 stated that ‘an intent [sic] to commit a crime… is punished as the crime itself’. As a result, the arrestee was accused ‘through Article 19’, as the phrasing went, of the intent to commit a counter revolutionary crime. Some Chekists even considered themselves more sophisticated than their German analogue, the Gestapo. In 1944, Lev Vlodzimersky, head of the NKGB Investigation Department, bragged to a prisoner: ‘The Gestapo men are poor imitators of us.’13
The Soviets had big plans for Article 58. In 1940, an NKVD interrogator told Menachem Begin, the arrested Polish citizen and the future prime minister of Israeclass="underline" ‘Section 58 applies to everyone in the world… It is only a question of when he will get to us, or we to him.’14 After the Red Army entered Eastern Europe in 1944, SMERSH began to make wide use of Article 58 against foreign citizens. Mostly they were accused of espionage (58-6) or ‘assisting the world bourgeoisie’ (58-4).
Military Tribunals
OO/SMERSH cases were tried under Articles 58 and 59 by military tribunals, which existed within the Red Army at the district (in the wartime, a military district was called a front), corps, brigade, and divisional levels, and within the NKVD troops.15 In the Red Navy there were fleet, flotilla and base tribunals. Tribunals were part of, to use the awkward official term, ‘the three-element system of the punishment organs’—OO/SMERSH, a military prosecutor, and a military tribunal.16 From 1926 to June 1939, military tribunals were subordinated to the Military Collegium only, and from June 1939–1946, to both the Military Collegium and the USSR Justice Commissariat.17
The Military Collegium, which had oversight over all military tribunals, was one of three collegia (Civil, Criminal and Miltary) of the USSR Supreme Court.18 The Supreme Court’s chairman, I. T. Golyakov, served from 1938 to 1948, a long term of service in those days. However, V. V. Ulrikh, who played an important role during the Great Terror, served as head of the Military Collegium from 1926–1948, one of the very few high level Communist officials to enjoy such a long tenure. The Military Collegium consisted of the following departments between 1939 and 1946: