1. NKVD report, dated January 1, 1945; quoted in Nikita Petrov, Istoriya imperiiy ‘GULAG.’ Glava 12 (in Russian), http://www.pseudology.org/GULAG/Glava12.htm, retrieved September 15, 2011.
2. Classification of paragraphs according to the NKVD report on prisoners in the Correction-Labor Colonies, dated January 1, 1943. Document No. 96 in A. I. Kokurin and N. V. Petrov, GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) 1917–1960 (Moscow: Materik, 2000), 426–28 (in Russian).
During the war, the arresting procedure of OO/SMERSH operatives changed.34 The arrest of a private or a low-ranking officer required a military prosecutor’s approval; the arrest of a mid-ranking commander, the approval of the commander and prosecutor of the unit; and the arrest of a high-ranking officer, the approval of the Military Council of the Army. The highest commanders, as before, could be arrested only with the approval of the NKO Commissar—in other words, of Stalin himself.
To arrest a serviceman, an OO/SMERSH investigator wrote the arrest warrant (Postanovlenie na arrest) and decision (on the selection of a measure of restraint) (Postanovlenie ob izbranii mery presecheniya) which substantiated the necessity of keeping the arrestee in custody. Both documents were also signed by the investigator’s superiors and a prosecutor. Copies of these documents were included in the investigation file (Sledstvennoe delo), which contained mostly transcripts called protokoly of the interrogations that followed.
While concluding the case, the OO/SMERSH investigator summarized the results of his investigation in an indictment (Obvinitel’noe zaklyuchenie). This document was also signed by the investigator’s superiors, and a copy was sent to a prosecutor. The prosecutor was obliged to ask the accused if he agreed to the indictment and if he had complaints about, for instance, torture during the investigation. Commonly, the final verdict of the tribunal at the end of the hearing simply repeated the indictment.
The relationship between OO/SMERSH investigators and military prosecutors, as well as with military tribunal chairs and members, was uneasy. Prosecutors had legal training, while the majority of OO/SMERSH officers were uneducated and sometimes almost illiterate. Also, as a rule, OO/SMERSH investigators presented cases based on accusations provided by unreliable informers and confessions obtained under duress. Beyond that, the OO investigators used to try to influence the chair’s decision. Delagrammatik recalled: ‘Frequently the osobisty [OO/SMERSH officers] attached a sealed envelope with an inscription “For the Eyes of the Chair of MT [military tribunal] Only” to the case file received by our tribunal. It contained data about the defendant obtained from informers… Sometimes the seksoty [secret informers] testified as witnesses (or pseudo-witnesses, if necessary) at the hearing.’35
Many honest prosecutors rejected these falsified cases, insisting on a new investigation or even closing such cases entirely. These closures led Aleksei Sidnev, head of the OO of the Leningrad Military District (LVO), to send a report entitled ‘On the Anti-Soviet Practice of the Military Prosecutor’s Office of the LVO’ to Bochkov (an insubordinate act, since Sidnev should have sent the report through his superior, OO head Mikheev) in March 1941.36 Bochkov forwarded Sidnev’s report to his deputy and chief military prosecutor, Vladimir Nosov, who determined that Sidnev had slandered the prosecutors. However, no measures were taken against Sidnev, who later became a high-level SMERSH and then MGB functionary.
The independence shown by military prosecutors was rare and potentially dangerous. During Bochkov’s tenure as OO head, dossiers (or, in secret-service jargon, ‘operational files’) were collected on many military prosecutors, as well as members of military tribunals.37
Death Sentences
During the war, the Commander of the Front could disaffirm any decision of tribunals within his front, even a death sentence.38 In any case, the Front Military Council needed to approve or disapprove the death sentence of a high-ranking officer. In theory, a serviceman condemned to death had the right to appeal; in practice, appealing was useless. As Delagrammatik notes, ‘I recall no occasion when the commander of a unit did not approve the death sentence.’39
After the summer of 1942, military tribunals usually replaced death sentences in criminal cases with sending the condemned to a punishment unit fighting at the front. Delagrammatik gives an example: ‘Two servicemen from the Marine Brigade were convicted of self-inflicted injury “by shooting at each other from behind a tree in order not to be drafted”… Instead of the death penalty, the military tribunal… condemned each of them to 10 years of imprisonment in labor camps. The punishment was commuted to sending them to a punishment platoon. Only “espionage” [i.e., 58-1b] was inevitably punished by death.’ Delagrammatik gives more detail about an ‘espionage’ case of Olga Serdyuk, a woman from Kiev: