45. Politburo decision P53/39, dated August 20, 1946 and MGB Order No. 00496, dated November 2, 1946. Petrov, Kto rukovodil organami bezopasnosti, 62.
46. Mesyatsev, Gorizonty i labirinty, 147.
CHAPTER 5
Division of Europe
The period from mid-1939 to mid-1941 was the time of mutual understanding between two dictators, Stalin and Adolf Hitler, and their division of Europe. As a result, Germany acquired part of Poland and most of Western Europe, while the Soviet Union included another part of Poland and occupied the Baltic States, part of Romania and tried to conquer Finland. Soviet propaganda called the Soviet annexations ‘the acts of assistance’ to the supposedly oppressed Ukrainians, Belorussians and other working people. Even now most of the Russians do not consider these occupations part of World War II and think that the war began only on June 22, 1941, the day of the German attack against the Soviet Union.
During this period of Soviet expansion, military counterintelligence in general and Viktor Abakumov in particular gained valuable experience. Techniques developed by the NKVD and its Special Department (OO) to eliminate all opposition in the new territories were later continued and refined by SMERSH.
Secret Agreement
In May 1939 Stalin replaced Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish, pro-British Foreign Affairs Commissar, with Vyacheslav Molotov.1 Beria’s man Vladimir Dekanozov became deputy Commissar. These were steps toward making a deal with Hitler.
On August 23, 1939, the infamous Molotov–Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, containing a secret agreement to divide Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, was signed in Moscow.2 Poland was divided between the two countries, and Germany agreed that Finland, Estonia, and Latvia were in the sphere of Soviet interests. The division of Poland was like the final word in Stalin’s old dispute with now dead Marshal Tukhachevsky: Hitler received Warsaw, which was almost taken over by Tukhachevsky’s troops in 1920, while Stalin got Lvov, which he unsuccessfully tried to conquer during that time.
The pact with the fascist Nazis, the deadly enemy of German Communists, did what even the Great Terror could not—it caused millions of dedicated but naive Communists worldwide to finally drop their support for Stalin’s Soviet Union. Time magazine voiced the outrage of many worldwide when it referred to the agreement as the ‘Communazi Pact’ and called the signatories ‘communazis’.3 Two weeks after the signing, Stalin explained to Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, his Machiavellian reasons for signing the covenant (a division into paragraphs is added):
A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries… for redividing the world, for the domination of the world! We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other. It would be fine if at the hands of Germany the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken. Hitler, without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system…
We can maneuver, pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible. The non-aggression pact is to a certain degree helping Germany. Next time we’ll urge on the other side…
Now [Poland] is a fascist state… The annihilation of that state under current conditions would mean one fewer bourgeois fascist state to contend with! What would be the harm if as a result of the rout of Poland we were to extend the socialist system on the new territories and populations?4
This explanation clearly reveals Stalin’s long-term plan for the Sovietizing of Europe, beginning with the division of Poland and continuing after World War II with the creation of the Soviet bloc.
Strictly speaking, the division of Europe was a step within Stalin’s doctrine of the offensive war, i.e., the need to rapidly carry the war into enemy territory and achieve a victory at ‘little cost’, which was repeated in the Red Army’s Field Regulations (Ustav) from 1929 onwards.5 In vain Valentin Trifonov—one of the Red Army organizers and the first Military Collegium’s Chairman (before Vasilii Ulrikh)—tried to call Stalin’s attention to the strategy of defense. On June 17, 1937, four years before Hitler’s attack, Trifonov wrote to Stalin: ‘Most probably, Germany will be our mighty enemy in the future war and [the Germans] will have the serious advantage of a sudden attack. This advantage can be neutralized only by creating a system of efficient defense along the border… Defense is the strongest method of carrying out a war and, therefore, a plan for defending our state borders will be less costly than a plan for an offensive war.’6 Five days later, Trifonov was arrested, and he was executed on March 15, 1938. The Ustav of 1939 repeated the doctrine of the offensive war.
Poland
On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland, and World War II began. A week later, nine days before the Red Army advanced into Poland, Beria ordered the creation of two NKVD operational groups in Kiev and Minsk, each of which would consist of 300 hand-picked Ukrainian and Belorussian NKVD officers and NKVD operatives from Moscow and Leningrad. Their goal was simple: to purge all opposition in Poland to the Soviet military takeover. They were under the command of NKVD commissars Ivan Serov of Ukraine and Lavrentii Tsanava of Belorussia, who specialized in purging Soviet-occupied territories from this time until the end of World War II.7 The groups had additional operational support from units of NKVD Border Guard Troops.
To coordinate NKVD actions in the newly acquired territories, Beria’s first deputy Vsevolod Merkulov was sent to Kiev and Viktor Bochkov (at the time, still OO head), to Minsk. Official documents referred obliquely to this operation as ‘measures in connection with ongoing military training’.
Beria’s dispatch of September 15, 1939, clarified the plan: ‘Following our troops after the occupation of towns, provisional administrative groups… will be created; heads of the NKVD operational groups will be included.’8
By September 16, 1939, the Germans occupied most of their part of Polish territory, as defined in the Non-Aggression Pact, although Warsaw put up a brave defense. The next day, the Red Army invaded Poland on the flimsy pretext of protecting Belorussians and Ukrainians living in Polish territory.9 German and Soviet troops met near Lvov, Lublin, and Bialystok at the end of September, and even held a joint parade in the city of Brest.10 The parade inspectors, the German General of Tank Troops Heinz Guderian and the Soviet Kombrig (Brigade Commander) Semyon Krivoshein (a famous tank commander during the Spanish Civil War who, ironically, was a Jew), chatted in French. They had met before, in 1929, when Guderian inspected the Kazan Tank School in the Soviet Union. Two years later, during the German invasion, Guderian used Lev Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana mansion as his headquarters.
On September 28, 1939, Warsaw surrendered. On the same day Merkulov reported to Moscow that NKVD Operational Group No. 1 had arrested 923 Polish officers, policemen, landowners, ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’, Ukrainian nationalists, and so forth, in the newly acquired territory.11 A second NKVD operational group arrested an additional 533 men. Mass arrests and exiles of Polish citizens continued through 1940.12 A new organization, the UPVI (NKVD Directorate for POWs and Interned Persons), was created two days after the Soviet invasion of Poland to manage the new prisoners. It had its own system of concentration camps.