On March 3, 1940, Stalin and five Politburo members, along with Beria himself, approved Beria’s proposal to execute Polish officers interned in POW camps as well as officers and members of ‘various spy and diversion organizations of the former land and factory owners’ held in NKVD prisons.13 The result was the infamous Katyn Forest massacre: the execution, in April 1940, of approximately 22,500 Polish officers and prisoners in the Katyn forest near Smolensk and in prisons in Kharkov and Kalinin (currently, Tver). Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, and Leonid Bashtakov, head of the 1st NKVD Special Department (registration and statistics), were in charge of organizing the executions. The local OOs actively participated in the preparation of the executions.14 Altogether, the NKVD killed almost half the Polish officer corps and many members of the Polish intelligentsia, including medical doctors. Only 395 men were spared, mostly those of interest to the foreign intelligence department (Pavel Sudoplatov, the notorious organizer of terrorist acts, compiled the list of names).
On March 20, 1940 Beria ordered eleven NKVD killing squads to be sent to the newly acquired parts of Ukraine and Belorussia.15 Thirty-year-old Pavel Meshik, one of Beria’s most devoted men, headed the group dispatched to Lvov, where the main atrocities took place. In December Beria reported to Stalin that from September to December 1940 in these parts of Ukraine and Belorussia ‘up to 407,000 people were arrested… and [additionally] 275,784 people were sent to Kazakhstan and the northern regions of the USSR’.16
The massacre continued in June and July of 1941. As the Germans advanced and the Soviets retreated from the former Polish territories, NKVD guards executed at least 10,000 local prisoners who were being held without trial.17 In the callous NKVD jargon, these were known as ‘losses of the first category’.
On August 12, 1941, the Politburo amnestied Polish prisoners and ordered their release, as well as that of the deported Polish citizens.18 By October 1, the NKVD was ready to release 51,257 of the convicted Poles and the arrested Poles who were awaiting trial, and 254,473 of the deportees.19 Soon many of these people joined the Anders Army commanded by the released General Wladislaw Anders. Until the German attack on June 22, 1941, Anders was kept in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow after he had refused to join the Red Army.20 However, 12,817 of the Polish prisoners and 33,252 of their family members remained in the NKVD camps and in exile in the Soviet Union. The Anders Army moved to Iran, at the time occupied by Soviet and British troops.
The Invasion of Finland
On September 28, 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, made a second visit to Moscow. In a rushed early meeting at 5 a.m., he signed the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, which contained a secret protocol that finalized the division of Poland and ceded Lithuania to Stalin. Stalin’s translator Valentin Berezhkov recalled: ‘When a map with the just agreed upon border between the German possessions and the Soviet Union was brought in, Stalin put it on the desk, took one of his big blue pencils and, allowing his emotions to come out, wrote his signature with a flourish in gigantic letters that covered the newly acquired territories of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine.’21 Now all three Baltic States, plus Finland and eastern Poland, would be under Soviet control. Two days later, in a long speech supporting the German war against Britain and France, Molotov blamed the Allies: ‘It is senseless and criminal to conduct such a war, a war “to destroy Hitlerism.”’22
Like the Nazi invasion of Poland, which began on the German–Polish border with a provocation organized by the German secret services, the Soviet war with Finland began with the NKVD’s artillery shelling of its own Soviet troops, which was then blamed on the Finns.23 Aleksandr Shcherbakov, the Party propaganda chief, explained the Soviet aggression: ‘Lenin’s theory teaches us that in favorable international circumstances a Socialist country must—and is obliged to—initiate a military offensive against the surrounding capitalist countries for the purpose of widening the front of Socialism.’24
Stalin was so confident that he would win a fast victory over Finland that he did not even inform Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff, who was on vacation, about the beginning of military actions.25 According to Soviet plans, the whole operation would take twelve days.26 To Stalin’s chagrin, Finland was able to withstand his appetite for ‘widening the front of Socialism’. This was not surprising. In early 1940 General Konstantin Pyadyshev courageously wrote to his wife from the front: ‘Our commanding officers are extremely poorly trained, many are not even able to use maps. They are incapable of commanding, and they have no authority among privates. The Red Army men are also poorly trained and many of them do not want to fight. This is why the desertion is so high.’27 This and other letters to his wife ended up in the general’s OO file, but he was arrested later, in September 1941, at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.
The morale of the troops and the coordination of fighting units were so bad that during the first ten days of January 1940 alone, the OOs of these Red Army units sent Stalin 22 reports complaining about the poor efficiency of the troops.28 As for discipline, NKVD zagradotryady (zagraditel’nye otryady, literally ‘fence detachments’ or barrage units) were created for the first time in Red Army history. The joint order of the NKO and NKVD commissars stated:
To prevent the desertion and to purge the rear of the fighting army of enemy elements, we order:
1. To form control-barrage detachments from the operational NKVD regiments… and put them under the command of Special Departments.
2. The task of control-barrage detachments should be to organize covering force, raids in the rear of the fighting army, checking documents of single servicemen and civilians going to the rear, and capturing deserters.
3. The detainees should be sent to the Special Departments…
4. Each control-barrage detachment should consist of 100 men and include three rifle platoons, as well as an operational group of the Special Department of 3–5 men…
5. The best personnel of the Special Departments should be mobilized [for these detachments]…
6. …The deserters should be immediately transferred under military tribunals and tried within 24 hours.29
From January to March 1940, zagradotryady arrested 6,724 Red Army men.30 Of them, 5,934 were sent back to the fighting units, and 790 were tried by military tribunals. Of the latter number, only six servicemen were acquitted. Later, during the war with Germany, the barrage units became one of the main tools of the NKVD and SMERSH.
During the five months of the Winter War, from November 1939 to March 1940, the Finns’ preparation, tactics, and determination were far superior to those of the Soviets, who suffered 131,500 casualties to the Finns’ 21,400.31 Stalin was so outraged by the unprofessional performance of Kliment Voroshilov as NKO Commissar that in May 1940 he replaced Voroshilov with Semyon Timoshenko.
Nikita Khrushchev recalled a quarrel between Stalin and Voroshilov just after the war: