One day Stalin angrily criticized Voroshilov in our [Politburo members’] presence at the nearby dacha. He was very nervous, and viciously attacked Voroshilov. Voroshilov also became angry; he stood up with a red face and snapped at Stalin: ‘You are to blame. You have exterminated the military [during the Great Terror].’ Stalin shot back an angry reply. Then Voroshilov picked up a platter with a small boiled pig on it and smashed it on the floor. This was the only time that I witnessed such a situation. Stalin definitely felt elements of defeat in our victory over the Finns in 1940.32
But the new appointment was not a demotion for Voroshilov. Despite Voroshilov’s unprofessionalism, Stalin promoted him Defense Committee head (in this capacity, Voroshilov supervised both the new Defense Commissar Timoshenko and the Navy Commissar Nikolai Kuznetsov) as well as deputy chairman of Sovnarkom in charge of military industry. Contrary to the physically short Voroshilov and Semyon Budennyi, two of Stalin’s pals from the Civil War, Timoshenko, whom Stalin called a muzhik (literally, a real man), was very big and tall. As Timoshenko used to say, ‘Stalin… liked huge guys’.33 Later, in 1945, Stalin forced his son Vasilii to marry Timoshenko’s daughter.
The terms of the March 12, 1940 peace agreement stipulated that Finland would lose a small but densely populated part of its territory along with important nickel mines, but would maintain its sovereignty and independence.34 The aggression against Finland caused the Soviet Union’s expulsion from the League of Nations.
Of more than 6,000 Soviet POWs taken by Finnish troops, about 100 refused to return to the Soviet Union.35 Those who returned were vetted in the Yuzhskii NKVD Camp by NKVD—most likely OO—investigators. On June 29, 1940, Beria presented Stalin with a list of 232 repatriated servicemen, proposing that the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court sentence them to death.36 In many cases this was unnecessary, since 158 had already been executed. It is possible that these were the Soviet POWs who volunteered for Boris Bazhanov’s small anti-Soviet Russian People’s Army in Finland during the Winter War.37
Punishment of commanders arrested by the OOs continued after the war. In July 1940 Beria reported to Stalin:
On March 3, 1940, KONDRASHOV Grigorii Fyodorovich, commander of the 18th Rifle Division… was arrested for treason…
The investigation by the NKVD Special Department established that because of KONDRASHOV’s negligent actions his division was encircled by the enemy… KONDRASHOV left the column and ran away…
The NKVD considers it is necessary for KONDRASHOV Grigorii Fyodorovich, who has admitted his guilt, to be tried by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court for treacherous actions…
I await your instructions.38
Stalin wrote on the first page of the report: ‘He should be tried, and harshly. St[alin].’ On August 12, the Military Collegium sentenced Kondrashov to death, and on August 29, he was executed.
The Baltic States, Bessarabia, and Western Ukraine
The Baltic States were the next victims of Soviet expansion. In June 1940, the Red Army invaded Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania under the ruse of ‘mutual assistance pacts’.39 Again, NKVD troops played a special role in the occupation. On June 17, 1940, with Soviet troops still on the march, NKO Commissar Timoshenko described the steps to be taken:
1. Our border guards should immediately occupy the border with Eastern Prussia and the Baltic coast to prevent spying and diversion activity from our western neighbor.
2. (Initially), one regiment of NKVD troops should be moved to each of the occupied republics to keep order.
3. The question of the ‘government’ of the occupied republics should be decided as soon as possible.
4. The disarmament and disbanding of the armies of the occupied republics should begin. The population, police, and military organizations should be disarmed.40
Some details of the annexation became publicly known fifty years later. In January 1991, on the order of Mikhail Gorbachev’s government, Soviet tanks fired at civilians in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Fourteen civilians were killed and 600 wounded. After this, first the government-independent radio station Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) transmitted a speech by Georgii Fedorov, who had served in the Red Army troops which had occupied Lithuania in 1940 and later became a prominent historian. Fedorov appealed to the tank crews, asking them not to follow further criminal orders from Moscow. He compared the situation with the events in 1940:
Before we crossed the border [in 1940], our political officers told us that we would see all the horrors of capitalist slavery in Lithuania: poor peasants, terribly exploited workers weak from hunger, and a small group of rich people exploiting the poor. Instead, we saw a blooming, abundant country…
Our people in power—criminals and scoundrels—robbed Lithuania… Executioners called… ‘officers of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs’… acted with enormous brutality… And we, soldiers of the Red Army, covered this revelry of robbery, violence, and killings that was cynically called ‘acts of will of the Lithuanian people’.41
In 1940, Stalin sent three special watchdogs, officially plenipotentiaries for the Soviet government, to supervise events in the Baltics: Party ideologue Andrei Zhdanov to Estonia; infamous former USSR prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky to Latvia; and Beria’s man, Vladimir Dekanozov, to Lithuania. Later Merkulov, Abakumov, and Serov went to Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, respectively, to organize and supervise the arrests and deportations.
Irena Baruch Wiley, the wife of the American Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Latvia and Estonia, witnessed the deportation: ‘The long trains with curtained windows left every night for Russia. I had thought that in the unspeakable brutality of the Nazi invasion of Austria I had witnessed the depths of horror, but there was something even more nightmarish, more terrifying in watching, weary and helpless, this silent nightly exodus. The Nazis committed their atrocities night and day; the Russians, more surreptitious, only under cover of darkness.’42 Here then, in 1940, was a template for taking over a foreign state, a template that was expanded upon and used successfully, with SMERSH’s help, in the East European countries at the end of the war.
By July 21, 1940, Soviet-controlled governments had taken power in the three republics. Members of the Baltic governments were taken to the Soviet Union. A year later, after the beginning of war with Germany, former Latvian and Estonian officials and their wives were jailed without trial and held in solitary confinement. They were not sentenced until 1952, when they became nameless secret political prisoners, held in strict isolation in the infamously inhuman Vladimir Prison, identified only by numbers.43
The arrests continued through 1941. On May 16, 1941, Merkulov sent Stalin the final deportation plan for the former Baltic States.44 The plan stipulated the arrests of prominent members of ‘counter revolutionary’ parties; members of Russian emigrant organizations; all policemen, landowners, and owners of industrial plants; army officers; and so on. The arrestees ‘should be placed in [labor] camps for five to eight years and after their release they should be exiled to distant areas of the Soviet Union for twenty years’. In addition, their family members were to be banished to distant parts of the Soviet Union for twenty years. Incredibly, in 2009 Viktor Stepakov, the FSB-connected historian, wrote: ‘This document… was an example of true humanism [emphasis added]. During that complicated time, enemies… could [simply] be shot to death.’45