With the Soviet Union now defending its own ground rather than taking new territory, Stalin decided to merge the recently created NKGB and the three military counterintelligence services back into the NKVD. The thought was that a monolithic NKVD could better control the retreating army and keep order more efficiently than three separate services.
UOO Structure and Activities
On July 17, 1941, the GKO issued an order to transfer the 3rd NKO Directorate back to the NKVD as its Special Departments Directorate, or UOO (Figure 8-1).1 An NKVD instruction explained: ‘The goal of the reorganization of the 3rd directorates into special departments within the NKVD is to conduct a merciless fight against spies, traitors, saboteurs, deserters, and various kinds of panic-stricken persons and disorganizers.’2 Viktor Abakumov, retaining his position as deputy NKVD head, was now appointed head of the UOO, an important position because military counterintelligence became so critical. Solomon Milshtein, who was involved in the extermination of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest massacre, became his deputy.3 Six months later, in January 1942, the 3rd Navy Commissariat Directorate was also transferred to the UOO.4
Five days after the reorganization in the NKO and NKVD, the NKVD and NKGB were again merged into one Commissariat, the NKVD.5 Operational directorates, largely repeating the GUGB structure, were created within the new NKVD, and the UOO became one of six operational directorates (Figure 8-1). Beria remained NKVD Commissar and Merkulov was once again his first deputy.
By the end of 1941, Abakumov’s UOO headquarters consisted of eight departments, and Abakumov acquired three more deputies: Fyodor Tutushkin, Nikolai Osetrov, and Lavrentii Tsanava. Later, both Tutushkin and Osetrov headed SMERSH front directorates. By July 1942, after additional changes, the UOO headquarters in Moscow increased to twelve main departments (Figure 8-2), and had a staff of 225 people.6
Field operations were carried out by OO directorates at each of the six fronts created in July 1941, which reported to the UOO, the Main Directorate, in Moscow (Table 8-1). Later, in August—December 1941, additionally six, and in January 1942—August 1942, five more fronts with their OO directorates were organized. There were department-level OOs in all armies, corps, divisions, and independent brigades but not at regimental and battalion levels. OO functions at this level were performed by a single OO officer (osobist) attached to these units. The chain of command within the OO directorates at the fronts was hierarchical. A typical OO unit at the division level consisted of about twenty-five people:
| Position7 | Equivalent | |
|---|---|---|
| State Security Rank | Military Rank8 | |
| Head | Captain | Lt. Colonel |
| Assistant head | Senior Lieutenant | Major |
| Two operational officers | Lieutenants | Captains |
| Secretary (usually a woman) | Junior Lieutenant | Senior Lieutenant |
| Executive officer | Junior Lieutenant | Senior Lieutenant |
| A platoon of 15–20 riflemen | — | Privates |
In the field, the OO assistant heads and operational officers of OO departments conducted the actual investigations of political cases. In addition to clerical duties, the secretary was in charge of ciphers and coded messages. The head of each OO sometimes carried out executions personally. From July 1942 onwards, OOs had ‘the right to arrest deserters and, when necessary, shoot them to death’ without trial.9
The OO head recruited informers commonly called seksoty (secret workers) or stukachi (this word comes from the Russian word stuchat’ or to ‘knock’, and carried the meaning of secretly knocking at the door of the NKVD office) among officers of the military staff. A classified KGB textbook explains how this worked: ‘Operational workers recruited agents and informers in all military units of the front line forces, despite the presence or absence of hostile elements [in the units]. The number of agents of special departments also grew due to recruitments of secret informers in reserve units, from where they were sent to the front line forces.’10
The OO officers met secretly with their informers in offices apart from the regular military facilities, often located in separate buildings. Seksoty were sworn to secrecy. Pyotr Pirogov, a former Soviet officer and later a defector to the West, recalled the document that an OO officer ordered him to sign after recruiting him, which read: ‘I, Pirogov, had a conference with a member of the Special Section and undertake to tell no one of this meeting. I am aware that in the contrary case I shall be subject to prosecution under Article 58 of the Criminal Code.’11 Each seksot or stukach was given a code name that he used for signing his reports.
Seksoty (the plural) were also recruited among the privates. An infantryman recalled in 2009: ‘I remember one night the osobist of our regiment called me [from the wet trenches] up to the battalion headquarters in a dry dug-out. He kept me for an hour and a half, trying to recruit me to be a stukach, but I refused. What could he do to me? I was a machine-gunner, not an informer. The osobist got mad and I remember how he screamed at me: “If you want to live, don’t you dare tell anybody about our conversation!”’12 Another infantryman remembered the same: ‘Our osobisty… talked to me… and even gave me a pseudonym, “Leonov”, derived from the name of my place of birth—Leonovo. Later they continually rebuked me: “Why don’t you want to share what you know with us? Why don’t you write a report for us?” What would I write in a report if there weren’t traitors among us? Should I write some fiction?’13
From the structure of the UOO and its field branches it is obvious that during the first period of the war, the main objective of military counterintelligence was spying on the Red Army and Red Navy in order to keep them in line. For instance, on July 22, 1941 Viktor Bochkov, OO head of the Northwestern Front, issued the following directive: