26. Otkroveniya i priznaniya. Natsistskaya verkhushka o voine ‘tret’ego reikha’ protiv SSSR. Sekretnye rechi. Dnevniki. Vospominaniya (translation from the German, Smolensk: Rusich, 2000), 120 (in Russian).
27. Alfred Rosenberg’s letter to Field Marshal Keitel, dated February 28, 1942. Quoted in Paul Carrel and Guenther Boeddeker, Nemetskie voennoplennye vtoroi mirivoi voiny 1939–1945 (Moscow: Izografus, 2004), 311–2 (in Russian, translated from the German). Rosenberg was sentenced to death at the International Nuremberg Trial and hanged on October 16, 1946.
28. V. P. Naumov, ‘Sud’ba voennoplennykh i deportirovannykh grazhdan SSSR. Materialy Komissii po reabilitatsii zhertv politicheskikh repressii’, Novaya i noveishaya istoriya 2 (1996), 91–112 (in Russian).
29. As given in Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981).
30. V. N. Zemskov, ‘Repatriatsiya sovetskikh grazhdan i ikh dal’neishaya sud’ba,’ Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya 5 (1995), 3–13 (in Russian).
31. Directive No. 2317 by Col. Vasilii Shilin, OO head of the 16th Army, dated August 20, 1941. Quoted in I. L. Ustinov, Na rubezhe istoricheskix peremen. Vospominaniya veterana spetsluzhb (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2008), 68–69 (in Russian).
32. ‘Prikaz verkhovnogo glavnogo komandovaniya Krasnoi armii’ No. 270, 16 avgusta 1941 goda,’ VIZh, no. 9 (1988), 26–28.
33. Chris Bellamy, Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (New York: Vantage Books, 2008), 257–9.
34. John Tolland, Adolf Hitler (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1976), 680.
35. Valentin Runov, 1941. Pobednyi parad Gitlera. Pravda ob umanskom poboishche (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2010) (in Russian).
36. Defense Commissar’s Order No. 0321, dated August 26, 1941. Cited in N. Ya. Komarov and G. A. Kumanev, Velikaya Bitva pod Moskvoi: Letopis’vazhneishikh sobytii. Kommentarii (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN), 76 (in Russian).
37. Yezhov’s report to Stalin, dated March 4, 1938. Document No. 298, in Lubyanka. Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD 1927-1938, edited by V. N. Khaustov, V. P. Naumov, and N. S. Plotnikov, 490–6 (Moscow: materik, 2004) (in Russian).
38. F. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, translated from the original German by Eric Mosbacher and David Porter (New York: The Viking Press, 1951), 136.
39. D. Ortenberg, Iyun’-dekabr’ sorok pervogo. (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1984), 130–1 (in Russian).
40. Zhukov’s cable No. 4976, dated September 28, 1941. Quoted in Boris Sokolov, ‘Georgii Zhukov: narodnyi marshal ili marshal-lyudoed?’ Grani.ru, February 23, 2001 (in Russian), http://grani.ru/Society/Myth/m.6463.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.
41. GKO Order No. 460-ss, dated August 11, 1941. Document No. 193, in Lubyanka: Stalin i NKVD, 310.
42. Yurii Rubtsov, Alter ego Stalina (Moscow: Zvonnitsa-MG, 1999), 188–91 (in Russian).
43. Mekhlis’s cable to Colonel G. P. Popov, dated September 24, 1941. Quoted in ibid., 193.
44. Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy, 137–9.
45. Ibid., 137.
46. A letter by V. Koroteev, a Red Star correspondent, dated September 1943; quoted in Yurii Rubtsov, Alter ego Stalina, 242.
Part III. Military Counterintelligence: July 1941–April 1943
CHAPTER 9
At the Moscow Gates
By August 1941, the German Army Group Center took Smolensk. On September 27, the GKO issued the disastrous ‘Directive to Organize a Strategic Defense’.1 Because of this confusing, incompetent directive, thirty-seven divisions near Vyazma and twenty-five divisions near Bryansk were encircled. In the region to the west of Moscow the Red Army lost almost a million servicemen, of whom 673,000 were taken prisoner.
Panic in Moscow
On October 2, the Germans began Operation Typhoon, their advance on Moscow.2 Viktor Kravchenko, a witness to this event who later defected to the West, remembered the widespread alarm of those days: ‘Day and night smoke belched from the chimneys of the NKVD, the Supreme Court, the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, various other institutions and Party headquarters. Our leaders were hastily destroying records, wiping out the clues to their decades of official crimes. The government, evidently under orders from the top, was covering up its traces. The first snows of October were sooty with burnt paper.’3 Another witness, an African-American who worked in Moscow, also recalled: ‘Many Communist party members were throwing away their party credentials, some tearing them up and stuffing the pieces down the toilet, others simply tossing their party tickets with their names and pictures rubbed out, into the street. I saw scores of these passes strewn along sidewalks.’4
Nikolai Sbytov, head of the Air Force Fighter Command, remembered that during those days he was the only professional military commander in Moscow.5 On October 5, his fighters noticed a German tank column within about fifty kilometers of the capital. Sbytov reported this threat to brigade Commissar Konstantin Telegin, a member of the Military Council of the Moscow District. Instead of ordering a bombardment of the column as Sbytov recommended, Telegin apparently reported Sbytov to the UOO, because suddenly Abakumov telephoned Sbytov and ordered him to come immediately to NKVD headquarters. There Abakumov interrogated Sbytov in the presence of Merkulov and Aleksandr Avseevich, head of the UOO department responsible for the air force. Abakumov was convinced that the tank sighting was false and that Sbytov was guilty of disseminating rumors aimed at starting a panic in Moscow, but he could not order Sbytov’s arrest without Stalin’s approval. Fortunately, Stalin believed Sbytov, and the GKO approved an attack on the very real column of German tanks.
Abakumov stayed in Moscow during the entire October crisis. However, after the war, Ivan Serov, one of his main enemies, accused him of planning a cowardly escape from Moscow.6
The Nazi troops were so close to Moscow that on October 15, 1941, the GKO ordered the evacuation of the main commissariats, including the NKVD, and foreign legations to Kuibyshev (currently, Samara) on the Volga River.7 All important buildings were mined and the UOO camouflaged buildings in the Kremlin.
The next day the Germans reached the suburbs of Moscow and fearful chaos set in. A subsequent report stated: ‘On October 16–18, according to incomplete data, 779 leading administrators from 438 industrial facilities fled.’8 Approximately two million Muscovites left the city on foot. Kravchenko recalled that on October 16:
The most hysterical rumors spread everywhere. It was said that a coup d’état had occurred in the Kremlin, that Stalin was under arrest, that the Germans were already… on the edge of the city… Crowds surged from street to street, then back again in sudden waves of panic.
Already riots and looting had begun. Stores and warehouses were being emptied by frenzied mobs…