16. Interview with Mark Ivanikhin in Vitalii Yaroshevsky, ‘Mark i katyushi,’ Novaya gazeta, no. 41, April 19, 2010 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/041/22.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.
17. Recollections by Fyodor Kiselev, the crew head, in Vladimir Batshev, ‘7 noyabrya 1941,’ Lebed.com, no. 509, December 3, 2006 (in Russian), http://www.lebed.com/2006/art4815.htm, retrieved September 6, 2011.
18. Details in M. Yu. Myagkov, Vermakht u vorot Moskvy, 1941–1942 (Moscow: RAN, 1999) (in Russian).
19. Lev Bezymensky, Bitva za Moskvu. Proval operatsii ‘Taifun’ (Moscow: Yauza, 2007), 188 (in Russian).
20. Moskva voennaya, 81–128.
21. Vitalii Shentalinsky, Donos na Sokrata (Moscow: Formica-S, 2001), 325–82 (in Russian).
22. Beria’s instruction No. 2756/B, dated October 18, 1941. Document No. 617, in Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 2 (2), 215–6; also Document Nos. 650 and 675, in ibid., 260–1 and 305.
23. Stalin’s resolution on the first page of the list at http://stalin.memo.ru/images/t378-196.jpg, retrieved September 6, 2011.
24. From Abakumov’s report, dated December 9, 1941, in Boris Syromyatnikov, ‘Neotsennyonnyi vklad,’ Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, December 1, 2006, http://nvo.ng.ru/spforces/2006-12-01/7_vklad.html, retrieved September 6, 2011.
25. Mark Solonin, 23 iyunya:”Den’ M” (Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2007), 411-20 (in Russian)
26. Report of Captain Berezkin, head of the OO of the 1st Shock Army, dated February 14, 1942. Quoted in Yurii Veremeev, Krasnaya Armiya v nachale Vtoroi mirovoi (Moscow: Eksmo-Algoritm, 2010), 91–93 (in Russian).
27. B. V. Sokolov, ‘The Role of Lend-Lease in Soviet Military Efforts, 1941–1945,’ Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 7, no. 3 (September 1994), 567–86.
28. Quoted in Syromyatnikov, ‘Neotsennyonnyi vklad.’
29. Details in Albert L. Weeks, Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).
30. V. F. Vorsin, ‘Motor Vehicle Transport Deliveries Through “Lend-Lease”,’ Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 10, no. 2 (June 1997), 153–75.
31. N. N. Nikoulin, Vospominaniya o voine (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, 2008), 55–56 (in Russian).
32. Ibid., 67.
33. Dmitrii Steshin, ‘Svalka na kostyakh geroev,’ Komsomol’skaya pravda, January 27, 2009 (in Russian), http://kp.ru/daily/24233/433433/, retrieved September 6, 2011.
CHAPTER 10
More About OOs
Catching German spies was the main duty of OO officers. In 1941–1942, due to the disastrous situation at the front, they worked in close cooperation with the political officers. Because of their privileged position, many OO officers were out of control.
Catching German Spies
There were no special units in the OOs and the UOO that dealt with German spies. Identification of German agents was part of the routine work of the OOs. In November 1941, Pavel Zelenin, OO head of the Southern Front, issued the following order:
Enemy intelligence agents are trying to infiltrate our military units under the cover of [Soviet] servicemen who supposedly have escaped as POWs from the enemy, or who have gotten through the encirclement or become detached from their formations. Their goals are diversion, espionage, and demoralization [of our troops]…
I suggest conducting all cases against agents in the investigation departments of the OOs of the front and the armies, as well as in the OO of NKVD Troops Guarding the Rear… The divisional and brigade OOs… should conduct preliminary investigations…
As a counterintelligence measure, the OO heads of the armies should introduce a practice of recruiting enemy agents, especially those who previously served in the Red Army… The front OO should approve such recruitments, as well as the dispatching of these double agents behind the enemy’s front line.1
The NKVD Troops Guarding the Rear of the Red Army (hereinafter ‘rear guard troops’) that Zelenin mentions belonged to a separate directorate formed in April 1942 within the NKVD Main Directorate of Interior Troops and headed by State Security Senior Major Aleksandr Leontiev.2 Head of the rear guard troops of a particular front reported to Leontiev and the Military Council of the front. Also, the Military Council of the front, together with the head of the rear guard troops of the front, decided how deep in the front’s rear these troops should operate.
Nikolai Stakhanov, head of the NKVD Main Directorate for Border Guard Troops, described the rear guard troops in his report to Beria about a meeting with the American major generals John R. Deane, head of the U.S. Military Mission in Moscow, and Harold R. Bull, assistant chief of staff (G-3) at Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters (SHAEF) in Europe.3
Two days before this meeting, on January 15, 1945, a group of American and British military representatives, including Dean and Bull, had a two-hour conversation with Stalin in the Kremlin.4 The Allied generals thanked Stalin for the Soviet supportive offensive during the ongoing Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944–January 25, 1945).5 In response to the generals, Stalin declared, ‘We have no [special] treaty, but we are comrades,’ and talked at length about the offensive, stressing the importance of the ‘Cheka-type’ troops for controlling German espionage in the conquered areas.
The American generals were so interested in the ‘Cheka-type’ rear guard troops that Beria ordered Stakhanov to provide the generals with basic information on the structure and activities of these troops. According to Stakhanov, the rear guard troops were typically placed 15–25 kilometers behind the front line, at the rear of the combat detachments. Their task was ‘to fight individual agents and small intelligence-saboteur groups of the enemy’. The rear guard troops consisted of divisions of 5,000 men each; each division included three regiments, and each regiment consisted of three battalions. These troops did not have tanks or artillery, but they had vehicles for mobility.
Back in 1941, the osobisty constantly reported on the capturing of enemy agents. For instance, in December 1941 the OO of the Western Front reported to front commander Zhukov that from the beginning of the war, ‘505 agents were arrested and identified. Of them, four were recruited before the war; 380 were recruited from the POWs; 76 were civilians recruited in the occupied territories; 43 were from civilians who lived near the front line; and two agents were found among the headquarters staff’.6 Almost a year later, during August 1942, at the Stalingrad Front ‘110 agents were arrested and identified… Of them, 97 were arrested at the front line and three in the front’s rear, while 10 were unmasked through secret agents… Of those, 12 were commanding officers, 76 were privates, and 13 were women’.7
These reports did not mean that all servicemen whom the osobisty described as agents were, in fact, real agents. For example, many soldiers were arrested for keeping leaflets the Germans had dropped from planes. Besides the propaganda leaflets, there were also leaflets that a Soviet serviceman could use as a pass if he decided to change sides and to get through the front line to the Germans. But many soldiers kept the leaflets simply as paper for writing letters or making cigarettes. They were supplied only with low-quality tobacco called makhorka, and they had to roll their own makeshift cigarettes from makhorka and a piece of paper. German leaflets worked well for this purpose, but if an OO informer told the supervising osobist that a soldier had an enemy’s leaflet, the soldier was usually arrested on suspicion of being an enemy agent or planning to change sides.8 These cases were so numerous that in November 1942 the head of the Main Directorate of Military Tribunals (Justice Commissariat) and the chief military prosecutor issued a joint directive trying to prevent sentencing ‘when the ill intention of the servicemen who possessed leaflets had not been established’.9