Here is an example of a typical OO suspect. In September 1942, the 24-year-old officer Yeleazar Meletinsky was arrested by the OO Department of the 56th Army and accused of espionage. He knew German and served in military intelligence. In his memoirs, Meletinsky wrote:
The arrestees under investigation were kept in a big barn… separately from the sentenced placed in a special dugout. Interrogations were conducted in another semi-dugout… Strangely, only ten years [of imprisonment] were given for treason [instead of the death penalty], but a person could be shot for praising the German technical equipment. The barracks were very dirty, and everybody had lice… Convoy soldiers were extremely rude…
The investigator called me up only once. ‘Do you admit your guilt?’ ‘No.’ … ‘We won’t check anything [the investigator said]. I have enough material to shoot you to death. We won’t accuse you of espionage, but we’ll try you for agitation…’
The military tribunal… sentenced me to 10 years in corrective labor camps plus five years of deprivation of civil rights after that term, as well as confiscation of all my possessions. I was accused of anti-Soviet agitation aimed at demoralizing the Red Army. The verdict said that I praised the Fascist regime and Hitler.
The Red Army soldier who took me [from the tribunal] to the dugout where the sentenced were kept told me on the way that the German books found in my officer’s field bag had caused the tribunal’s decision. These were a trophy Russian-German phrase book and a book of Lutheran psalms that one of the German prisoners had given to me.10
The fact that Meletinsky was a Jew and, therefore, would be extremely unlikely to ‘praise the Fascist regime and Hitler’ only emphasizes the absurdity of the verdict. The other arrestees, falsely accused of treason, including two teenagers drafted in the nearby village, were sentenced to death and mercilessly shot. Many years later Meletinsky became a distinguished, internationally recognized linguist.
The OOs arrested not only real and imagined enemy agents, but also sent their own agents to the enemy. A report from the Stalingrad Front mentioned the OO’s active counterintelligence measures:
On the whole, 30 agents were sent to the enemy’s rear in August [1942]; of them, 22 had counterintelligence duties, and eight had other tasks.
Additionally, during the retreat to the new positions, 46 rezidents [heads of spy networks], agents, and liaison people were left at the enemy’s rear. They were assigned to penetrate the enemy’s intelligence organs and collect counterintelligence information.
Three agents came back from the enemy’s rear and brought important information about the enemy’s intelligence.
In August… the NKVD Special Department of the Front opened two Agent Files, one under the name ‘Reid’ [Raid], about watching the safe apartments used by German intelligence in the city of Stalingrad, and another called ‘Lira’ [Lyre], on watching the Yablonskaya [German] Intelligence School…
Also, 10 spies were arrested.11
Apparently, there was no contact with the agents in the field except through the liaison people or agents who reported the information when they came back.
OOs and Political Officers
The OO officers worked on a daily basis with the political officers known as politruki (the plural of politicheskii rukovoditel’, meaning political mentor), who were responsible for enforcing correct political behavior among the servicemen.12 In the field units, one of the duties of political officers was a distribution among members of the Party and Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) of the ‘correct’ slogans that they were obliged to shout during attacks. These included ‘For the Motherland!’, ‘For Stalin!’, and ‘Death to the German occupiers!’13 However, war veterans recalled that the slogans had only propaganda value in the military newspapers because nobody would have been able to hear such shouts in a noisy battle.14
In July 1941, the Red Army’s politruki were renamed military commissars (voennye komissary) and became independent of the military command, like OO officers.15 Commissars, important during the Civil War, had been revived in 1937 during the Great Terror, then demoted in 1940 and made subordinate to military command. Now commissars again became very powerful, reporting only to their own headquarters, GlavPURKKA (part of the Central Committee), and not to the military commanders. Until May 1942, the GlavPURKKA was headed by Lev Mekhlis and after June 1942, by Aleksandr Shcherbakov, a Politburo candidate member.
Although commissars remained primarily responsible for troop morale and Party organizations in the army, they also monitored whether unit commanders followed orders and could recommend the arrest of servicemen they suspected of treason. Additionally, until October 1942 political commissars even had some limited oversight of field OO officers, because OO officers in corps and divisions reported not only to their OO superiors but also to the political commissars of their military units.
In October 1942, the role of political commissars was again transformed, perhaps because of improved discipline in the Red Army.16 Political commissars, now renamed zampolity (the plural of zampolit, a short form of ‘deputy commander for political matters’), began reporting once again to their military unit commanders, as well as to their own superiors.
Each corps, division, and brigade had a zampolit appointed by the Glav-PURKKA, and zampolity at these levels headed their own political departments. A corps zampolit reported to the Army Political Directorate, which reported to the Front Political Directorate.17 At a regimental level there was a zampolit appointed by the Army Political Directorate, as well as a partorg (Party secretary responsible for the members of the Communist Party), a komsorg (secretary of the Communist Youth Organization) and an agitator, in charge of reading newspapers to the privates, while at a battalion level, there were a zampolit, a partorg, and a komsorg. Partorgi, komsorgi, and agitatory were appointed from among servicemen and assisted the zampolity. Through these chains of command many Party and Komsomol members reported on their fellow comrades. Finally, there was a company zampolit who every three days wrote a bulletin to his superior regarding the political morale of his company. This was an organization that spied on servicemen in addition to the OOs.