Barrage units were unable to stop the defeat of troops encircled by the enemy. In mid-1942, possibly the worst situation was in the 2nd Shock Army at the Volkhov Front, where the barrage units were formed in April 1942.15 By June 1942, many detachments of this army were completely cut off from supplies. Later, the head of the front’s OO reported to Abakumov that in June ‘there were days when servicemen received no food at all and some died of hunger. Zubov, deputy head of the political department of the 46th Division, detained Afinogenov, a private of the 57th Rifle Brigade, who had cut a piece of flesh from the corpse of a dead Soviet soldier for food. Afinogenov died of exhaustion on the way’.16 More likely, he was shot on the spot because there was no mercy for cannibals. On July 11, 1942, 2nd Shock Army commander Andrei Vlasov was taken prisoner while trying to get through the enemy encirclement. This was the same Lieutenant General Vlasov who soon began the creation of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) under German control. Contrary to Vlasov, Aleksandr Shashkov, head of the OO of the 2nd Shock Army, committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner.
The NKVD rear guard troops also could not stop the wave of deserters at the Volkhov Front and in nearby areas. In September 1942, the deputy head of the NKVD Directorate of the Leningrad Province complained to Moscow in a report with the long title ‘On the Inadequate Supervision of the Barrage Service of Field Units and NKVD Troops Guarding the Rear of the Northwestern and Volkhov Fronts and the 7th Separate Army’:
As a result of the decreased attention of the Special Organs [OOs] of the field detachments and headquarters of the NKVD Troops… the number of deserters recently increased in the rear of front units.
The regional NKVD organs and militia [police] arrested 381 deserters in 1942…
Deserters are leaving their units with arms, documents, and horses and they even steal vehicles. In the forests in the rear of the troops, deserters are building comfortable dugouts where they can live for a long time. They are robbing [the local population], and are real bandits. Upon detection and during arrests they are putting up armed resistance.17
Nikolai Nikoulin, an infantry veteran, explained in his memoirs how the whole punishment system worked before, during, and after attacks:
The troops used to attack while being galvanized by fear. Facing the Germans with all their heavy machine guns and tanks, [and enduring the] horrific mincing-machine-like bombing and artillery shelling, was terrifying. But the inexorable threat of being shot to death [by our own side] was no less frightening.
To keep an amorphous crowd of poorly trained soldiers under control, shootings were conducted before a combat. Some weak, almost dying soldiers, or those who had accidentally said something anti-Soviet, or, occasionally, deserters, were used for this purpose. The division was formed into the shape of the [Russian] letter ‘П’, and the doomed were slaughtered without mercy. As a result of this ‘prophylactic political work’, the fear of the NKVD and commissars was deeper than the fear of the Germans.
And during the attack, if somebody turned back, he was shot by the barrage detachment. Fear forced soldiers to move forward and be killed. This was exactly what our wise [Communist] Party, [supposedly] the leader and organizer of our victories, was counting on.
Of course, shootings to death also continued after an unsuccessful combat. And if regiments retreated without an order, barrage detachments used heavy machine guns against them.18
Barrage units existed until October 1944.
Vetting POWs
In August 1941, Stalin ordered commanders, political commissars, and OOs at the corps and division levels to write up lists of servicemen who ‘had surrendered to the enemy’, and to send these lists to the General Staff.19 This was a preparation for the fil’tratsiya (vetting; literally, ‘filtering’) of Soviet servicemen who had been POWs or had been encircled by German troops.
Three months later, in December 1941, the GKO ordered the setting up of special NKVD camps to assist in vetting ‘former Red Army servicemen who were captured or surrounded by the enemy’.20 From 1941 to 1942, twenty-two of these camps were organized, and the officers of the OO, and later SMERSH, conducted the interrogations there. The vetting procedure in the NKVD Podolsk Camp near Moscow in 1944 was described by Junior Lieutenant Roman Lazebnik in a 2008 interview:
During the night we were brought to a camp surrounded by two lines of barbed wire. Immediately… we were given the uniforms of privates without officers’ shoulder boards, as well as soldiers’ boots, and brought to barracks. Our barrack was for the Red Army commanders who had been taken prisoner or were in the detachments surrounded by the enemy. There were also barracks for privates and sergeants, and separate barracks for civilians. In the barracks, there were iron beds [not wooden bunks, as in labor camps]. We were given 350 grams of bread daily and a bowl of porridge twice a day… Daily newspapers were brought to our barrack… It was forbidden to write letters to relatives.
No officer in the barrack talked about his past, the war or his experiences as a prisoner… The atmosphere was very tense in terms of morale, and some officers could not bear the waiting. One officer threw himself at the camp’s fence which was alive with high-voltage electricity… It was terrible torture to wait, and hope…
After vetting, 95 per cent of officers were sent to penal battalions… Interrogations were conducted only during the night, and officers were interrogated every night. There were no beatings, but the osobisty had other methods for breaking an interrogated prisoner.
My investigator was calm and behaved quite correctly. He never mentioned his name. He did not beat me up or threaten me while he was methodically asking questions. One night I was surprised by not being taken for an interrogation, and in the morning… I was called up to the camp’s komendatura [administration office], where they asked me if I had complaints or was beaten during interrogations… They told me that I would be released as a serviceman who had been successfully vetted and would be sent as a private to the army in the field… The osobisty advised me not to tell anybody that I had been vetted.21
For each prisoner in these special camps, OO/SMERSH investigators opened a Fil’tratsionnoe delo or Filtration File, which contained transcripts of interrogations and other materials. As proof that the prisoner had not collaborated with the Germans, confirmation of the interrogation details was required from at least two people who were with the prisoner during his internment.
According to the NKVD report dated October 1944, the total number of Soviet servicemen, who had been German POWs or encircled by the enemy before breaking out, vetted in filtration camps to date was 354,592. Of them, 50,441 were officers.22 The report stressed that although the camps were administered by the NKVD ‘the vetting… is conducted by counterintelligence SMERSH departments’ and 11,556 of those vetted had been arrested by OO/SMERSH departments. Among the arrested by SMERSH, 2,083 servicemen were identified as enemy intelligence and counterintelligence agents, and 1,284 were officers.
Of those not arrested, only 60 percent of the officers were sent back to the army to continue their service. The remaining 40 percent were demoted to private and sent to penal assault battalions (shturmovye batal’ony) created in the Moscow, Volga, and Stalingrad military districts on Stalin’s order.23 Each assault battalion consisted of 929 demoted officers who were used, in Stalin’s words, for ‘the most active parts of the fronts’, such as attacks through minefields. The chance of survival in an assault battalion was almost zero. The few survivors were recommended for promotion to their previous ranks and positions.