33. Vladimir Dobryshevsky, ‘Pomnit’ vsekh poimenno,’ Krasnaya zvezda, June 18, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.redstar.ru/2008/06/18_06/3_05.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
34. Aleksandr Melenberg, ‘Podachka iz arkhiva,’ Novaya gazeta, No. 48, May 7, 2010 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2010/048/09.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
35. NKO orders No. 138, dated March 15, 1941 (Document No. 109 in Russkii arkhiv: Velikaya Otechestvennaya: Prikazy Narodnogo Komissara Oborony SSSR, 13 (2-1) (1994), 258–61), and No. 376, dated November 17, 1942 (Document No. 292 in ibid., 13 (2-2) (1997), 368), on personal lockers, and No. 330, dated October 7, 1941 (Document No. 86 in ibid., 111–2), on IDs.
36. Stepan Kashurko, ‘Lezhat’ smirno!,’ Novaya gazeta, No. 33, May 12, 2005 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2005/33/00.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
37. Testimony of Andrei Illarionov, Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, Washington, DC, and the President of the Institute of Economic Analysis, Moscow, before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs at the hearing ‘From Competition to Collaboration: Strengthening the U.S.-Russia Relationship,’ February 25, 2009, http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/111/ill022509.pdf, retrieved September 4, 2011.
38. ‘The Making of a Neo-KGB State,’ The Economist, August 25–31, 2007, 25–28. A detailed analysis of the Russian political and business elite is given in Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Anatomiya rossiiskoi elity (Moscow: Zakharov, 2004) (in Russian).
39. Vladimir Ivanov and Igor Plugatarev, ‘FSB menyaet orientiry,’ Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie, October 29, 2004 (in Russian), http://nvo.ng.ru/spforces/2004-10-29/7_fsb.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
40. List of published books in Russia on http://www.biblio-globus.com, retrieved September 4, 2011.
41. http://www.fsb.ru/fsb/history/author/single.htm%21id%3D10318168%2540fsbPublication.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
42. Istoriya Rossii. 1900–1945 gg. Kniga dly uchitelya, edited by Aleksandr Danilov and Aleksandr Filippov (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2009).
43. Owen Matthews, ‘Young Russians’ About-Face From the West.’ Newsweek, November 5, 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/id/221210, retrieved September 4, 2011.
44. The Soviets participated only in the Military International Tribunal and the Trial of the Major War Criminals (November 1945–October 1946). Most Russians are not aware of the twelve American Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings that followed from 1946 to 1949.
45. Only recently were several truthful memoirs about these events published, including Nikolai I. Obryn’ba, The Memoirs of a Soviet Resistance Fighter on the Eastern Front, translated by Vladimir Kupnik (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2007), and Vladimir Shimkevich, Sud’ba moskovskogo opolchentsa. Front, okruzhenie, plen. 1941–1945 (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2008) (in Russian).
46. Aleksandr Melenberg, ‘Pobeda. Vremya posle bedy. Chast’ III. L’goty veteranam Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny v instruktsiyakh i postanovleniyakh vlasti,’ Novaya gazeta, tsvetnoi vypusk 17 (May 11, 2007) (in Russian). http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2007/color17/07.html, retrieved September 4, 2011.
47. The denial intensified after the publication in 2005 of the Russian translation of Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Viking, 2002), see S. Turchenko, ‘Nasilie nad faktami,’ Trud, July 21, 2005 (in Russian). Beevor’s Russian opponents ignored the fact that Beevor cited Soviet documents from the Russian military archive.
48. For instance, a discussion in Mark Solonin, Net blaga na voine (Moscow: Yauza-Press, 2010), 180–264 (in Russian).
49. N. N. Nikoulin, Vospominaniya o voine (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha, 2008), 41–42 (in Russian).
Part I. The Big Picture
CHAPTER 1
Soviet Military Counterintelligence: An Overview
The history of SMERSH is so intimately intertwined with the many skeins of Soviet political and secret service history I decided to start out this volume with a short overview of Soviet military counterintelligence and its place in the larger landscape of the Soviet Union. Hopefully this will serve to keep the reader oriented in the chapters that follow, where detailed explanations of the many byzantine cabals of Stalin and other political and secret service figures are necessary to illuminate the dark history of SMERSH. And as an aid to keeping track of the many confusing transformations and personnel changes in the secret services, I have provided a listing of the various organizations (Table 1-1).
It all began on November 7, 1917 when the Bolshevik Party organized a coup known as the October Revolution and took over political power in Russia. The Party was small, consisting of about 400,000 members in a country with a population of over 100 million.1 Soon the Bolshevik government was on the verge of collapse. The troops of the Cossack Ataman (Leader) Pyotr Krasnov and the White Army of General Anton Denikin were threatening the new Russian Republic from the South, Ukraine and the Baltic States were occupied by the Germans, and Siberia was in the hands of anti-Soviet Czechoslovak WWI POWs.
But the numerous peasant revolts that erupted throughout Bolshevik-controlled territory were even more dangerous for them. In these circumstances Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, unleashed terror to hang onto power. On December 20, 1917, the first Soviet secret service, the VCheKa (Vserossiiskaya Chrezvychainaya Komissiya po bor’be s kontrrevolyutsiei i sabotazhem or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), attached to the SNK (Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov or Council of People’s Commissars, i.e. the Bolshevik government) was created.2 The VCheKa’s task was ‘to stop and liquidate counterrevolutionary and diversion activity’ and ‘to put on trial in the Revolutionary tribunal those who had committed sabotage acts and the counterrevolutionaries, and to develop methods for fighting them’. Since this time and to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, through the VCheKa and its successors, a comparatively small Bolshevik (later Communist) Party controlled the large population of Russia (later the Soviet Union) through intimidation and terror. In Lenin’s terminology, this method of control was called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.3 But, in fact, the Bolshevik’s tactics were the same as those of any organized criminal or fascist group, such as the Italian Mafia and the Nazi Party in Germany.4
The VCheKa, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Bolshevik from a family of minor Polish nobility, who as a teenager dreamed of becoming a Catholic priest, consisted of only 12 members. On September 2, 1918, the VCheKa issued ‘The Red Terror Order’ to arrest and imprison members of socialist non-Bolshevik parties.5 Additionally, all big industrialists, businessmen, merchants, noble-landowners, ‘counterrevolutionary priests’, and ‘officers hostile to the Soviet government’ were to be placed into concentration camps and forced to work there. Any attempt to resist was punished by immediate execution.