48. Vyacheslav Zvyagintsev, Voina na vesakh Femidy. Voina 1941–1945 gg. v materialakh sledstvenno-sudebnykh del (Moscow: Terra, 2006), 628 (in Russian).
49. Sinevirsky, SMERSH, 116–7.
50. Beria and Merkulov’s joint report, dated May 20, 1943. Document No. 237 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 377.
51. Vyacheslav Shevchenko, ‘“SMERSH” opasnee smercha,’ Leninskaya smena. Ekspress-K, no. 81 (16229), May 11, 2007 (in Russian), http://www.express-k.kz/show_article.php?art_id=8885, retrieved September 7, 2011.
52. Abramov, SMERSH, 264.
CHAPTER 17
Leaders of SMERSH
While appointing Viktor Abakumov and his deputies Nikolai Selivanovsky, Pavel Meshik, and Isai Babich leaders of SMERSH, Stalin, obviously, had serious reasons. He needed a secret service that would fight enemy intelligence, control the enormous Soviet army, and be loyal and subordinated only to him. Apparently, Abakumov and his deputes’ backgrounds and careers fit Stalin’s expectations.
Abakumov the Man
Abakumov was tall and well built, with a square face, high forehead, brown eyes, big nose and mouth, thick lips, and brown hair.1 He was considered quite handsome by men and women alike. ‘Romanov’, the pseudonym of a SMERSH officer who later defected, was impressed with Abakumov: ‘There was no doubt that the chief of GUKR Smersh was a very handsome man. He had an athletic build, just a shade overweight… He had… one eyebrow just a shade higher than the other. His thick, dark hair was brushed back.’2
In a three-page, handwritten autobiography that Abakumov prepared for the NKVD in December 1939, he claimed he was born in 1908 in Moscow.3 However, some mystery surrounds his real age, place of birth, and early career. In 1952, after he was arrested, investigators checked a church register of births in a small village in the Moscow Region. A record of Abakumov’s birth was not found.4 But the investigators apparently believed that Abakumov was not born in Moscow, as he claimed, but somewhere near Moscow.
Abakumov claims that his father received a salary so low that ‘our family of five people—a brother, a sister, and me—was always poor.’ He says that before the October Revolution his father was a worker who was sometimes employed in a small pharmaceutical plant in Moscow. These details helped establish Abakumov’s ‘class origin’ as proletariat, which was important for his NKVD career. It is possible that Abakumov concealed his father’s real position; this was common practice, because even as innocuous a position as store manager would place one in the ideologically undesirable bourgeoisie class.5 After the October Revolution, Abakumov’s father was a maintenance man in a hospital. He died in 1922 when Abakumov was fourteen. Abakumov also states that before the revolution his mother was a seamstress, and after the revolution she was a charwoman in the same hospital where her husband worked.
According to Abakumov, he attended only four years of grade school. Amazingly, he was very literate, often editing documents written by his barely literate subordinates. ‘Romanov’ stresses in his memoirs that Abakumov’s orders ‘were very different from army orders… [They] were always absolutely clear, and never had any kind of introduction.’6
Abakumov also claims to have volunteered for the army in 1921. This is odd, since even under the Soviet standards of the time a thirteen-year-old boy would not have been accepted. This and the above-mentioned inconsistencies in Abakumov’s biography led Boris Sokolov, a knowledgeable Russian historian, to hypothesize that Abakumov might have been three or four years older and better educated than he claimed.7 It is also possible that somebody helped Abakumov join the army at such a young age so that he could at least eat—there was famine throughout the country in those years. Another mystery is that no sources give any information about Abakumov’s brother and sister.
In any case, Abakumov served as a medical orderly in the 2nd Moscow Special Brigade until the end of 1923. This brigade was part of the Formations for Special Tasks, or ChON—military units consisting mostly of Party and Komsomol (Union of Young Communists) members who were used to back up Chekist actions. They were formed in April 1919 and played an important role in the Civil War.8 From November 1919 until mid-1921, Nikolai Podvoisky, an Old Bolshevik, who was one of the leaders of the Revolution and the first War Commissar, was its commander.9
In August 1920, an anti-Soviet peasant uprising broke out in Tambov Province. In April 1921, the Politburo appointed Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the best Red Army military leaders, Commander of the Tambov Military District and put him in charge of suppressing the uprising.10 Apparently, Vladimir Lenin insisted on Tukhachevsky’s appointment after Tukhachevsky commanded a successful repression of the military anti-Bolshevik revolt in the city of Kronstadt in March 1920. As Tukhachevsky’s sister Olga recalled, after the appointment to Tambov Tukhachevsky ‘went to his room and drank for two days… This was the only occasion during his whole life when he became dead drunk’.11
The tactics the thirty-year-old Tukhachevsky used against the peasants were brutal even by Civil War standards. For instance, on June 11, 1921 he signed an order to shoot numerous hostages and anyone who did not give his name. The uprising was finally suppressed only in July–August 1921, after Tukhachevsky’s troops used, at least once, chemical weapons against the insurgents and their families who were hiding in the forests.12
Abakumov’s 2nd Moscow Special Brigade participated in suppressing this and a similar peasant revolt in the Ryazan Province. One can only wonder what effect participating in these events at such a young age may have had on the teenage Abakumov.
In 1924, after the ChON was disbanded, Abakumov returned to Moscow, where he worked at several unimportant jobs. In 1930, after being accepted as a member of the Communist Party, he was appointed head of the Military Department of the Komsomol Zamoskvoretsky Regional Office. In 1932, he joined the OGPU, the NKVD’s predecessor, which existed from 1922 to 1934.
First Years in the OGPU/NKVD
For the first year Abakumov worked in the Economic Department (EKO) of the Moscow Regional Branch of the OGPU (Table 17-1). In 1933, he was transferred to the Economic Directorate (EKU) of the central OGPU. Mikhail Shreider (who was, at the time, the head of the 6th Section of the EKO of the OGPU’s Moscow Regional Branch), describes Abakumov’s transfer:
[Yakov] Deich, first deputy of the OGPU Plenipotentiary [Representative] of the Moscow Region, called me on the phone and recommended that I take into my section a ‘good guy’ who had had problems with his previous superior, the head of the 5th Section [Iosif Estrin]. Although he was not ‘a very capable guy’, some important persons ‘asked for him very much’.
Deich did not tell me who was asking for Abakumov, but, from the tone of his voice, they were very high-ranking people, and most probably, their wives were behind it [Abakumov was a ladies’ man]… Deich added that Abakumov was supposedly an adopted son of one of the October Uprising leaders, [Nikolai] Podvoisky.13
