In SMERSH ABAKUMOV kept everyone in fear. This allowed him to dictate his will in all cases…
ABAKUMOV developed a special, deliberately elaborate system of intimidation and persecution of his subordinates.
By using foul language with or without a reason, ABAKUMOV suppressed any shy attempt of a subordinate to contradict him. Any word said against his opinion always provoked a flood of ABAKUMOV’s verbal abuses mixed with threats to punish the subordinate, to ‘send him to Siberia’, or to imprison him.
After the frightened and stunned victim of ABAKUMOV’s abuse left his office, ABAKUMOV’s adherents—[Ivan] CHERNOV, head of [SMERSH] Secretariat, and [Yakov] BROVERMAN, his deputy—continued working on the subordinate. They tried to persuade him that to contradict ABAKUMOV was, in fact, to do harm to himself…
ABAKUMOV did not restrict himself to frightening people. By the same token he wanted to show that he was a boss who cared about his subordinates. Frequently he was quite generous, but for this purpose he used governmental funds. Therefore, he used a stick and a carrot method, and at the same time he went around the law.62
Apparently, while working with Beria as UOO head, Abakumov learned something from Beria’s style of command and administration.
Abakumov’s Deputies
Much less is known about Abakumov’s new deputies. Two of them, Nikolai Selivanovsky and Isai Babich, came from OOs. The third, Pavel Meshik, was an old colleague of Abakumov and a Beria man.
In 1923, after graduating from a GPU school in Moscow, the 21-year-old Nikolai Nikolaevich Selivanovsky joined the OO of the Central Asian Military District.63 From 1930 to 1941, he served in various sections of the OO in Moscow. He was definitely successful because in July 1937 he received his first award, the Order of the Badge of Honor.
Interestingly, in July-October 1937 Selivanovsky made trips to Prague and Paris, two centers of the Russian emigration in Europe. Although the goals of these trips are unknown, during that year the NKVD organized a series of provocations and terrorist acts in both cities in which Selivanovsky might have participated. In the spring of 1937, on Stalin’s order, NKVD agents planted (with the help of the Czech police) falsified documents among the belongings of Anton Grylewicz, a German émigré who lived in Czechoslovakia.64 Grylewicz, a former German Communist leader, was very close to Leon Trotsky and Stalin hoped that the Czech authorities would organize a trial against Grylewicz, which would be, in fact, an anti-Trotsky trial. Most probably, this plan emerged due to the close relationship between the Soviet and Czech intelligence services from 1936–38, when they even had a joint intelligence center (Vonano, located in Prague) that worked against the Germans and Austrians.65 Grylewicz was arrested in Prague in June 1937, just after the Tukhachevsky trial in Moscow, but in November he was released after he had proven that he was not the owner of the incriminating documents.
In Paris, a group of NKVD agents headed by Yakov Serebryansky was preparing to kidnap Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, and Selivanovsky’s trip might have been connected with these preparations. However, Sedov mysteriously died in February 1938 after a surgical operation, and the kidnapping became unnecessary. The same year Serebryansky and the members of his group were arrested upon their return to Moscow, and, on Beria’s order, Abakumov tortured Serebryansky in Lubyanka.
Selivanovsky could also have participated in preparations for the assassination of the NKVD defector Ignatii Reiss, who was killed on September 2, 1937 in Switzerland (however, the preparations were made in Paris), or in the successful kidnapping of General Yevgenii Miller, chairman of the Russian émigré military organization ROVS.66 On September 22, 1937, a group of NKVD agents abducted Miller in Paris. The general was brought to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, where he was kept at first as Prisoner No. 110 and then as ‘Pyotr Ivanov’. On May 11, 1939, he was finally shot without trial.
Most of the participants in these terrorist acts were liquidated. Sergei Shpigelglas, deputy head of the NKVD’s foreign intelligence who organized Reiss’s and Miller’s operations in Paris, was arrested in November 1938, and in January 1940 the Military Collegium sentenced him to death and he was executed. Former Russian émigrés who assisted Shpigelglas in Paris and then escaped to Moscow were also executed. But Selivanovsky’s career continued to be successful.
Back in Moscow, in 1938, Selivanovsky fabricated a case against Eduard Lepin, a military attaché to China and former military attaché to Finland and Poland.67 As a military attaché, Lepin represented military intelligence. At the end of 1937, he was called back to Moscow and arrested as an alleged member of a Latvian nationalistic group within the Red Army; Selivanovsky headed the investigation. On August 20, 1938, the Military Collegium sentenced Lepin to death, and he was shot.
In 1939, Selivanovsky became head of the 7th Section (responsible for infantry), then from 1939 to 1940, he headed the 9th Section (supply units), and, finally, from 1940 to 1941, the 5th Section (motorized infantry) of the OO. He continued to head this section after the OO was transferred to the NKO in February 1941. In November of that year, Selivanovsky succeeded Mikheev as head of the OO of the Southwestern Front after Mikheev was killed in action.
On July 25, 1942, Selivanovsky, now head of the OO of the Stalingrad Front, sent a ciphered telegram directly to Stalin, trying, as he said, ‘to save Stalingrad, to save the country’.68 Two days earlier Lieutenant General Vasilii Gordov replaced Marshal Timoshenko as commander of the Stalingrad Front. At the same time, the Germans began a successful offensive and by July 25, three divisions of the front were surrounded by the enemy. In his telegram Selivanovsky accused Gordov of mistakes that resulted in the defeat and stated that Gordov was not respected by his subordinates.
It was a serious military insubordination to address Stalin over Abakumov and Beria, Selivanovsky’s direct superiors, and immediately Beria ordered Selivanovsky to come to Moscow. Later Selivanovsky recalled: ‘In Moscow, Beria cursed me for a long time. He said that the appointment of a front commander should not be my business because it is a prerogative of the Supreme High Command.’69 But Stalin, apparently, considered the telegram important. It arrived just after the Red Army left the city of Rostov-on-Don, and the telegram informed Stalin about a potentially even bigger disaster at the Stalingrad Front. At the time, Stalin was preparing his infamous NKO Order No. 227 (‘No Step Back!’) that introduced penal battalions and companies into the army, as well as barrage units consisting of Red Army, and not NKVD, servicemen.
On July 27, Stalin signed this order, and almost immediately he ordered Abakumov to personally evaluate the situation at the Stalingrad Front. In the meantime, on August 1, Gordov and Nikita Khrushchev, a member of the Military Council of the front, ordered, following Stalin’s Order No. 227, the creation of two penal battalions for officers, penal companies for privates, and 36 barrage detachments.
Abakumov and a huge group of his high-level subordinates spent five days inspecting the situation at the front line in Stalingrad, questioning commanders and checking the NKVD and Red Army barrage detachments in the rear.70 Firstly, Abakumov briefed Gordov and Khrushchev. Then he divided his subordinates into three groups and sent them to different detachments of the front. Abakumov, accompanied by Selivanovsky, led one of the groups. It was attacked by German aircraft several times on the way to and at the front line.