On August 6, the groups were back at the front HQ to discuss the results of their inspection trips, and the next day Abakumov sent a report to Stalin. Gordov was dismissed and later appointed commander of the 33rd Army at the Western Front, while Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko replaced him as commander of the Stalingrad Front. However, after the war, in 1947, Gordov was arrested on charges of treason; in fact, the MGB secretly recorded his critical talks about Stalin.71 On August 24, 1950 the Military Collegium sentenced Gordov to death and he was executed.
At the end of August 1942, after Abakumov left, Selivanovsky reported to Moscow on the activity of his OO that month:
On the whole, 110 German spies have been arrested and unmasked. Among them… there were 12 commanding officers and 76 servicemen, and 13 women-spies…
On the whole, 30 of our agents were sent in August [1942] to the enemy’s rear. Also, 26 rezidents [heads of spy networks] and agents were left in the enemy’s rear during the withdrawal of our troops tasked with becoming members of the enemy’s intelligence and collecting counterintelligence information.
Three agents returned from the enemy’s rear. They provided our military intelligence with important information.72
It is not clear whether Selivanovsky was talking about two crucial pieces of intelligence his department received in August 1942—about the structure of the 6th German Army under the command of Field–Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, and the German plans for taking Stalingrad.
In SMERSH, Selivanovsky, Abakumov’s deputy, was responsible for collecting and analyzing intelligence data. Of the three SMERSH deputies, he was the closest to Abakumov, continuing as his deputy after the war when Abakumov became State Security Minister. After Selivanovsky was arrested in 1951 as ‘Abakumov’s accomplice’, he became mentally ill and was sent to a special psychiatric hospital for examination. Possibly, this saved him from being tried and executed along with Abakumov. After his release in 1953, Selivanovsky was discharged from the MVD ‘due to health problems’. Selivanovsky outlived Abakumov by 43 years (he died in 1997), and he never released any secrets about his work in SMERSH/MGB, including information about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, in whose case he was involved.
Abakumov’s second deputy, Pavel Yakovlevich Meshik, was, according to his son Charles, ‘a tall, handsome man. He had a beautiful voice and a very self-confident style of behavior’.73 Interestingly, Meshik was so fascinated by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species that he named one of his three sons after Darwin.
In March 1932, at the age of twenty-one, Meshik began his work in the EKU of the OGPU, where he met Abakumov.74 In 1937, he moved to the GUGB Counterintelligence Department. In December of the same year he received the Order of the Badge of Honor, most likely for his participation in fabricating the case of Moisei Rukhimovich, Defense Industry Commissar.75 In July 1938, the Military Collegium sentenced Rukhimovich to death and he was shot.
In January 1939, Meshik was appointed assistant to Bogdan Kobulov, head of the NKVD Investigation Unit. Sergei Mironov-Korol’, arrested on January 6, 1939, was Meshik’s first victim in this unit. He was a prominent old Chekist—he began his career as head of OOs during the Civil War, and later occupied many important posts.76 In 1937, Mironov was appointed Minister to Mongolia, and from April 1938 onwards, he headed the 2nd Eastern Department within the Foreign Affairs Commissariat. For almost a year Meshik used to call Mironov’s wife Agnessa to his NKVD office to give her short notes written by Mironov, asking her to write brief replies. She was never arrested for being the wife of an ‘enemy of the people’, and for the rest of her life Agnessa tried to figure out why Meshik organized the exchange of letters.77
She didn’t know that this was a common method used by NKVD interrogators to blackmail the investigated prisoner. To force the prisoner to write or sign false testimonies, especially if other people were mentioned, an investigator would tell the prisoner that his wife would not be arrested as long as he was ‘cooperating’, and as proof that she was still free, the investigator used the exchange of notes. In February 1940, the Military Collegium sentenced Mironov to death and he was executed. Interestingly, Mironov has never been rehabilitated, which usually means that he had tortured the arrestees when he worked in the OGPU/NKVD.
Ironically, Mikhail Kedrov, the first head of the OO (Table 1-2), was among the victims whose cases Meshik helped to fabricate. Kedrov, arrested in April 1939, was accused of having been an agent of the czar’s secret police (okhranka) in the past, of connections with the NKVD’s fake ‘Yagoda plot’ of old Chekists, and of being an American spy. In his appeal to the Politburo, Kedrov described in detail how Meshik tortured him. On July 9, 1941, the Military Collegium miraculously acquitted Kedrov.78 However, following USSR Prosecutor Bochkov’s instruction about acquittals, Kedrov was not released from prison. With the Germans marching on Moscow, he was moved to Saratov and shot on October 18, along with twenty-two other prisoners.
Meshik personally tortured other arrested Chekists, including Kedrov’s son Igor and Ivan Miroshnikov.79 Miroshnikov, who survived long imprisonment in labor camps, testified in 1953 that Meshik was especially brutal when he used to arrive in Sukhanovo Prison completely drunk and beat up prisoners. Miroshnikov added that ‘generally, Meshik was extremely cynical. He used to show his fist to me while saying, “Here is the Soviet government,” then come up to me and hit me with the fist with terrible force’.80 However, Igor Kedrov was not as lucky as Miroshnikov. On January 24, 1940, the Military Collegium sentenced him to death and the next day he was executed.
One more survivor, Aleksandr Mil’chakov, former General Secretary of Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) and then head of Glavzoloto (the company that managed the state gold mines), who was arrested in May 1939, also recalled Meshik as a cynical investigator and person:
Lieutenant Meshik, comfortably leaning in a chair, puts his legs on the desk. There is a rubber truncheon brought from Berlin near the inkwell on it. Recently an NKVD delegation visited Berlin, apparently to ‘exchange experiences’ [with the Germans]. From time to time Meshik takes the truncheon in his hands and plays with it…
After Meshik sniffed a small flask, his eyes began to glitter and he laughed loudly. Today Meshik is ‘philosophizing’: ‘The Chekists are Stalin’s new vanguard. And we will destroy everybody who is in our way… We, the Chekists, are a party within the party… You are saying that you are not guilty of anything… But you must be destroyed because you are useless for us… Stalin himself blessed your arrest.’81
In September 1939, Meshik was appointed head of the Investigation Unit of the NKVD Main Economic Directorate. At his trial in December 1953, Meshik claimed that he was not responsible for the interrogation methods he used (note that he talks about himself in the third person): ‘I think the problem is not how many prisoners Kobulov and Meshik have beaten up, but that they did beat them up… I think that Beria’s low trick and disgusting crime was that he persuaded interrogators that the Instantsiya allowed and approved the beatings [of course, Stalin did approve the torture]… Interrogators, including myself, used beatings and torture thinking it was the right thing to do.’82 The word ‘Instantsiya’ that Meshik used was an important term in the Party jargon of Stalin’s bureaucrats. As Stalin’s biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore noted, Instantsiya was ‘an almost magical euphemism for the Highest Authority’.83 It was used in official documents and speeches to indicate Stalin or, sometimes, the Politburo. In other words, NKVD/MGB officials never said that Stalin gave them an order; they said the Instantsiya did.