As previously mentioned, in March 1940 Meshik headed an operational NKVD group that arrived in the just-occupied Lvov Province.84 This was one of eleven NKVD groups sent to the former Polish territory to ‘cleanse’ (an NKVD term) it of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. A month later Meshik was decorated with the military Red Star Order, possibly for this action.
In February 1941, Meshik was appointed NKGB Commissar of Ukraine even though, like Abakumov, he was only thirty-one years old. Meshik reported to Moscow on the nationalistic underground Ukrainian movement in the newly acquired former Polish territories and on the movements of German troops in the Nazi-occupied part of Poland.85 Apparently, Moscow was impressed by Meshik’s activity because in May 1941, he received the Honored NKVD Worker medal.
The day after Operation Barbarossa began, Meshik was able to give Nikita Khrushchev, then Ukrainian first Party secretary, detailed information from secret informers regarding the local reaction to the invasion.86 A few days later, the Ukrainian NKGB began to arrest people who had criticized the response of Soviet leaders to the German invasion. During the first days of the war, 473 political prisoners, whose executions Merkulov approved in Moscow on Meshik’s request, were shot to death in Kiev’s prisons.87
In July 1941, in the middle of the battle for Kiev, Meshik went back to Moscow, where he was appointed head of the Economic Directorate (EKU) of the new NKVD.88 In February 1943, he was promoted to State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank and, finally, on April 19, 1943, he became deputy head of SMERSH.
It is possible that Abakumov was forced to choose Meshik as a deputy since a difficult relationship developed almost immediately between them. Much later, in August 1948, Ivan Serov, first deputy MVD minister, reported to Stalin that ‘in 1943, Abakumov told me that he would eventually shoot Meshik, no matter what’.89 No doubt Abakumov considered Meshik to be Beria’s spy. In turn, Meshik despised Abakumov. After Abakumov was arrested in 1951, Meshik called him ‘an adventurer’.90
In December 1953, Meshik was tried along with Beria and five of his men, including Merkulov and Kobulov. All of them were sentenced to death and executed on December 23, 1953.
Abakumov’s third deputy, Isai Yakovlevich Babich, was born in 1902 to a Jewish family in the small Ukrainian town of Borislav.91 Although Babich was the only person of Jewish origin close to Abakumov, in the 1990s the German historian Joachim Hoffmann mistakenly wrote that Abakumov ‘surrounded himself with a whole group of Jewish collaborators’.92
In 1920, Babich joined the local branch of the CheKa in the city of Nikolaev and made a slow but steady advance within the CheKa, and then the NKVD of Ukraine. From December 1936 till August 1937, he headed the OO of the NKVD Directorate of Kiev Province, and in January 1938, Babich was promoted to acting head of this directorate. In other words, Babich supervised all arrests of military personnel during the Great Terror in Kiev Province, and in December 1937 he was awarded the Red Banner Order—apparently for this activity. In February 1938, he was transferred to the OO in Moscow, where he headed several sections.
Finally, in September 1940, Babich was appointed head of the OO of the Baltic Military District, which was created from the territory of the three just-annexed Baltic States: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. As head of military counterintelligence, he was in charge of the numerous arrests of high-ranking officers of the former armies of these states.
At the beginning of the war, Babich was a deputy head, and from May 1942 onwards, head of the OO of the Northwestern Front. In February 1943, he was promoted to State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank (Major General). As Abakumov’s deputy, Babich was responsible for SMERSH operations that sent agents behind enemy lines. The summer and autumn of 1945, when he headed SMERSH units in the Russian Far East during the short military campaign against Japan, were the highest point in his SMERSH career. After the war Babich became deputy head of the 3rd MGB Main Directorate (as SMERSH was called after it became part of the MGB in 1946), and he held that position until his death in 1948.
Besides the three operational deputies, Stalin appointed a fourth deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Vradii, to head the SMERSH Personnel Department.93 In Abakumov’s MGB, Vradii also headed the Personnel Directorate. After Abakumov’s arrest in 1951, Vradii was demoted to head of the labor department in the Ukhto-Izhemsk Labor Camp Directorate attached to the USSR Justice Ministry. In 1954, Vradii was accused of embezzling 26,000 rubles for the renovation of his apartment and transferred to the reserve.
On May 26, 1943 the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia published an order signed by Stalin assigning all SMERSH leaders actual military ranks.94 Selivanovsky, Meshik, Babich, and Pavel Zelenin became lieutenant generals, while Vradii and thirty-four of Abakumov’s assistants, along with the heads and deputy heads of SMERSH front directorates, became major generals.95 Curiously, only Abakumov was not given military rank during the war, even though he often wore a Red Army uniform. He remained State Security Commissar of the 2nd Rank, equivalent to Colonel General in the army.
The Personnel
Many officers of the GUKR SMERSH, especially investigators, were former mid-level OO officers. They had participated in the fabrication of cases during the Great Terror and survived the purges of that period, which wiped out the OO leadership. For instance, almost all low-level members of Izrail Leplevsky’s investigation team of about thirty officers, who created the 1937 Tukhachevsky case, continued their service.96 Two of Abakumov’s deputies, Selivanovsky and Babich, were veterans of the old OO.
The career of Vladimir Kazakevich, who from 1943 to 1945 was deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 2nd Belorussian and then of the 4th Ukrainian fronts, was typical of mid-level SMERSH officers.97 Nicola Sinevirsky recalled Kazakevich at the end of the war: ‘He was a tall man, heavyset of frame. His twisted nose gave his face a fierce look, and made almost everybody afraid of him. He was a severe and exacting officer.’98 In 1928, Kazakevich started working for the Ukrainian GPU as a secret agent, reporting on his fellow students at the Kharkov Institute of People’s Industry. As he wrote in 1948, ‘they were imprisoned due to my reports as an agent’.99 Later he joined the Ukrainian NKVD, but in 1937 he was transferred to Moscow, to the 4th GUGB (secret-political) Department. Then, in 1938, he was moved to the 5th GUGB (OO) Department.100
Before long, Kazakevich became known in Beria’s NKVD as one of the most efficient and ruthless investigators.101 Over a short period, he falsified at least eleven cases against high-level military men, including Marshal Aleksandr Yegorov and Komandarm Ivan Belov, who were sentenced to death. One of them, Komdiv N. F. Sevastiyanov, described Kazakevich’s methods in a letter to Stalin: ‘Captain Kazakevich used to hit me in the face so badly that I flew through the room. He punched me in the chin, under my ribs, and hit my knees with the heels of his boots… He forced me to lie down on a chair and then beat me with a rubber truncheon while knowing well that I had an inflamed liver… Also he beat me up with a truncheon while I was lying on the floor… During the three months that I was in Lefortovo Prison, I slept not more than an hour a day.’102 Other victims also made statements about the torture Kazakevich inflicted on them. The arrested Corps Commissar A. I. Zabirko wrote: ‘Kazakevich told me that he would beat me up until my ribs were broken or I became insane.’103 Most probably, Kazakevich used these torture methods later, in SMERSH.