The Military Collegium sentenced Sevastiyanov to death in July 1941, after the war had begun. At the time, Kazakevich was deputy head of the 3rd NKVD Department and then deputy head of OOs and, later, UKRs of various fronts. In November 1944, Kazakevich, together with Abakumov, cleansed the Bialystok region of Poland of members of the underground Armija Krajowa. For his activity, he received twenty-four military awards. Kazakevich retired in 1948.
In 1956, while being asked in the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office about Sevastiyanov, Kazakevich refused to admit that he had tortured him. As a result of the prosecutor’s reinvestigation of the Sevastiyanov case, Kazakevich was expelled from the Party, and two years later, his military pension was reduced by half as a punishment for his falsification of cases, although he had never been criminally charged.
This was quite typical. Kazakevich’s superior, Nikolai Kovalchuk, head of the UKR SMERSH of the 4th Ukrainian front, was also a brutal torturer. In 1937, in Tbilisi, Aslamazov, the arrested Komsomol secretary, jumped out a window during terrible beatings by Kovalchuk, a member of the Secret-Political Department in the Georgian NKVD.104 Soon Kovalchuk continued his successful career in Moscow, then in the UOO and SMERSH. After the war he even rose to deputy state security minister. Only in 1954 was Kovalchuk forced to retire and deprived of his lieutenant general rank for the ‘activity of discrediting an officer’, a Party euphemism that described torture used by a high-ranking security officer.
To prepare the new personnel, special schools for teaching SMERSH officers were opened in 1943: two in Moscow, for 600 and 200 students respectively, and four more in the cities of Tashkent (300 students); Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg; 200 students); and one each in the Siberian cities of Novosibirsk and Khabarovsk (200 and 250 students, respectively).105 These schools were established by GKO order and may have represented Stalin’s solution to the problem of unprofessional investigators.106 Later, special military counterintelligence courses in Leningrad and Saratov were also reorganized into schools. Depending on the school, the training lasted from four to nine months. Reserve groups of 50–100 graduates were created at each field SMERSH directorate and at the GUKR in Moscow. Despite these efforts, SMERSH officers remained poorly educated. Nikolai Mesyatsev, one of the SMERSH investigators, recalled in 2005 that ‘investigators were usually recruited from among poorly educated, uncultured people’.107
Everyone who worked in SMERSH was sworn to secrecy. Sinevirsky recalled that before he was allowed to work as a translator in the UKR SMERSH of the 4th Ukrainian Front, he was forced to sign three copies of this pledge:
I hereby promise that never and at no place, even under the threat of capital punishment, will I mention anything of my work in the headquarters of the counterintelligence SMERSH of the Fourth Ukrainian Front. I am aware that should I fail to carry out this promise I will become subject to the severest penalties including the highest measure of punishment—shooting.108
Since SMERSH was formally part of the army, SMERSH officers had the ranks and uniforms of military officers.109 Romanov, a former SMERSH officer, wrote that ‘this was a camouflage measure to make it impossible to distinguish them from the rest of the armed forces’.110 In contrast, the ranks of NKGB and NKVD officers and their special insignias differed from those of the military. Therefore, NKGB and NKVD officers could be identified by their uniforms during World War II but SMERSH officers could not. What made it more confusing was that NKVD troops transported SMERSH prisoners. Typically, foreign POWs did not understand that they were being investigated by SMERSH, a special military counterintelligence service. The only secret service group known at that time in the West was the NKVD, and this has led to a lot of misidentification of SMERSH investigators as NKVD operatives in the memoirs of former POWs.
Notes
1. Abakumov’s description in a questionnaire (anketa) in his Investigation File. Cited in Kirill Stolyarov, Palachi i zhertvy (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1997), 12 (in Russian).
2. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 185.
3. A photo of Abakumov’s handwritten autobiography in SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 108.
4. Yevgenii Tolstykh, Agent Nikto. Iz istorii ‘SMERSH’ (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 2004), 150 (in Russian).
5. If Abakumov doctored information in his biography, he was not the only one. Nikolai Yezhov hid the fact that his mother was not a Russian, but a Lithuanian. Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2002), 2.
6. Romanov, Nights Are Longest, 234.
7. B. V. Sokolov, Narkomy strakha. Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria, Abakumov (Moscow: Ast-Press Kniga, 2001), 304–7 (in Russian).
8. Details in V. L. Krotov, ‘Chonovtsy’ (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1974) (in Russian), http://www.biografia.ru/cgi-bin/quotes.pl?oaction=show&name=material73, retrieved September 7, 2011.
9. Detailed biography of N. I. Podvoisky (1880–1948) in Leonid Mlechin, Russkaya armiya mezhdu Trotskim i Stalinym (Moscow: Tsetropoligraf, 2002), 170–207 (in Russian).
10. Biography of M. N. Tukhachevsky (1893–1937) with new archival materials in Yuliya Kantor, Voina i mir Mikhaila Tukhachevskogo (Moscow: Ogonyok, 2005) (in Russian).
11. Quoted in ibid., 255.
12. Details in Boris Sokolov, Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Zhizn’ i smert’ ‘Krasnogo Marshala’ (Smolensk: Rusich, 1999), 206–28 (in Russian). Tukhachevsky also planned to use chemical weapons against insurgents in March 1921 during the Kronstadt anti-Bolshevik uprising.
13. Mikhail Shreider, NKVD iznutri: zapiski chekista (Moscow: Vozrozhdenie, 1995), 60–61 (in Russian).
14. Boris Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, translation and commentary by David W. Doyle (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990), 167.
15. I. F. Tubala (1897-1938) joined the VCheKa in 1918; in 1937, was head of the 1st Department, Main Directorate of the Border Guards. He was arrested on October 19, 1937 and executed on June 22, 1938. Klim Degtyarev and Aleksandr Kolpakidi, Vneshnyaya razvedka SSSR (Moscow: Eksmo, 2009), 587 (in Russian).
16. Detailed biography of M. S. Kedrov (1878–1941) in I. V. Viktorov, Podpol’shchik, voin, chekist (Moscow: Politizdat, 1963) (in Russian). A short biography of Nina (Antonina) Didrikil’ (1882–1953) (in Russian) at http://www.oval.ru/enc/55323.html, retrieved September 7, 2011.