Stalin and His Hangmen

Liberating Europe

IN 1944–5, AS THE WAR ENDED, Beria’s NKVD met resistance even on Soviet territory. The Chechens and Crimean Tatars had submitted without a fight, but in the western Ukraine and the Baltic states, particularly Lithuania, there was desperate partisan resistance. It would take the NKVD nine years to liquidate the Ukrainian nationalists and the Lithuanian “green brotherhood,” who had been joined by deserters from the Red Army and were supported by men of the Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa), whom the Soviets had first betrayed and then turned on. In six months’ mopping up after the German retreat, 40,000 Ukrainians were killed and nearly as many taken prisoner. Beria let Bogdan Kobulov and Lavrenti Tsanava, his commissar in Belorussia, run this antiguerrilla war. Some 200,000 Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Poles were killed in 1944–5; the NKVD lost fewer than 3,000 men.

In the recaptured Baltic states, Beria resumed the arrests and deportations interrupted in June 1941. About 100,000 kulaks were deported from the Baltic to Siberia. All ethnic groups other than Lithuanians and their Russian colonizers were deported from Lithuania. In Latvia 2,000 “forest cats” and other guerrilla groups fought the NKVD. There were massive reprisals. Estonia offered less armed resistance, but still lost most of its remaining intellectuals and middle class to the Siberian camps.

In summer 1944, with the Red Army back in Poland and Stalin determined to consolidate his conquests of 1939–40, Beria was fully stretched. As the German troops retreated, followed by millions of civilians fleeing East Prussia, the Armija Krajowa, loyal to the Polish government in London, tried to take control. This partisan army, supplied with light weapons, radios, and uniforms by British and American airplanes, numbered over a quarter of a million. For them the Red Army were occupiers, not liberators, though the Poles recognized the Soviets’ right to pursue the Germans across Poland. The USSR had broken off relations with the London government and the Armija Krajowa in 1943, when the latter had accused the NKVD of the Katyn murders.

When the Red Army entered Vilnius, helped by two Polish partisan regiments, the eighty-year-old Polish bishop greeted them with a cross in his outstretched hands. He was arrested by the NKVD. The Poles were told that Vilnius was now the Lithuanian capital, even though the Lithuanians had collaborated with the Germans in exterminating the Jews and oppressing the Poles, who had together been the ethnic majorities in the city. The Red Army was accompanied by its own puppet Polish Ministry of Security and army under Zygmunt Berling.

There were so few communist Poles, particularly officers, that this army had been stiffened with Russian officers with Polish surnames. The intelligence service of the communist Polish army was entirely Russian. As the NKVD took over each city they disarmed, arrested, and sometimes shot members of the Armija Krajowa. Ivan Serov, Beria’s deputy in Poland, branded the Armija Krajowa criminals and British agents. Serov could not cope with all Poland. In Lublin and Łódź, for example, Viktor Abakumov of SMERSH and Lavrenti Tsanava of the NKVD worked in parallel. Their main concern was ethnic homogenization: tens of thousands of Belorussians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians, as well as millions of Germans, were deported from Poland, while similar numbers of Poles were driven out of the Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania. This cleansing accorded with the Armija Krajowa’s nationalism, but did not reconcile them to communist rule.

In summer 1944 the Armija Krajowa led an uprising in Warsaw against the Germans, banking on help from the Red Army dug in on the opposite bank of the Vistula. However, the Soviets chose to watch idly as the Germans brought in heavy artillery and over two months destroyed Polish resistance and, block by block, Warsaw itself. After the surrender of General Bór-Komorowski, the new commander of the Armija Krajowa, General Leopold Okulicki, disbanded his men into autonomous partisan groups.

By the time the Soviets reached Berlin, Beria’s men had arrested 27,000 Poles, mostly resistance fighters against the Germans. The unreliability of the puppet Lublin Polish forces, who deserted to their families or to the partisans at the first opportunity, forced Beria and Serov to use cunning. In March 1945 Beria had Serov invite General Okulicki and seven key figures in the Polish resistance to talks with the NKVD at which, guaranteed immunity from arrest, they would meet a General Ivanov and fly with him to London to reach a compromise between the London and Lublin governments with the terms agreed by Russian, American, and British representatives. On March 28 the eight Poles were taken to an airport. There was no General Ivanov; the plane flew them to Moscow, where they went straight to the Lubianka to be interrogated by Beria’s deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov. They were followed by 113 other Poles. Okulicki had been in the hands of the NKVD before, from 1939 to 1941 in Lwów. He confessed that he had been waiting for the war to end in order to join with the British in a battle against the USSR. On June 18 sixteen Poles were tried by Ulrikh, who was for this delicate occasion restrained, on Stalin’s orders, by Molotov, Beria, and Vyshinsky. The Poles were allowed defense lawyers; the sentences were mild. Leopold Okulicki came off worst with ten years’ imprisonment. However, Okulicki and two others soon died in prison. Poland had had the first taste of the techniques Beria and Abakumov would use all over eastern Europe to secure Stalin’s control.

Bolesław Bierut’s government was nervous about reaction to Okulicki’s fate and interceded for Armija Krajowa members and for judges, professors, schoolboys, and others among the thousands arrested. Stalin granted most an amnesty. Bierut’s government included a number of Jews; endemic Polish anti-Semitism flared up. In Kraków Polish policemen joined in a pogrom. On July 4, 1946, in Kielce, a runaway Polish child, Henryk Blaszczyk, was induced by state security officers to say that he was fleeing from Jews who meant to eat him. A crowd of some 15,000, again led by policemen, slaughtered forty-two Jews. These pogroms, which in total killed perhaps 2,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, were led by Poles who saw Jews and communists as one and the same. A 1947 leaflet in Bydgoszcz declared, “a handful of degenerate Jews have taken over the state.” But the Soviet-backed Polish Ministry of Security joined the frenzy: one of its bulletins read, “Once again a nine-year-old girl has disappeared. It may be that Jews from Rzeszów have eaten her. . . .” Poles complained that Russian films had been dubbed into Polish by Jews so the Soviet authorities employed ’s widow and son to check the dubbing actors for Jewish accents.

Other countries that the Red Army invaded caused the NKVD fewer headaches. In Bulgaria elections were rigged to give Dimitrov’s communists and their Soviet advisers control by the end of 1945. In Czechoslovakia, where even noncommunists revered Stalin as the leader of the Slavs and the USSR as the sole country that had not betrayed them at Munich, the survivors of the prewar communist party, strengthened by the Moscow nominees Gottwald and Clementis, needed less assistance than Polish communists and infiltrated Eduard Beneš’s social democrat government. The communists took over policing, public and secret, and banished or murdered politicians who stood in their way. The Red Army and the NKVD helped the Czechs in their most popular enterprise: to drive out 3 million Germans from the Sudetenland. The government handed over the land to Czech peasants and the factories to Red Army engineers for dismantling and removal to the USSR.

By the end of 1944, the Soviet authorities had installed in Romania their nominee Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. As in Czechoslovakia, they needed three years to disable other political parties. (One minister, Gheorghe Tatarescu, said, “We shall put some in prison, liquidate others, and the rest we shall deport.”) Romania, unlike Poland or Czechoslovakia, was not to be ethnically homogenized: the Hungarian-speaking west of the country was kept intact, and many Romanian Jews had survived. Stalin insisted on Gheorghiu-Dej giving ministerial posts to a Jew, Ana Pauker, and an ethnic Hungarian, Vasile Luca—although both were soon purged.

Hungary, as a German ally, was treated with special caution. The British and American contingents on the Allied Control Commission and a shortage of skilled NKVD operators slowed Stalin’s takeover. Elections in 1945 were free and resulted in a majority for a peasant-based smallholders’ party. For two years Hungary seemed destined for the happy neutral status of Finland, where the prospect of serious armed conflict and of bad relations with Sweden kept Stalin from using force. In Hungary, however, which the Allies had tacitly assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence, there was no reason not to apply the salami tactics used on Czechoslovakia.

Viktor Abakumov’s SMERSH, far worse informed than Beria’s NKVD, followed the Red Army into Hungary. There Abakumov made a blunder whose repercussions for Soviet foreign policy were as baleful as the murders committed by Beria and Merkulov at Katyn. In Budapest Abakumov detained Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish consul who had saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the camps. He was sent to the Lubianka. In Soviet eyes he had been an intermediary between the Germans and Americans exploring the possibility of a separate peace. Wallenberg had also helped the Soviets barter valuable metals and had played a part in Finnish–Russian negotiations. Nikolai Bulganin, then reporting to Stalin as deputy minister of defense, signed the order for Wallenberg’s arrest. When SMERSH was wound up and Abakumov became minister of state security on May 4, 1946, Wallenberg remained his prisoner. Wallenberg, according to Pavel Sudoplatov, was interrogated forcefully at Lefortovo prison then housed in the Lubianka and invited to become a Soviet agent. He refused. On Molotov and Vyshinsky’s instructions, Wallenberg was killed, probably by a lethal injection from the toxicologist Professor Grigori Mairanovsky in the laboratory adjoining the Lubianka on July 17, 1947, and cremated. The Soviet cover-up was inept: claims that Wallenberg had suffered a fatal heart attack were undermined by Dekanozov blurting out to the Swedes immediately after Wallenberg’s arrest that he was in the Lubianka. Like the Katyn murders, Wallenberg’s murder was obfuscated by the Soviets for another forty years and the records of his interrogation have almost certainly been destroyed. ²⁰

Beria’s main task in 1945–6 was to install a Soviet regime in each of the conquered territories. Viktor Abakumov’s was easier, if equally large in its scale: SMERSH had to repatriate about 4 million Soviet citizens— and some wretched ethnic Russian noncitizens—from western and central Europe. The largest contingent were the 1,836,000 surviving POWs. Despite their fragile state they went to filtration camps, and from there mostly to the GULAG as “traitors to the motherland.” The next largest contingent were Ukrainians and Russians, largely women, sent to Germany as forced labor. Only those who had at least two children by marriage to a foreigner escaped repatriation; the rest suffered the same fate as POWs, no matter how involuntary their stay in Germany. To aid the war effort Beria had reduced the number held in the GULAG from nearly 2 million in January 1941 to just over 1 million by January 1946. Abakumov’s SMERSH repatriated so many Soviet citizens that by the end of 1949 the GULAG’s population had climbed to an official 2,561,351. As in 1938 and 1942, so in 1947 the GULAG could not cope: the annual mortality rate doubled to nearly 4 percent. In 1947 alone 66,830 prisoners died.

Abakumov was especially harsh to Soviet citizens and ethnic Russians who had fought on the German side. Unlike those Poles and Hungarians who had served with the Germans, they were not treated as POWs. The Russian Liberation Army formed by General Vlasov was handed over to the Soviets in its entirety, even though the British and Americans knew that Vlasovites were being executed on the dockside in Odessa and in the filtration camps in Austria. Vlasov’s men in some cases had turned against the Germans: the Vlasov army had liberated Prague before Marshal Konev’s men entered the city and on the island of Texel in Holland Georgian Vlasovites had allied themselves with the Dutch resistance. The Allies’ return of the Vlasovites was legally dubious and morally wicked.

Worse, in July 1945, the Allies handed over at Judenburg and Sankt Valentin 50,000 Cossacks and White Russians, together with their women and children, who had never been citizens of the USSR. Individual Cossacks had been guilty of atrocities, particularly against Serbs, but in an operation worthy of Stalin, a whole community was sent for extermination. The menfolk were killed before they reached the GULAG; the women and children were in eastern Siberia by October 1945. All traces vanish after 1949. Cossack commanders, who had operated under General von Panwitz, were personally interrogated by Abakumov and their statements read by Molotov and Stalin before they were tried. They were hanged in January 1947.