Viktor Abakumov
http://barnesreview.org/pdf/TBR2008-no6.pdf
M
ore than one disillusioned or discarded Communist could attest to the truth of the observation that the revolution devours its own. Col. Gen. Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, minister of the MGB (Ministry of State Security)1 from 1946 to 1951, was one such victim of the cannibalistic Communist system. Abakumov, a loyal Stalinist, became the target of the political intrigues and ambitions of several of his colleagues, notably Col. Gen. Ivan Serov,Lavrenty Beria and Georgi Malenkov. They saw the upcoming young general and people’s commissar of Lubyanka first as
a competitor for Stalin’s favor and later as an obstacle to their own involvement in the putative murder of the tyrant.
These events were played out from 1946 to the deaths of Stalin and Beria in 1953 against the background of the Doctors
Plot and the tyrant’s plans to institute a new purge to
thwart a perceived threat to his rule on the part of Zionist
agents. At the same time the purge was to be used in a new
struggle, managed by Stalin, to remove some of his oldest associates
from power, thereby further Russifying and rejuvenating
the party leadership. To do this, Stalin would concurrently
have had to rid the secret police agencies of the disproportionate
number of Beria’s associates entrenched in
those agencies, many of whom were Jewish.
Unlike his predecessors in the office of the head of the secret
police (Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria,
Merkulov), Abakumov was an ethnic Russian. He was born in
Moscow, in 1894.
Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov, his immediate predecessor
(in 1946), had a Georgian mother and his early experience
was in Georgia, after which he became (and remained)
a deputy to and allied with Beria.
Abakumov rose rapidly in the intelligence hierarchy during
the purges and the war period. At age 33Abakumov was
made head of Soviet military counterintelligence, called
SMERSH (Death to Spies), which included “OO” (Osobyy
Otdel), special units of the NKVD whose responsibility in the
broadest sense was to counter enemy intelligence activities
and ensure the political reliability of the Soviet armed forces.
When Stalin separated SMERSH from the NKVD, Abakumov
became a direct deputy to Stalin in the top echelons of
power and a rival to Beria.
Tasks of SMERSH included: the prevention of infiltration
by Abwehr agents (including émigré Russians collaborating
with the Germans); stabilization of the war front by
punishing deserters, “panic-mongers”
and cowards; running double agents,
conducting “radio games”; vetting and
dealing with Russians who had been
German POWs as well as with captured
members of Vlasov’s forces, Soviet citizens
who had any contact with the Germans
etc. In short, the elimination of all
possible anti-Soviet elements.
Abakumov reduced desertions and
retreats by setting up blocking detachments
(
zagradotryady) that routinely machine-gunned RedArmy men caught attempting to flee the front. Other Red
Army men and “criminal civilians” “shirking their duty” were
assigned to “
shtraf” or military punishment units that wereused to perform the most dangerous (usually suicidal) operations.
Abwehr attempts to infiltrate agents behind enemy
lines were almost always foiled. Gen. Ernst August Koestring,
the prewar German military attaché to Moscow, best expressed
the futility of such efforts: “It is more likely that an
Arab with a burnoose can walk through Berlin undetected
than a foreign agent through Russia.”1
During the war SMERSH, as the most important counterintelligence
asset of the Red Army, expended considerable
time and resources engaging in “radio-games” with German
military intelligence—the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst.
A major effort in combating the German “Zeppelin” Operation
and the infiltration of German Abwehr commandos was
the Soviet “Zagadka” Program, run by SMERSH.2
Commencing from 1944, when the RedArmy crossed its
own borders and proceeded into Eastern Europe, SMERSH
and its parent organization, the NKVD, undertook to physically