Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

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.