The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Molodtsov’s end may well have been genuinely heroic. According to the official Soviet version, he was captured by the enemy in July 1942 but refused to beg for his life, courageously telling his captors, “We are in our own country and will not ask the enemy for mercy.”⁴⁶ The rest of the history of the Odessa catacombs, however, was an NKVD horror story. After Molodtsov’s execution, Kuznetsov disarmed his detachment and put them under guard inside the catacombs. All but one, N. F. Abramov, were executed on Kuznetsov’s orders on charges of plotting against him. As conditions in the catacombs deteriorated, the Odessans then proceeded to fall out among themselves. The dwindling food supply became moldy; and, with their kerosene almost exhausted, the detachment was forced to live in semidarkness. On August 28 Kuznetsov shot one of his men, Molochny, for the theft of a piece of bread. On September 27 two others, Polschikov and Kovalchuk, were executed for stealing food and “lack of sexual discipline.” Fearing that he might be shot next, Abramov killed Kuznetsov a month later. In his notebook, later discovered in the catacombs and preserved in the KGB Odessa file, Abramov wrote:

The former head of the Third Special Department of the Odessa district of the NKVD, State Security Lieutenant V. A. Kuznetsov, was shot by me with two bullets in the temple in the underground “Mirror Factory” [the base in the catacombs] on October 21, 1942.

By this time, following several other deaths at the hands of the enemy, only three NKVD officers remained alive in the catacombs: Abramov, Glushchenko and Litvinov. Abramov and Glushchenko together killed Litvinov, then began to eye each other suspiciously in the semi-darkness.

Glushchenko wrote in his diary that Abramov wanted to surrender: “We are beaten. There is no victory to wait for. He told me not to be frightened of committing treason or being shot as he has friends in German intelligence.” On February 18, 1943, apparently suffering from hallucinations, Glushchenko wrote, “[Abramov] was bending over, attending to his papers. I took my pistol from my belt and shot him in the back of the head.” Over the next few months Glushchenko spent much of his time outside the catacombs in his wife’s Odessa flat, finally abandoning the underground base on November 10, 1943. After the liberation of Odessa by the Red Army in April 1945 Glushchenko returned with members of the Ukrainian NKVD to collect equipment and compromising papers from the catacombs, but was fatally wounded when a grenade he picked up exploded in his hands.⁴⁷

For almost twenty years, the Centre believed that no survivor of the Odessa catacombs remained to cast doubt on the heroic myth it had constructed. In 1963, however, the KGB was disconcerted to discover that Abramov had not been killed by Glushchenko after all, but had escaped and was living in France. His father, who may also have known the true story of the Odessa catacombs, was reported to have emigrated to the United States. Abramov’s supposed widow, Nina Abramova, who had been working in the KGB First Chief Directorate, was quietly transferred to another job. The myth of the NKVD heroes of the Odessa catacombs was left undisturbed.⁴⁸

According to statistics in KGB files, the NKVD ran a total of 2,222 “operational combat groups” behind enemy lines during the Great Patriotic War.⁴⁹ Mitrokhin found no realistic appraisal, however, of the effectiveness of partisan warfare. Contrary to the claims of post-war Soviet hagiographers, the combat groups seem only rarely to have tied down German forces larger than themselves.⁵⁰ Because about half of all partisans were NKVD personnel or Party officials, they were frequently regarded with acute suspicion by the peasant population on whom they depended for local support. The virtual collapse of partisan warfare in the western Ukraine, for example, was due largely to the hostility of the inhabitants to the Party and the NKVD. Though partisan warfare became more effective after Stalingrad, there were important areas—notably Crimea and the steppes—where it never became a significant factor in the fighting on the eastern front.⁵¹