Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII by Vadim Birstein

Author:Vadim Birstein [Birstein, Vadim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, Political Science, Espionage, Modern, 20th Century, World War II
ISBN: 9781849546898
Google: kg2uAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00G8OBMG8
Barnesnoble: B00G8OBMG8
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2013-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

In September 1939, Meshik was appointed head of the Investigation Unit of the NKVD Main Economic Directorate. At his trial in December 1953, Meshik claimed that he was not responsible for the interrogation methods he used (note that he talks about himself in the third person): ‘I think the problem is not how many prisoners Kobulov and Meshik have beaten up, but that they did beat them up… I think that Beria’s low trick and disgusting crime was that he persuaded interrogators that the Instantsiya allowed and approved the beatings [of course, Stalin did approve the torture]… Interrogators, including myself, used beatings and torture thinking it was the right thing to do.’82 The word ‘Instantsiya’ that Meshik used was an important term in the Party jargon of Stalin’s bureaucrats. As Stalin’s biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore noted, Instantsiya was ‘an almost magical euphemism for the Highest Authority’.83 It was used in official documents and speeches to indicate Stalin or, sometimes, the Politburo. In other words, NKVD/MGB officials never said that Stalin gave them an order; they said the Instantsiya did.

As previously mentioned, in March 1940 Meshik headed an operational NKVD group that arrived in the just-occupied Lvov Province.84 This was one of eleven NKVD groups sent to the former Polish territory to ‘cleanse’ (an NKVD term) it of ‘anti-Soviet elements’. A month later Meshik was decorated with the military Red Star Order, possibly for this action.

In February 1941, Meshik was appointed NKGB Commissar of Ukraine even though, like Abakumov, he was only thirty-one years old. Meshik reported to Moscow on the nationalistic underground Ukrainian movement in the newly acquired former Polish territories and on the movements of German troops in the Nazi-occupied part of Poland.85 Apparently, Moscow was impressed by Meshik’s activity because in May 1941, he received the Honored NKVD Worker medal.

The day after Operation Barbarossa began, Meshik was able to give Nikita Khrushchev, then Ukrainian first Party secretary, detailed information from secret informers regarding the local reaction to the invasion.86 A few days later, the Ukrainian NKGB began to arrest people who had criticized the response of Soviet leaders to the German invasion. During the first days of the war, 473 political prisoners, whose executions Merkulov approved in Moscow on Meshik’s request, were shot to death in Kiev’s prisons.87

In July 1941, in the middle of the battle for Kiev, Meshik went back to Moscow, where he was appointed head of the Economic Directorate (EKU) of the new NKVD.88 In February 1943, he was promoted to State Security Commissar of the 3rd Rank and, finally, on April 19, 1943, he became deputy head of SMERSH.

It is possible that Abakumov was forced to choose Meshik as a deputy since a difficult relationship developed almost immediately between them. Much later, in August 1948, Ivan Serov, first deputy MVD minister, reported to Stalin that ‘in 1943, Abakumov told me that he would eventually shoot Meshik, no matter what’.89 No doubt Abakumov considered Meshik to be Beria’s spy. In turn, Meshik despised Abakumov. After Abakumov was arrested in 1951, Meshik called him ‘an adventurer’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.