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

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.