Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

…Following the order of the new Minister Abakumov, in 1946 Eitingon and I were put in charge of organizing and heading the Special Service of the MGB of the USSR [i.e., Department “DR”]… Our task included organization of the special intelligence through [a network of] agents abroad and within the country. In particular, following the special order of the Politburo of the C[entral] C[ommittee], we prepared terrorist operations in France, Turkey, and Iran. However, at the last moment we were ordered to postpone them. Within the country during the second part of 1946 and in 1947, four operations were performed. 306

To fulfill these operations, Abakumov also received orders from the Politburo and the Central Committee. As Sudoplatov stated in his appeal, “Eitingon and I knew very well that Abakumov reported the results of operations conducted by the MGB Special Service [i.e., Department “DR”] to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party.” 307

This activity was so secret that Mairanovsky’s superior at the time, Zhelezov, was not aware of it. As Mairanovsky put it in a letter to MVD minister Beria on April 21, 1953, from Vladimir Prison, “I had no right to inform my superiors, including the former Department Head Zhelezov, about my additional job, which continued until 1950 (only you, V. N. Merkulov, and P. A. Sudoplatov knew about this job).” 308

In the summer of 1946, a leader of the Ukrainian nationalistic movement, Aleksandr Shumsky, was killed by Mairanovsky by an injection of curare poison, at a hospital in Saratov (where he was in exile). 309From 1924 to 1933, Shumsky was Ukrainian commissar of education. In January 1933, he was accused of Ukrainian nationalism and arrested. From 1946, Shumsky lived in exile in Saratov. Before he was executed, Shumsky wrote a personal letter to Stalin in which he protested against the Soviet policy regarding Ukrainians. He even tried to commit suicide to attract attention to his appeal. 310Allegedly, in 1946 Shumsky was in contact with Ukrainian nationalists in Kiev and abroad. According to Sudoplatov, this execution of Shumsky was under personal supervision of Abakumov, and the group of executioners consisted of Mairanovsky, his supervisor Ogol’tsov, who was first deputy MGB minister, and Lazar Kaganovich, a Politburo member and the Ukrainian first party secretary from March to December 1947, who had personally known Shumsky. 311

The next victim was Archbishop Romzha of the Ukrainian Catholic (Uniate) Church. The Ukrainian MGB, under the supervision of Ukrainian MGB minister Sergei Savchenko, staged an unsuccessful car accident in 1947, and the archbishop was taken to a local hospital in the town of Mukachevo. 312He was killed by an injection of curare provided by Mairanovsky and administered by a medical nurse, an MGB agent. 313In his memoirs published in Russian, Sudoplatov claimed that before going to Mukachevo for the execution of the archbishop, Mairanovsky and Savchenko were being instructed in Kiev by then by the first Communist Party secretary of the Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev personally, who supposedly had already received Stalin’s approval of the assassination. 314Savchenko was awarded for the successful execution: He was transferred to Moscow and appointed deputy chairman of the Committee of Information.

The same year a Polish engineer of Jewish origin, Samet, was abducted and killed by Sudoplatov’s team in the city of Ul’yanovsk. Samet had been interned in the Soviet Union since 1939 (due to the Hitler-Stalin division of Poland) and according to MGB information, was arranging his defection to Britain in 1947. Mairanovsky again administered the lethal injection of curare. 315Later, Sudoplatov claimed that Stalin and Minister of Defense Nikolai Bulganin had ordered the killing. 316Finally, an American citizen and a Gulag prisoner, Isaac Oggins, was killed in Moscow in 1947. Copies of several documents, which evidently came from Oggins’s investigation file, were released by the FSB in 1992 and given by the Russian side (Colonel General Dmitrii Volkogonov) of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIA Affairs to the American side. 317Although these documents provide some light on the mechanism of Mairanovsky’s executions, they also raise unanswered questions.

In the appeal to the Twenty-Third Congress of the Communist Party, Sudoplatov mentioned the killing of Oggins as the fourth assassination he and Eitingon took part in:

In Moscow, following orders of Stalin and Molotov, an American citizen Oggins was liquidated. Oggins, being imprisoned in a labor camp during WWII, contacted the American Embassy in the USSR [Moscow]. Many times Americans sent [diplomatic] notes asking for his release from the imprisonment and for a permission for him to leave the USSR for the United States. 318

According to Sudoplatov’s memoirs, “Oggins was a Communist sympathizer and a member of the American Communist Party. He was also a veteran agent of the Comintern and NKVD intelligence in China and the Far East. His wife, Nora, was a member of the NKVD intelligence network in charge of controlling safe apartments in France in the mid-1930s.” 319Oggins was not the only American put into the Gulag during and after World War II. 320In 1938, Oggins arrived in the Soviet Far East under false Czechoslovak documents and was arrested by the NKVD. Oggins had different aliases. In Bobryonev and Ryazentsev, he is mentioned as “Saines.” 321On the photos released by the FSB and taken, apparently, from his investigation file, there is an inscription: “Egon-Ogens Hain-San Samon” (possibly, the last name was Oggins’s NKVD alias in China). This inscription starts with “No. 568,” which is probably the number under which Oggins was registered in the prison’s Registration Book of Arrested Persons. 322The “Warrant for the Arrest and Search” No. 2634 was issued for “Hein Egon, also Oggins Isai (Sai) Saimonovich.” 323The “Certificate of Rehabilitation” (dated 1992) was issued to “Oggins-Hein Isai Saimonovich.” 324

The NKVD arrested Oggins on February 20, 1939. At the time, as many members of the Comintern did, he lived in the Moscow Hotel in the center of Moscow (room number 1035). 325On January 5, 1940, he was tried by the Special Board of the NKVD (OSO). The “Excerpt” from the Protocol [Transcript] No. 1 of the OSO stated:

Hearing: 3. Case No. 85 of the GUGB Investigation Department of the NKVD for Oggins Isai Samoilovich [sic!] , born 1898 in Massachusetts (USA), a Jew, an American citizen.

Decision: Oggins Isai Saimonovich [this is in the text] is guilty of spying and was condemned to an imprisonment for 8 years. The term starts from February 20, 1939. The File should be kept in the archive.

Two letters, “am.,” were typed at the left side of the document above the text. Apparently, this meant the “American spy.” On January 15, 1940, ten days after the trial, Oggins signed a notification that a NKVD officer had acquainted him with this decision. 327Another document, a report written by MGB minister Abakumov in May 1947 and addressed to Stalin and Molotov, confirms this information. 328It also describes the plan Abakumov suggested to deal with Oggins’s situation.

Despite the typewritten name “Abakumov” at the bottom of the document, it does not have the MGB letterhead; it was addressed to the USSR Council of Ministers. This is strange because beginning in February 1947, the activity of the MGB was controlled and approved by the Politburo, while the activity of the MVD was controlled by the Council of Ministers. 329The report was typed with blank spaces indicated by underlines, which later were filled in by hand. Possibly, this was done so that the typist would not see certain key words (this was a routine practice for secret documents in the Soviet Union). 330The geneticist Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky, who in the late 1940s–1950s worked at a secret institute as an imprisoned scientist, described in his memoirs how the secret documents were prepared: