Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The reassurance about Japanese intentions provided by SIGINT enabled Stalin to shift to the west half the divisional strength of the Far Eastern Command. During October and November 1941, between eight and ten rifle divisions, together with about a thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft, were flung into the fight against Germany. These forces, together with other Red Army divisions which had been held in reserve, may well have saved the Soviet Union from defeat. As Professor Richard Overy concludes in his study of the eastern front, “It was not the tough winter conditions that halted the German army [in December 1941] but the remarkable revival of Soviet military manpower after the terrible maulings of the summer and autumn.” 37

As well as providing reassurance that Japan did not propose to attack the Soviet Union, SIGINT also gave indications of its move towards war with Britain and the United States, though the diplomatic decrypts contained no mention of plans for a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A decrypted telegram from Tokyo to its Berlin embassy (probably copied to the Moscow embassy) on November 27, 1941, ten days before Pearl Harbor, instructed the ambassador:

See Hitler and Ribbentrop, and explain to them in secret our relations with the United States… Explain to Hitler that the main Japanese efforts will be concentrated in the south and that we propose to refrain from deliberate operations in the north [against the Soviet Union]. 38

Soviet cryptanalysts, however, were unable to match the success of the British wartime SIGINT agency at Bletchley Park in breaking the main high-grade ciphers used by the German armed forces. They failed to do so partly for technological reasons. Soviet intelligence was unable to construct the powerful electronic “bombs,” first constructed at Bletchley Park in 1940 to break the daily settings of the German Enigma machine cipher. It was even further from being able to replicate COLOSSUS, the world’s first electronic computer used by Bletchley from 1943 to decrypt the Geheimschreiber messages (radio signals based on teleprinter impulses enciphered and deciphered automatically) which for the last two years of the war yielded more operational intelligence than the Enigma traffic. But there was a human as well as a technological explanation for the inferiority of Soviet to British SIGINT. The Soviet system would never have tolerated the remarkable infusion of unconventional youthful talent on which much of Bletchley’s success was built. Alan Turing—the brilliant eccentric who buried his life savings (converted into silver ingots) in the Bletchley Woods, forgot where he had hidden them, but went on to be chiefly responsible for the invention of COLOSSUS—was one of many British cryptanalysts who would surely have been incapable of conforming to the political correctness demanded by the Stalinist system. 39Some British ULTRA—the SIGINT derived from decrypting high-grade enemy traffic—was, however, passed officially to Moscow in a disguised form, and in an undisguised form by several Soviet agents. 40

JUST AS THE KGB later sought to take refuge from the horrors of its Stalinist past by constructing a Leninist golden age of revolutionary purity, so it also sought to reinvent its record during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-5 as one of selfless heroism—best exemplified by its role in special operations and partisan warfare behind enemy lines. According to Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, head of the wartime NKVD Directorate for Special Tasks and Guerrilla Warfare, “This chapter in NKVD history is the only one that was not officially rewritten, since its accomplishments stood on their own merit and did not contain Stalinist crimes that had to be covered up.” 41In reality, the NKVD’s wartime record, like the rest of its history, was extensively doctored.

Among the best-publicized examples of the NKVD’s bravery behind enemy lines were the heroic deeds of its detachment in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa during the 907-day occupation by German and Romanian forces. The detachment based itself in the catacombs there, a maze of underground tunnels used to excavate sandstone for the construction of the elegant nineteenth-century buildings which still line many of Odessa’s streets and boulevards. With over a thousand kilometers of unmapped tunnels as well as numerous entrances and exits, the catacombs made an almost ideal base for partisan warfare. In 1969, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of VE Day, a section of the catacombs on the outskirts of Odessa was opened as the Museum of Partisan Glory, which throughout the remainder of the Soviet era received over a million visitors a year. 42

After the Second World War, however, the sometimes heroic story of the struggle to liberate Odessa from enemy occupation was hijacked by the KGB to refurbish its dubious wartime record. Pride of place in the Museum of Partisan Glory is given to the exploits of the NKVD detachment headed by Captain Vladimir Aleksandrovich Molodtsov, who was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union and suffered the indignity of having his whole life transformed into that of a Stalinist plaster saint. The origins of Molodtsov’s heroism were officially traced back to selfless devotion in overfulfilling his norms as a miner during the first Five Year Plan. “What a wonderful thing it is,” he was said to have declared in 1930, “not to notice or watch the time during the working day, not to wait for the end of the shift but to seek to prolong it, to run behind the [coal] trolley, to be bathed in sweat and at the end of the shift to emerge victorious in fulfilling the plan!” 43

The Museum of Partisan Glory contains a “reconstruction” of the NKVD detachment’s underground headquarters, complete with dormitories, ammunition depot, workshops, fuel store, kitchen and meeting room with—inevitably—a portrait of Lenin (but not of Stalin) on the wall. 44Nearby is a vertical shaft 17 meters long linking the headquarters to the surface, through which it received messages and food from its agents in Odessa. During the Soviet era numerous films, books, magazine and newspaper articles, many promoted by the KGB, celebrated the heroic feats of the NKVD detachment in holding at bay thousands of German and Romanian troops in Odessa before giving their lives in defense of the fatherland.

Mitrokhin owed his discovery of the true story of the catacombs to a colleague in the FCD Illegals Directorate S, who borrowed the multi-volume Odessa file and, when he returned it, told Mitrokhin he might find it interesting. The file began by recording the despatch of Molodtsov’s detachment of six NKVD officers to Odessa shortly before it fell to the Germans in October 1941, with orders to establish an underground residency which would organize reconnaissance, sabotage and special operations behind the German lines. In Odessa they were joined by thirteen members of the local NKVD Special Department, commanded by Lieutenant V. A. Kuznetsov. According to the official version of events, the two groups held a Party/Komsomol meeting on the evening of October 15 immediately before going down into the catacombs to set up their base. What actually took place, according to the KGB file, was a raucous dinner party and heavy drinking which ended in a fight between the Moscow and Odessa NKVD detachments. The next day the two groups entered the catacombs still at daggers drawn, with Molodtsov and Kuznetsov each claiming overall command. Over the next nine months Muscovites and Odessans combined operations against the Germans and Romanians with internecine warfare among themselves. 45

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.” 46The 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: