What Stalin Knew (11 page)

nationalist organizations. Forming the slightly larger group (1,719) were

the old Soviet standbys: former landowners, factory owners, wealthy mer-

chants, and house owners. They must have had large families because the

total number of family members evacuated came to 13,980.23

The Baltic States

Stalin was determined not to allow the Germans a foothold in the Bal-

tic States, whose people he knew were decidedly anti-Soviet after twenty

years of independence. He could not undo the German annexation of the

Lithuanian port of Memel in March 1939, but he knew Hitler had designs

on Lithuania. For this reason he insisted that the secret protocol to the

nonaggresion pact provide that the Baltic States were to be in the Soviet

sphere of influence. The ink on the signatures was hardly dry before Sta-

lin moved to nail down his rights in the Baltic by concluding treaties of

mutual assistance with each of the countries, beginning with Estonia on

September 28, 1939, and followed by Latvia and Lithuania on October 5

and 10. The treaties gave the Soviets the right to station troops in each

country. Beria recognized, of course, that placing Soviet garrisons in coun-

tries that had for two decades enjoyed a higher standard of living than

the Soviet Union, among people who were accustomed to speaking their

minds openly, involved serious problems of morale and political disaffec-

tion. On October 19, 1939, he gave new orders to the military counter-

intelligence Special Departments that would be assigned to these troop

units. After making the ritual bow to the danger of foreign intelligence

services recruiting Red Army personnel, Beria got down to business. He

warned the units to check on their informant nets among the troops, en-

larging them as necessary, so as to observe any suspicious activity on the

part of the local citizenry. Reports on troop morale or infractions of disci-

pline were to be sent to Moscow every three days. Obviously, Beria was

very concerned about the impact on his socialist soldiers of their bourgeois

surroundings.24 Defense Commissar Voroshilov followed up on October 25

with orders to each of the major Soviet units. Commanders were to explain

to their troops the reasons for the mutual assistance treaties and the pol-

icies of friendship adopted by the USSR toward the Baltic countries. After

warning the troops to be on the lookout for provocations, Voroshilov for-

bade them to have contact with the local population either in groups or

individually.25

SOVIET BORDERS MOVE WESTWARD

39

A November 23, 1939, report by a Soviet military attaché in Riga,

Latvia, illustrates how difficult this operation was for the Red Army. The

Latvian military, responsible for dealing with the Soviets on the problems

of their garrisons, was extremely unfriendly and uncooperative. Senior

Latvian officers expressed the hope that the Soviet presence would be

short-lived. These attitudes affected every aspect of their dealings with the

Red Army. Asked to make a Latvian army casern available for use by a

Soviet unit, the Latvians stripped the buildings bare, right down to the

sinks and toilets. They made it difficult for Soviet garrisons to reach com-

mercial contracts with suppliers of foodstuffs and interfered with mail

deliveries. The Soviets complained of being under constant, obvious, if not

insolent surveillance.26

Similar attitudes toward Soviet garrisons existed in each of the Baltic

States. While the Winter War with Finland was under way, there was little

Stalin could do. By mid-June 1940, however, the Soviets were ready to

embark on the final phase of their program to eliminate the independence

of the Baltic States. Accusing them of conspiring together to create an anti-

Soviet military alliance, the USSR demanded the resignation of their gov-

ernments and the acceptance of additional Soviet troops to be stationed

near all their principal cities.27

On June 19, 1940, Proskurov disseminated an intelligence report de-

scribing increases in German troop strength along the East Prussian–

Lithuanian border following the entry of additional Soviet troops into the

Baltic States. Two days later, Timoshenko, the new Soviet defense com-

missar, received an excited handwritten note from Colonel General Dimi-

try G. Pavlov, commander of the Belorussian Special Military District.

After asserting that it was impossible to permit the units of the Lithuanian,

Latvian, and Estonian armies to remain together, Pavlov recommended

that all three armies be disarmed and their weapons taken to the USSR.

Alternatively, after a purge of the officer corps and reinforcement by ‘‘our

commanders,’’ the Lithuanian and Estonian units were to be used in war,

possibly against Afghans, Romanians, or Japanese, but not in the Belo-

russian Special Military District’s area. ‘‘I consider it necessary to disarm

the Latvians completely. Once the matter of the armies is taken care of,

we should immediately disarm the civilian population. Failure to turn in

weapons should result in death by firing squad,’’ Pavlov added. The Special

Military District was prepared to assist in carrying out these measures, he

said, but asked that the order for them ‘‘be given 36 hours before the be-

ginning of the action.’’ There is no record of any answer from Timoshenko.

40

SOVIET BORDERS MOVE WESTWARD

While Pavlov’s reaction to the problems presented by integrating Baltic

troops into the Red Army may have sounded a bit exaggerated at the time,

he would see his worst fears come true in June 1941 when Lithuanian units

on his left flank mutinied and supported the advancing Germans.28

By August 6, 1940, the Supreme Soviet acknowledged the entry of the

Baltic States into the USSR and on August 17 Defense Commissar Timo-

shenko ordered that the existing armies of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia

be preserved for one year, with politically untrustworthy elements to be

weeded out. Then each republic’s army would become a corps in the Red

Army. This process of Sovietization in the military and in civilian life natu-

rally angered even politically moderate elements in the three states.29 But

Soviet counterintelligence seemed mainly concerned about the danger of

espionage arising from the presence of the German Repatriation Commis-

sion and other organizations to which Germans awaiting repatriation be-

longed. By early April, however, it became apparent that these Germans

were trying to unify Latvian nationalists, creating groups known as ‘‘De-

fenders of Latvia,’’ who could terrorize those Latvians cooperating with

the Soviet Latvian administration. The Germans were also supplying the

groups with arms and other equipment for use against Red Army gar-

risons.30 On May 3, 1941, the NKGB of the Lithuanian SSR uncovered a

German intelligence team operating a radio transmitter in Kaunas and

broadcasting to Stettin, Germany, the location of an Abwehr station train-

ing agents for sabotage operations in the Baltic. The principal agent at the

radio site in Kaunas was a former Lithuanian Army officer. Clearly, though

the Lithuanian nationalist underground may have started slowly, its ardor

was fanned by the repressive nature of Soviet actions. According to the

NKGB, between July 1940 and May 1941 it uncovered and liquidated

seventy-five illegal anti-Soviet organizations, all of which had as their mis-

sion the instigation of uprisings against the Soviet government as soon as

war began between Germany and the USSR. There were many different

groupings among the nationalists but in January 1941 they united under

the title of the ‘‘Lithuanian Activists Front.’’31

By May 16, 1941, the Soviets were desperate. The Central Committee

and the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree on ‘‘measures for

the purging of the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian SSRs of anti-Soviet,

criminal, and socially dangerous elements.’’ Noting the ‘‘significant quan-

tity of former members of various counterrevolutionary nationalist par-

ties, of former policemen, gendarmes, landowners, manufacturers, high

officials of the former government apparatuses of Lithuania, Latvia, and

SOVIET BORDERS MOVE WESTWARD

41

Estonia, and of other persons carrying out subversive anti-Soviet work and

being used by foreign intelligence for espionage tasks,’’ the decree enumer-

ated those categories of persons (and their families) subject to confiscation

of property, prison terms, and exile, as well as the procedures to be used

and the locations of camps and places of exile. The whole operation was to

be executed over three days under the supervision of the people’s commis-

sar for state security, Vsevolod N. Merkulov; his deputy, Ivan A. Serov; and

the deputy commissar for internal affairs, Viktor S. Abakumov. It is said

that even in the brief time before the German invasion, Stalin managed to

deport thousands of persons, amounting to 4 percent of the Estonian popu-

lation and 2 percent of the populations of Lithuania and Latvia.32

Still, the Soviets did not succeed in wiping out all vestiges of Lithua-

nian nationalism. On May 27 the Lithuanian NKGB described a group

calling itself the ‘‘Lithuanian Legion.’’ Predicting the Germans’ imminent

invasion of the USSR, it set as its goal to ‘‘create an uprising in the rear of

the Red Army and engage in diversionary and subversive activity, destroy-

ing bridges and rail lines and disrupting communications.’’ An NKGB re-

port of June 10 dealt with a ‘‘Guard for the Defense of Lithuania’’ that

sought to unify Lithuanians around the idea of an independent Lithuania.

The group instructed its members that the signal for a national uprising

would be the moment Germany crossed the frontier of the Lithuanian

SSR; its tasks would include ‘‘the arrest of commissars and communist

activists, seizure of Communist Party centers without destruction of their

archives, stopping deportations, rendering rail lines and highways in the

rear of Soviet troops unusable, and finally, in the event of assistance by the

Lithuanian corps [of the Red Army], disarming Soviet troops and creating

panic.’’ Another report on the Guard and on the so-called Diversionists was

sent to Moscow by a USSR NKGB operational group working in Lithu-

ania; it described them as prepared to lend armed support to German

troops invading the USSR. The Lithuanian NKGB hoped to arrest twenty-

four members of these organizations and asked Moscow to send a group of

‘‘qualified interrogators.’’ Wonder if they made it before June 22?33

Theater Infrastructure and Fortified Areas

It was not only the hostility of the populations of the areas absorbed by

the Soviet Union in 1939–40 that would create problems for the Red Army.

It was also the absence of a well-developed military infrastructure of the

type that had existed along the old frontier. Meeting the needs of a fully

The Partition of Eastern Europe

FINLAND

N

Tallinn

Leningrad

EST

ES ONIA

TO

EST NIA

ONIA

SWEDEN

SWEDEN

SWEDEN

Occupied b

Occupied y

b

Occupied b

Russia 1940

Russia 1940

Russia 1940

A

E

Pskov

S

Riga

C

I

T

LA

L TVIA

AT

LA VIA

TVIA

L

A

Occupied b

Occupied y

b

Occupied b Russia 1940

y

y Russia 1940

Russia 1940

B

LITHU

LITH ANIA

UA

LITHU NIA

ANIA

Occupied b

Occupied y

b

Occupied b Russia 1940

y

y Russia 1940

Russia 1940

Königsberg

Vilnius

Vilnius

Danzig

Danzig

Vilnius

Danzig

EAST

EAST

EAST

PR

P USSIA

RU

PR SSIA

USSIA

Minsk

R. Neman

R. Nema

BELORUSSIA

German-So

German-S viet

ov

German-So iet

viet

Poznan

Po

P znan

oznan

demar

dema cation line

rc

demar ation line

cation line

R.Vi

V stula

Sept.

Sept 8,

.

Sept. 8 1939

,

8, 1939

1939

U . S . S . R .

G E R M A N Y

Kutno

Ku

K tno

utno

Warsa

Wa

W rs w

a

arsa

Br

B est-Liv

re

Br st-Li otsk