http://barnesreview.org/pdf/TBR2008-no6.pdf

Lavrenty Beria and Georgi Malenkov. They saw the upcoming young general and people’s commissar of Lubyanka first as

a competitor for Stalin’s favor and later as an obstacle to their own involvement in the putative murder of the tyrant.

These events were played out from 1946 to the deaths of Stalin and Beria in 1953 against the background of the Doctors

Plot and the tyrant’s plans to institute a new purge to

thwart a perceived threat to his rule on the part of Zionist

agents. At the same time the purge was to be used in a new

struggle, managed by Stalin, to remove some of his oldest associates

from power, thereby further Russifying and rejuvenating

the party leadership. To do this, Stalin would concurrently

have had to rid the secret police agencies of the disproportionate

number of Beria’s associates entrenched in

those agencies, many of whom were Jewish.

Unlike his predecessors in the office of the head of the secret

police (Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria,

Merkulov), Abakumov was an ethnic Russian. He was born in

Moscow, in 1894.

Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov, his immediate predecessor

(in 1946), had a Georgian mother and his early experience

was in Georgia, after which he became (and remained)

a deputy to and allied with Beria.

Abakumov rose rapidly in the intelligence hierarchy during

the purges and the war period. At age 33Abakumov was

made head of Soviet military counterintelligence, called

SMERSH (Death to Spies), which included “OO” (Osobyy

Otdel), special units of the NKVD whose responsibility in the

broadest sense was to counter enemy intelligence activities

and ensure the political reliability of the Soviet armed forces.

When Stalin separated SMERSH from the NKVD, Abakumov

became a direct deputy to Stalin in the top echelons of

power and a rival to Beria.

Tasks of SMERSH included: the prevention of infiltration

by Abwehr agents (including émigré Russians collaborating

with the Germans); stabilization of the war front by

punishing deserters, “panic-mongers”

and cowards; running double agents,

conducting “radio games”; vetting and

dealing with Russians who had been

German POWs as well as with captured

members of Vlasov’s forces, Soviet citizens

who had any contact with the Germans

etc. In short, the elimination of all

possible anti-Soviet elements.

Abakumov reduced desertions and

retreats by setting up blocking detachments

Army men caught attempting to flee the front. Other Red

Army men and “criminal civilians” “shirking their duty” were

used to perform the most dangerous (usually suicidal) operations.

Abwehr attempts to infiltrate agents behind enemy

lines were almost always foiled. Gen. Ernst August Koestring,

the prewar German military attaché to Moscow, best expressed

the futility of such efforts: “It is more likely that an

Arab with a burnoose can walk through Berlin undetected

than a foreign agent through Russia.”1

During the war SMERSH, as the most important counterintelligence

asset of the Red Army, expended considerable

time and resources engaging in “radio-games” with German

military intelligence—the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst.

A major effort in combating the German “Zeppelin” Operation

and the infiltration of German Abwehr commandos was

the Soviet “Zagadka” Program, run by SMERSH.2

Commencing from 1944, when the RedArmy crossed its

own borders and proceeded into Eastern Europe, SMERSH

and its parent organization, the NKVD, undertook to physically