The most high-profile special operations of the KGB abroad. Maestro of special operations outside the USSR - ship payments p.a The first operation outside the USSR

Some foreign operations of the GRU special forces are becoming public.

The Soviet Union had extensive military capabilities. Giant intercontinental missiles, the world's largest and fastest nuclear submarines, thousands of tanks, a powerful ocean fleet and other delights of the Cold War. But in addition to the most powerful cudgel for a full-scale clash with the West, there was also an almost imperceptible GRU special forces capable of performing tasks of fantastic complexity on the territory of other states, while remaining under the veil of the strictest secrecy.

Gradually, the term for imposing a secrecy stamp on the actions of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the USSR expires, and some foreign operations of the GRU special forces become public. A selection of such episodes that can outdo any American action movie is presented to you by the Word and Deed magazine.

Throw on "Cobra"

The first major operation of this kind dates back to 1968. Ten people from the GRU special forces attacked a secret American facility located in Cambodia, almost on the border with Vietnam. From this base, the Americans carried out reconnaissance and raids for downed pilots.

The base had a number of various helicopters, among which four of the latest Cobras were wormed, equipped with a previously unknown guidance system and guided missiles.

As a result of a carefully prepared attack, one Cobra was hijacked to Vietnam, and the rest of the equipment was destroyed. The whole operation took 25 minutes and there were no casualties. At the same time, only a few years later, due to a leak in the KGB, the Americans learned that Russian special forces had taken a secret helicopter from under their noses.

Hot 1968

The "Prague Spring" of 1968 ended with the "Danube" operation, during which the combined group of troops of the Warsaw Pact countries was introduced into Czechoslovakia. The GRU special forces were the first to start the operation in the strictest secrecy.

So that no one would suspect anything, the plane, on board of which there was a special forces detachment, simulated an emergency situation with an engine failure and landed at the Prague airport. Further events developed with dizzying speed; the capture of the airport ended in 9 minutes 21 seconds.

Immediately after the report on the success of the operation, the transfer of the airborne division to the captured airfield began, and the special forces quickly captured railway stations, telegraph stations and government offices. The government of Czechoslovakia was taken to Moscow, and the GRU special forces chalked up another operation, which the famous German saboteur Otto Skorzeny called "brilliant."

Angolan trophy

The Cold War did not bypass Africa either, although only military clashes involving Egypt were more or less promoted. But the rest of the Black Continent was also hot.

So, out of nowhere, the Stinger MANPADS appeared in service with the rebels from Angola. This happened long before the Soviet military personnel in Afghanistan met the American MANPADS. Naturally, the task was set before the GRU special forces - to get such a complex for research.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to capture the Stinger in Angola, but in the end, the Chinese T-59 tank, captured near Luanda, was taken to the territory of the USSR by the GRU special forces.

Beirut proposal

At the end of September 1985, several employees of the USSR embassy were taken hostage by the Hezbollah unit Munata`mat al-Jihad al-Islami, headed by Imad Mugnia. The hostages needed to be rescued immediately, so the Vympel group under the command of General Yuri Drozdov was involved in the operation.

In the shortest possible time, more than 10 commanders of the Lebanese special services, who were the closest associates of Mughnia, disappeared without a trace. After these disappearances, a letter was planted on him with an offer to choose the next victim of the kidnapping. Mugnia quickly realized that if a letter was delivered to him with such ease, then they could be kidnapped without batting an eyelid, and the next day the hostages were released.

Amin's Palace

The capture of the palace of the head of Afghanistan, Hafizuly Amin, is perhaps the most famous operation of the GRU special forces. The Taj Beck Palace was captured in 40 minutes by the GRU forces and the Grom and Zenit groups (later becoming departments A - Alpha and B - Vympel).

The losses of the GRU special forces amounted to 7 people, despite the fact that there were four times more guards of the palace than the attackers, and the training of these guards was higher than that of ordinary soldiers. During the assault, Amin was destroyed, which is an unequivocal success of the operation.

"Stinger"

In Angola, it was not possible to capture the latest American MANPADS, but it was critically necessary to do this in Afghanistan, since the Mujahideen successfully used them against Soviet aircraft.

Luck smiled on the GRU special forces group under the command of Senior Lieutenant Vladimir Kovtun. Having discovered a group of motorcyclist dushmans, our special forces organized a chase, as a result of which Kovtun ended up in the hands of a captured Stinger, which was instantly sent by helicopter to the base and further for study in the USSR.

Finally

The GRU special forces in Russia were replaced by the Special Operations Forces. There is no doubt that the traditions of the elite special forces units were transferred to this new Russian structure, and the MTR soldiers worthily continue the work of the GRU special forces. However, there is no exact information. Secrecy…

Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov is one of the most mysterious and tragic figures in the history of the Soviet special services. His name was erased from the people's memory for decades. His investigative file, which outlines all the special operations carried out by him personally or under his leadership, is still classified.

From the declassified part of the personal file No. - *** of the Commissar of State Security of the 3rd rank of the NKVD of the USSR Sudoplatov Pavel Anatolyevich

Pavel Sudoplatov was born on July 7, 1907 in the city of Melitopol in the family of a miller. Ukrainian. In 1914 he went to the first class of the city school and studied there for five years. In 1919, left without parents, he fled to Odessa, where he joined a company of homeless children who hunted by begging and stealing food in the market, but, being a small smart one, he had no conflicts with the law. Raised on the tenets of the New and Old Testaments learned in school, Paul felt remorse for the life he was forced to lead. Having abruptly changed the vector of his aspirations, he got a job as a laborer in a seaport.

In early 1920, after the flight of whites from Odessa, Pavel, a 12-year-old starving orphan, kind people attached the “son of a regiment” to the 14th Army of the Red Army, where he became an assistant telegraph operator of a communications company. As part of the army, he participated in battles in Ukraine and on the Polish front.

In May 1921, during a routine inspection of the personal belongings of the Red Army, the head of the Special Department (military counterintelligence) of the division discovered Bukharin's ABC of Revolution in Sudoplatov's travel bag. The marginal notes made by Pavel's hand testified to his political maturity, and he was sent to training courses for political workers. At the end of them, in September 1923, the young Red Army soldier Sudoplatov was at Komsomol work in Melitopol: head of the information department of the district committee of the LKSMU, member of the board and commandant of the Working Youth Club, secretary of the cell of the LKSMU of the plant named after V. Vorovsky.

In February 1925, the district committee of the LKSMU sent Sudoplatov to the Melitopol department of the GPU, where for three years, as a junior detective, he was responsible for the work of agents operating in the Greek, Bulgarian and German settlements.

So at the age of 17, Pavel Sudoplatov became a personnel Chekist.

He has a brilliant ability for languages, a phenomenal memory, an absolute ear for music, and within a year he is fluent in Greek, Bulgarian and German. This helped build a more trusting relationship with secret agents and improved the quality of the information they provided.

It was during that period that Sudoplatov developed as a professional recruiter, a "bounty hunter." And the acquired skills to transform - pass for a Greek or a Bulgarian - more than once will serve him in good stead when leaving for Western Europe and Finland as an illegal intelligence agent in 1930-1940.

August 1927 was marked for Sudoplatov by four fateful events: he was accepted as a member of the CPSU (b), promoted and transferred to the secret political department of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR in Kharkov (the capital of Ukraine in those years), admitted to the workers' faculty of the GPU, met (!) with his future wife.

GOLD-HAIRED BEAUTY EMMA

Is it true that a great love for a woman leads a man to the road of life? 20-year-old Pavel found the answer for himself when he met Emma Kaganova (Kogan). A blue-eyed Jewish woman with hair the color of wild honey instantly won his heart and thoughts.

Pavel Sudoplatov with his wife Emma. Photos provided by the author

Emma was as beautiful as she was smart. At 22, she graduated from several classes of the Gomel gymnasium, was fond of literature, music, theater. She was fluent in Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German. In the central office of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR, Emma coordinated the activities of secret agents who worked among the Ukrainian creative intelligentsia - writers and theater figures.

According to Sudoplatov, Emma, “this commissar in a skirt”, from the first days of their acquaintance took patronage over him: not only introduced him to the theater, music and Russian classical literature, but also, having more experience in operational work, supplied him with practical advice and recommendations.

In 1928, young people got married, but the marriage was officially registered only 23 years later. At that time, this phenomenon was widespread everywhere, becoming a kind of Soviet tradition.

In February 1932, the spouses were transferred to Moscow to the central office of the OGPU of the USSR.

Emma was assigned to the secret political department, where she led the work of secret agents operating in the Writers' Union and other creative associations of the USSR. And Sudoplatov, preparing for work in Germany, at the headquarters of the Organization Ukrainian nationalists(OUN), which was created and headed by Evgen Konovalets, began to study the German language. Pavel studied them so thoroughly that even at home with Emma he spoke only German ...

DEATH IS HIDING IN A BOX OF CANDIES

During the First World War, Evgen Konovalets, a colonel in the Austro-Hungarian army, fought against Russia on the Southwestern Front. In 1918, after three years in Russian captivity, he returned to Ukraine and, at the head of a gang of Ukrainian nationalists, engaged in robberies and pogroms against Jews. After the elimination of the gang, taking two suitcases with stolen jewelry, he fled to Germany.

In 1922, Konovalets met Hitler. From the very first meeting, a friendship arose between them, which was fueled by a common hatred of Russia. At the initiative of Hitler and with the help of German intelligence officers, Konovalets created the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

In 1928, special schools were opened in Germany for members of the OUN, where German officers taught them the art of sabotage and the organization of terrorist attacks. And in 1934, the militants of Konovalets successfully passed the exam for the certificate of maturity of hired killers: the Polish minister Peratsky was killed in Warsaw, and the Soviet diplomat Mailov was killed in Lvov.

In 1935, Sudoplatov, under the guise of a representative of the Ukrainian anti-Soviet underground, was introduced into the leadership of the OUN in Berlin. He managed to get to study at the special Nazi party school of the NSDPA in Leipzig, where Konovalets' henchmen were trained. Having won the favor of the OUN leader, Pavel accompanied him on inspection trips to Vienna and Paris. This, in particular, was facilitated by his impeccable command of the German language ...

Konovalets was so imbued with confidence in Sudoplatov that he appointed him his plenipotentiary representative in Ukraine and initiated him into the strategic plans of the OUN.

So, relying on the support of the Germans, he was going to "liberate" a number of regions of Ukraine. To do this, he formed two brigades of militants in 2 thousand sabers. The “action of rejection” of the Ukrainian territories from the USSR was financed by the German military intelligence. Konovalets also planned to arrange a series of assassination attempts on senior party officials of the central apparatus of the CPSU (b) in Moscow.

Obtained information Sudoplatov reported personally to Stalin. The award was not long in coming: for the successful completion of the task and "the endurance and ingenuity shown at the same time" Sudoplatov was awarded the order Red Banner.

At the direction of Stalin, a plan was developed for preventive operational measures against the OUN, in particular, the liquidation of Konovalets. Sudoplatov had to carry it out.

Several ways were considered to eliminate the leader of the OUN. We settled on Sudoplatov's proposal: to use Konovalets' pathological passion for chocolate. To do this, an explosive device with a clockwork was built into a box of his favorite chocolates. To bring the device into a combat state, it was enough to give the box a horizontal position. The mine worked in 20 minutes, which, according to the developers of the operation, made it possible for Sudoplatov to escape unharmed and created an alibi for him.

On August 21, 1938, Sudoplatov, as a radio operator of the Shilka dry cargo ship, left Leningrad for Norway. From there, he called Konovalets and made an appointment in Rotterdam.

On August 23 at 11.50 Sudoplatov and Konovalets met at the Atlant restaurant. After mutual greetings, Pavel announced that the meeting would be very short, since he was obliged to return to the ship, but at 17.00 they would meet again to discuss everything “thoroughly”. Pavel immediately put a box of chocolates on the table in front of Konovalets.

In order to change his appearance, Sudoplatov bought a hat and a white raincoat in a nearby store, and when he left, he heard a faint pop of an explosion, reminiscent of the sound of a burst tire ...

STALIN'S BLESSING

– There are no important political figures in the Trotskyist movement, except for Trotsky himself. By putting an end to it, we will eliminate the threat of the collapse of the Comintern ...

Stalin lit his pipe and looked at Beria and Sudoplatov, who were sitting on the other side of the table. Then, minting words, as if giving an order, he said:

- Comrade Sudoplatov, the party instructs you to carry out an action to eliminate Trotsky. You must personally carry out all the preparatory work and personally send a special team from Europe to Mexico. You will be provided with any help and support. You will report everything directly to Comrade Beria and no one else. The Central Committee demands that all reporting on the operation be submitted exclusively in handwritten form in a single copy!

So late at night on May 9, 1939, a meeting in the Kremlin of the "small troika" - Stalin, Beria, Sudoplatov - ended and a special operation of the NKVD, code-named "Duck", to eliminate Trotsky (nickname Old Man) began.

Over time, the "Duck" will be recognized as a classic example of a diverse multi-pass operation and will not only enter into teaching aids KGB and GRU - it will be studied in classrooms leading intelligence agencies of the world.

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME!

On May 10, the day after the meeting, Sudoplatov received a promotion - he was appointed deputy head of foreign intelligence of the NKVD.

From agents who settled in Mexico after the end of the Spanish Civil War, as well as from agents living in Western Europe and the USA, Sudoplatov and his deputy Eitingon formed two groups. The first is the "Horse" led by David Siqueiros, the famous Mexican artist. The second is "Mother" under the leadership of Caridad Mercader, a Spanish revolutionary, a brave and selfless woman. Her eldest son died fighting Franco's troops; medium - Ramon fought in a partisan detachment in 1936; the youngest, Louis, with other children of Republican fighters who fled from the Francoist regime, ended up in Moscow.

"Horse" and "Mother" acted autonomously and did not know about the existence of each other. And the tasks before the groups were different: "Horse" was preparing to storm Trotsky's villa in Coyacan, a suburb of Mexico City, and "Mother" was supposed to introduce her people into the environment of the Old Man, since there was not a single NKVD agent there. Because of this, the work of the first group was stalled - after all, there was no plan for the villa, no data on the system and number of guards, no information about Trotsky's daily routine.

Life suggested that the path to Trotsky's inner circle lies through the heart of a woman. And the handsome macho Ramon was brought in Paris to a certain Sylvia. As conceived by Sudoplatov and Eitingon, this was a blow with a doublet, where the decisive role was to be played not by Sylvia herself, but by her sister Ruth Agelov, an employee of the secretariat and the Old Man's liaison with his supporters in the United States.

Ramon turned Sylvia's head, and things went to the wedding. In January 1940, they appeared together in Mexico City. Ruth Agelow interceded with Trotsky for her sister, and he hired her as a secretary. So, using the "blind" of two sisters, Ramon became a member of Trotsky's house. Since March 1940, he has been there 12 times and even talked with Trotsky, introducing himself as Jean Mornard, a Belgian journalist.

SAVING BED

The information obtained by Ramon was used by Siqueiros to storm the villa.

In the early morning of May 24, 1940, 20 people in police uniforms drove up to the gates of the villa-fortress. Neutralized the guards at the entrance. Having penetrated inside, they turned off the alarm, tied up all the guards and, dispersed around the Old Man's bedroom, opened heavy fire from revolvers and a light machine gun.

Trotsky, who lived in constant expectation of an assassination attempt, reacted instantly: grabbing his wife in an armful, he threw himself from bed to the floor and hid under the bed.

A massive bed of bog oak saved both of them: they have no scratches, and the bedroom is turned into crumbs - the attackers fired (!) More than 200 bullets.

The police did not manage to detain any of the attackers. Except Siqueiros. But he stayed in the dungeon for only a couple of days: the President of Mexico was a passionate admirer of his talent and let go on all four sides ...

MERKADER IS A VIRTUOSIS OF THE ICE-AXE

The failure of the action to eliminate the Old Man by the militants of Siqueiros was painfully received in the Kremlin. The directors of the play "The Duck" were forced "on the march" to redo the script, assigning the actors of the troupe roles that were unusual for them. So, having changed the role of a seducer to the role of a liquidator, Ramon Mercader came to the fore.

In early August, he showed his article to Trotsky (compiled by craftsmen from the Lubyanka) on Trotskyist organizations in the USA and asked him to express his opinion. Trotsky took the article and offered to come in for a discussion on 20 August.

Ramon showed up at the appointed time, carrying a pistol and an ice pick. In case the guards took away the pistol and the ice pick, he hid the knife in the lining of his jacket. It worked out: no one stopped and searched.

Ramon went into Trotsky's office. He sat down at the table and, holding the article in his hands, began to express his opinion. Mercader stood a little behind and to one side, pretending to heed the teacher's remarks. Deciding that it was time to act, he pulled out an ice pick from under the hem of his jacket and hit Trotsky on the head.

Either the blow was weak, or the head was red-hot, but Trotsky quickly turned around, screamed wildly and dug his teeth into Ramon's hand. The bursting guards twisted him and beat him half to death.

Trotsky was transported to the hospital, Mercader to prison.

Trotsky died a day later, Mercader was released from prison after 20 years.

By the way, the Old Man almost deprived Mercader of his hand - a purulent inflammation arose at the site of the bite, which threatened to turn into gangrene. The abscess was successfully treated with penicillin blockade. Penicillin, which had just appeared on the world medical market, was purchased by Eitingon's agents for a huge amount of money in the United States and fraudulently taken to prison.

For the fulfillment of the "special task" Eitingon and Caridad were awarded the Orders of Lenin, Sudoplatov - the Order of the Red Banner.

Mercader was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star medal, but he only received them on May 31, 1960 in Moscow...

... In the future, on the eve and during the Great Patriotic War, the Commissar of State Security of the 3rd rank Sudoplatov not only occupied a significant position in the hierarchy of state security of the Soviet Union, but also made a significant contribution to our Victory, being the leader and taking a direct part in the unique special operations of the NKVD "Monastyr" and "Berezino", carried out in order to misinform the German military intelligence and the Wehrmacht ...

INSTEAD OF AFTERWORD

It is hard to believe, but, despite all the services to the Motherland, Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, holder of the Order of Lenin, three Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree, the Order of Suvorov of the 2nd degree, two Orders of the Red Star, a dozen medals, as well as the highest departmental award "Honored Worker of the NKVD", on August 21, 1953, he was arrested in his own office and accused of the Beria conspiracy, which had the goal of "destroying members of the Soviet government and restoring capitalism in the USSR."

Subsequently, Sudoplatov was sentenced to 15 years in prison. From September 1958 he served his sentence in the Vladimir prison. There he suffered three heart attacks, became blind in one eye, became an invalid of the second group, but was not spiritually broken. He was fully rehabilitated only in 1992. He died in 1996, six months before his 90th birthday.

In October 1998, by decree of the President of the Russian Federation, Lieutenant General Sudoplatov was posthumously reinstated in the rights to state awards confiscated during his arrest.

Igor Grigorievich Atamanenko- writer, historian of special services, veteran of KGB counterintelligence, retired lieutenant colonel.

Throw on "Cobra"

The base had a number of various helicopters, among which four of the latest Cobras were wormed, equipped with a previously unknown guidance system and guided missiles.

Hot 1968

Angolan trophy

The Cold War did not bypass Africa either, although only military clashes involving Egypt were more or less promoted. But the rest of the Black Continent was also hot.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to capture the Stinger in Angola, but in the end, the Chinese T-59 tank, captured near Luanda, was taken to the territory of the USSR by the GRU special forces.

Beirut proposal

Amin's Palace

"Stinger"

In Angola, it was not possible to capture the latest American MANPADS, but it was critically necessary to do this in Afghanistan, since the Mujahideen successfully used them against Soviet aircraft.

Finally

The operation was carried out by the troops of the Belorussian Front under the command of General K.K. Rokossovsky.

The main blow was delivered from the bridgehead at Loev by the forces of the 48th, 61st and 65th armies. The troops of the 11th and 63rd armies operated north of Gomel.

In mid-October 1943, using the bridgeheads captured in the first half of October on the western banks of the Pronya and Sozh, the troops of the right wing of the Belorussian Front resumed their offensive against Bobruisk. On October 16, the troops of the left wing of this front crossed the Dnieper south of Loev, liberated the city and advanced westward up to 15-20 km, creating a direct threat to the envelopment of Gomel and the entire 2nd German army, which held the southern regions of Belarus. For the 2nd and 9th German armies, it was the most important railway junction, where the main communications of these armies converged. During the second half of October and the first days of November, the troops of the Belorussian Front fought for the expansion of bridgeheads on the Dnieper and prepared for decisive battles for Gomel. On the night of November 18, they cut the Gomel-Kalinkovichi railway, and on November 18 they captured Rechitsa, thereby cutting off the enemy's retreat to the west.

On the same day, a salute was fired in Moscow for the first time in honor of the Belarusian city of Rechitsa, liberated by Soviet troops.

By the evening of November 25, Soviet troops approached Gomel from three sides and soon began fighting on the streets of the city. The fighting continued all night and already on the morning of November 26, Gomel was completely cleared of the Nazis. It was the first regional center Belarus, liberated by the Red Army. On the same day in the evening, Moscow, on behalf of the Motherland, saluted the valiant troops who liberated the city.

The first to enter Gomel were units of the 217th Infantry Division (commander Colonel N.P. Massonov), the 102nd Infantry Division (commander Major General A.M. Andreev), the 96th Infantry Division (commander Colonel F.G. Bulatov ), 4th Infantry Division (commander Colonel D.D. Vorobyov). A red banner hoisted over the city, which was hoisted on the building of the power plant by the corporal of the 2nd company of the 39th rifle regiment F. Vasiliev. The Belarusian government arrived in the liberated city. From December 7, 1943 to April 10, 1944, the headquarters of the Belorussian Front was located in the city.

Gomel honors the memory of its heroes-liberators. Today the streets of the city bear their names: generals I.D. Antoshkina, A.V. Gorbatov,

I.I. Fedyuninsky, officers G.A. Ivanov, G.M. Golovatsky, I.G. Lapin, I.A. Parkhomenko, A.N. Khutoryansky and others.

During the operation, the troops of the Belorussian Front inflicted a heavy defeat on the enemy grouping in the Gomel region. During the 20 days of the offensive, they advanced westward up to 130 km, liberated part of the eastern regions of Belarus and reached, basically, the line from which, in June 1944, Soviet troops launched the Bobruisk operation. As a result of the Gomel-Rechitsa operation, the enemy was deprived of the opportunity to launch a counterattack from the north-west from the side of Mozyr to the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front and was unable to transfer a single division from Belarus to the Kyiv region.

In the western direction, Soviet troops liberated the Smolensk and Bryansk regions, the eastern regions of Belarus, and by the end of the year they were fighting on the outskirts of Vitebsk and Orsha. Having crossed the Sozh and the Dnieper (south from Zhlobin to Loev), they captured a section of the "eastern rampart" with a length of over 500 km.

During the Gomel-Rechitsa operation, partisans of Belarus provided great assistance to the troops of the Byelorussian Front. Recognizing their accomplishments,

K.K. Rokossovsky wrote: “The people's avengers represented a great force and we needed to develop a plan of joint military operations with them in the operation. In this we received invaluable assistance from Comrade P.K. Ponamorenko as Chief of the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement.

In the winter of 1943-1944. on the central sector of the Soviet-German front, the main events unfolded in the Vitebsk and Bobruisk directions. In December 1943 An offensive operation was carried out by the troops of the right wing of the 1st Baltic Front in order to eliminate the Gorodok ledge, which was defended by the troops of the 3rd Panzer Army of Army Group Center.

In the period from December 13 to 31, 1943, the troops of the 4th shock and 11th guards armies carried out the City operation. The 43rd Army also provided partial assistance.

For two weeks there were intense battles on a broad front from Nevel to Liozno. The assault on the city of Gorodok began at 11 o'clock on December 24, 1943, by the end of the day the city was liberated. During the operation, Soviet troops advanced 60 km, liquidated the Gorodok ledge, and created conditions for an offensive in the Vitebsk direction.

Parts of the Red Army liberated 1220 settlements of the Vitebsk region, destroyed over 65 thousand enemy soldiers and officers, captured 3300 Nazis, captured a lot of military equipment. The purpose of the operation was largely achieved.

Our compatriots also distinguished themselves in these battles. So, the 145th rifle division was commanded by the Belarusian Major General Anisim Stefanovich Lyukhtikov, the 204th rifle division was commanded by Colonel Ksaver Mikhailovich Baidak, the 35th howitzer artillery brigade was commanded by Colonel Pyotr Semenovich Kushner.

In subsequent battles for the liberation of the city of Vitebsk, General

A.S. Lyukhtikov was already in command of the 60th Rifle Corps. 12 military units were awarded the honorary title of City. To four participants in the battles for the liberation of the city of Gorodok in post-war years was awarded the title of "Honorary Citizens of the City of Gorodok". These are the division commander of the 7th Guards Mortar Brigade Vladimir Demidovich Butsenko, the head of artillery of the 40th Guards Rifle Regiment of the 11th Guards City Rifle Division Colonel Rafgat Akhtyamovich Valiev (after the war he became a general, laureate of the Lenin Prize of the USSR), the platoon commander Lieutenant Ruvim Zakharovich Kozhevnikov and instructor of the political department of the 11th Guards Rifle Division, Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Stepanovich Pozdnin.

The 61st Army of General P.A. Belov, the 65th Army of General L.I. Batov and the 16th Air Army of General S.I. Rudenko took part in the operation.

As a result of the operation, Soviet troops advanced 60 km, pushed the enemy back to the river. Ptich and to the Petrikov area, inflicting significant losses on the enemy.

In the battles for Kalinkovichi, the commander of the 9th Guards rifle corps Belarusian General A.A. Boreyko: On January 14, 1944, the cities of Mozyr and Kalinkovichi were liberated, and on January 15, 1944, he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

During the Kalinkovichi-Mozyr operation on January 20, 1944. Ozarichi village was liberated. In the battles for Ozarichi, the commander of a platoon of the 1184th artillery brigade, Lieutenant Anatoly Andreevich Ananyev, distinguished himself (after the war, editor-in-chief of the October magazine (1973-2001), later Hero of Socialist Labor, famous Soviet writer, honorary citizen of the city of Kalinkovichi, author of the novel " Tanks move in a rhombus").

In the battles for the city of Kalinkovichi, officers Nikolai Fedorovich Vasiliev, Pavel Kuzmich Ezhak, Nikolai Ilyich Yesin, Nikolai Petrovich Zhgun, Ivan Ivanovich Ladutko, Arab Savbetovich Shakhbazov distinguished themselves. All of them in the post-war years were awarded the title of "Honorary Citizen of the city of Kalinkovichi". In addition to them, this title was also awarded to the generals - participants in the liberation of the city of Kalinkovichi: Alexander Vasilyevich Kirsanov, Pavel Ivanovich Batov, Mikhail Fedorovich Panov and Mikhail Ivanovich Sheremet.

The commander of the battalion, Belarusian Captain Ivan Ivanovich Ladutko, was awarded the Order of A. Nevsky in the battles for the city of Kalinkovichi. In subsequent battles, he became a Hero of the Soviet Union.

In the battles for Mozyr, the head of the political department of the cavalry division, Colonel Evgeny Evgenievich Aleksievsky, the Belarusian pilot Lieutenant Mikhail Vladimirovich Borisov, the commander of the Belarusian artillery brigade, Colonel Kazimir Frantsevich Vikentiev, and the commander of the 14th Cavalry Division, General Grigory Petrovich Koblov, distinguished themselves in the battles for Mozyr. All of them in the post-war years became honorary citizens of the city of Mozyr.

In the defeat of the Mozyr grouping of the enemy, the troops of the Byelorussian Front were assisted by the Polessye partisans. 38th Yelskaya brigade November 28, 1943, together with military unit drove the enemy out of Yelsk, the 28th Narovlyanskaya brigade on the night of November 30, 1943, together with the 415th rifle division, liberated Narovlya. Polissya partisans participated in the liberation of the cities of Vasilevichi, Lelchitsy, Kalinkovichi and other settlements. Vitebsk and Mogilev partisans interacted directly with the military units. Partisan formations in other regions launched a wide range of combat activities.

Speaking about the significance of the battles in the Belarusian Polesie in the autumn-winter period of 1943-1944, it should be noted that the Red Army troops, with the help of Belarusian partisans, managed to break through the enemy’s continuous strategic front, which made it difficult for him to maneuver with forces and means along the front between groupings of Nazi troops . From Kovel to Gomel - on this huge front, Soviet troops demonstrated their high military prowess.

From September to the end of December 1943. about 40 enemy divisions were defeated, including 7 tank and motorized. The enemy was thrown back, which created favorable conditions for the complete expulsion of the enemy from the borders of the Soviet state.

The troops of the right wing of the first Belorussian Front as part of the 3rd Army, part of the forces of the 50th and 48th Army and the 16th Air Army took part in this operation. The main role was assigned to the 3rd Army of General A.V. Gorbaty, which was tasked with capturing the city of Rogachev and further advancing on Bobruisk. On February 24, Rogachev was released, the troops advanced to the river. Drut, captured on the right bank of the Dnieper between Novy Bykhov and Rogachev a bridgehead south of Rogachev and reached the approaches to Zhlobin. During the operation, the troops inflicted a serious defeat on the 9th army of the enemy, created the conditions for a subsequent offensive in the Bobruisk direction.

In the liberation of the city of Rogachev, the 120th Guards Rifle Division especially distinguished itself, for which it was awarded the honorary title "Rogachevskaya". The division was part of the 41st Rifle Corps, commanded by the Belarusian General Viktor Kazimirovich Urbanovich. The head of the artillery in this corps was also the Belarusian General Fyodor Aleksandrovich Kandidatov.

In this operation, 37 fighters and commanders were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Among them are Russians Valentin Kuzmich Ardashev, Yakov Pavlovich Zaitsev, Stepan Andreevich Nikitin, Kazakh Khasan Mamutov, Kalmyk Elmurza Dzhumagulov. All of them in the post-war years became honorary citizens of the city of Rogachev.

Among the honorary citizens are the commanders of the regiments who distinguished themselves in the battles for the city of Rogachev: Ukrainian Colonel Petr Vasilyevich Kochura and Armenian, commander of the 310th artillery regiment, Colonel Andronik Hayrapetovich Kagramanyan.

In the battles for the city of Rogachev, the commander of the 248th Fighter Aviation Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Nikolaevich Abaltusov, who on February 14, 1944 sent his plane to an enemy column of troops, thereby performed the same feat as Nikolai Gastello, especially distinguished himself.

In the battles for Rogachev in February 1944, the commander of the rifle company of the 1020th rifle regiment of the 269th rifle division, senior lieutenant I.I. Khmelev, especially distinguished himself. On February 20, 1944, he secretly led a company to the enemy's barbed wire and, at the end of the artillery preparation, personally led the attack. The village of Vishchin was occupied, a bridgehead was formed on the right bank, which ensured the crossing of military equipment over the ice. In the ensuing battle, he was mortally wounded and buried in the village of Vishchin.

Machine gunner K. Mamutov (336 rifle regiment 120th Guards Rifle Division) on February 21, 1944, crossed the Dnieper near the village of Kisten, destroyed several enemy machine-gun crews. In the battle for the city of Rogachev February 24, 1944. he was the first to break into the enemy's trench, in hand-to-hand combat he destroyed several Nazis. He was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. In the post-war years he was awarded the title of "Honorary Citizen of Rogachev".

In the battles for the liberation of Rogachev, tankers also distinguished themselves. The commander of a tank platoon, Senior Lieutenant E.B. Dzhumagulov, at the head of a platoon, crossed the river. Drut in the Rogachev area, personally destroyed a large number of Nazis, cut the Rogachev-Bobruisk highway, which contributed to the successful offensive of the units on Bobruisk.

The campaign began with the final operation of the battle for Leningrad - the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk strategic offensive operation. It was carried out from June 10 to August 9 by the troops of the right wing of the Leningrad and the left wing of the Karelian fronts with the assistance of the forces of the Baltic Fleet and the Onega military flotilla.

During two months of fighting, Soviet troops liberated the territory of the Karelian-Finnish SSR, the northern regions of the Leningrad region and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Finnish army. Successful Actions Soviet troops in this operation, they significantly changed the situation on the northern sector of the Soviet-German front, predetermined Finland's withdrawal from the war, and created conditions for the liberation of the Soviet Arctic and the northern regions of Norway. Germany lost another ally after Italy.

The summer of 1944 was marked by the offensive of Soviet troops in Belarus. The fascist commanders attached special importance to its retention. great importance, since the German troops defending here covered the shortest routes to East Prussia and Poland. A large grouping was concentrated in this area, with a total of 1.2 million people, 9.5 thousand guns and mortars, 900 tanks and assault guns, and 1350 combat aircraft1.

One of the largest in the Second World War, the Belarusian strategic offensive operation "Bagration" was carried out from June 23 to August 29, 1944 by the troops of the 1st Baltic, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Belorussian fronts together with the Dnieper military flotilla.

By the beginning of the operation, the number of troops of the four fronts and the flotilla was 2 million 330 thousand people, in addition, in the units of the 1st Army of the Polish Army that took part in this operation, there were 80 thousand people2. The troops of the fronts were armed with 35,000 guns and mortars, 5,000 tanks and 5,500 combat aircraft3. The Belarusian strategic operation was carried out in two stages.

At the first stage (June 23 - July 4), Vitebsk-Orsha, Mogilev, Bobruisk, Polotsk and Minsk were carried out, at the second stage (July 5 - August 29) - Siauliai, Vilnius, Kaunas, Bialystok and Lublin-Brest front offensive operations.

As a result of the battles, the troops of the fronts defeated one of the most powerful enemy groupings - Army Group Center, its 17 divisions and 3 brigades were destroyed, and 50 divisions lost more than half of their composition.

Soviet troops advanced 550-600 kilometers and liberated all of Belarus, part of Lithuania and Latvia, Polish lands east of the Narew and Vistula. The Red Army entered the territory of Poland and advanced to the borders of East Prussia. During the offensive, large water barriers were crossed - the Berezina, Neman, Vistula, important bridgeheads were captured on their western shores.

According to far from complete data, the Nazis lost 500,000 soldiers and officers.

The irretrievable losses of the Soviet troops in this operation amounted to 180 thousand people. Sanitary losses(wounded, shell-shocked, ill) numbered 590 thousand people2.

In the midst of the Belorussian battle, the Lvov-Sandomierz strategic offensive operation began (July 13 - August 29). It was carried out by the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front. At the first stage (July 13-27), the enemy defenses were broken through, Brodskaya was surrounded and destroyed, the Lvov and Rava-Russian enemy groupings were defeated; the cities of Lvov, Rava-Russkaya, Przemysl, Stanislav and others were liberated. At the second stage (July 28-August 29), the troops of the front, developing the offensive, crossed the Vistula and captured a bridgehead on its western bank in the Sandomierz region.

As a result of the operation, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front inflicted a heavy defeat on the Northern Ukraine Army Group. Of the 56 divisions participating in the battle, 8 were destroyed and 323 were defeated. This, in turn, had a negative effect on the position of the Southern Ukraine Army Group, which was defending in Moldova and Romania.

Another crushing blow to the Nazi troops in the summer-autumn campaign of 1944 was delivered during the Yassy-Kishinev strategic offensive operation (August 20-29). It was carried out by the forces of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts, Black Sea Fleet and the Danube military flotilla. In this operation, Soviet troops in a short time defeated the main forces of the Southern Ukraine Army Group, destroyed 22 German and almost all Romanian divisions that were on the Soviet-German front, captured 210 thousand soldiers and officers, and captured a large amount of military equipment1. Moldova was liberated, Romania was withdrawn from the fascist bloc, which then declared war on Germany.

A new blow to the enemy was inflicted in the Baltic. In the period from September 14 to November 24, 1944, the troops of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Baltic fronts and part of the forces of the Leningrad Front, with the assistance of the Baltic Fleet, carried out the Baltic strategic offensive operation, and within its framework - the Riga, Memel front-line offensive operations and the Moonsund landing operation.

As a result of 72 daily battles, the liberation of the Baltic states was almost completely completed and favorable conditions were created for the development of an offensive in East Prussia. The troops of the German Army Group North suffered a major defeat. Its remaining formations were pressed to the sea in Courland, in the Memel region, and cut off from land from East Prussia.

Although the successes of the Red Army confidently brought the end of the war closer, the Soviet people hoped, as our allies had long promised, for the opening of a second front. This would hasten the defeat of Germany and reduce the losses of our troops. The governments of the United States and England declaratively supported this intention, but in fact they did not consider the landing of allied troops in France in 1942 to be real. The second front was not opened in 1943 either. For almost 3 years, the Red Army fought alone with the main forces of the Nazi troops, suffering heavy losses. And only after the German troops in the West weakened (both quantitatively and qualitatively) and it became clear that the Red Army could defeat the fascist armed forces without the help of the allies and independently liberate Europe from the Nazi occupation, in June 1944 during the Normandy landing operation a second front was opened. A large landing of Anglo-American forces landed across the English Channel on the coast of France. It also involved Canadian, French and other troops of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition. It was the largest amphibious operation of World War II. It was attended by about 3 million people, 6 thousand tanks, 15 thousand guns and mortars, 11 thousand combat aircraft, about 7 thousand ships, transport and landing craft.

The Norman landing operation of the Allies played a significant role in bringing about the complete defeat of fascism. But the leadership of the Wehrmacht did not make major changes in the grouping of its forces. As before, the Soviet-German front remained decisive. Here were the main forces of the Wehrmacht. Germany, although it carried out intensive mobilization among the population, could no longer fully compensate for the heavy losses that it suffered on the eastern front. But her army still retained the capacity for tough resistance. By the beginning of July on western front there were 65 divisions, and 235 enemy divisions acted against the Soviet troops. In January 1945, 195 divisions opposed the Soviet formations, and 74 enemy divisions opposed the allied forces in Western Europe.

By July 25, Anglo-American troops were able to create the necessary strategic foothold. In the Normandy landing operation, which had ended by that time, the Allies lost 120 thousand people, the Nazi troops - over 113 thousand people.

In the summer-autumn campaign of 1944, the Red Army carried out many successful operations. The most important military-political result of the Soviet offensive was the clearing of the enemy of a territory with a total area of 930,000 km2, on which up to 39 million people lived before the war.

Along with the expulsion of enemy troops from Soviet territory, the Red Army proceeded to fulfill the tasks of rescuing the peoples of European countries from fascist captivity.

In this operation, it is characteristic that the secret liquidation of the former personnel Chekist, who for some reason betrayed his service, was entrusted to the Comintern cadres from among the members of the militant organization of one of the European Communist Parties, in this case the German one. This was a common practice for the Soviet secret services at that time, and the Comintern was often used by the Lubyanka for such operations. In turn, employees of the Comintern and foreign communist parties who had betrayed the cause of socialism, who had previously performed tasks of the Soviet special services, were persecuted outside the Soviet Union in the same way as those who had changed Soviet citizens, and also became victims of secret liquidations. Like, for example, the American communist and Soviet intelligence agent Juliette Points, who broke with the USSR special services in 1936. In 1937, she disappeared without a trace right in the United States, as it is believed, secretly kidnapped and killed by a Soviet intelligence agent and also an American citizen Mink, who then was an agent and saboteur of the NKVD named Hertz on the front of the Spanish war, where he was involved in the kidnapping and murder of the leader of the Spanish Trotskyists Andreas Nin. After that, traces of Mink are lost, either he was killed in revenge for Nin by the Trotskyists from the POUM group, or he was liquidated by the NKVD itself, or the killer in the service of the Lubyanka was taken to the Soviet Union, where he was later shot as a spy.

Or the German communist and Cominternist Georg Semmelman, who was shot dead in 1931 on the orders of Soviet intelligence by a hired killer Serb Piklovich for breaking with the GPU. “In 1931, a loud scandal erupted around a certain Georg Semmelman. Semmelman worked for the INO GPU since 1921. Semmelman turned to the editors of one of the Viennese newspapers with a proposal to publish a series of his articles on Soviet espionage in Germany. A special place in his revelations was to take a description of the true activities of Hans Kippenberger, who was responsible in the KKE Politburo for the connection of the party underground with Soviet intelligence. Serbian communist Andrei Piklovich, posing as a medical student, shot Zemmelman on July 27, 1931 in his own apartment.

In this description of another secret liquidation by the Soviet special services of their cheating agent from D.P. Prokhorov and O.I. Lemekhov on the fate of Soviet defectors (with a very apt sublinear title "Shot in absentia"), Yugoslav Piklovich, who killed Zemmelman, is called a communist. That is, he acted as an ideological adherent of the Comintern, who killed the same former Comintern German for betraying the common great cause. Although in other studies, the authors consider Piklovich an ordinary hired killer, hired by the GPU to carry out this liquidation for money and providing similar services to Soviet intelligence in the future, in particular when hunting for the Soviet intelligence officer Reiss who fled to Europe. According to some defectors from the ranks of the Soviet special services, under the legend of the Serb Piklovich, a staff member of the GPU and a Soviet citizen Shulman, who acted under this name in Europe, could be hiding under the legend, but there is no evidence of this. Hans Kippenberger, who was in charge of communications with the GPU and party intelligence in the underground of the German Communists, really knew a lot, fearing his arrest after the statements of the late Semmelman. The GPU arranged for Kippenberger to escape to the USSR, where he worked in the apparatus of the Comintern, and then was shot by the Chekists during the years of repression. A shot German - an agent and a traitor, a Serb hired killer, a Comintern soldier shot by his own with a lot of services to Soviet intelligence - is the usual entourage of one secret operation of the USSR special services from the era of the 30s.

Particularly indicative is the fact that a professional killer was hired to carry out the liquidation of his defector, which does not fit too well with the usual way of thoroughly ideologized Soviet special services. Piklovich was at least considered a communist and a sympathizer of Moscow, if he was not a Soviet intelligence officer at all, although, according to many, in the story with Semmelman he was simply hired for money. And this is not the only fact of such use of professional killers by the Soviet special services in such operations. The same American Mink, who is suspected of liquidating the Points Comintern and of the subsequent murders of Trotskyists in Spain, started in New York as the most common mafia killer. And in the future, in similar operations of the secret services of the USSR, such types of professional killers, completely far from the ideas of socialism and the Comintern movement, as the Dutchman Buss, the German Voldemut or the anonymous "Turkish army officer" will come across.

One of the most famous killers and terrorists in the service of Soviet intelligence in the 20s and 30s is Mustafa Golubich, a native of Bosnia from Yugoslav Muslims. Since the age of seventeen, this man has been a member of the Black Hand terrorist organization of Serbian nationalists, in 1914 he was an accomplice in the murder of Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg in Sarajevo by this organization, later arrested for terror in France and tried in the Thessalonica trial of the Black Hand in 1917 , according to which the leaders of the group, led by Apis, were shot. Since 1921, Golubich declared himself a communist and was a member of the secret combat organization of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, underwent combat training in Moscow through the Comintern, and from 1923 was a resident of the INO GPU in Vienna, and then worked for the Red Army Intelligence Agency. For a year and a half of work for the Soviet special services, all the details of which are still unknown and shrouded in a mass of legends, Golubich, nicknamed Ismet in Soviet intelligence, carried out such specific assignments from Moscow in Greece, France, China, Germany. There is evidence of Golubich's involvement in secret murders, as well as kidnappings for ransom, one of these ransoms was allegedly transferred by Golubich to the NKVD to organize the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico. This mysterious Yugoslav named Ismet, who was later declared a People's Hero of Yugoslavia in the Titov SFRY, was also said to be one of the initiators of the military coup in Belgrade in March 1941, when, with the assistance of Soviet intelligence, a group of officers overthrew the pro-German government of Cvetkovic. And that Golubich was a Soviet resident in China under the legend of a simple rickshaw, and that he was the lover of actress Greta Garbo. But it is precisely established that this man of unique destiny was an agent of Soviet intelligence and provided her with the services of a professional assassin and saboteur. In 1941, Mustafa Golubich was a resident of Soviet military intelligence in German-occupied Belgrade, was rounded up by the Gestapo and was executed.

But Piklovich, Golubich, Mink and others, in their trade as professional terrorists or hired killers, at least formally declared themselves communists out of conviction. You can also understand the logic of the Soviet special services, which gave shelter and shelter in the USSR with new documents to foreign communists who were wanted in their homeland for outright terrorism, although this goes against the modern understanding of the foundations of international law. So, in the USSR, the German communist Erich Milke, the future long-term chief of the Stasi secret service of the GDR, who killed two police officers in Germany, was sheltered. Or the Italian fighter of the Communist Party Bertelli, in the Soviet Union, under a new name, was taken to the intelligence service after he fled Italy after the murder of a police officer.

But here, I repeat, violating international laws that the USSR was never in a hurry to comply with, in the Lubyanka, the shelter and use of people wanted for terror and criminal acts in their service could still be explained by their ideological closeness to the first socialist state. And there were cases in the pre-war history of the GPU - the NKVD and the use in their operations for money or on the basis of the exchange of services and professional terrorists, absolutely far from the communist or even just a leftist movement.

For example, in the 1920s, one of the leaders of the Macedonian terrorist organization IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) Todor Panitsa was involved in the operations of delivering weapons from the GPU to the Bulgarian leftist underground from the GPU in the 1920s. And VMRO, despite its loud and “revolutionary” name, was in its purest form a nationalist organization, one of the most daring then in Europe, which fought for the independence of Macedonia and soon began to work closely on this basis with the intelligence of Nazi Germany. Panitsa was not so long an ally of the GPU, in 1925, as a result of an internal struggle among the top of the VMRO, he was killed by former comrades in the theater of Vienna for betraying the cause of Macedonian independence.

At times, the obvious ideological illegibility of the GPU - the NKVD and the military intelligence of the USSR in matters of such "hiring professionals" is simply amazing, they used the services of outright terrorists who were in no way involved in Marxism. So, the famous terrorist and bank robber Max Geltz in Germany in the 1920s did not hide his anarchist views, he was clearly cold towards Marxism, rather approached the unprincipled Robin Hood from terror and expropriations. But the GPU also used it in its secret operations in Germany, and after the arrest it exchanged Gelz, delivering him from a German prison to the USSR, where in 1933 the dashing German terrorist-robber drowned while swimming in a river in the Moscow region. His strange death in the river then gave rise to versions about the liquidation of him in the Soviet Union by the GPU, although it is not clear why then they pulled him out of the German prison. But the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky from the NKVD was firmly convinced that Goelz was liquidated for disagreeing with Soviet policy and plans to return to Germany, when the GPU detected his visit to the German consulate.

Goelz's colleague in the anarchist terror of the 1920s, Max Goldstein, also did not hide his anarchist views, and was wanted by a number of secret police of various states for terror. He arrived in Russia in 1918 and joined the Bolsheviks, even participated in their underground in Odessa and in the battles of the Red Army, but soon left Soviet Russia again due to disagreements with the Soviets and remained in the positions of an anarchist terrorist. But with him in the GPU they found mutual language, using in an attempt to destabilize the situation in Romania to organize then the Romanian campaign of the Red Army and export the revolution to this country. In Bucharest, working in contact with the Soviet GPU, Goldstein detonated a bomb in the Romanian Senate, killing several senators, and also prepared an assassination attempt on the head of the Romanian Interior Ministry, Arjetoyan. After his arrest, Goldstein denied contacts with Soviet intelligence and claimed that he organized these attacks as an anarchist and the head of a terrorist group of Romanian anarchists, although the Romanian secret police of Siguranza provided the court with evidence of Goldstein's close ties with the GPU. In 1922, at the trial in the “270 terrorists” case, this militant from anarchy and an ally of the Soviet GPU was sentenced to life imprisonment, where in 1925 he killed himself on a long hunger strike.

It was just as easy through the Communist Party of Palestine and the Jewish section of the Comintern under the leadership of Berger to establish contact with the Zionist terrorists in the Middle East, who fought terror for the departure of the British and the creation of an independent state of Israel, and frankly far from the ideas of socialism. Thus, from the 1920s, the GPU worked in Palestine with the Jewish terrorist Lukacher, nicknamed Khozro, one of the close associates of the main Jewish terrorist of those years, Israel Shoikhet, the founder of the Stern terrorist organization. In the mid-1920s, on the instructions of Soviet intelligence, Lukacher carried weapons for the pro-communist secret organization Gdud Gaavoda (Workers' Battalion), and in 1926, together with the commanders of this group Mekhonay and Elkind, he even visited Moscow, where he led on behalf of the Zionist terrorists talks with the GPU about joint work. True, during his next voyage to the USSR in 1934, Lukacher was arrested by the NKVD and convicted as a terrorist and an English spy, but with the outbreak of war in 1941 he was released from the camp to the front, and disappeared near Stalingrad.

By this time, military operations against foreign citizens had become a common intelligence practice of the Soviet Union, which especially then outraged the world outside the USSR. Western researchers of the history of the Soviet special services are still amazed at the ease with which Lubyanka decided in the pre-war period to liquidate or kidnap citizens who were not legally connected with the first country in the world of victorious socialism. Here is the opinion of D. Barron, a well-known Western specialist in the history of the Cheka - the KGB: “The Soviet Union has been killing and kidnapping foreigners since 1926. That year, an OGPU agent shot Ukrainian leader Symon Petlyura in Paris. In broad daylight, in the middle of a Moscow street, the Estonian ambassador to the Soviet Union, Alo Berk, was kidnapped ... He was never heard from again. And on May 22, 1932, the former communist courier Hans Wissinger was shot dead in Hamburg. Soviet intelligence officers who incurred the wrath of their superiors were also eliminated. In 1934, the head of the OGPU in the United States, Valentin Markin, was assassinated in New York.

Although this particular statement of Barron has been refuted more than once by domestic researchers of the special services (and Barron himself is considered by many of them to be a biased Russophobe for his books about the KGB), in the part that in the case of the Estonian diplomat Burke (correctly - Birk), the kidnapping could have been staged to cover him the same work for the GPU, and the death of a Soviet resident in the United States, Markin, under the wheels of a car (according to another version, beaten to death in a fight in one of the bars in New York), found dead on the street, is still officially considered an accident - in general, Barron still right. Soviet intelligence, if necessary, did not hesitate to use force against citizens of foreign states, both from among the former Russian subjects-immigrants, and from real foreigners.

Where Soviet intelligence for some reason could not itself reach out to a foreigner from the Comintern who had betrayed her, she stopped at nothing to cause him trouble. A typical example: when its former Czech agent Grilevich stopped working for the intelligence of the USSR (he was a staunch Trotskyist and, after Trotsky was expelled from the Union with Lubyanka, broke for ideological reasons), his former curators did not stop at simply handing him over to the secret police of his native Czechoslovakia as Soviet agent, and then also requested his extradition. Grilevich was lucky, the Czechs did not extradite him to Moscow after his arrest, and soon released him altogether, although Soviet intelligence even planted falsified documents on Grilevich's espionage in favor of Nazi Germany to the Czechs. But the very fact of an attempt to punish his former agent by announcing his work for himself to enemy intelligence (and for the secret services of the Soviet Union in the 20-30s of the twentieth century, all foreign intelligence was enemy, including, of course, Czechoslovak) speaks volumes.

The issue of reprisals against one's own intelligence officer in the event of his departure abroad was almost always resolved by the method of secret liquidation. In the 1920s, cases of such care for the cordon by employees of the Soviet special services were still isolated. The first serious wave of such escapes began towards the end of the 1920s (Opperput, Agabekov, Birger, Besedovsky, etc.), and it was connected with the purge of Trotsky's supporters from the Bolshevik Party in the USSR. Many of the then employees of the GPU in the 20s did not hide their Trotskyist orientation, which they had retained from their turbulent years. civil war. A handful of such outspoken Trotskyists in the GPU bucked then, like Blumkin, and paid for it with their lives or decided to flee the USSR, like Chekist Agabekov.

It was precisely from the end of the 1920s that the work of searching for and liquidating its employees abroad who had defected ceased to be an exceptional matter for the intelligence of the GPU, but was being established on an ongoing basis precisely because of the increased number of such fugitives. At the same time, the government gives its special service a legal basis for this activity - a decree of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the USSR dated November 21, 1929 with a formidable and long title “On the outlawing of officials from citizens of the USSR abroad who defected to the camp of enemies of the working class and peasantry and refuse to return to the USSR. It was on the basis of this decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee that the GPU officers had the right to kidnap or liquidate defectors from their ranks abroad without an additional document or even a sentence in absentia for each of them separately. In 1934, with the aggravation of the situation in the USSR, the Soviet law was supplemented by the state security sanction for repression against an employee of the special services who had fled abroad, and indeed any Soviet soldier. Since that time, receipts have been taken from the employees of the NKVD and the Intelligence Agency that they have been warned: in the event of their treason and flight abroad, their relatives in the USSR can be shot, and extrajudicial reprisals by the NKVD will be automatically allowed against them anywhere in the world without additional warnings.

Agabekov, who wrote the book “The Cheka at Work” abroad, among other secrets of the Soviet special service, also spoke about the purges in its ranks, still using non-violent methods, when from 1923 they began to squeeze out of the GPU by various methods or directly expel adherents of the Trotskyist opposition, which were then in the ranks of the Chekists there were quite a few, since the power, which was not yet strongly strengthened in the person of Secretary General Stalin, pursued a policy in 1923-1927: “Leave Trotsky in his posts, and ruthlessly expel all Trotskyites from everywhere.” Agabekov even described the party meetings of the KGB activists in 1923, where he and other Trotskyists from the GPU at times found themselves in the majority and were suppressed by the authorities only through various tricks: “Down with the bureaucrats, down with the apparatchiks,” the cell shouted all the time. The meeting had to be canceled and rescheduled for the next day. Well, the next day, action was taken. Firstly, Zinoviev was urgently summoned from Leningrad by direct wire, and then Felix isolated the especially inveterate screamers, partly sent them on urgent business trips ... Yes, there was a heated discussion. Cleaner than 1921,” Medved finished. – By the way, have you already received an order from the GPU to disband the legal department of the GPU in Moscow? asked the Bear to Belsky. Do you know why they disbanded? Not? So I'll tell you, the entire department turned out to be completely decomposed and stood for the opposition. Well, Dzerzhinsky dispersed them, sending them to the outskirts. He sent four of them to me in Belarus.” “Yes,” Belsky replied thoughtfully, “they don’t send good communists to the outskirts, but more and more buzzers or delinquents. It's like a prison here." By such measures, during the discussion, the leaders of the party and the OGPU defended the "solidity and unity" of the proletarian party in the ranks of the communists of the OGPU.

Agabekov, who observed this so far quiet suppression of the Trotskyist faction among the Chekists with mailings to the outlying departments of the GPU, and who already knew about the fate of his comrade Blumkin, had no doubt that soon the discussion would become even hotter and the solidity of the party ranks of the special services would be strengthened by even more severe methods. It was this that prompted him to flee to the West in 1930 and to expose his own special service, in which he had been a member since the Civil War. Although at the same time Agabekov had a no less compelling reason to flee to the West, similar circumstances in the 20th century would lead to a break with Lubyanka more than one of its secret front fighters: in Turkey, Georgy Agabekov, a resident of the GPU, fell in love with an Englishwoman Isabella Streeter, after his escape they got married in France .

Georgy Agabekov (Arutyunyan), from this galaxy of Chekists-Trotskyists, became in the late 20s the most famous defector from the GPU in the West, who told a lot about the activities of this special service, and he also became one of the first victims of the secret liquidation of his former special service abroad. Having told the West many secrets of the work of the GPU, Agabekov was sentenced by former bosses and secretly killed in Paris in 1938. Even before that, the GPU had made several attempts to carry out the death sentence passed in absentia on Agabekov in Moscow. In 1932, the GPU established its location in the Romanian port of Constanta, where Agabekov was going to do business with his companions from the Armenian diaspora. In January 1932, Alekseev, an intelligence officer of the GPU, arrived in Constanta on the Filomena yacht, planning to lure the defector on board to be captured and taken to soviet port or liquidate it in the city itself. Agabekov was saved only by the precise work of the Romanian secret police Sigurantsa, who captured Alekseev at the moment when he was about to shoot his former colleague at the entrance to the restaurant. Frightened, Agabekov left for France, but only delayed the denouement for six years, where he was removed in the spring of 1938.

Pavel Sudoplatov, chief specialist of the NKVD on such actions, later described the whole wrong side of this demonstrative operation of Soviet intelligence against his defector in his memoirs “Intelligence and the Kremlin”, since it was long believed that Agabekov simply disappeared without a trace somewhere in the Spanish Pyrenees or fell victim to internal clashes of Armenian mafia. In fact, according to Sudoplatov, Agabekov was lured in Paris to a secret apartment specially rented by Soviet intelligence, allegedly to negotiate the purchase of diamonds from some Armenian jeweler. In this Parisian apartment, where Agabekov was brought by a fake “Armenian jeweler from Antwerp”, an ambush awaited the defector in the person of a young Soviet intelligence agent Korotkov and a certain assassin, a former Turkish officer. The Turk killed Agabekov with a dagger, after which the corpse was packed in a suitcase and drowned in the river in the style of Italian mafiosi.

According to Sudoplatov, soon the same Alexander Korotkov led a similar operation in Paris, when in 1938 the famous Trotskyist Clement, secretary of the Trotskyist Fourth International, was secretly killed. According to the same scheme, the Chekist agent Taubman (pseudonym Yunets), introduced into the Fourth International, lured him to an apartment, where Korotkov and his henchmen also stabbed Klement with a knife. Then the corpse of Clement was dismembered and beheaded, it was in such a terrible form that he was fished out of the Seine.

After these two successful liquidations of the "enemies of socialism" in the style of the Italian Carbonari or mafiosi (with dagger blows, corpses in suitcases, a severed head, Turkish mercenaries), Korotkov was noticed by his superiors and soon made a dizzying career in the NKVD, working during the war years as a resident in the Nazi Germany, and after the war he headed all illegal intelligence in the USSR Ministry of State Security. The young Sasha Korotkov, as his biographers like to recall, began by working as an elevator operator in a building on the Lubyanka and playing tennis in the Dynamo sports society. Here, a strong athlete was noticed by senior comrades, transferring him from elevator operators to INO intelligence, from where he already brought the "elevator to intelligence" to the highest positions in the system of Soviet special services by the 50s. At first, Korotkov was used precisely as a militant in liquidation operations abroad, and it was he personally, together with a Turkish mercenary and other militants, who killed Agabekov and Klement. At least Korotkov himself took credit for this when, with the arrival of Beria as head of the NKVD in 1938, he was temporarily suspended from work, along with other employees of the INO, to test loyalty. Then, in a letter addressed to Beria about his services to his homeland and the cause of socialism, Korotkov did not hesitate to write that in the murders of Klement and Agabekov he "did the most dirty work." Is it necessary to understand that he himself wielded a knife or cut off the head of a corpse to make it difficult to identify? However, former employees of the Soviet special services who write laudatory essays about Korotkov still consider these operations with the dagger to be correct and fair.

The story of Agabekov was not the only one in the 30s. Everyone remembers and is widely aware of the details of the hunt for former residents of Soviet intelligence in the countries who left in the midst of the Great Terror to the West. Western Europe Reiss and Krivitsky. In 1937-1939, examples of how even the most successful intelligence officers or intelligence residents who returned to the Union on orders were, after a short investigation, executed (Bazarov, Axelrod, Barovich, Bortnovsky, etc.) or thrown into camps for many years (Anulov, Bystroletov, etc.). Therefore, cases of refusal to return among scouts became more and more frequent.

When, under Khrushchev, the name of the Soviet illegal immigrant Richard Sorge, who was executed in a Japanese prison, was made public, in the midst of the hype around his name, everyone was perplexed for a long time: why in the Lubyanka did not believe Sorge’s information about the day of the German attack on the USSR and about Japan’s military plans in the light of a future war for so long . But it turned out that by that time Sorge was not considered a reliable source in the NKVD and Intelligence Agency because of his same refusal to return to the USSR for fear of reprisals, that by that time Sorge was almost considered a traitor in the Lubyanka, although he continued to give valuable information, remaining a defector in the eyes of his superiors. And after that, part of the reports to Sorge in Moscow, his direct boss and head of the Intelligence Department of the Red Army, Golikov, put aside in a folder with the name "Ramsay's unverified and false messages."

The fates of Reiss and Krivitsky were no less tragic, and their names were deleted from the history of Soviet intelligence for many years because they dared to refuse to dutifully return to the USSR, where they were expected to be shot. Ignatius Reiss (aka Reis, aka Poretsky - the last surname is real, this is a former Comintern member in Soviet intelligence, a native of the Jews of Austro-Hungarian Galicia), who worked as a resident of the NKVD under the nickname Ludwig in several countries of Western Europe, went to the West first, he too suspected of Trotskyist beliefs. With his departure, Reiss confirmed his Trotskyist views by sending a letter to the Soviet embassy in Paris through a messenger stating that he was breaking with the Stalinist regime and “returning to the ideals of Lenin, going to the Fourth International, and long live the world revolution!”. In the same letter to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks at the embassy, Reiss explained his choice: “I have been walking with you so far - but not a step further! Whoever is still silent becomes an accomplice of Stalin and a traitor to the cause of the working class and socialism!” In exchange for shelter, he gave Western intelligence and Russian emigrants information about the work of Soviet intelligence in Europe, in particular, finally highlighted the role of the Soviet agent Skoblin and his wife in the work against the ROVS and in the tragic fate of Generals Kutepov and Miller. With Reiss in the West, his wife Elsa Poretskaya, who also worked for Soviet intelligence, remained.

According to Elsa, her husband, whom she constantly calls in her memoirs the intelligence pseudonym Ludwig, decided not to return to the USSR back in 1936, when Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in Moscow, and in Spain the NKVD began to liquidate Trotskyists close to him. In 1937, with the beginning of mass repressions in the intelligence of the NKVD itself, this idea of Reiss strengthened, especially after short trips to Moscow by his wife and his intelligence friend Krivitsky, who told him about the beginning of the hysteria of the Great Terror. The NKVD, after a long persecution of its former employee Reiss, figured out his whereabouts thanks to his agents among the white emigrants in France, primarily agent Sergei Efron, the husband of the poetess Tsvetaeva and a white officer recruited by the Chekists in exile. So it was established that Reiss fled to a family sent in advance from Paris to the Swiss mountainous canton of Valais.

On September 4, 1937, Reiss was secretly liquidated by the NKVD as a result of a well-planned special operation. Having learned from Efron the whereabouts of Reiss in Switzerland, he was “set up” by an NKVD intelligence agent from the German communists Gertrude Schildbach, with whom Reiss began an affair and whom he invited to a restaurant. In a restaurant in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Reiss had dinner with a new acquaintance, NKVD officers Pravdin and Afanasiev (Bulgarian Comintern militant Atanasov) imitated a drunken quarrel with him and offered to go out and talk. At the restaurant, Reiss was beaten, pushed into a nearby car and taken out of the city, where Afanasiev shot him, 13 bullets were fired into Reiss's body, mostly in the head.

In total, the NKVD special group for the liquidation of Reiss in Lausanne included more than ten people: Chekists-performers Pravdin and Afanasiev, Schildbach who lured him and another Comintern and Chekist from the Germans Renata Steiner, white émigrés Kondratiev and Smirensky recruited earlier by the NKVD, a certain Frenchman Ducomet and others. The white emigrant Efron, recruited by the Chekists, did not directly participate in the liquidation of Reiss in Switzerland, despite repeated allegations about this.

This whole story is very confusing, for some time it was believed that Reiss himself at the restaurant was seized and kidnapped by professional French bandits Abbia and Martigny hired for the money of the NKVD. Only later, from the archive materials of the NKVD and the memoirs of this case of General Sudoplatov, it turned out that under the name of the Frenchman from Monaco Abbia (aka Rossi) the same Chekist Sergey Pravdin was hiding, and under the name of Martigny - Afanasiev, before all of them were considered different characters of this mysterious history. At the same time, they still argue: the Russian Chekist Pravdin worked in Europe under the legend of Roland Abbia, or is it really an NKVD mercenary agent from the French, after the assassination of Reiss, who received Soviet citizenship and the surname Pravdin, who became a personnel Chekist (he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for the Reiss case, worked as an intelligence officer in the United States under the cover of the TASS agency, died in Moscow in 1970). But at least Pravdin-Abbia is identified by historians as one and the same person. It is more difficult with Afanasiev-Martigny, some consider them to be different characters in this case. Although the Bulgarian Afanasiev, who was also awarded in Moscow for this operation, is definitely established as the direct killer of Ignatius Reiss. Most likely, as the defector Gordievsky wrote about this in his study of the history of the KGB, together with his co-author Englishman Andrew, Pravdin nevertheless became a real Frenchman Abbia, who went to the service of the NKVD. This is also indicated by indirect evidence: when in 1953, after the defeat of the Beria team in the special services, the new head of the Soviet state security, Kruglov, in his accusatory speech about the Beriaites expelled from the organs, named Sergey Pravdin, specifying his claims to him in the spirit of Soviet internationalism: “Suspicious type and French by birth."

Most likely, it was this mysterious man with many names who fired the last control bullet into the head of Reiss in the forest near Lausanne. When the Swiss police found Reiss's body by the road (he had cover documents in the name of the Czechoslovak citizen Eberhard), they found that the beaten Reiss was put in the trunk while still alive, and shot already in a secluded place. In the fist of the deceased, as a result of his attempt to defend himself, a tuft of hair from his former girlfriend Gertrude Schildbach, who lured him into a trap, remained. The same Schildbach had previously given Elsa Poretskaya, who was leaving her husband, a box of poisoned sweets as a gift, which was supposed to ruin Reiss's wife and their little son. But Elsa did not take a gift from a woman suspected of having an affair with her husband, and therefore escaped the revenge of the NKVD.

Sergei Efron, who played such a sad role in the fate of Reiss, fell under the suspicion of emigrants in terms of his connections with the NKVD, after which he was ordered to return to the USSR, where Efron was soon convicted as an “enemy of the people” and shot in Orel in 1941. The same fate awaited the former emigrant Klopenin, who worked for the Chekists for a long time, he was also recalled to Moscow and shot. The third participant in this story from among the recruited emigrants, Kondratyev, was also “brought out” to the USSR, obviously with the same aim, he was only partially “lucky” to die immediately upon arrival in Moscow from advanced tuberculosis. The French police did not even have time to interrogate Efron when documents came from the Swiss secret services about his participation in the murder of Reiss. Of all the participants in the liquidation of Reiss, the Swiss arrested only Renata Steiner, she rented a car in her name, in which they took Reiss out and in the trunk of which the police then found his blood. The French police were able to find their citizen Ducomet and the white émigré Smirensky from this group on their territory, but they were not extradited to Switzerland due to lack of evidence, limiting themselves to interrogations, as they interrogated in this case because of Efron, who had already fled to Moscow and was going there herself his death to Marina Tsvetaeva. The Chekists themselves, the executors of this case, have long since left for Moscow for awards.

Reiss's comrade Walter Krivitsky (Ginzburg), also a Chekist with experience from the Civil War, who worked for a long time in the military intelligence of the Red Army, and by 1939 was a resident of the NKVD intelligence in Holland, after the massacre of Reiss, he preferred to leave Europe and hide from the revenge of his former colleagues in the United States. At the same time, Krivitsky sent a letter to the Union explaining his actions, attaching to it his Soviet order for former services in intelligence. His friend Reiss did the same earlier with his Order of the Red Banner, also putting it in a farewell letter to former bosses. Many researchers are still perplexed: who allowed the residents of the INO GPU and the Intelligence Agency to take with them on business trips the awards presented in the Union, which is contrary to any rules of secrecy in intelligence? But the facts have been confirmed by history: Reiss and Krivitsky did defiantly return their "red banners" to yesterday's leaders. Krivitsky did not repeat the mistake of his comrade Reiss, he asked the French special services to protect himself and his family, giving them in exchange information about the activities of the NKVD intelligence in their state and issuing all his cover passports in exchange for new legal documents, with which he sailed to America .

There is evidence that the NKVD in America also tried to locate Krivitsky in order to eliminate him. He himself regularly fell into a panic, identifying the "agents of the Lubyanka" either in the supermarket, or at the station, or in the middle of Broadway, hiding from them by fleeing in the crowd. In one of the restaurants in Manhattan, Krivitsky was suddenly approached in 1940 by Basov, a well-known resident of the Intelligence Agency in the United States (a pseudonym in intelligence, Jim) and offered to talk, but the defector preferred to retreat from such conversations, remembering how they ended in Switzerland for Reiss. Before his death, Krivitsky himself managed to tell about this story in the book of memoirs “I was Stalin's agent”, while deciding not to mention the name of Basov and calling him only by the nickname Jim. At the same time, Krivitsky believed that intelligence Nazi Germany is also preparing his abduction, although this can still be attributed to the mania of pursuing a fugitive scout. Although, given his knowledge of many examples of liquidations of predecessors on the escape from the NKVD and a personal friend of Reiss-Poretsky, it is hardly worth being ironic here, as they did after Krivitsky's complaints about such "accidental" meetings with shadows from the past on the streets of New York in the American FBI.

It is still not clear whether Krivitsky really shot himself in a hotel room in Washington in February 1941 as a result of depression and the constant expectation of retribution from the Lubyanka, or whether he too became a victim of a covert operation of Soviet intelligence, as it is believed, he was shot by the Dutch professional assassin Heinrich Buss hired by her. , who previously worked for the NKVD in Holland just under the command of resident Krivitsky and personally knew him well. At least, Krivitsky himself wrote that even in France, before leaving for the United States, Buss found him and tried to call him for a conversation. During this conversation, Krivitsky saw in the crowd an employee of the Intelligence Agency Kral, whom he knew by sight, felt a trap and fled from Buss (Kral was soon shot in Moscow after returning from this trip). A few weeks before his death, Krivitsky managed to tell his friends and lawyers in the United States that he had seen Buss in New York; this is the basis of their firm belief that the NKVD tentacles reached Krivitsky across the ocean.

On February 10, 1941, the body of Walter Krivitsky was found in the room he occupied at the Washington Belle Vue Hotel on a bed; according to the police, he shot himself in the temple with a personal pistol, although many facts testified to the murder of a well-known defector by someone from outside. His lawyer, Waldman, claimed that the late client had instructed him never to believe in his death by suicide or accident. Waldman literally forced the FBI to start an investigation into the death of Krivitsky, but it ended again with a suicide conclusion. Against the background of the fates of Krivitsky, Agabekov, Reiss, Lyushkov and other high-ranking fugitives from the Soviet special services, the story of the defector Alexander Orlov stands out. Chekist Orlov (Feldbin) occupied a very high position in Soviet intelligence, and during the years of the civil war in Spain he was the main resident of Soviet intelligence in this country and knew almost everything about the secret operations of the Soviet special services on both sides of the Spanish front. Having then received the standard order to arrive from Spain at the Belgian port of Antwerp and board the Soviet ship Svir, Orlov realized his imminent arrest on board the ship and, in the future, execution soon after arriving on Soviet territory. And so he took his family and instead of being trapped in Antwerp, he went to France, from where he sailed to the USA. According to many, Orlov was saved by his maneuver: after fleeing to the West in 1939, the former resident Orlov left a message for the NKVD, where he promised to keep secret all the information known to him if the NKVD stopped hunting him and prevented repressions against family members who remained in the Soviet Union Orlov. Otherwise, Orlov promised to give the Western intelligence services all the information he knew, and he knew a lot.

After that, Orlov, having stuffed Western historians with hardly verifiable and shocking sensations from the life of the Soviet special services, really hid a lot of things known to him, so even some of the former Chekists consider him not a traitor, unlike Reiss or Agabekov, but a person fleeing unreasonable repressions in extreme circumstances . Prior to his flight, Orlov oversaw most of the secret operations of the Soviet special services in Spain, and their very participation in the Spanish war became a separate page in the history of the special services of the Soviet Union.

Soviet intelligence in the Spanish war

Several years of active operations by the foreign intelligence of the NKVD and the military intelligence of the Red Army in Spain engulfed in civil war created a new precedent. For the first time in the territories of this country occupied by the Spanish Republicans in 1936-1939, the Soviet secret services were able to operate so legally and widely in a foreign country, transferring their methods here. And the methods were transferred in full, under the cover of the allied secret police of the Spanish Republicans, the SIM NKVD even founded its own torture prison in the Spanish city of Alcalade, which was under the personal control of the NKVD resident in Spain, Orlov.

Orlov himself, after his flight from Stalinist repressions in the United States in 1939, told a lot about the activities of the Soviet special services in the Spanish war. And about torture chambers in the NKVD residency, almost a branch of the Lubyanka prison right in Spain, and about sabotage and terrorist work. Orlov named six NKVD saboteur training centers in Spain. And about how the NKVD officers took away their passports from the volunteers who arrived in the international brigades from around the world, sending them in thick bundles to Moscow to the Lubyanka for use by Soviet intelligence officers. And about the mass recruitment by his residency of NKVD agents from international brigades who arrived from all over the world. Orlov’s testimony was preserved in the US Senate commission as early as 1957, where he recalls the American citizens he recruited in the late 30s, on the margins of his testimony by the hand of the head of the FBI, Edgar Hoover, a note: “Raise the lists of American volunteers from the Lincoln Battalion, find out , who where".

The NKVD and military intelligence officers, who acted as instructors of the republican army, put into practice everything that they were used to in their homeland. Therefore, there are many sins behind the Soviet special services in Spain, including the hunt for white emigrants in Franco's army, and the secret liquidations of representatives of the republican camp proper, who deviated from the only true pro-Soviet line (left socialists, Trotskyists, anarchists).

Created almost entirely from Spanish communists, the Republican special service SIM, headed by Basa, from 1937 was already more subordinate to the NKVD representative office and the branch of the Comintern in Spain than to its own coalition government in Madrid. Involved in this hunt and in planning special operations in Spain was the headquarters of the Comintern in the Spanish war, stuffed with agents of the NKVD, located in Albacete. The chief representatives of the Comintern in Spain, the Frenchman Andre Marty and the German Walter Ulbricht (the future leader of the GDR), who were in charge here, gave sanctions to the Chekists and their friends from the SIM for secret arrests and executions in the ranks of the international brigades themselves in case of suspicion of deviating from Stalin's line. Later, similar facts that were revealed aroused protest even in the ranks of the Spanish and French Communist Parties, at their request, Marty, who was called the “executioner from Albacete”, had to be recalled from Spain, and even Hemingway, who sang the hymn to the international brigades with his wonderful novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, Hemingway will tell about this Stalinist from the Comintern : "It was a bed bug with a mania to shoot."

So in Spain, the well-known Trotskyists Wolf, Freund, Rein, Robles, well-known in the international Fourth International, were liquidated - while they were liquidated secretly in order to protect the republican camp from a premature split. Secretly captured and killed in the fall of 1937, the leader of the POUM Kurt Landau from the Austrian Trotskyists, NKVD resident Orlov complained in a report to the Lubyanka that "the letter business (liquidation) of Landau turned out to be the most difficult in Spain, he is experienced and was in deep underground." The militant organization POUM, created in Spain by local and European Trotskyists, as well as groups of Spanish anarchists, occupied the NKVD in this matter no less than open enemies from the camp of Franco's Falangists. Also in Spain, the leader of local anarchists, Alfredo Martinez, who headed the Anarchist Federation in Catalonia and opposed the too close alliance of the republican government with Moscow, was secretly liquidated. Later, the prominent Italian anarchist Bernelli, who fought among the fighters of the international brigades, was also killed here, he was also considered in the NKVD as having a bad influence on the internationalist brotherhood. In Barcelona, the well-known English Trotskyist Robert Smiley, who arrived here to fight against fascism, was kidnapped and killed. In addition to such "literal actions", the Chekist agents were actively introduced into the POUM and the FAI anarchist federation. So, inside the POUM, an NKVD agent, Leon Narvich, worked for a long time from among the Jews who emigrated from Russia. Later, the Poumovites exposed him and also secretly liquidated him. During the defeat of the POUM after the Catalan rebellion, an arrested Dane Trotskyist from this group by the name of Kjelse admitted during interrogation in the Spanish state security that it was he, on the orders of the leaders of the POUM, who killed Narwich for working for Soviet intelligence and provocations.

The loudest and most daring liquidation of their own temporary supporter in the left camp was carried out by the NKVD and its comrades from the Spanish SIM in 1937, when the POUM commander Andreas Nin was secretly kidnapped and killed. Later, the Trotskyists of the POUM and the anarchists of the CNT faction, irritated by such interference of the Soviet secret services in Spanish affairs, would raise the famous mutiny in Barcelona, suppressed by the communists in 1938, and this would be the beginning of the end of the republic in Spain. Although the Soviet secret services never admitted their guilt in such a weakening of the left camp from the inside, which Franco's much more politically united supporters managed to take advantage of. Even the commander of the POUM, Nin, was declared simply to have escaped from prison and then disappeared without a trace. It is now well established that SIM officers arrested Andreas Nin and 40 other POUM leaders in June 1937, disbanded the Poum militia and shut down their Batalha newspaper after an obvious provocation by the NKVD.

In the annals of the NKVD, this operation to defeat the main forces of the POUM and liquidate Nin takes place as the Nikolai action. Orlov's people actually concocted false documents that the top of the POUM entered into secret contacts with Franco's right-wing camp in order to overthrow the Negrin government. The arrested Nin was tortured in the Alcalade prison in the presence of the NKVD resident Orlov and the representative of the Comintern headquarters, the Italian Vidali, to beat him out of a confession of mythical connections with the Francoists. According to the surviving leader of the POUM, the Spaniard Gorkin, after a couple of days of such interrogations in Alcalade, Nin's face was a shapeless mass from beatings. Since Nin and his comrades did not admit to treason in favor of Franco, which means that it was impossible to shoot them in a public process, his secret liquidation was organized. Personally, the NKVD resident Orlov, with the help of the Soviet intelligence officer Grigulevich and several Spaniards from the SIM who were especially devoted to the NKVD, took Andreas Nin out of prison at night to a suburban highway, where he was shot dead, and the corpse was thrown on the side of the road. It was officially announced that Nin had escaped from prison, which was supposed to remove the blame for his death from the NKVD and his allies, but the truth came out over the years.

The Soviet secret services also did not forget about the opposing camp, helping the Spanish Republicans not only with their advisers, but also by direct organization of sabotage in the rear of the Francoists. Among other things, the possibility of organizing an assassination attempt on Franco himself was also considered, for which it was supposed to use the young English intelligence officer Kim Philby, who had already been recruited by the NKVD, who worked at Franco's headquarters under the legend of a British journalist.

Almost all the leading specialists in secret actions from the secret services of the Soviet Union have passed the Spanish paths of the secret war: Medvedev, Vaupshas, Prokopyuk, Akulov, Korobitsyn, Eitingon, Vasilevsky, Orlovsky, Rabtsevich and others. Here, secret sabotage in the rear of Franco was led by the famous Soviet intelligence officer Khoja Mamsurov (known in Spain as Comrade Santi), one of the main specialists of the USSR military intelligence in secret actions abroad, the organizer of the explosion in Sofia Cathedral in 1925, which almost killed the Bulgarian Tsar Boris and Prime Minister Tsankov. In Spain, he was an instructor in a special partisan corps of the Republican army, designed to operate behind enemy lines. After returning from a Spanish assignment in 1938, Mamsurov received a promotion in the Intelligence Agency and headed the entire special department of this special service for sabotage (Department A), replacing Gai Tumanyan, who was transferred to a command position in the troops. Mamsurov then retained the position of chief saboteur of the GRU during the Second World War.

Here, in Spain, the future founder of the Soviet GRU special forces, Ilya Starinov, one of the best specialists of the Soviet special services in sabotage behind enemy lines, began his journey. He was an instructor of the already purely sabotage brigade of the Spanish Republican army under the command of Domingo Ungrii and Antonio Buitrago, went with her to the rear of the Francoists. It was from the experience of the actions of this sabotage special forces of the Spaniards that Starinov took out his main idea about the need to create special special forces under the GRU, for which he was later called the "father of the Soviet special forces."

From here, in fear of repeating the path of Berzin, Orlov, the chief resident of the NKVD, also fled, according to many, before his escape, he was one of the best foreign intelligence operatives of the GPU and the NKVD in the 30s, who had been in the ranks of the Cheka since 1920. His deputy in Spain, Belkin, was also later recalled to the USSR, although he escaped repression, and Eitingon was appointed resident in Spain to replace Orlov. Although the deputy resident Belkin, who “overlooked” the betrayal of his boss, was interrogated and checked for a long time in Moscow, being suspended from work in the NKVD intelligence, Belkin’s arrest was also clearly being prepared, he was saved only by the removal of Yezhov from the post of head of the NKVD and the slightly weakened grip of the “hedgehogs” around the Soviet scouts. Belkin was simply fired from the security agencies and, with the entry of the USSR into the war with Germany, he was sent to the army as an ordinary political instructor. Although then, at the request of Beria, he was returned to intelligence as an experienced employee. In 1942, he will be sent on a secret mission to Iran, formally neutral in that war, to establish contacts with the Kurdish movement, where he will die with typhus.

Marcel Rosenberg, the then chief specialist in behind-the-scenes negotiations of Soviet intelligence, would be summoned from Spain and shot in Moscow. The same fate will befall Umansky, Salnyn, Syroezhkin (known in Spain under the nickname Grande - Bolshoi), who carried out responsible tasks of Soviet intelligence in Spain. Recalled from Spain, the Soviet intelligence officer Belenkaya (the wife of one of the leaders of the "Special Group" of the NKVD Perevozchikov, who was also shot in 1941 by his own), committed suicide in Moscow in anticipation of the inevitable arrest. So the period of great repressions also blossomed in a new way the history of the secret operations of the Soviet special services in Spain, which came with the Great Terror in the same years.

At the same time, we note that the special services of the republican government of Spain - counterintelligence SIM and the General Directorate of Security (secret police, or Securidad) became the first allied Soviet special services of another state, except for the special services of Mongolia, whose capabilities were rather limited. Here, in Spain, Soviet intelligence for the first time held a full-scale rehearsal of involving the allied special services in their operations, the head of the General Directorate of Security Ortega and his employees in this Republican security service especially willingly cooperated with the NKVD in Spain. Employees of this special service (Castillo, Jimenez, and others) participated not only in covert operations against the Francoists, but also in the elimination of persons undesirable for the NKVD in the camp of their own allies. Although the leaders of SIM Basa and Barutel, who later replaced him, also became devoted executors of the will of the NKVD.

Employees of the military intelligence service SIM (the second department of the General Staff of the Republican Army) went through such a good school of sabotage behind enemy lines under the guidance of Soviet intelligence saboteurs that when they left Spain as a result of Franco's victory in the war, the Soviet comrades evacuated some of these Spanish specialists with them to the USSR. Most of them were involved in the same profile in the Soviet special services, especially during the Second World War. Such sabotage specialists from the Spanish special services, trained by their civil war, such as Ungria, Buitrago, Ramirez (led the NKVD sabotage group in occupied Ukraine), Africa (the famous Patria, after the war a KGB resident in the Americas), Lister ( known in the Union under the surname Lissitzky). Some of them later became disillusioned with the Soviet model of socialism and left the USSR, as did Manuel Tagueña, who served in the Soviet military intelligence, and author of the memoir Witness to Two Wars in 1947. The general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain, Jose Diaz, who was taken out after the defeat of the republic in the USSR, also plunged into the abyss of disappointment; in 1942 he committed suicide in evacuation to Tbilisi. Others did not get along in the Soviet Union immediately and fell under repression. Like Gonzalez, who secretly shot the Spanish Trotskyists during the war, better known by his partisan nickname Campesino (Peasant). In the Union, he quarreled with the head of the Spanish communist emigration, Dolores Ibarruri, threw his party card in her face, then tried to illegally leave the Soviet Union, was arrested while crossing the border with Iran, served time in the Vorkuta camps and fled to Iran on the second attempt. In Europe, Campesino wrote an honest memoir about his disillusionment with Soviet communism, spent time in a French prison for participating in the terror of the Basque ETA, and died in France in 1983.

At the same time, the instructors of the NKVD and the Intelligence Agency introduced their own specific notes into cooperation with the Spanish secret services of the Republicans. They often amazed the Spanish comrades with their ideological nature, calls to be closer to the Communist Party, to purge their own ranks of "wavering" socialists, anarchists or Trotskyists, and at times shocking the Spaniards with their cruel determination.

In the memoirs of the same Ilya Starinov “Mines are waiting in the wings” about the events of the Spanish war, a typical example is given, where Starinov himself and other Soviet instructors of the Red Army Intelligence Department, as well as communist saboteurs like Domingo Ungrii who completely agree with them, demand permission for them to organize a mass detonation of mines trains behind Francoist lines. And the commander of the front of the Republicans, Colonel Sales, with the arrogance of a military personnel referring to saboteurs and special services in general, allows them to do this only in those places where ordinary passenger trains are not allowed in the rear of the Francoists, otherwise peaceful Spaniards may accidentally suffer. According to Starinov, Soviet specialists from the military intelligence of the Intelligence Agency and the NKVD insisted on sabotage on railway even at the risk to civilian passengers, more than once violating this prohibition of Sales behind enemy lines. And the front commander Sales himself was suspected of secret sympathies for Franco and hidden anti-communism. And they suspected in vain: in 1939, the Francoists, who won that war, shot Colonel Sales, who fought for the republic, to the end. This is an old dispute between supporters of the traditional way of war from career officers and innovators of sabotage and terrorist actions from the special services, and even painted in red-communist tones.

In the same book by Starinov, an even more eloquent example is mentioned of what such instructors from the USSR special services tried to teach Spanish comrades. The representative of the NKVD among the Republicans, Orlovsky, proposed to destroy the water supply system in the fields in the rear of the Francoists with explosions in order to deliberately cause starvation among the peasants and encourage them to revolt against Franco as soon as possible. Two or three years after the Spanish events, Starinov, Orlovsky and other specialists who had passed through Spain would apply this experience in the partisan movement on the territory of the USSR.

In the same years of the Spanish war, the NKVD and the military intelligence of the Intelligence Agency felt at ease in another allied country, on the other side of the world from the Pyrenees, full of civil war. The end of the 1930s was the peak of the activities of NKVD advisers and military intelligence officers of the Intelligence Agency in allied Mongolia under the rule of the pro-Soviet socialist marshal Choibalsan. And here in 1937 we see a picture very reminiscent of the Spanish one.

This year, the first trial took place in the case of a group of Mongolian leaders accused of treason in favor of Japan and a conspiracy against Choibalsan, in which most of the Mongolian party leadership, headed by Prime Minister Gendun and Defense Minister Demid, was destroyed. In participation in this conspiracy against the pro-Stalin ruler Choibalsan, in addition to people from the Mongolian party elite, they accused Soviet ambassador in Mongolia Tairov, he was recalled to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested by the NKVD and shot. And the main "conspirators" from the Mongolian comrades themselves, for the most part, were also dealt with by the NKVD themselves, and not by the Mongolian GVO. So, Prime Minister Gendun was summoned to the USSR to improve his health in a sanatorium, in Sochi in July 1937 he was secretly arrested by the NKVD. Gendun was secretly shot at the end of 1937 in Moscow by the verdict of the Supreme Court of the USSR. Defense Minister Marshal Demid, named the second main conspirator and supporter of the party opposition in the USSR, was also invited to the Soviet Union for reprisals under the pretext of a friendly visit. But they didn’t even take him to Moscow, they liquidated him right on the train on Soviet territory in Irkutsk, for which purpose Frinovsky, Deputy People’s Commissar of the NKVD, personally flew here. Demid was either strangled or poisoned. Just in case, the Mongolian comrades were informed about the death of their chief military leader, who allegedly died on a train from acute poisoning with canned food, as if the Minister of Defense on the way to Moscow decided to eat anything in the style of modern Mongolian shuttles in order to save money.

And then for several years there were a series of such cases in which they destroyed both the Mongolian leaders who had previously criticized Choibalsan for something, as the ex-premier of the country Tserendorji, who had been dismissed on charges of Trotskyism, and the new elite, as the chairman of the Mongolian People's Khural (parliament) Amar . Here, the Great Terror in the Mongolian manner was carried out by the local special service of the GVO with the participation of instructors and advisers from the Soviet NKVD. And like ours, this campaign did not pass over the attention of our own special services, the head of the GVO himself in the 30s, Shidzhai, was arrested and shot by his former subordinates, repeating the fate of our state security commissars Yagoda and Yezhov. Namsaray, who headed this service before him, was also arrested and destroyed in this purge, as was the head of the Mongolian police, Ayushi, as well as the arrested chief prosecutor of the country, Borkha. A new round of GVO terror, with the support of the Soviet NKVD, fell upon the Mongolian "reactionary" lamas, hundreds of them were shot in a new case of a lama conspiracy led by the supreme lama Damdin.

So in Mongolia, as in Spain, the Soviet secret services felt at home, habitually organizing arrests and secret liquidations, rolling back the method of managing the special services of the satellite countries dependent on the USSR, which was so useful after 1945.

Elimination of Trotsky

The secret operation to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 puts a logical end in the history of pre-war operations of Soviet intelligence in the pre-war period, although formally it goes beyond the boundaries of the 30s and beyond the concept of "pre-war years", because since the autumn of 1939 the world war has been out of bounds. The USSR was already raging. Two decades of secret operations and liquidations of emigrants, their own defectors, disillusioned leaders of the Comintern movement, Trotskyists resulted in a secret massacre by the method of a special operation with the most important apostate from the Stalinist model of development of the USSR. And this is symbolic, and really closes the big first cycle of the life of the secret services of the USSR, because they dealt with one of the founders of their own Soviet power in Russia and the first ally of Lenin himself.

By the end of the 1930s, Stalin's hatred for this man, who claimed to be the successor to the work of Lenin and the world revolution, who founded an alternative to the pro-Soviet Comintern, the Fourth International, reached the limit. In addition to the mass of anti-Stalinist books written by Trotsky in exile, such as The Revolution Betrayed, articles on the same topic, his biography by Trotsky, which was not very pleasant for Stalin, the Fourth International, created by the Trotskyists in 1938 abroad, grew and was eager to compete with the Soviet Comintern. In the foreign communist parties controlled by the Comintern, Trotsky's supporters often caused a serious split in the 1930s. Thus, Jacques Doriot in France, Arvid Hansen in Norway, Tesso Blanco in Italy or Ruth Fischer in Germany took a very significant part of the local communist parties, one of the strongest and most numerous in pre-war Europe, to alternative Trotskyist parties. In China, Trotsky's line was followed by a part of the CCP, which had gained strength, headed by Chiang Tung-hsing. In France, in the home of another member of the Comintern, Rosmer, who had gone over to the Trotskyists, Trotsky and the leaders of the parties of various countries loyal to him wrote a program for a new international union - the Fourth International, and this was already a frank challenge to Moscow. And in Spain, the pro-Trotskyist POUM, created by Andreas Nin, went to an armed clash with the communists subordinate to Moscow. In addition, the Bulletin of the Opposition was published in the West under the editorship of Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov.

By the end of the 1930s, the scope of the international activities of the Trotskyists, inspired by the example of their leader who did not give up to the circumstances, forced Moscow to admit that simply expelling Trotsky from the borders of the Soviet Union was a mistake. Looking at the newsreel footage of Trotsky’s departure from the Alma-Ata railway station into exile abroad, where Lev Davidovich is loaded into a train surrounded by guys in gray uniforms from the GPU, Stalin probably regretted more than once about his liberalism towards his former comrade-in-arms in the Central Committee. To organize the expulsion of Trotsky from the USSR, Yagoda's secretary Pavel Bulanov personally came to Alma-Ata, who in 1938 would be shot just as a "right-wing Trotskyist conspirator." The very decision to send Trotsky to Turkey was made in 1929 after the GPU reported that the exile from Alma-Ata maintains ties with his comrades-in-arms in the capital and tries to lead the opposition underground, and secretly meets couriers coming from them when visiting a public bath in Alma-Ata .

Stalin quickly realized his mistake in the gracious release of Trotsky outside the Soviet Union, because many are sure that back in the 1920s, at the height of the factional struggle, Joseph Vissarionovich thought about a plan to secretly liquidate Trotsky by the forces of the GPU. Back in the early 1930s, on one of the NKVD intelligence reports on Trotsky's active work abroad, Stalin imposed a personal resolution with the words in it: "We need to hit him well on the head through the Comintern." Even if Stalin did not mean a literal blow to the head by Trotsky at the expense of a special operation of the NKVD intelligence and its Comintern cadres, if it was still a figurative “warming up” at the verbal or organizational level, then later Stalin exactly repeated this order to his intelligence literally, and the leader of world Trotskyism was naturally hit on the head with an ice pick.

In addition, they have somehow forgotten about this now, but before the order for the literal liquidation of Trotsky abroad by the NKVD, Stalin managed to make an attempt and legally return the dangerous exile to his possessions for reprisal. In 1936, the Soviet Union finally joined the League of Nations, which was the predecessor of the UN, and, according to its rules, then issued a request for the extradition of Trotsky back to the USSR as a criminal offender, all the same confessions of the "Trotskyists-Zinovievites" on the already past first trials of them about a conspiracy led by Trotsky in the USSR and the plans of the conspirators to kill Stalin. In parallel, a request for the extradition of Trotsky was also sent to the Norwegian authorities, where Lev Davidovich was then before leaving for Mexico. But the Norwegians simply chose to escort the dangerous guest to the Mexican shores. And the international court of the League of Nations told Moscow that it had no right to demand the extradition of a person whom she herself had deprived of her own citizenship, because Trotsky was an "apartid", that is, a person without any citizenship. “Now, if you persuaded Trotsky to take Soviet citizenship again, or if you persuaded some state to give Trotsky citizenship, then we could talk about extradition,” the League of Nations answered Stalin like this.

Stalin continued his attempts to obtain the extradition of the enemy to him by the hands of the world community. In 1938, the Soviet Union proposed to the League of Nations to establish a special "Anti-Terrorist Tribunal" to resolve such issues in relation to persons accused by any country of terrorism - then it was an outlandish proposal, because the League of Nations was not concerned with the "anti-terrorist struggle" then, like the UN at the beginning of the 21st century. But the somersaults of the Soviet government surprised few people: in 1918-1920, it was not shy about the concept of "red terror" and in fact recognized that its Cheka was conducting terrorist activities against political opponents. Lenin, in his dispatches, did not hesitate to demand "more terror." And twenty years later, they suddenly became the main spokesmen for the anti-terrorist struggle on a global scale, ahead of Clinton and Bush by half a century.

But the League of Nations did not fall for this bait, having not established any anti-terrorist international tribunal on the proposal from Moscow. Only Trotsky himself responded joyfully to Soviet initiatives in exile, supporting this Stalinist proposal and saying that he would personally come to this tribunal and prove that Stalin's power was the main terrorist gang in the world. Realizing that it would not be possible to outplay international law with his peculiar evidence and initiatives, Stalin then decided to act with his own methods, taking out the dangerous emigrant with the hand of the NKVD.

Another circumstance that brought to life the secret action of Soviet intelligence to eliminate Trotsky was the fear of getting a strong Trotskyist underground inside the USSR itself. Although a significant part of those repressed for Trotskyism or participation in secret groups of the “Trotskyist conspiracy” of the late 30s consisted of Soviet citizens who were not involved in this movement or former Trotskyists who had long ceased opposition activities. Trotsky's supporters tried to create a real underground in the USSR. And in the party, and in the army, and in the GPU itself, then there were enough supporters of the Trotskyist platform. The fear of creating such an underground remained, and Trotsky was sentenced in Moscow for this reason as well. As well as for the reason (which later many Chekists tried to justify the expediency of the secret assassination of Trotsky) that he was ready for an alliance with any foreign state to overthrow the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union and subsequently inflate his beloved world revolution, including with Nazi Germany . Although Trotsky's Germanophile sympathies are clearly exaggerated by the Chekists and their followers, and Trotsky's supporters were just as persecuted in Hitler's Germany as pro-Soviet Communists, the German Trotskyist leader Monat was killed by the Gestapo, as was the Communist leader Thälmann, and Hitler's official newspaper of the NSDAP, Trotsky's Völkischer Beobachter, was otherwise as a "Soviet-Jewish bloodhound" she did not call.

Regretting that in the late 1920s Trotsky was simply expelled from the Soviet Union to emigrate, where he did not reconcile himself, but launched a fierce struggle against the Soviet regime, Stalin ordered the liquidation of Trotsky abroad by the forces of Soviet intelligence. Operation Duck itself, which led to the assassination of Trotsky, was only the final chord of a long-term hunt for this prominent exile and leader of international Trotskyism. Leon Trotsky himself was called a duck in this NKVD intelligence operation, Stalin personally gave his Chekists a license to shoot this “bird”. Since 1936, this was entrusted to the People's Commissar of the NKVD Yezhov, but he did not manage to fulfill the leader's instructions before his removal and arrest. And in 1939, Stalin instructed the new People's Commissar of the NKVD, Beria, to carry out Operation Duck. And he appointed Pavel Sudoplatov as the main person in charge of the operation in his department, who had just “dealt with” the head of the Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN Konovalets in a foreign territory in Holland in a similar way, for which he received the post of deputy head of foreign intelligence in the NKVD. Sudoplatov himself recalled in his memoirs how he and Beria reported to Stalin in his Kremlin office on the preparations for the hunt for the "duck" and how Stalin told them that in any case they would know that Trotsky was killed by the Stalinist NKVD, but cannot be left to him. direct evidence and evidence.

This long hunt began back in 1936 under People's Commissar Yezhov on the Lubyanka, and at first it was led by the famous specialist in covert operations of the INO NKVD, Sergei Shpigelglass, nicknamed Douglas. Although the Russian historian General Volkogonov believed that Spiegelglass received such an order even earlier, under Yagoda, in 1934 or 1935. The best personnel of the 5th special department of the NKVD, which was engaged in secret actions, were attracted to this operation. Then they connected the “Special Group” of Serebryansky, which existed in parallel with him in the NKVD, and liquidated General Kutepov in 1930 in Paris. As part of the NKVD, the "Special Group" retained its autonomy, reporting only to the People's Commissar, being classified within the NKVD itself and having its headquarters separately from the Lubyanka in an inconspicuous mansion on Gogolevsky Boulevard.

Pavel Sudoplatov, who replaced Spiegelglass as the chief saboteur of the NKVD, wrote in his memoirs “Intelligence and the Kremlin” that the “Special Group”, which existed autonomously and under the direct subordination of the People’s Commissar of the NKVD, was originally created to build sabotage networks in Europe, the USA, China and the Middle East in case of a future great war. But, despite the purpose of the “Special Group” indicated by Sudoplatov to prepare an autonomous sabotage network in case of a war, they began to use its asset back in the early 30s, and it was during covert operations against Trotskyists abroad. Employees of the "Special Group" are involved in the liquidations of the famous Trotskyist Clement in Paris, the representative of the Trotskyists in the Spanish war, Erwin Wolf, formerly Trotsky's personal secretary, a native of Czechoslovakia from the Sudeten Germans. Serebryansky and his people in the late 30s were getting closer and closer to Trotsky himself.

In 1938, Serebryansky and his group, following the model of kidnapping General Miller, prepared the capture and secret removal to the Soviet Union of Trotsky's son Lev Sedov, which could become a trump card in bargaining with the leader of world Trotskyism himself. But Sedov suddenly died during an operation to remove the appendix in a French clinic, and this, in the spirit of that time, turned out to be sufficient reason to accuse Serebryansky and his people of disrupting the operation and failing to comply with the order of the command. There were rumors that, in confusion, the main NKVD saboteurs of those years, Spiegelglass and Serebryansky, even tried to give their people's commissar Yezhov the natural death of Lev Sedov on the operating table as a secret operation of their agents from among the French Communists. And allegedly Yezhov, when Spiegelglass reported to him about Sedov’s death in a Paris clinic, asked rather: “What, did we work nicely?”, And Spiegelglass, who spoke specifically about the natural death of the “client”, did not seem to dare to clarify, so Yezhov reported the false version to the Central Committee on the liquidation of Sedov by the Chekists. But then such a version did not receive any confirmation in the Lubyanka archives, and the interrupted operation to capture Trotsky's son became the basis for an early repression against Serebryansky and Spiegelglass.

Since even now there are sometimes hints in the press and literature that the Chekists could “help” Lev Sedov die in the hospital, it is worth recalling that the Trotskyists themselves then suspected them of this, and according to their requirements, the French police even conducted an investigation. It is also believed that in the hospital ward Sedov was presented with an orange stuffed with poison by the NKVD agent Zborovsky (agent Etienne or Tulip according to the Lubyanka classification) introduced to the Trotskyists. But even the appointed examination and the conclusions of the doctors showed that Lev Sedov simply did not go to the doctors on time, the appendix broke through, and with peritonitis, Sedov was doomed even by the time he entered the Paris clinic. And many researchers quite reasonably point out how short was the period from Sedov's admission to the clinic to his death, so that intelligence officers from the Chekists could find an approach to it, obtain mandatory sanction from Moscow for liquidation and organize the murder.

Serebryansky himself, already under the arrest of his former colleagues in the Lubyanka, also honestly admitted that he was obliged to deliver Sonny (as Sedov was called in this operation of the Chekists) on assignment to Moscow alive, and not to kill, only the living Sedov in the hands of the NKVD became a bargaining chip and a lever of pressure on Trotsky in distant Mexico. Serebryansky's group had a plan to kidnap Lev Sedov on a Parisian street during one of the nightly sprees familiar to him. And for the export of living Sedov by sea to Leningrad, Serebryansky’s people hired a fishing ship on the northern coast of France, assuring the team that there was a good “coven” to make a smuggling raid to Leningrad for a load of weapons for the Spanish Republicans. Well, the iron argument is that the non-execution of this operation, even in connection with the death of its object, was blamed on Serebryansky during his arrest. This means that he was indeed instructed to bring Trotsky's son to the USSR alive, and there was no liquidation on the operating table then; as Sudoplatov aptly noted in his memoirs: "At least no one was awarded for it."

Soon, the resident of the INO NKVD in Spain, Orlov, who worked together with Serebryansky in the operation against Trotsky, fled to the West, this also became a contribution to the decision to repress the commander of the "Special Group" and its dissolution. Yakov Serebryansky was recalled to Moscow and here, in the midst of Stalin's repressions, he was arrested as an "enemy of the people" in the ranks of the NKVD. During interrogations with prejudice, in which the deputies of the then People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria Abakumov and Kobulov personally participated, they tried to knock out a confession from Serebryansky in participation in a counter-revolutionary organization within the NKVD. He did not admit this, was imprisoned until 1941, and only with the outbreak of war with Germany was released and returned to the state security agencies for sabotage work against the Germans (Serebryansky did not survive the second arrest in 1953 as an accomplice of Beria, having died in 1956 in a detention facility). The “Special Group” itself, after the arrest of Serebryansky, was liquidated in the structure of the NKVD; created in case of participation of the USSR in the world war, this secret structure did not live up to the entry of the Union into this very war.

Spiegelglass, who worked along the line of eliminating Trotsky, was also shot by that time, so a new generation of specialists in sabotage of the Soviet special services had to complete Operation Duck, and they completed it in 1940. In the Lubyanka archives of the late 1930s, researchers found evidence that the assassination attempt on Trotsky in Mexico was not the first, that at least one such operation was prepared by Soviet intelligence before. But it was not possible to establish who was involved in it, why the operation failed, what happened to these people - everything is now hidden by the opaque blackness of the past and the NKVD archives that have undergone more than one purge over the years.

Although it is known for certain that Stalin first gave the order to prepare for the liquidation of Trotsky back in the early 1930s, after the first serious attacks by an exile released from the country against the Kremlin leader. Even during the years of the existence of the GPU, he gave such an oral order and reprimanded Menzhinsky that he did not work well according to Trotsky and generally "stopped catching mice," in Stalin's words. Approaches to Trotsky for his possible liquidation also began in the early 1930s, when they tried to infiltrate him as a secretary under the guise of a Trotskyist, the agent of the GPU Olberg, but unsuccessfully. Then the emigrant Zborovsky recruited by the NKVD, the same agent Tulip, was introduced into Trotsky's inner circle, at the founding congress of the Fourth International in France he was the only representative of the Trotskyist underground from the USSR itself, and that secret employee of Soviet intelligence. But Zborovsky did not pull directly on the militant to eliminate Trotsky, the maximum that he then managed to do was to help his murderer Mercader infiltrate the inner circle of the leader of Trotskyism in 1939.

Sudoplatov, in his memoirs, clearly said that, admonishing him and Beria in 1939 for Operation Duck, Stalin at the audience unequivocally said that Spiegelglass had previously prepared some kind of operation directly for the assassination of Trotsky, but he failed because he was " enemy of the people," and has already suffered severe punishment for this. It is the details of this unrealized operation or operations that are still being sought by persistent historians of the special services in the archives. It is quite possible that Spiegelglass and Serebryansky were not forgiven for the disruption of this operation, it was they who, according to their work, were supposed to lead such an action. It is possible that the execution of Passov, who was then the head of foreign intelligence for a short time, was connected with these plans. It is likely that the recall to Moscow and the arrest of the NKVD intelligence resident in New York, Gutzeit, is also associated with this unrealized plan, there are versions that he coordinated the operation on the spot, as Eitingon later performed this mission in Utka. Now you can’t find out anymore and you can’t ask these people - in the fall of 1938, in the wave of the Yezhovites being cleared, they were thrown into the investigation chambers of the NKVD, from which only Serebryansky got out alive in 1941, and even then, until the next arrest, already in the cleansing of the “Berievites”. It is reasonable to assume that the ordinary participants in this unknown operation under the leadership of Spiegelglass, as punishment for the failure, went under the knife of repression and took the secret with them to the grave. The final part of the duck hunt is known to us due to the fact that it ended in success for reconnaissance, leaving traces of this in the archives, and thanks to the memories of its developer Sudoplatov, who survived until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Sudoplatov in 1939 developed a detailed plan for the operation "Duck" with many different options for its execution, directly appointing Naum Eitingon, who had just returned to Moscow from the fronts of Spain from the fronts of Spain, an experienced saboteur with a good knowledge of Spanish and agents recruited by him from the Spanish communists. Even the plan for Operation Duck, authored by Sudoplatov, was preserved, then printed in a single copy for a report to Stalin and lain for a long time in the Chekist archives, it was even recently shown in the documentary film Trotsky, Doomed to Murder by its author journalist Sergei Medvedev. Under the plan are the signatures of the head of foreign intelligence of the NKVD Fitin, his deputy Sudoplatov and the head of the Eitingon group working on the case, at the bottom there is a note: “Printed in a single copy personally by P. Sudoplatov”; the secrecy of the operation was so maintained that even at the top of the Lubyanka only a few people knew about it and were themselves forced to print the plan. In it, in various versions, it was supposed to shoot at Trotsky, strangle him, cut him with a knife at close contact, poison his food or water, blow up Trotsky’s entire house near Mexico City or his car when leaving the city. Finally, two battle groups were formed to eliminate Trotsky. The first consisted of Mexican left-wing militants and NKVD agents, led by the famous artist Siqueiros, it was called the Horse group in the Sudoplatov operation, and it was supervised by the Soviet intelligence officer Grigulevich. The second group was called “Mother”, since its leader was the Spanish communist and NKVD agent Caridad Mercader, and her son Ramon Mercader was a member of the group as a militant. Together with the reserve group "Mother", Eitingon, who led the entire operation on the spot, sailed to America, having personally recruited Mercader's mother and son as intelligence agents of the Soviet Union while still in Spain.

The operation "Duck" itself is now sufficiently described in all details, it can be briefly discussed. As you know, in 1937, at the invitation of the head of the Trotskyist Socialist Party of the United States, Shachtman, Trotsky arrived in New York, and then settled in Mexico for a long time visiting the leader of the local Trotskyists, Rivera, where he lived until his death in 1940. After the scandal with Rivera, when Trotsky fell in love with his charming wife, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Rivera showed his spiritual leader and rival in love to the door, and Trotsky and his entourage rented a villa in the suburbs of the Mexican capital in Coyocan. It was dangerous for him to stay in Europe after several liquidations of the NKVD of his closest supporters and secretaries and the revealed plans of assassination attempts on Trotsky himself and his son.

In addition, in 1933 in France, in parallel with the NKVD, an attempt on the life of Trotsky, hated by them since the Civil War, was being prepared by terrorists of the White emigre ROVS from the combat group of General Turkul; on the street of the Clermont-Ferrand resort, Trotsky miraculously missed the armed ROVS militants Spodin and Naletov, who were waiting for him. In Mexico, Trotsky was sheltered by his comrades-in-arms in a well-fortified villa in Coyocan, a suburb of Mexico City, where, behind a powerful fence with observation towers, the leader of world Trotskyism was guarded by two solid security rings - outside the Mexican police, and inside Trotsky's armed guards from members of his movement under the command of the English Trotskyite Robins . It was in the villa in Coyocan that the final act of Operation Duck was played out, which cost Trotsky himself, his killer Mercader a twenty-year sentence in the Mexican Lecumbre prison, and his curators from the Soviet special services received orders and Stalin's gratitude for the elimination of a dangerous political opponent.

The operation itself took place in two stages. Its leaders were replaced by Spiegelglass and Serebryansky, younger specialists in foreign sabotage and secret liquidations Sudoplatov, Eitingon, Grigulevich. Naum (Leonid) Eitingon in the Cheka during the Civil War was a very young operative, wounded during the suppression of the anti-Soviet uprising in Bashkiria and then transferred to the INO VChK. He came to the fore at secret actions in China, where he was one of the organizers of the Communist rebellion against Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai in 1927, then he is sometimes credited with organizing the assassination of Chinese Marshal Zhang Zuolin by blowing up his headquarters train, although Zhang Zuolin was officially liquidated in 1928 in history is considered the work of Japanese intelligence and its specialist in this kind of actions by the name of Komoto. BUT finest hour Eitingon came to the war in Spain, where he was one of the main leaders of the sabotage of the Republicans in the rear of Franco, and after the flight of his predecessor Orlov, he was a resident of the entire NKVD intelligence in Spain. During the flight of the defeated Republicans and their advisers from the secret services of the USSR, Eitingon, along with some other NKVD intelligence officers, was suspected of embezzling part of the gold reserves of the Spanish Republic in this chaos, removed from business in Moscow and expected to be arrested every day. But instead, after the guarantee for him of his friend Sudoplatov, Eitingon was summoned to the new People's Commissar of the NKVD, Beria, and received an order to leave for Mexico to organize the liquidation of Trotsky.

In Mexico, under the leadership of Eitingon, two attempts were made during the year 1940 to liquidate the leader of world Trotskyism, one of which became fatal for him. First, in May 1940, Trotsky's villa was attacked at night by a group of local Communist Party militants selected by Grigulevich, the Kon group in the materials of this NKVD operation. It was a group of Mexican communists who went through the school of sabotage war in Spain under the then famous Mexican artist David Siqueiros. Terrorists in the amount of 20 people, whose actions were coordinated by the same Soviet intelligence officer Grigulevich, drove up to the villa and broke inside, several Trotskyist guards died in the battle with them, but they never reached Trotsky that night. Soldiers of Siqueiros from the corridor riddled Trotsky's bedroom, but he and his wife managed to roll off the bed and hide in the corner of the room, surviving among the hail of bullets of the terrorists of Siqueiros.

At the same time, as it turned out later, among the Trotskyist guards, Soviet intelligence had its own recruited agent - the American Trotskyist Sheldon Hart, who was on duty that night at the entrance gate and let the attackers in. From Hart, Grigulevich learned the order of actions of the guard, in the environment of Trotsky and before the NKVD more than once introduced his secret agents, like Zborovsky, whose agent nickname was Etienne. Sheldon Hart in this story with the May raid on Trotsky's villa became an indicative figure, because, in annoyance for the disruption of the action, Grigulevich considered him to have given out the plan of attack to Trotsky, and therefore ordered Siqueiros' militants to forcibly take Hart with them during the retreat and later kill him. Grigulevich's militants did not even bring charges against Hart and did not allow him to explain anything, killing him during his sleep with two shots to the head. The corpse of an American Trotskyist was later found by the police, and Trotsky himself believed him to be a real security guard, kidnapped and killed. Soviet agents, although now the fact of Hart's work for the NKVD before the attack is firmly established by the testimony of the participants in this operation from the Soviet side.

For the history of the Soviet special services, the fate of Sheldon Hart is interesting to others: a secret agent in the Trotskyist camp, who honestly fulfilled his obligations to the Soviet intelligence that recruited him, was taken away in the heat of a failed operation and killed only on the basis of a fleeting suspicion of a double game. At the same time, Grigulevich later, and after the liquidation of Trotsky), knowing that he ordered his Mexican mercenaries to shoot Hart unreasonably, honestly reported all this to the authorities in Moscow. Even in the Soviet secret services, apparently, they felt this ambiguity in the reprisals against Hart. In 1954, after the collapse of Beria, Eitingon, already arrested among the main Beria men in the special services, it was not by chance that the employees of the MGB and the prosecutor’s office asked this question among many: “Who determined that Hart had betrayed, and who gave the command to the Mexican mercenaries to kill him while he was sleeping?” Eitingon stubbornly insisted that Grigulevich did the right thing, and Hart betrayed them, and cited only one fact in support of his “treason”. When the militants of Siqueiros broke into the territory of the villa and began to pour pistol and machine-gun fire on the house, Hart, it turns out, exclaimed: “If I had known what this would result in, I would not have agreed to help you!” - perhaps he simply did not expect such a massacre or was deceived by Grigulevich, who recruited him. This reaction of his to the shooting, when, shelling the bedroom, the communist militants, together with Trotsky, tried to kill his wife, Natalya Sedova, who was also there, according to the logic of Chekist Eitingon, and should have been considered Hart’s “apostasy” or betrayal, for which he, according to the KGB logic and was worthy of death.

Grigulevich escaped from Mexico, crossing the border into the United States and later leaving for Moscow, since the Mexican secret services already had an identikit of him as the man who commanded the May raid on Trotsky's villa. His assistant, the artist Siqueiros, was less fortunate, he was hiding in one of the mining villages, where the police found him, then he was convicted of a raid in Koyokan and the creation of a terrorist group. Colonel Salazar, head of the Secret Police of Mexico, was personally involved in this case, identifying and arresting one by one the members of the Siqueiros group, and a little later he would personally investigate the murder of Trotsky. Grigulevich then made a dizzying career in Soviet intelligence, worked as an illegal immigrant in many Latin American countries, even became an official diplomat of Costa Rica and was elected in 1953 as the executor of the failed liquidation of the head of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito. No one remembered Hart's fate in the Soviet Union; like many Chekists shot in the repression of the 30s in the USSR itself, he also became a chip during the great felling of the forest. At that time, Soviet intelligence treated such costs of the process as the ridiculous murder of their own secret agent just as calmly, because all Soviet special services of those years were imbued with such a spirit.

On the second attempt, Eitingon managed to complete Operation Duck. Under the legend of the Belgian Trotskyist Jean Mornard, it was possible to infiltrate Trotsky's house, the Spaniard Ramon Mercader, a Soviet intelligence agent. He underwent combat training under the control of the NKVD on the fronts of the Spanish war, and his mother, Caridad Mercader, was a well-known communist in Spain and the mistress of the master of sabotage in the NKVD, Naum Eitingon, who recruited her. Mercader entered a villa in Coyocan under the guise of a Belgian rich man and a young man sympathizing with the Trotskyists through Trotsky's secretary, an American, Sylvia Agelof, with whom, on behalf of Eitingon, he began an affair, became close to Trotsky, and often began to be alone with him. And on August 20, 1940, in Trotsky's personal office, he carried out Moscow's secret sentence by stabbing that same famous ice ax hidden under the hem of his jacket into Trotsky's head. Trotsky died the next day in agony in the hospital, muttering in his deathbed delirium the legendary phrase: "I believe in the triumph of the Fourth International." His grave on Mexican soil is embossed with a hammer and sickle and a red flag is flying.

Naum Eitingon patiently waited at the walls of the hospital for the news of Trotsky's death, only after that he sent a cipher to Moscow about the complete completion of the task in Operation Duck. Mercader, who did not admit in court any connection with the Soviet NKVD and insisted on the murder of Trotsky out of personal hostility as a result of a sudden quarrel over Sylvia Agelof, served a twenty-year sentence in Mexico. Then he was taken to the USSR, where he became a Hero of the Soviet Union for the murder of Trotsky, on the proposal of the Chekists, and was buried here in 1978 at the Kuntsevo cemetery. Eitingon, Sudoplatov, Grigulevich and other Chekists who led Operation Duck received awards and promotions at Lubyanka. When, already at the beginning of 1941, in the reception room of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the chairman of this Soviet authority, Kalinin, presented the Orders of Lenin and the Red Banner to Sudoplatov, Eitingon, Grigulevich and Karidad Mercader, according to some reports, the “all-Union headman” himself did not know why he was awarding this group of employees of the Soviet special services .