Jan Dvořák
At its first meeting after its arrival in liberated Czechoslovak territory on April 5, 1945, in the Slovakian city of Košice, the Czechoslovak government approved the Košice Program, which had been previously agreed in Moscow. The so-called Third Czechoslovak Republic began.
However, the restored Czechoslovakia, whose territory was not fully liberated by the Allies until early May, was no longer the sovereign state it had been before WWII. In fact, thanks to the considerable support of the domestic political elite led by President Edvard Beneš, it almost immediately became another colony of the Soviet Empire. Under pressure from Stalin’s regime, its pre-war borders were not even restored and it soon lost Subcarpathian Ruthenia (Transcarpathian Ukraine) after Soviet annexation.
The future political development of Czechoslovakia was foreshadowed by the arrival of the Red Army. Although its troops made a significant contribution to the final defeat of Nazi Germany, from the outset they behaved in the liberated territory of Czechoslovakia as if it were a conquered country – stealing industrial equipment and unscrupulously forcing the supply of minerals (mainly uranium). While the general population was celebrating the liberation from Nazi occupation with the Red Army in May 1945, the Soviet security forces started a hunt for politically inconvenient Czechoslovaks.
Soviet intelligence activities outside the USSR
The activities of the Soviet security services outside the USSR against opponents of Bolshevism and the Stalinist regime can be traced back to before WWII. However, it was not until 1939 that the conditions were in place for the mass persecution of alleged or real enemies of the Bolshevik regime. This first became possible in eastern Poland after its annexation by the Soviets in the autumn of 1939, and then in the summer of 1940 in occupied northern Romania or the Baltic states. However, these actions were still traditionally protected by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), as had been the case elsewhere within Soviet territory.
The failure of the Nazi campaign in the USSR and the subsequent turn in the war presented the Soviets with new opportunities. The advance of the Red Army across the western borders of the USSR literally caused the Stalinist leadership to rethink its strategic intentions. The main objective was clear: to take the first step towards establishing Soviet power by pacifying the reconquered or newly occupied territories as quickly as possible. However, the NKVD units operating at the rear of the Red Army did not have sufficient resources to carry out all the tasks set. In addition, the structure and organisation of the Soviet security forces were highly fragmented at the time as a result of the previous German attack, and there were constant disputes over jurisdiction between the various units.
The new conditions therefore called for a new organisation that was discreet and more efficient. And so Smersh (an acronym for the Russian words “Smerť shpionam”) was created: a military counter-intelligence unit set up on Stalin’s secret orders and reporting directly to the People’s Commissar of Defence, again Stalin. Unlike the arresting units of the NKVD, Smersh had special powers, including judicial power.
Smersh units entered the liberated territories and immediately operated in the second line of military formations, usually within the framework of individual fronts. Their main task was to search, monitor and arrest all actual and potential enemies of the USSR or communism in territories recently entered by the Red Army. All this, of course, took place without regard for the pre-war legal order of the individual countries and the generally accepted norms of international law. It also took place without the participation or, in the vast majority of cases, knowledge of local leaders or the relevant state authorities.
Arrests and deportations
As had been the case in the Balkans, Poland and the Baltic States, Soviet military counter-intelligence units appeared almost immediately in the liberated territory of Czechoslovakia. From the day the Red Army crossed the eastern borders of the state (i.e., the pre-war borders), there was an endless series of arrests, imprisonments and deportations of civilians to the USSR.
While mass arrests occurred in Subcarpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia, tens of thousands of people were also secured and mobilized to work for the war-devastated Soviet economy (estimates are almost 40 thousand in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, and 6 thousand in Slovakia, including 2500 Slovak and also German and Hungarian inhabitants of this region). In the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia), the arrests were mostly selective but were prepared and targeted in advance.
As early as March 1945, Smersh and NKVD units made their first preventive interventions in Czech Silesia, an area that had been largely annexed to the German Reich since the autumn of 1939 (within the Reichsgau Sudetenland). The local population (most of inhabitants were already Reich citizens) could therefore easily be accused of anti-Soviet activities (mostly collaboration with Germans) by the Soviet security authorities and subsequently deported to the USSR. Of course, only the most “serious” cases were brought before Soviet courts; the remaining thousands of prisoners were sent to forced labour without any conviction.
However, the main “prize” awaited the Soviet secret services in the gradually liberated territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In addition to supporters of the German occupying power and collaborators, members of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian anti-Bolshevik exile who had found temporary asylum or settled permanently in Czechoslovakia in the interwar period found themselves in the crosshairs of Smersh. Members of the Czechoslovak political representation in Subcarpathian Ruthenia who had found temporary asylum in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia after the Hungarian occupation of Subcarpathian Ruthenia in 1939, and, of course, former Red Army soldiers who were “guilty” of having fallen into German captivity, could also not escape. The worst fate awaited the officers and soldiers of the “treacherous” Russian Liberation Army. Even the considerable help given by the so-called “Vlasov army” to the Prague Uprising in its early days could not erase their earlier “sins”, i.e., collaboration with Nazi Germany, motivated by the fight against the Stalinist regime.
In the Moravian urban centres of Ostrava, Olomouc and Brno, the first cases of targeted arrests of pre-selected persons had already been seen. However, there are also documented cases of people arrested on the basis of fabricated reports from the local population, or even people arrested at random for no apparent reason.
However, the main attention of the Soviet secret services was logically focused on Prague, the capital of exile activity in pre-war Czechoslovakia. When news of the outbreak of the Prague Uprising reached people, counterintelligence units moved in quickly. The arrests in Prague occurred as early as 11 May, but they continued throughout May and June, even on Saturdays and Sundays.
Within a short time, several dozen leading figures from the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian exile communities were arrested in the capital, including high-ranking officers of the Czechoslovak armed forces, university teachers and students, doctors, important technical experts, officials of the Czechoslovak state and public administration, and businessmen. Among those arrested were also those who had never been citizens of the USSR or Tsarist Russia. A number of Subcarpathian politicians were arrested, as well as people of Czech nationality who, for one reason or another, had displeased the Red Army or had been arrested on the basis of denunciations from their neighbourhood.
There is, of course, very little information about the top-secret operations of Smersh in liberated Czechoslovakia. The only known direct testimony is the memoirs of Mikhail Mondich (published in a book shortly after the war under the pseudonym Nikolai Sinevirsky: Smerš – god ve straně vraga, 1948), who was born in Subcarpathian Ruthenia and served as an interpreter for a Smersh unit at the end of the war. This testimony provides a detailed description of the arrests and interrogations he witnessed. Not only his diary records but also the recollections of relatives of those arrested show that the arresting procedures were very sophisticated. In most cases, ‘arrest’ in the true sense of the word did not take place. The victims were lured from their homes or jobs under various pretexts (they had to read, translate, or explain something, or give someone directions). The family would be assured not to worry, that it would not take long. But it took at least ten long years; many never returned and nothing is known of their fate.
Most of the Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian exiles were “repatriated” soon after their arrest to the USSR, where a more thorough investigation took place. Some were unable to withstand the ordeal of awaiting trial and died in pre-trial detention. Those who went to trial were most often tried under the notorious Article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian SSR (or its numerous versions in other Union republics) for anti-Soviet or counter-revolutionary activities, with sentences from 8 to 25 years in Gulag camps. Those arrested were also deprived of the right to contact relatives and were subject to a ban on correspondence. Their families therefore had no news of them throughout their imprisonment.
Although most of the arrests and deportations (up to 80%) were confirmed in the first year after the war (especially in May and June 1945), arrests and deportations continued until the early 1950s. However, the number of arrests was not nearly as high as in 1945.
In 1946, the method of arrest also changed. In the same year, Smersh was abolished and its activities were largely taken over by the 3rd Administration of the Ministry of State Security (MGB), whose headquarters for Eastern and Central Europe were located in Vienna. However, the powers of this military counter-intelligence agency were already more limited (it had lost its judicial powers) than those of Smersh. Arbitrary arrests by Soviet authorities diminished (although they did not disappear completely), and persons of interest to the Soviets were requested by the Czechoslovak authorities from the Soviet embassy, usually on the grounds that they were prisoners of war. On this issue, the Czechoslovak side, again out of “gratitude” or fear of political isolation, mostly only passively observed the actions of the Soviets and, with a few exceptions, certainly did not put up any resistance. The fate of Czechoslovak citizens who had already been deported was of little interest – or only in a formal sense – to the Czechoslovak authorities.
After the Communists seized power in February 1948, deportations of Czechoslovak citizens to the repressive Soviet authorities was carried out with the open cooperation of the Czechoslovak authorities, in particular the Czechoslovak State Security. The last cases were seen in the early 1950s.
Numbers
For several reasons, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to precisely quantify the total number of persons abducted and deported by the Soviet authorities from the territory of Czechoslovakia to the USSR after 1945: the very definition of the term “deported” is a problem; then, there is the lack of archival material or its testimonial value – we have only very fragmentary information or no trace at all of many deportees. Given the longstanding refusal of the Russian authorities to provide basic information, this is unlikely to change in the future. We only have older statistics, and these are being supplemented, albeit gradually, by new data, mainly from recently declassified Ukrainian security archives.
The historian Petr Čuka, using records from the 1990s, was able to identify 295 people who had Czechoslovak citizenship, permanent residence in the territory of the present-day Czech Republic, or who were abducted from the present-day Czech Republic. Of these, 188 were Czechoslovak citizens, 42 were holders of so-called Nansen passports, and 4 were holders of foreign citizenship; the citizenship of the others could not be established. At the same time, 278 people were taken from the territory of the present-day Czech Republic, 100 from Prague, and 178 from other places.
The “Oni byli první” Committee, which brings together the descendants of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians abducted from Czechoslovakia to the USSR, has been able to compile a “partial inventory” of 215 names of those abducted, the vast majority of whom were men, and only 3 women. More than half of those arrested had Czechoslovak citizenship, while 39 had Nansen passports or no citizenship at all. Most of them were arrested in and “repatriated” from the territory of the present-day Czech Republic. In his latest thematic study, historian Vladimir Bystrov speaks of as many as 327 cases of restrictions on the freedom of Czechoslovak citizens by NKVD troops and Smersh units from the last days of the Second World War until the end of the 1940s.
Returns
The fates of those abducted to the USSR were often not known to their families or the public until decades later, and in some cases have not been discovered until today. Many did not survive the hardships and died in pre-trial detention. Others ended their lives in the Gulag camps. Some, as mentioned above, disappeared without a trace and their fate remains unknown.
Only a few dozen people were allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, mostly in the first three years after Stalin’s death, between 1953 and 1956. However, there are also cases from later years. Of the 215 persons in the “partial inventory”, about 60 returned. Vladimír Bystrov last reported that about two dozen of these had returned as early as autumn 1945 from the NKVD camp in Ratibor in Silesia (on Polish territory after the war), and several more returned in 1950 from temporary camps in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Another 70 came back in the mid-1950s.
All the returnees were granted Czechoslovak citizenship (they already had a citizenship document or were issued one sooner or later). Whatever the reasons for the post-war repression against them, they were therefore outside the jurisdiction of the Soviet authorities under pre-war Czechoslovak and international law. There is therefore no doubt that this was an unprecedented abuse of power on the part of the victorious power. However, such actions were only an unfortunate foreshadowing of Soviet power ambitions in Central and Eastern Europe in the next years.
Jan Dvořák Ph.D., Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Prague)