citizens who had been deported to work in Nazi Germany. According
to former Soviet archives, over 25 percent of those interviewed were
executedor sentenced to lengthy terms in a gulag.
One of the most infamous chapters of World War IIhistory for
both the Soviet Union and the Western Allies was the forcible repa-
triation of more than 40,000 Cossacks by the British to the Soviet
Union. Smershofficers persuaded British army officers to force men,
women, and children on trains bound for the Soviet zone. Worse, at
least 10 percent had never been Soviet citizens or had fled Russia
during the Revolution of November 1917. Smersh also received
British help in arresting Cossack leaders who had fled the Soviet
Union in the early 1920s. They were later hanged in the Lubyanka.
Following the war, Smersh ran foreign intelligence operations in
Germany and Austria, recruiting military and civilian sources. Be-
cause Smershoperations were essentially counterintelligence by na-
ture, these efforts produced little important political intelligence. In
Hungary, Smersh at Abakumov’s orders arrested the Swedish Consul,
Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg was reportedly murdered two years
later in Moscow.
Smershwas folded into the new Ministry of State Security (MGB)
in March 1946. Many of its responsibilities were transferred to the
Third (Military Counterintelligence) Chief Directorate. Smersh’s
fearsome reputation outlived its short bureaucratic life and it showed
up in numerous novels about Russian intelligence, including those by
Ian Fleming.SOLOVETSKY. The first cluster of forced labor camps was located on
the White Sea, north of the Arctic Circle. The camps were centered
on Solovetsky Island, which had been a Russian Orthodox Church
monastery before the 1917 Revolution. The Solovetsky camps,
known as Northern Camps of Special Designation (SLON), were es-
tablished to punish political dissidents. Prisoners included clergy,
corrupt businesspeople, rich peasants, and former tsarist soldiers and
civil servants. The camps had a brutal reputation: many prisoners
were executed, and many starved or were worked to death. At-
tempted escapes were punished by mass shootings, according to one
of the few survivors of the camps. The camps at first had only a rel-
atively minor economic function, but they later became a model for244 •SOLOVETSKY06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 244