19

Spoils of War

The departing Americans left behind more than their illusions, broken hearts, and memories at Poltava. The metal mats used to build runways a year earlier remained in place, as did a great deal of equipment and ammunition. It was too expensive to remove all that equipment from Poltava, and the Soviets agreed to take it as part of the Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR. The guests also left food supplies. The Soviets later calculated that altogether two metric tons of wheat flour, one metric ton of jam, and at least a couple of sacks of sugar were distributed among the Soviet officers and soldiers remaining at the base. Red Army personnel had no compunctions about selling the surplus American goods and keeping the profit. Chewing gum, which was popular among adults and children alike, as well as candy bars and cigarettes, promptly appeared on the Poltava market.¹

General Kovalev and his deputies divided the lion’s share of food supplies among themselves. For Kovalev and some of his top lieutenants, these were their last days at the base. Many of them would be posted to occupied Germany. On June 26, 1945, a few days after the last Americans had left Poltava, Kovalev was appointed deputy commander of the Air Force division of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAG), which was in charge of Soviet-occupied German territory and handled relations with the Western Allies, who controlled the rest of Germany. In a few short years, the Soviet part of the country would become the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, while the western part would be known as West Germany, its official name being the Federal Republic of Germany. The commanding officer of SMAG, Marshal Zhukov, became Stalin’s proconsul in Soviet-occupied Germany, with his headquarters in the divided Berlin, and Kovalev’s new supreme commander.

The troops of the First Belarusian Front under Zhukov’s command had played a key role in the Battle of Berlin in late April and early May 1945. More than eighty thousand Soviet soldiers and officers were killed and more than three times as many wounded. It was now their time to take revenge—victors’ justice at its worst. By late June, the murder of civilians, gang rape, and robbery that had been ubiquitous immediately after the Red Army’s entrance into Germany slowly diminished. The SMAG commanders now presided over the much more orderly and systematic plunder of the conquered country. A few months earlier, at Yalta, Stalin had convinced the reluctant Roosevelt and Churchill to allow the Soviets to take up to 10 billion dollars in reparations from the defeated enemy. It was SMAG’s task to make sure that industrial equipment, works of art, antique furniture, and valuables of every kind were shipped to the USSR.

Most of the equipment and goods taken in lieu of reparations were shipped to the Soviet Union by rail, but some were transported by air—the responsibility of Kovalev’s division. His immediate superior, the commander of the SMAG Air Force, Lieutenant General Timofei Kutsevalov, was a long-time acquaintance and subordinate of Zhukov. Both men had cut their teeth as military commanders in 1939 at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in Mongolia, where they defeated the Japanese and were awarded the order of Hero of the Soviet Union. Zhukov and Kutsevalov needed people who could communicate effectively with the Americans, British, and French. As agreed at Yalta, the occupation of Germany was a joint enterprise, as was the occupation of its capital, Berlin, and many assets that the Soviets wanted were outside the Soviet zone of occupation—which consisted largely of the agricultural areas of eastern Germany—and in the industrial Ruhr region controlled by the Allies.²

Few in the Red Army had more experience of day-to-day cooperation with the Americans than Kovalev and his Poltava colleagues, who were accordingly posted to Germany. By the end of the war the first commander of the Poltava air base, General Aleksandr Perminov, had become commander of the 18th Air Army, which specialized in long-range bombing. He had learned a thing or two about it from the Americans. The chief operations officer of the Poltava air base, Captain Viktor Maksimov, was also sent to Germany. Scores of interpreters were dispatched there as well, including the twenty-two-year-old Second Lieutenant Andrei Sachkov, who would interpret for General Kovalev at four-party meetings with Allied air force commanders. Kovalev’s responsibilities at the SMAG Air Force division included negotiations with the Allies, and he would often attend sessions of the Allied Air Directorate along with his superior, General Kutsevalov.³

In November 1945, Kovalev played a key role in establishing air corridors to West Berlin, which would assure the survival of the city during the 1948-49 blockade. To use them the allies were not required to notify the Soviet authorities who controlled the air space around Berlin. Kovalev also negotiated the establishment of Soviet air bases in western Germany. Probably because of his experience at Poltava, he asked the Allies to assign their own technicians to help Soviet personnel at the Western bases. A problem arose with this request. Unlike the Soviets, the Americans and British were not troubled by the presence of foreigners on their turf, while the British lacked sufficient technical personnel to assist the Soviets. The Soviets were therefore allowed to bring in as many technicians as they needed to service their aircraft.⁴

Kovalev’s many responsibilities included the coordination of efforts to acquire German technological know-how in areas of interest to the Soviets. The USSR was both cooperating and competing with the Western Allies in Germany, especially when it came to hunting down German experts in rocket science, aviation, tank-building, and other branches of arms production in which German scientists and engineers were often ahead of their Soviet, American, and British counterparts. But Kovalev’s tenure in Berlin did not last very long. In August 1946 he was recalled to the Soviet Union and took a teaching position at the Air Force Academy in Moscow, a clear demotion for a general on active duty. Kovalev would be remembered in Berlin for his considerate and humane attitude toward his subordinates.

It was not his relations with staff members that caused his recall. Kovalev left Germany in the middle of a major purge of Red Army commanders initiated by Stalin. Marshal Zhukov himself was recalled a few months before Kovalev, in April 1946, and assigned to a second-rate command in the Ukrainian city of Odesa. The “Marshal of Victory,” as Zhukov was known to the Russian public, was accused of enriching himself by robbing German mansions and museums of their most valuable pieces of art and furniture. Kovalev would be investigated for embezzlement of Lend-Lease supplies and food that the Americans had left at the Poltava base. Times were changing. If in March 1945 Kovalev had been reprimanded for bellicosity toward the American allies, he would now find himself under scrutiny by the secret police for being too friendly with them and benefiting from that liaison.⁵

The purge began in February 1946, when Stalin delivered a speech in the course of elections to the Soviet parliament, the Supreme Soviet. He took stock of the war that had just ended and reminded the Soviet people of Lenin’s words about the inevitability of war as long as capitalism ruled the world—a statement understood by many in the West as a sign that the Soviets were preparing for a new conflict. In fact, he was simply setting the stage for reclaiming powers that he had temporarily relinquished during the war to his civilian and military aides. “They say that victors are never judged; that they are not to be criticized or checked. That is wrong,” Stalin told the audience gathered in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. “Victors can and must be judged, can and must be criticized and checked. That is useful not only to the cause but also to the victors themselves.”⁶

Which victors Stalin had in mind and what kind of judgment he had prepared for them became clear in April 1946, when he approved the arrest of the minister of the aviation industry, Aleksei Shakhurin. Later that month the commander of the Red Army Air Force, Marshal of Aviation Aleksandr Novikov, found himself behind bars. In February 1944 Stalin had ordered him to accommodate American requests for the establishment of US air bases in the USSR. General Deane had characterized Novikov as the “General Arnold of the Red Air Force”—comparing him to Hap Arnold, head of the USAF. Both Shakhurin and Novikov had been in conflict with Stalin’s son, Air Force General Vasilii Stalin, who complained to his father about the high death rate of pilots caused by malfunctioning planes. Novikov was accused of deliberately causing the deaths of pilots by putting into service defective airplanes produced by Shakhurin. Both were blamed for the inferior quality of the Soviet aircraft industry as compared with its Western competitors.

There were indeed problems, as Soviet pilots who saw Flying Fortresses at Poltava and compared them with Soviet-built aircraft could attest. Out of more than eighty thousand airplanes lost by the Red Air Force during the war, 47 percent were lost not to enemy fire but to accidents caused by technical defects. Still, Stalin unleashed his secret police on the captains of the airplane industry and Air Force for reasons other than the deficiencies of Soviet aircraft, which he had tolerated during the war, knowing perfectly well that the Soviet air industry was inferior to the American. For years the Soviets had replicated American C-47s under license and B-29s illegally after a few of them made emergency landings in the Far East and fell into Soviet hands in 1944. There was more on Stalin’s mind than the desire to punish officials and commanders who had failed to catch up with the Americans. He was after the military brass, which he regarded as having become too powerful during the war and thus presenting a potential threat to his power.⁷

Stalin’s main investigator in the “case of the aviators” was Viktor Abakumov, the long-serving head of SMERSH, appointed minister of state security in May 1946. Who could do a better job of prosecuting generals than the former head of army counterintelligence? Abakumov wanted Novikov to testify against Marshal Zhukov, who had already been recalled from Berlin. Novikov had eventually signed the document prepared for him. “They arrested me in the Military Air Force case but interrogated me about another,” Novikov recalled later. “I was interrogated day and night and returned to my cell at 6:00 a.m., when prisoners were obliged to rise. … After two or three days of such treatment I fell asleep standing or sitting but was immediately awakened. Deprived of sleep, in a few days I was reduced to such a state that I was ready to give any testimony at all to put an end to the torture.”⁸

In a letter addressed to Stalin, Novikov claimed that Zhukov had shown disrespect to the nation’s leader. “Stalin is envious of my fame,” Zhukov had allegedly told Novikov. “He has not forgotten my capacity to contradict him sharply and argue with him, to which he was unaccustomed.” That was not all. “Novikov asserts that this is not merely brazen and mendacious blather but that Zhukov might head a military conspiracy,” stated Abakumov’s report to Stalin. The dictator was clearly afraid of Zhukov’s popularity and the power acquired by the top echelon of the military during the war. It was there that he saw the primary challenge to his leadership. The potential threat had to be eliminated before it could become actual.⁹

In August 1946 Stalin learned that customs officials had impounded seven railcars taking German-made furniture from Germany to the USSR for Zhukov. Vsevolod Merkulov, the minister of state security, and his staff were ordered into action. With Zhukov in Odesa, Abakumov’s investigators searched his apartment in Moscow and his country house near the Soviet capital. They found a treasure trove of jewelry, sculptures, paintings, and furniture looted from German private houses, collections and museums. In due course, Abakumov reported to Stalin on the findings at Zhukov’s country house: “large and expensive rugs and tapestries taken from Potsdam and other German palaces and homes—44 items in all… large, valuable classical paintings in artistic frames—55 items in all hung in various rooms, with some awaiting removal for storage.” The charges were not made up. Zhukov’s weakness for “trophies” was an open secret, and he himself would admit later to his transgressions.¹⁰

The arrests of generals closely associated with Zhukov, including a number of his top aides in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, uncovered a web of organized theft and corruption that included not only Red Army military commanders but also counterintelligence officials in Germany. What began as a case against aviators turned into a case against generals, or the so-called “trophy case.” In early 1948 the Politburo considered the results of the investigation. The document adopted by the supreme party institution asserted: “Having been provided with every necessity on the part of the state, Comrade Zhukov abused his official position and gave himself over to looting, appropriating and taking out of Germany a large number of diverse valuables for private use. To that end Comrade Zhukov, giving free rein to his unrestrained inclination to greed, exploited his subordinates, who, truckling to him, engaged in obvious criminal activity.”¹¹

Zhukov, still in Odesa, was sent into more distant exile in the Ural Mountains to command a third-rate military district. He would be joined there by his longtime ally, Kutsevalov. Recalled from Germany in 1947, Kutsevalov had been sent to head a second-rate pilots’ school in the provincial town of Taganrog, and then, after becoming a student in a military academy, assigned to the Urals. Like Zhukov, Kutsevalov was never arrested but could have said a great deal about the goods looted from Germany by Zhukov and his fellow generals—many of them were shipped to the Soviet Union by transport planes under Kutsevalov’s command.¹²

Zhukov and Kutsevalov were lucky to keep their ranks, medals and, most important, their freedom. Many of their colleagues and subordinates were sent to prison. Among them was a confidant of Zhukov’s, General Vladimir Kriukov, who had been the uncrowned king of Königsberg and East Prussia before being recalled in December 1945. The investigators searched Kriukov’s three apartments and two country houses, uncovering two Mercedes automobiles, one Audi, 107 kilograms of silver objects of high artistic value, 87 suits, and 312 pairs of shoes. Ten days later they arrested Kriukov’s wife, Lidiia Ruslanova, a popular Soviet folk singer and the darling of every Soviet soldier during the war. Kriukov and Ruslanova would spend almost five years in prisons and camps, released only after Stalin’s death in 1953.¹³

General Kovalev’s turn came in October 1947, fourteen months after his recall from Germany. That month Lavrentii Beria, the deputy head of the Soviet government in charge of the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of State Security, received a letter from Major Pavlo Bondarenko, an Air Force officer who had overseen supplies of gasoline, spare parts, and technical supplies for American airplanes at the Poltava air base. Bondarenko accused his former superior of suspicious contacts with the Americans and misappropriation of goods and food supplies left by the Americans after their departure from Poltava. Kovalev allegedly had two co-conspirators, Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Shchepankov and Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Demin.¹⁴

Bondarenko was unlikely to have made things up. A native of the Sumy region in northern Ukraine and a professional military officer, he had fought in the Soviet war against Finland, for which he received his first military decoration, the Order of the Red Star, in 1940. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for the defense of Leningrad and the Medal of Military Merit for his role in the campaign to retake western Ukraine and Belarus in 1944. He also distinguished himself at Poltava, while staying in the shadows, never making it into the SMERSH reports, and remaining of little interest to the Americans.

Bondarenko’s superiors credited him with providing support for 1,100 flights of transport planes, 900 flights of B-17 bombers, and 138 reconnaissance flights. Between December 1944 and March 1945, he had played an important role in salvaging US airplanes that made forced landings on Soviet-held territory in western Ukraine and eastern Poland. He had made seven trips to help American crews repair damaged aircraft. In short, he was an excellent officer, and on May 31, 1945 Lieutenant Colonel Shchepankov, whom Bondarenko would later accuse of corruption, signed papers recommending Bondarenko for a high government award, the Order of the Great Patriotic War second class.¹⁵

Bondarenko was deadly serious in his accusations against his former superiors, ranging from corruption to treason. He claimed that Kovalev had taken possession of the two tons of wheat and one ton of jam left at the base by the American airmen. The food supplies had been divided among Kovalev, Shchepankov, and Demin. The three officers had allegedly gained possession of American cars, and Demin had even given a Willys Jeep to a local collective farm. Another car allegedly went to a Poltava regional official. Bondarenko also attached two photographs to his letter, showing Kovalev partying with the Americans. He suggested that in exchange for the gift of a leather suit Kovalev had supplied the Americans with secret Soviet air maps. The implication was clear: now that the Americans were no longer considered allies, those maps could be used to guide American airplanes in operations against the Soviet Union.

With investigations into the “aviators’ case” and the “trophy case” involving Zhukov and other generals going full blast, the military counterintelligence directorate of Abakumov’s state security ministry ordered an investigation into Bondarenko’s allegations. They interrogated Kovalev himself and scores of witnesses, completing their work by the end of December 1947. Abakumov’s agents established that Kovalev had indeed had numerous official and private meetings with American officers at the Poltava air base. Bondarenko’s claim that Kovalev had caroused with the Americans at drinking parties, however, found little corroboration. The investigators established that Kovalev had helped organize and attended dinners given at the air base in honor of Ambassador Harriman, President Roosevelt’s son Elliott, and generals Deane, Walsh, and Hill. With Lieutenant Colonel Shchepankov he had also attended weekend parties at the American officers’ club on the Poltava base. The investigators did not regard such receptions and courtesy calls as drinking parties. They were not interested in the amount of alcohol Kovalev consumed.

The investigators were also soft on Kovalev with regard to gifts he had received from the Americans. They were unable to establish that he had received this “leather suit,” an allegation that he apparently denied. American items that Kovalev did not deny receiving were presented in exchanges of gifts between the two parties. When visiting the base, Generals Walsh and Deane had presented Kovalev with an automatic hunting rifle, a fountain pen, and boxes of perfume, and in exchange he had sent them gifts of fruit. Kovalev received a silk sleeping bag from General Hill, but that was in return for leather boots he gave the general on one of his visits to Moscow. Kovalev also received cigarette lighters and other trinkets from the Americans. The investigators clearly did not consider them significant.

The investigation established that topographic maps were indeed passed on to the Americans, but that was officially approved, as they needed maps of the routes to Poltava from Teheran and Moscow, as well as areas in western Ukraine where emergency landings were made. The foodstuffs left by the Americans at the Poltava base were, as noted earlier, distributed among the officers and soldiers there, and some were sent to the headquarters of the Kyiv military district. Still, it was established that Kovalev and his aides had received larger shares than anyone else. As for cars, it appeared that Kovalev and Demin had benefited from Red Army requisitions in Germany rather than from American generosity. Kovalev’s car was brought to Poltava from Germany on a transport plane, while Shchepankov and Demin got their cars from among those seized from Red Army officers who had driven them to the USSR from Germany without obtaining official clearance.

The matter of prime interest to Abakumov’s investigators was whether Kovalev had ever been alone with the Americans. They found that most of Kovalev’s conversations with Colonel Hampton had taken place in the presence of Soviet interpreters. His inability to speak English seemed a blessing under the circumstances. More suspicious were meetings between Kovalev and Hampton in the presence of American interpreters, George Fischer and Samuel Chavkin, whom the investigators identified as employees of American intelligence services. Nevertheless, there was no indication that anything untoward had happened at those meetings. By this point Major Bondarenko could not be interviewed, as he had died of unspecified causes in a military hospital on June 27, 1947, a few months before his letter reached Beria’s office. It is not clear how he died.

The investigators’ report ended on an unpromising note for Kovalev and his assistants at Poltava: “Thus the facts set forth in Guard Major Bondarenko’s statement are basically confirmed by the investigation.” In reality, the findings supported only some of Bondarenko’s assertions. Nonetheless in the charged atmosphere of the aviators’ and trophy cases, the investigators preferred to err on the side of the government in their official conclusions. The last thing they wanted was to be accused of a cover-up. They reported their findings to Abakumov’s deputy, General Nikolai Selivanovsky, who decided to pass on the results of the investigation to General Ivan Moskalenko. Like Selivanovsky himself, Moskalenko was a former SMERSH officer now in charge of a department of the military counterintelligence division.¹⁶

This was good news for Kovalev. Moskalenko was a fellow Ukrainian from the agricultural heartland of the republic; he had also started his career in aviation. More importantly, Moskalenko’s daughter, Second Lieutenant Halyna Hrynko-Okolovych, had served at the Poltava air base as one of Kovalev’s interpreters. If Moskalenko investigated Kovalev aggressively, he might endanger his own daughter. Kovalev, by then already in semi-exile in Moscow, where he taught at the Air Force Academy, apparently avoided arrest. His name does not appear among those prosecuted in the aviators’ or trophy case. He died a free man in 1964 after a successful second career in Soviet missile engineering—a specialization that he probably acquired in Germany while trying to help Soviet scientists gain access to German technological secrets.¹⁷

Kovalev was lucky to have survived the purge. While Abakumov’s investigation focused on his contacts with the Americans, the main concern of the secret police was to uncover possible corruption. In 1947, the year in which General Moskalenko apparently closed Kovalev’s case, his Ministry of State Security began to review the SMERSH Poltava files in search of possible spies. As the Cold War set in, rendering all aspects of Soviet-American relations suspect, mere contact with Americans would be considered sufficient grounds to launch an espionage investigation. The files of the Poltava bases was to be further mined for incriminating evidence.