Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (64 page)

Kruglov was a ruthless but brilliant strategist, who understood instinctively that the partisans could not be defeated by a military approach alone. From the very beginning he involved local Lithuanian militias in as many anti-insurgency operations as possible, specifically in order to give the impression that this was a civil war rather than a war against Soviet occupation. Under his leadership any and all methods were sanctioned, provided they furthered the anti-partisan cause, and his troops embarked on a conscious and deliberate campaign of terror.

One of the cornerstones of Soviet methods was the use of torture. This usually took the form of beating prisoners, a practice that was so common, and so violent, that in one district of Latvia 18 per cent of police suspects were reported to have died during interrogation.
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Other methods included the administering of electric shocks, burning the skin with cigarettes, slamming doors on prisoners’ hands and fingers, and waterboarding. One former partisan suffered the same torture as the hero of George Orwell’s 1984: Eleonora Labanauskiene was locked into a toilet stall the size of a telephone booth, along with fifty rats released from a cage.
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Such torture was officially frowned upon by the authorities, but in reality it was sanctioned at every level of the Soviet administration. Stalin himself had claimed before the war that the use of torture was ‘absolutely correct and useful’ because it ‘brought results and greatly accelerated the unmasking of enemies of the people’. The Soviet secret police continued to use Stalin’s endorsement as an excuse for torture at least until the end of the 1940s.
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While torture did provide the authorities with intelligence, it also had other, less welcome, results. All partisan memoirs state with pride that the ‘Forest Brothers’ would rather die than surrender, and there are numerous stories of partisan units trying to shoot their way out of hopeless situations rather than giving themselves up peacefully. This is not mere myth: Soviet reports also describe the extraordinary determination of partisans in both Ukraine and Lithuania to die fighting. For example, a Lithuanian police report from January 1945 describes how security troops surrounded a house containing twenty-five partisans who refused to surrender even after the house was set on fire. Five of these partisans broke out and crawled across a field towards a machine-gun crew in an attempt to silence it. They were shot one by one, but did not give up advancing until they were all dead. The rest of the group carried on firing from the burning house until it finally collapsed and buried them.
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Such determination was only partly born of bravery. The certainty that they would be tortured, and perhaps the fear of what they might reveal under interrogation, provided a strong incentive for partisans never to be taken alive.

The use of torture was just one element of a system that was designed to terrorize both the partisans and their support networks amongst the civilian population. Other methods of intimidation included the public hanging of local guerrilla leaders, the deportation of those suspected of links to the resistance, and the display of dead bodies in market squares. In his memoir, Juozas Lukša gives half a dozen examples of dead partisans being propped up in villages, sometimes in obscene poses, as a method of terrorizing the population – even his own brother’s body was treated this way. Sometimes the NKVD would force local residents to come and look at the bodies, and their reactions were observed in order to discover where their loyalties lay. ‘If they saw people passing by the corpses who revealed sadness or pity, they would go out and arrest them and torture them, demanding that they reveal the names and surnames of the dead men.’ There are numerous stories of parents being shown their dead children, and being obliged to show no emotion for fear of betraying themselves.
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The price of revealing one’s loyalties in situations like this could be high. Zealous security officials thought nothing of targeting the friends and family of known partisans if they thought it might flush the insurgents out into the open. The very least such people could expect was arrest and interrogation, followed by the threat of deportation to Siberia. This was perhaps another reason that partisans were so reluctant to give themselves up during a siege. Many who found themselves surrounded would hold a grenade to their heads and blow themselves up, specifically so that the Soviets would not be able to identify them and so be able to target their families. Occasionally the Soviets would attempt surgical reconstruction, but ‘Even a father could not recognize his son under these circumstances.’
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Sometimes Soviet security troops would resort to even more brutal methods amongst the general population. The burning of homes and farms was quite widespread in Lithuania as a method of punishing suspected partisans and terrorizing their communities. Eventually the practice was banned by the chief of the security troops himself, but it seems that his main objections were not on the grounds that the practice was unlawful, but because he suspected that some troops were targeting innocent civilians as a way to avoid fighting the real partisans.
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An internal investigation revealed that it was not only the buildings that were being burned down – sometimes civilians were burned at the same time. For example, on 1 August 1945 an NKVD unit commanded by a Lieutenant Lipin set fire to a house in the village of Švendriai near Šiauliai. According to one of the other soldiers present, the family who owned the house were inside at the time:

Private Janin set the house on fire from the outside. When an old woman, crossing herself, came out of the house, followed by a girl, Lipin told them to go back. Then the old woman and the girl started to run. Lipin took out his pistol and began shooting at each of them but missed. One soldier shot down the old woman, while Lipin ran after the girl and shot her at close range. Then he ordered two soldiers to take the bodies and to throw them through the window into the house. The soldiers took the old woman by the hands and feet and threw her into the burning house, then did the same with the corpse of the girl. Soon an old man and the elder son ran out of the house through another door. Soldiers opened fire but could not get them. Then I and two other soldiers were ordered to catch and kill the son, but we failed as it was dark and he escaped. On returning to the house we started combing the rye field. We found the old man there, he was wounded and was crawling through the rye. One of the soldiers finished him off and we brought the corpse to the house …

The next morning, the soldiers returned to the burned-out house to fetch the body of the old man as proof that they had eliminated a group of ‘bandits’. Inside the house they saw the corpse of a teenager who had been burned alive. Not wishing to pick up the burned bodies, they instead stole a pig and two sheep belonging to the family and returned to their posts.
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There are also, of course, numerous examples of
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being burned alive inside houses when they refused to give themselves up, but testimonies like this are proof that the practice was more indiscriminate than even the Soviets were prepared to sanction. The problem with random terror was that it drove people to join the resistance, both through sheer disgust at the things they were forced to witness and through fear that they themselves might end up being the security troops’ next victims. It also stiffened the resolve of the partisans, and gave them a cause truly worth fighting for. Soviet doctrine advocated a much more targeted form of terror, to be directed exclusively at those who could be proven to support the resistance: everyone else should be made to feel relatively safe as long as they shunned the partisans at all costs. However, official policy was never properly enforced, and sadistic local officers often got away with perpetrating random acts of terror for years.

As the partisan war progressed, Soviet anti-insurgent methods became much more sophisticated. In 1946, whole bands of pseudo-partisans were set up to help catch the real ones. Such groups would pretend to be guerrillas from another region and, having arranged a meeting with the real partisans, would kill them all, along with any witnesses. They also murdered and robbed civilians in the name of the partisans, thereby giving the whole movement a bad name.
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As well as creating bands of false partisans, the Soviets developed methods of inserting their own agents into real partisan cells. Sometimes they would use Communists, or Baltic expats who had been living in the Soviet Union during the war, but more often they would attempt to recruit former members of the resistance to turn against their ex-comrades. Their biggest pool of recruits came from the amnesties in 1945 and 1946. According to the terms of these amnesties, partisans would be granted immunity from prosecution if they agreed to renounce their ways and hand in at least one weapon. In practice, however, the security apparatus threatened such people with deportation unless they also agreed to provide intelligence on their comrades, and even rejoin partisan groups as NKVD agents. Faced with these two equally unpalatable alternatives, the majority did the only thing they could do: they agreed to work for the security forces, but then did nothing. Some, however, succumbed to pressure and began to betray their former friends.

Perhaps the greatest success of the Soviet spies was the infiltration of the central organizing body of the Lithuanian resistance. In the spring of 1945 the security service had recruited a doctor named Juozas Markulis, who became one of their most valuable agents. Over the following months Markulis managed to convince the partisans that he headed an underground intelligence group, and became so trusted that when the partisans attempted to create a new overarching underground organization, the General Democratic Resistance Movement (Bendras demokratinis pasipriešinimo s
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dis, or BDPS), he was elected as one of the top leaders. The police gained a certain amount of control over this committee through Markulis, who used his position to encourage partisans to demobilize and put their weapons away. Promising to make the men fake documents, he succeeded in getting hold of lists of partisan members and even photographs. Through these and other activities, several regional leaders were arrested, killed and, in the case of one region in the east of the country, replaced by one of Markulis’s fellow agents.
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By the beginning of the 1950s the Soviets had set up specialist groups devoted to finding and monitoring partisan cells in specific localities. These groups were dedicated to building up a complete picture of the partisans they hunted – their names and code names, behaviour, methods of camouflage and signalling, their supporters and their contacts within other groups – before moving in and eliminating them.
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As partisan numbers began to dwindle, and their support amongst the general population drained away, there was little that the resistance could do to protect themselves against these groups. One by one the last remnants of the partisans were hunted down and destroyed.

Partisans or ‘Bandits’?

In his history of the Estonian partisans, the former Prime Minister of Estonia Mart Laar tells the story of Ants Kaljurand, a legendary figure in the resistance who became known as ‘Ants the Terrible’. According to the story, Ants had a habit of announcing his arrival in any particular area by mail. On one occasion he notified the manager of a restaurant in Parnu that he would be coming to lunch on a certain day, at a certain time, and that he was expecting a particularly tasty meal. The restaurant manager promptly informed the local authorities. When the day arrived hordes of plain-clothed NKVD men surrounded the restaurant, ready to leap out and capture the famed partisan leader. But Ants fooled them all by arriving in a Russian car marked with Russian army tags, and by dressing in the uniform of a high-ranking Soviet officer. Unsuspecting, the NKVD men left him alone. After enjoying a hearty meal, Ants left a generous tip and put a note under his plate reading ‘Thank you very much for the lunch, Ants the Terrible.’ By the time the NKVD men realized what had happened, he and his stolen Russian car were long gone.
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