During the period of exposure of the "personality cult" among the Soviet intelligentsia, it became fashionable to spread rumors about the executioners of the NKVD, who shot in the backs of the Red Army men who were trying to escape from the battlefield. Not surprisingly, Soviet soldiers are often portrayed as sadists and bloodsuckers. The myth spread quickly enough with some connivance of the official authorities. With the natural decrease in the number of veterans of the Great Patriotic War, the spread of this myth grew more and more, reaching its apogee in the 90s of the last century. How did everything really happen?
Directive number 35523 of the Third Directorate of the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR of June 27, 1941 clearly states that:
“… the organization of mobile control and barrage detachments on roads, railway junctions, for clearing forests, etc., allocated by the command, with the inclusion of operational workers of the Third Directorate with the tasks of:
- detention of deserters;
- detention of all suspicious elements that have penetrated the front line;
- preliminary investigation carried out by operational workers of the bodies
Of the Third Directorate of NCOs (1-2 days) with the subsequent transfer of the material together with the detainees by jurisdiction”.
Point. There is no question of any executions from machine guns. It is not difficult to imagine the most complicated situation in the first months of the war in the conditions of retreat. Some units succumbed to panic, recently mobilized citizens fled to their homes, and the mass exodus of refugees to the east of the country cannot be discounted either. Add to this the subversive sabotage activities of agents and units of the Abwehr and the SS and you get a very unsightly picture, to put it mildly.
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A significant number of Ukrainian nationalists and immigrants from the Russian émigré movement, who were fluent in Russian and Ukrainian, and easily pretended to be residents of the occupied territories, were attracted to service in their special forces, and many were dressed in the uniform of Soviet soldiers.
It was for the fight against the listed contingent that special units were created on the bay of the NKVD and NKGB united in July 1941. The famous 169 directive L. P. Beria revealed the meaning of transforming the organs of the Third Directorate into special departments: "… the fight against spies, traitors, saboteurs, deserters and all kinds of alarmists and disorganizers." In addition to spies and saboteurs, special departments were engaged in the fight against the pro-fascist underground and criminals, most of them on the side of the invaders.
And a little logic in half with arithmetic. Could three or four hundred fighters of the detachment hold back or, moreover, drive ten or more thousand similarly armed division fighters into the attack? Reason and logic answer unequivocally: no. But propaganda based on historical myths with reason and logic does not lead friendship.