Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

GETTING TO KNOW YOU 21
Army, while also mobilizing indigenous party and Komsomol members for
these positions. Headed by a Lithuanian national and veteran of the Soviet
security forces, the NKVD Special Department grew exponentially. Within
two months, it employed no less than 387 servicemen, including 68 military
officers. 56
Again, blackmail was the recruiters’ method of choice. In one such
case, a rank-and-file soldier turned NKVD agent in the 262nd Regiment
obtained a written pledge from a drunken major to inform on his peer
officers’ political views and sentiments. When the officer, once sober, refused
to keep his promise, he was threatened with arrest and deportation to Siberia.
Fully aware that large portions of the information provided by informants
was often of little value, especially that from and about officers, the Special
Department and the republic’s NKVD widely censored servicemen’s private
correspondence, which yielded information ranging from a plea to a brother
to hold on to his religious faith, pledges to sustain national identity, and
expressions of frustration with the silence imposed on the spread of political
terror and the decline in the quality of life to characterizations of Russian
commanders as “rabid dogs.” 57 Between 15 January and 5 May 1941, some
3,551 letters from servicemen to their relatives and acquaintances were
confiscated and used in investigations of politically suspicious personnel. In
addition, the oath of allegiance to the Red Army was used to mark those who
refused to swear or were suspected of such refusal. Based on this information,
the men of the 29th Corps were catalogued by “degrees of contamination.” 58
As elsewhere in the Soviet polity, the gathering and analysis of information
worked both ways. It was used to identify real and imagined opponents of
the regime and simultaneously catalogued constituencies on terms familiar to
the authorities, ordaining them with political identities, making them legible
and workable. Information not only reflected realities. It also created them.
Here, again, the comparison with the NKVD’s Nazi counterpart is
telling. Many of these servicemen would soon fall into German captivity.
56 Algirdas Jakubčionis, Stasys Knezys, and Arūnas Streikus, Okupacija ir aneksija: Pirmoji
sovietinė okupacija (1940–1941) (Vilnius: Margi Raštai, 2006), 534–35, 537–38; LYA f. 1771,
ap. 190, b. 1, l. 26.
57 LYA f. K-1, ap. 19, b. 1, ll. 39–42. These censored letters are reproduced in Okupacija ir
aneksija, 343–46.
58 Some 2,600 officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers were classified as suspicious,
mostly members of prewar organizations now categorized as counterrevolutionary. Over 500
were classified as potentially dangerous, including those whose families suffered in the course
of Sovietization policies. Somewhat more than 100 servicemen, although not a single officer,
were listed as supporters of Soviet power (Okupacija ir aneksija, 536, 538–39; LYA f. K-1, ap.
19, b. 1, ll. 75–80).