Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

30 AMIR WEINER AND AIGI RAHI-TAMM
of the investigations that were launched upon regaining territory and the utter
seriousness with which the commission members approached their task. 79
The assembled information was put to immediate use as waves of arrests
swept the recovered territories and war crime trials dominated the local
landscape for years to come. 80 In the Ukrainian Republic alone, between 1943
and 1957 some 93,690 people were arrested and charged with collaboration
with the Germans. Fifty-eight percent of the nearly 82,000 arrested in
1946–52 came from the western provinces. 81 When it came to information
gathering, even the calamity of the war presented an opening rather than a
setback.
The mass deportations from the western borderlands in the spring and
summer of 1949, when over 125,000 people in the Baltic and the Moldavian
republics were apprehended and exiled, were both a crowning achievement
and public display of the system’s chronic problem. After a decade of relying
almost solely on personnel imported from the Russian core and enduring
violations of secrecy that often resulted in targets slipping out of its grip,
Soviet surveillance had finally reversed these patterns. Attempts to indigenize
the informant pool gathered momentum in the course of the struggle against
nationalist guerillas. In mid-1945, the NKVD already registered over 11,000
local agents and informants in western Ukraine. In Lithuania, it managed
to increase the share of Lithuanians in its ranks from 25.3 percent in 1945
to 41.1 percent in 1947. Numerous files on the liquidation of anti-Soviet
partisans indicated the indispensable role of informants in the localities,
where command of the indigenous language was a prerequisite. This headway,
however, carried the steep price of having to rely on numerous unverified,
unqualified, and unreliable informants of dual loyalty, who were recruited in
haste under wartime and civil war circumstances and constituted an estimated
60 percent of the surveillance apparatus in 1946. 82
79 Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 813, 823–24, 825 n. 88; Sanders, “Extraordinary
Crimes in Ukraine,” 77. For typical compositions of these commissions in the town of Iv´e in
the Molodechno region of Belarus, see GARF f. 7021, op. 89, d. 2; on Virumaa in Estonia,
see GARF f. 7021, op. 97, d. 15, l. 19; and on Horodok in the L´viv region, see Derzhavnyi
arkhiv L´vivs´koi oblasti (DALO) f. 3, op. 1, spr. 279, ark. 1.
80 Nathalie Moine, “La commission d’enquête soviétique sur les crimes de guerre Nazis: Entre
reconquête du territoire, écriture du récit de la guerre et usages justiciers,” Le mouvement social
1, 2 (2008): 105–7.
81 Tanja Penter, “Collaboration on Trial: New Source Material,” Slavic Review 64, 4 (2005):
783 n. 2 and 789 n. 15.
82 Burds, “Agentura,” 120; Truska, Sovietinis Saugumas Lietuvoje, 102, 108; For one of
many detailed reports by informants that led to the arrest of nationalist guerrillas here in the
Lithuanian county of Siauliai in November 1947, see LYA f. K-1, ap. 45, b. 1492, ll. 9–9a; and
Chebrikov, Istoriia, 459–60.