Patriot Park, Guerilla village

To better illustrate the level of the partisan movement, we note that from 1941 to 1944, there were more than 6,200 detachments in the occupied territory of the USSR, with a total of about 1 million people, including Guerillas and “underground fighters” (members of the active Resistance). The most active partisans became Heroes of the Soviet Union, receiving the highest awards of the USSR – the Gold Star and the Order of Lenin (a total of 248 people). Another 128 thousand partisans received various state orders and medals. In reality, this was an entire army behind enemy lines, which caused significant damage to the German command, which was appreciated by Comrade Stalin and the leadership of the USSR.
Soviet NKVD instructors actively participated in the partisan movement in all the countries of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany. After the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939 and until June 22, 1941, the Soviet-German Pact of Friendship and Cooperation was in effect. The USSR prepared for war with Germany, but very secretly, officially demonstrating friendship and even supplying the Third Reich with the necessary petroleum products for armored vehicles, trucks and aviation. After Hitler’s attack on the USSR, the Soviet command began to organize a partisan movement in Yugoslavia from supporters of Josip Broz Tito and even in France from the Comintern, and later from prisoners of war. According to Soviet archival data, it is believed that more than 40 thousand citizens of the USSR took part in the anti-fascist Resistance movement in the territory of foreign countries of Europe, including, first of all, France and Yugoslavia. Russian emigration in Europe was divided into two opposing camps – supporters of Hitler’s defeat (defenders of the USSR) and supporters of Stalin’s destruction (defeatists). In France, former officers of the Russian army of General Wrangel fought together with the French against Germany, and in Yugoslavia together with the German army against Tito’s partisans. We write in more detail about this strange situation in the section of our reference book Russian Protective Corps in the fight against the partisans of Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia.
In this section of our Guide we will show a typical NKVD training center for preparing saboteurs, a sample of a reconstructed partisan village in the Moscow Patriot Park, as well as real partisan villages at World War II battlefields. We will supplement interesting museum exhibits with our own artifacts and documents, and also take a virtual tour of partisan sites of World War II.

Experience of Soviet special services and military intelligence before WW2

Even before the 1917 revolution in Russia, the Communist Party (VKPb) formed a large network of its supporters, open and secret agents throughout Europe, primarily in France and Germany, creating the Communist International (Comintern). After seizing power in 1917, the Soviet government continued to use the Comintern network for legal and illegal work. New services were also created for work abroad – the Foreign Department of the OGPU (since 1934 renamed the NKVD) and Military Intelligence (Razvedupr). A special team was created as part of the Foreign Department, a special group “Express” for illegal terrorist operations in Europe – kidnapping and killing enemies of the USSR, stealing secret archives, recruiting agents. Military intelligence was engaged in espionage in the field of technology – tanks, aviation and small arms and even the theft of codes for transmitting information. The Comintern served to carry out legal actions – holding necessary protest meetings and demonstrations, distributing pro-Soviet leaflets, newspapers and books, occupying important administrative positions, and recruiting agents for the Foreign Department. In France, the Foreign Department had a large network of its agents in the 1920s and 1930s and gained extensive practical experience in illegal work, which later came in handy during World War II. Murders were sometimes disguised as natural causes – allegedly accidentally falling from the Eiffel Tower or falling out of a window. In 1928, in Brussels, Soviet secret services poisoned General Wrangel with a poison simulating death from tuberculosis. The method of kidnapping people and delivering them to the USSR on Soviet ships from the ports of Le Havre or Marseille was well developed, as, for example, with General Miller. The French communist deputy Onel and his brother, an active police officer, took part in the kidnapping and murder of General Kutepov in 1930. Soviet NKVD saboteurs also gained extensive military experience during the Soviet-Finnish Winter War, including Nikolai Rutych, who later defected to Germany and lived near Paris until 2013. Thus, by 1941, the Soviet special services had a large network of agents, safe houses, and weapons and explosive caches in forests and mountains in France and other countries. In Paris, the Bois de Boulogne, within walking distance of the city and the Soviet embassy, ​​was used as a weapons cache. Soviet military intelligence gained extensive experience in rail warfare in China in 1925-1927. During the civil war in China, Marshal Dzhandzolin’s northern coalition, with the help of former officers of Kolchak’s White Army, built dozens of armored trains, which they used in the fight against the southern pro-communist group led by Soviet military advisers. Armored trains of the First World War type, such as the Orlik, were used as a powerful striking force of the northern group to capture Shanghai and other cities. But armored trains could only move on railways, which was used by Soviet military advisers in southern China. In 1925 and 1927, under the direction of Soviet instructors, rails and railway bridges were blown up, as a result of which the Russian northern armored trains were successfully destroyed.

This rail warfare was widely used in the USSR in 1941-1945. In 1937, during the Great Terror, Stalin shot or imprisoned almost all employees of the Foreign Department and its combat sabotage groups. One of those saboteurs whom Stalin accidentally did not imprison or shoot was Pavel Sudoplatov. In 1938, Sudoplatov, on Stalin’s personal order, blew up the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists, Yevgeny Konovalets. In 1940, Sudoplatov organized the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico with the help of a Comintern agent, thereby ensuring his own protection from repression. With the outbreak of World War II, Sudoplatov asked Stalin to release former agents of the special group from prison, including Yasha Serebryansky (Bergman), who was sentenced to death as a British and French spy. The special group for carrying out sabotage abroad was restored and expanded.

Formation of a mass Guerilla movement behind enemy lines

Immediately after the start of the war, on June 29, 1941, the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) issued a special Directive No. 624 “On party and soviet organizations in frontline areas”, and on July 18, 1941, they issued a Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) “On the organization of the struggle in the rear of German troops”. By this time, Pavel Sudoplatov was already heading the 4th Directorate of the NKVD, which was in charge of a separate special-purpose motorized rifle brigade of the NKVD, created from reconnaissance and sabotage groups for deployment behind enemy lines. These special NKVD groups organized new partisan detachments or served as instructors in existing ones. The groups were deployed both to the occupied territory of the USSR and to Yugoslavia to help Broz Tito. The partisan movement in the enemy’s rear is expanding and on May 30, 1942, the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement is created, headed by Panteleimon Ponomarenko, the leader of the Soviet Belarus Republic. This headquarters manages, coordinates all work and provides all partisan detachments and brigades in different parts of the country with the necessary things. The partisan movement began to have an organized structure, subordinate to the headquarters, called the “Big Land”.
The structure of partisan units was very diverse, but over time it began to include basic elements. The main partisan unit was a detachment, initially including several dozen people, and then several hundred. Partisan Detachments were united into brigades numbering from several hundred to several thousand fighters, operating in one area and having a single command. Those who joined a partisan detachment took a special oath similar to the general army oath and observed military discipline. The age of the partisans varied greatly, from children to the elderly. Children usually served as scouts, since they did not attract the attention of the German administration. The partisans had a variety of captured German or Soviet light small arms, including rifles, carbines, submachine guns, pistols, machine guns and grenades. Large partisan detachments had mortars and even light artillery. Such weapons allowed the partisans to hide well in the forests from the enemy and easily change their base in the event of punitive raids carried out by German units and Russian collaborators.

Patriot Park Guerilla Village in the Moscow Forests

Built exactly according to the real World War II structure, Patriot Park Partisan Village was officially supposed to serve various purposes, including training civilians and soldiers in partisan and sabotage work, as well as political education and propaganda of the Victory over Nazi Germany. The unofficial, but real purpose of the partisan village was to make money from tourists. An important goal was also to create a recreation and entertainment area for military personnel and their families. The result was a hybrid structure that included both real army elements and tourist entertainment. Soldiers from the local garrison took part in the construction of the village, including the 2nd Taman Motor Rifle Division, the 4th Kantimirovskaya Tank Division and the 45th Spetsnaz Brigade of the Airborne Forces. Real military property of these units, including radio stations, a printing house, classrooms and food, were also used as exhibits for the museum’s thematic expositions. Below we have posted our own description and guide to Patriot Park Guerrilla Village.

Main elements of Guerillas warfare in World War II

The main tasks of the partisans were sabotage, destruction of the enemy in any form, primarily rail warfare and damage to communication lines, destruction of power lines, poisoning of wells and water pipes, etc. Sabotage was the most effective means of destroying the enemy’s rear, destroying it without open combat. Small groups of partisans or even one person could plant a mine under the rails, in a locomotive or in a train with military cargo. An armed attack by partisans on a German headquarters or weapons depot was a more complex task and required the necessary number of trained fighters. Soviet archives show that during the war, Soviet partisans derailed or destroyed more than 18 thousand trains, mainly in 1943-1944. In Patriot Park, the Partisan Village shows a training center for blowing up railway tracks and telegraph poles. At first, the guides were professional military instructors and saboteurs, teaching tourists mine-blasting techniques. Later, the guides were civilians, telling only the history of the partisan movement.

The second very strategically important activity of the partisans was reconnaissance, obtaining information about the quantity and composition of transported military equipment, the deployment of enemy units and other information received from observation posts or from agents. The Patriot Park Partisan Village shows the main types of summer and winter observation posts for the railway and trains. Sometimes such observation posts had a telephone connection with the headquarters of the partisan detachment for the prompt transmission of operational information without leaving their post. Depending on the importance, this information was immediately transmitted to the mainland through the detachment’s radio stations. Of course, the Germans made a bearing on the radio station and sent punitive detachments. To prevent the unexpected appearance of the enemy near the partisan base, observation towers or special posts were set up, also presented in Patriot Park. When large German forces appeared, on the command of the detachment commander, the partisans were always ready to quickly leave their base and go further into the forest.

Political activity, Soviet agitation and propaganda behind enemy lines

The failures of the first year of the war, the retreat and surrender of more than a million Red Army soldiers, and the rapid German tank measures caused panic among the population in the occupied territories. For reasons why the German Soviet civil meetings were like the Liberators, we have separately allocated a section on the civil war, the destruction of the intelligentsia, peasants, Cossacks and the Great Terror. It should be noted that the heroic defense of the Brest Fortress, the battles in the border fortifications still held back the advance of the troops. At the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, the pace of German offensives sharply decreased. German propaganda screamed that the Wehrmacht soldiers were already on the outskirts of Moscow and that the capital of the USSR would soon fall. To support German propaganda, partisan detachments began to work in the field of Soviet agitation. The occupation authorities, under penalty of death, forbade the population to have radio receivers. Partisans from the mainland use various types of radio stations and radio receivers, so it was possible to listen to Soviet news from the front. To disseminate the data received among the local population, large partisan detachments had a single printing house. The printing house included only one dugout and a sample of a hand press, a set of fonts, paint and paper. This regime quickly collected the collected radio information and printed leaflets, which the partisans hung at night on poles and fences, in houses and public places. In addition to leaflets, the printing press allows you to print newspapers in different forms. Traditionally, all newspapers and leaflets had headlines with the text “For our Soviet Motherland” or “Death to the German occupiers!” The greatest activity of party members in Soviet propaganda and agitation was during the Stalingrad Revolution and the Kursk Bulge. With the help of the partisans, the Soviet command won the information war in the occupied territories.
The technology of manual typesetting and printing with the help of a machine and font set was used even before the First World War and did not change for decades. During the Cold War, each division or military district had its own small printing house, based on the model presented in Patriot Park Partisan Village. This machine was used in military units until the 90s, when all printing switched to computers.

In addition to the direct destruction of enemy soldiers and officers, the partisans, under the leadership of experienced NKVD saboteurs, were engaged in the liquidation of false partisans, collaborators and leaders of the occupation administration. Another goal was the restoration and preservation of elements of Soviet power in the occupied territories, attracting the local population and soldiers who were surrounded to the partisan movement.

Partisan village, living history site, structure and list of objects

• Observation post, watchtower for detecting the approach of the Germans
• Partisan detachment headquarters, commander’s dugout
• Political commissar’s dugout and Soviet propaganda with posters, maps of military operations, books by Marx, Lenin and Stalin
• Radio communication center with field radio stations of various types
• Dugout – field telephone communication center with telephone sets
• Field printing house, machine, font box, paint and leaflet samples
• Club where musicians perform, read Soviet poetry and dance
• School of saboteurs with an NKVD instructor, with samples of explosive devices, mines, detonators
• Open area of ​​the School of Saboteurs with rails, telegraph poles and trees
• Partisan dugouts for housing with interior, dishes and clothes
• Samples of summer and winter observation post behind the railway
• Field bathhouse with a stove and firewood, brooms and basins
• Forge for repairs, utility yard, workshops for repairing weapons and transport
• Utility yard with animals (chickens, rabbits, goats…) for meat food
• Food warehouse, all types of traditional Russian military food from the Second World War
• Field bakery, fresh hot homemade bread, canteen

The description will be continued soon, stay tuned for the addition