The Central Archives of the Russian Federation Federal Security Service (FSB) recently declassified documents from criminal cases against members of a group of American intelligence agents — Aleksandr Lakhno, Aleksandr Makov, and Sergei Gorbunov — who served in Nazi penal establishments during the Great Patriotic War and were arrested in April 1953 by Soviet state security elements in Ukraine.
Aleksandr Lakhno, a native of Lisichansk, crossed sides in 1942 as a Soviet soldier, voluntarily joining the German punitive unit Sondergruppe Peter [sic], where he actively participated in terrorizing civilians and identifying communists and partisans in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. During the German retreat, he fled to Yugoslavia, where he served as a private in the Russian Protective Corps until December 1944, fighting against Yugoslav partisans. In 1945, the Russian Protective Corps was interned by British forces.
Sergei Gorbunov, a native of the Sumy region and former sailor, defected to Germany in 1942. After the defeat of the Nazis, he did not return to the Soviet Union and remained in West Germany, where he joined the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS) in February 1952.
Oleksandr Makov, a resident of the Kherson region, voluntarily went to serve with the Nazis after the German occupation of the city. After the Germans were expelled from Sevastopol, he fled with them to Romania and then to Yugoslavia, where he served in the penal intelligence unit of the German Navy’s Black Sea headquarters, before joining the so-called “Russian Liberation Army.”
Dmitry Remiga, a native of Stalino Oblast, volunteered with his father to work in Germany during the Great Patriotic War, and refused to return to the Soviet Union after the war. In 1947, he left for Belgium, where he joined the NTS in late 1951.
NTS members were indoctrinated by people from the Russian Liberation Army’s propaganda school, which itself was founded in 1943 on the initiative of A. Vlasov, with the support of the People’s Labor Union of Russian Solidarists (founded in 1930 by White émigrés in Serbia, hereinafter referred to as the NTS), which also sided with Nazi Germany during World War II.
After the end of the war, members of this organization were used by American, German, French, and British intelligence services to carry out sabotage and terrorist acts and espionage in the USSR.
All defendants graduated from the NTS propaganda school in Bad Homburg and the American intelligence school in Bad Wiessee.
On the night of April 25-26, 1953, Lakhno, Makov, Gorbunov, and Remiga were secretly sent into the USSR on espionage and sabotage-terrorist missions.
On May 22, 1953, by a verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the four were found guilty of preparing acts of sabotage and terrorism, and were subsequently sentenced to the highest punishment: execution. On September 26, 2002, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation denied rehabilitation of these individuals.
The following is an English translation of the five-page record of Lakhno’s 28 April 1953 interrogation, in which he details his training in Germany and the assignments he and his partners were to carry out in Soviet territory. Additionally, he discusses the anti-Soviet propaganda campaign he was assigned in East Germany, dropping leaflets on the heads of the occupying Soviet forces.
The twenty-page interrogation of Lakhno conducted on 3 May 1953 will follow once it has been translated.
Question: Tell us, under what circumstances and for what purpose did you come to the Soviet Union?
Reply: From 1942 to 1945 I served as a private with the so-called Russian Protective Corps, which was created by the Germans in Yugoslavia to fight the Yugoslavian partisans.
In May 1945, as part of the Protective Corps, I left for Austria, where I was interned by the British forces, and I was a general worker there in various companies until 1947.
In November 1947, having been recruited to do so, I voluntarily left for England, where I lived until May 1952. Initially, I worked in coal mines, and then I was a machinist at the textile mill ‘Cortwolds’ [sic] in Wolverhampton.
Since 1948, I’d been periodically reading the NTS newspaper ‘Posev,’ and in December 1951, and at my own initiative, with my colleagues, I set up fundraisers for the NTS.
In January 1952, I was recruited in England by the head of the NTS, Lev Aleksandrovich RAR, to join this organization, and that May, RAR sent me to West Germany to study in the propaganda school in Bad Homburg (No. 57a Promenade Street).
I was taught for approximately four months along with nine other individuals from a number of Soviet citizens, as well as White émigrés.
To the best of my knowledge, the school has been in operation since 1950, and trained up to ten NTS propaganda graduates for work among the Soviet occupation forces in Germany, as well as another contingent, and partially among the German population in the Soviet zone of occupation. However, none of the students from this school were ever placed in Soviet territory, neither those who preceded me nor those who studied with me.
The head of this school, Sergey Alekseyevich TARASOV, an active member of the NTS, is a Russian émigré who had been living in Czechoslovakia since the Patriotic War.
Among the school’s instructors, there were Sergey Yevgenyevich FRUSHEL, Vladimir Sergeyevich MERTSALOV, Boris Ivanovich MARTINO, and a Georgiy Yakovlevich who went by the nickname ‘Papik’.
The school instructed us on propaganda methodologies, leaflet printing technologies, cover methods, obtaining a safe house, evading surveillance, setting up secret meetings, military affairs, topography, etc.
All students were taught under fictitious surnames. For example, I was known there as Aleksandr Vasilyevich SNEGOV.
In late August or early September of 1952, I was summoned to Frankfurt am Main by the head of the NTS sensitive sector Yevgeniy Yevgenyevich POZDEYEV. He tasked me with distributing NTS anti-Soviet leaflets among the Soviet occupation forces in Germany, which I carried out for two months. In order to accomplish this, we made use of elastic hydrogen-filled balloons that were launched from West Germany, and on the Soviet side, right over the location of the troops, the leaflets fell away from the balloon after the cord burned, and they scattered to the ground while the balloon ascended and subsequently burst.
Operating in this manner, my two partners and I were able to drop some 200 kilograms of leaflets into the Soviet zone of German occupation.
In late October or early November of 1952, I was once again beckoned to Frankfurt am Main, where I spoke personally with Georgiy Sergeyevich OKOLOVICH, who, in accordance with an agreement I had previously made with POZDEYEV on working against the Soviet Union, sent me to study at a special intelligence school located in the Munich area; more precisely, the school was located between the village of Gmund and Bad Wiessee on the shore of the Tegernsee.
The intelligence school was in a two-story villa that some German had previously owned. The building was isolated and surrounded by dense shrubs.
In all, there were eight of us in the school, and all of us had already previously undergone training in the Bad Homburg propaganda school.
The school was funded by the Americans, and some of the instructors were even American, specifically the instructors on radio techniques and physical training. A third American served as the liaison between this school and the American center located in Munich.
The head of the school was the active NTS member, Boris Ivanovich MARTINO.
For purposes of secrecy, all of the agents were known to each other only by nicknames. I was Alec, and the others were Bob, Pete, Dick, John, Paul, Ike, and Joe.
All of the other agents besides me began their intelligence school training back in the summer of 1952.
During our time at the school, we took courses on radio techniques, theory and practice, cover, and a number of lectures on the economic and geographic situation of the Soviet Union, as well as the work of the state security organs, physical training, and parachute operations. There was also a number of lectures on philosophy and ideology.
The school near the Tegernsee trained agents to work inside the Soviet Union.
On 19 April of this year, lessons ended at the school, and all of us were told that we would soon be brought into the Soviet Union. Upon our arrival in the USSR, we would carry out our assignment of settling in for our stay, finding work, and then we would begin preparing NTS pamphlets and distributing them among the Soviet population, for which each of us was given templates.
In addition, I had a personal assignment from the school head MARTINO to find two to four locations for possible insertion of people or cargo in the future. I was to use a radio transmitter to report to base the coordinates of these locations.
The city of Odessa was selected as the location for my partner “Pete” and I to settle in and carry out our work. I had no addresses for safe houses in Odessa or other locations in the Soviet Union, but prior to our departure, MARINO informed me that there was a possibility that I would be approached by a man who knows me well, and when meeting me, would use the pass phrase “Did you study at the Kharkiv training college?” My response would be “No, but I had friends there.”
I do not know whether or not the other agents had safe houses in the Soviet Union.
On 20 April of this year, as I recall, agents Bob and Paul left school to be brought into the Soviet Union, and on the 23rd or 24th, a transport aircraft brought me over, along with agents Pete, Dick, and John. Dick and John were the first to parachute down, and Pete and I jumped some fifty minutes later.
I have no knowledge of when and in what areas the other agents, Joe and Ike, parachuted in.
I do not know who studied at the school before our group, and I’m also unaware of who parachuted into the Soviet Union before us.
Before being brought into the Soviet Union, I was outfitted with an American-made radio transceiver, a Browning pistol, the templates for printing the NTS leaflets, and a package of tools to be used for making counterfeit documents. In addition, I received a radio beacon, money in the amount of 40 thousand rubles with Soviet markings, 40 gold coins embedded in cellulose, 10 per pack, fictitious documents, topographic maps, a compass, poison, and drugs, including some which could be used to throw dogs off of our scent, and other assets.
For establishing contact, other than the radio, I was also given addresses for correspondence with Norway and France. These were one-way communications. Secret writing tools were created by dissolving one drop of blood in 300 drops of plain drinking water.
The record of my interrogation was recorded from my own words accurately and read by me. /LYAKHOV/
INTERROGATOR: CHIEF OF SPECIAL DEPARTMENT 1 OF THE MAIN DIRECTORATE OF THE MVD OF THE USSR Colonel RUBLEV
Translation © 2025 by Michael Estes and TranslatingHistory.org
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