The Last Word on Wallenberg? New Investigations, New Questions
by William Korey

The Yakovlev Commission Bombshell

Even as the Swedish-Russian Working Group made final preparations to release their reports, a veritable bombshell exploded in Moscow, obliterating the fifty-year-old Russian account of what happened to Wallenberg. On December 6, 2000, a separate commission created by President Vladimir Putin-the Presidential Commission on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression-utterly punctured the notorious "Smoltsov Memorandum" upon which Moscow had relied for decades in explaining what happened to Wallenberg. The disclosure could not help but bring into question the validity of the report by the Russian section of the joint working group. Unfortunately, the commission's revelation went virtually unnoticed by the media in the West, including major newspapers in the United States.

The Smoltsov Memorandum, first unveiled in February 1957 by Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, was said at the time to be the only document on the Wallenberg case in the official Soviet archives. Lt. Col. A. Smoltsov, chief of health services at Lubyanka Prison, supposedly wrote the memorandum to Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov on July 17, 1947. It reported that the prisoner "Valenberg" (as misspelled in the document) had died that day, probably of a heart attack, and his body had been cremated. For the next forty-five years the memorandum was the centerpiece of the Kremlin's official version of the conclusion to the Wallenberg tragedy. It superseded the earlier blatantly false thesis, articulated by Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky in August 1947, that Wallenberg was unknown to Soviet officials and had never been in the country.

Though critics continually challenged the veracity of the Smoltsov Memorandum, it remained the linchpin of the Kremlin's account of Wallenberg's alleged death in July 1947.14 In an extraordinary demonstration of their political investment in the document, top Soviet officials in October 1989 presented Wallenberg's halfsister, Nina Lagergren, and his closest diplomatic colleague, Per Anger, with what they said was the "original" memorandum.

Lagergren and Anger had been invited as guests of the Soviet authorities at a time when Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika were in full bloom. The gift of the original memorandum was intended as a significant gesture of goodwill since the initial memorandum produced by Gromyko was but a copy. Though Lagergren and Anger contemptuously rejected the supposed original as a fraud, the Russian authorities continued to promote its authenticity even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the replacement of Gorbachev by Boris Yeltsin. That it was trotted out again and again at various forums and offered to major media sources testified to the Kremlin's continuing posture that the memorandum was a core document, the heart of its argument that Wallenberg had died in July 1947.

Now, just five weeks before the joint Swedish-Russian Working Group would submit its findings to the public, the so-called Rehabilitation Commission exposed the Smoltsov Memorandum as nothing short of a hoax perpetrated upon the world community. The Rehabilitation Commission was chaired by Aleksandr Yakovlev, the leading ideologist of glasnost, a close colleague of Gorbachev, and one held by many in the West to be a major Russian democratic reformer.

According to Yakovlev and his commission, documents at their disposal showed that Smoltsov had retired on disability leave on March 21, 1947, four months before he was supposed to have found Wallenberg dead of a heart attack and allegedly reported that event to the head of the State Security Ministry.15 Moreover, the Yakovlev Commission revealed that Smoltsov's younger son, O. Smoltsov, had testified that his father never left his home after his March retirement and did not keep in touch with his former colleagues at Lubyanka. Thus the prison health official could not have visited Wallenberg's cell on July 17 and could not have written the memorandum on his sudden death by heart attack and his alleged cremation.

The crucial Smoltsov Memorandum turned out to be one of the greatest hoaxes of the twentieth century. The names of its perpetrators were not revealed, nor was anything said about the shocking manner in which it was carried out. Finally, the commission provided no rationale for the deception.

Equally startling was the absence of an explanation of how and when the Yakovlev Commission learned about the deception. Before December 6, there had not been even a hint that Smoltsov had retired four months before he was alleged to have visited Lubyanka. How was it possible to withhold this information from the Swedish-Russian Working Group dealing with the fate of Wallenberg? Perhaps most amazingly, nothing was said concerning the hoax in the very detailed report of the Swedish group on January 12, 2001. Tragically and disturbingly, it went entirely unmentioned at the press conference in Stockholm.

While the Russian group's report carried no specific reference to the hoax, it did include an obscure and perplexing piece of information about Smoltsov and his son. The report related that Smoltsov's son was "working for the national security bodies" apparently in 1947.16 The revelation had never been made earlier. Neither the first name of the son, nor the initial letter of that name, was noted, nor was there any indication as to whether he was the "younger" son specified in the Yakovlev report. Still the disclosure was intriguing as it suggested why the elder Smoltsov, who died in 1953, might have permitted himself to be linked to the hoax.

According to the Russian group, the son had been interviewed in late May and early June 1992-only nine years before-by a member of the group, a certain A. E. Ziborov, and someone from the Russian Ministry of State Security. According to the group's official report, Smoltsov's son was reported to have told the interviewers "that his father, prior to his discharge in 1947, was summoned urgently to the Ministry [of State Security] despite being so ill. On his return, he apparently told his son that some Swedish man had died in prison." Significantly, Smoltsov's son did not specify the month or date of his father's discharge, which would have exposed the memorandum as a hoax. And this was the first time that anyone observed that A. Smoltsov had been "so ill."

Missing in the report were precise dates crucial to the Smoltsov episode. When was he supposed to have been "summoned urgently" to the Security Ministry? How did this tale square with the Yakovlev report's account of what the "younger" Smoltsov son had said about his father not leaving his home after March 21, 1947, and having no relations with his former associates?

The highly problematic quality of the narrative did not hinder the Russian group from completely endorsing the Smoltsov Memorandum. At one point, its report declared that "in this document, the Soviet leadership first told the truth about the tragic fate of Raoul Wallenberg."17 Shortly afterward, the Russian group's report sought to respond to the long-held, multiple, and detailed criticism of the Smoltsov Memorandum. Bluntly-and stunningly-it read:

The graphological and forensic analysis of Smoltsov's report, carried out by the Russian experts in 1990 and by the Swedish experts in 1992, confirmed its authenticity.18 How the Russian group reacted to the Yakovlev Commission's shocking information remains unknown; at the very least, it must have stirred some discomfiture.

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