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Vadim J. Birstein
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Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon Kindle Edition

by Vadim Birstein (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
SMERSH is the award-winning account of the top-secret counterintelligence organisation that dealt with Stalin's enemies from within the shadowy recesses of Soviet government. As James Bond's nemesis in Ian Fleming's novels, SMERSH and its operatives were depicted in exotic duels with 007, rather than fostering the bleak oppression and terror they actually spread in the name of their dictator. Stalin drew a veil of secrecy over SMERSH's operations in 1946, but that did not stop him using it to terrify Red Army dissenters in Leningrad and Moscow, or to abduct and execute suspected spooks - often without cause - across mainland Europe. Formed to mop up Nazi spy rings at the end of the Second World War, SMERSH gained its name from a combination of the Russian words for 'Death to Spies'. Successive Communist governments suppressed traces of Stalin's political hit squad; now Vadim Birstein lays bare the surgical brutality with which it exerted its influence as part of the paranoid regime, both within the Soviet Union and in the wider world. SMERSH was the most mysterious and secret of organisations - this definitive and magisterial history finally reveals truths that lay buried for nearly fifty years.
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  1. Print length
    598 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Biteback Publishing
  4. Accessibility
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  5. Publication date
    November 1, 2013
  6. File size
    8.9 MB
  7. Page Flip
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Why is a book about SMERSH relevant today? As Mr. Birstein takes pains to point out, "the present Russian government seems intent on whitewashing Stalin's atrocities and the history of the Soviet security services." -- The Washington Times, Feb 28, 2012

Vadim Birstein's SMERSH: Stalin's Secret Weapon has won the inaugural St Ermin's Hotel Intelligence Book of the Year Award 2012. Birstein's title is "a very absorbing, thoroughly readable, extraordinarily detailed account of an organisation that...had a terrible, bloody history " according to the judges.--The Bookseller, 13 June 2012

From the Inside Flap

SMERSH, an acronym of "Death to Spies", is primarily known to readers in English as James Bond's sinister opponent in several of Ian Fleming's spy novels. Yet SMERSH was a real organization and just as diabolical as its fictional counterpart. No information was available on the super-secret organization until the fall of the Soviet Union, and its importance to Second World War history is almost completely unknown to scholars and history readers alike.

Ostensibly a military counter intelligence organization dedicated to fighting Nazis, SMERSH spent considerable time and effort terriying its own servicemen including author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested for writing a letter to a fellow office. Its activities also often strayed into the politcal phere, exemplified by the arrest of many political leaders and foreign diplomats in Eastern Europe, including the famous rescuer of Hungarian Jews Raoul Wallenberg at the end of the Second World War.

While it was formally part of the Defense Commissariat, SMERSH was not under the control of the military hierarchy. In reality it was a secret service independent of the other Soviet security organizations, the NKVD and the NKGB. Its head, Viktor Abakumov, a shadowy and powerful figure whose biography is revealed here for the first time, reported directly to the dictator Joseph Stalin on a daily basis.

Based on a huge number of documents and memoirs available only in Russian, the book details all the known activities of SMERSH:
  • its clever 'radio games', which used captured German officers to lure German intelligence into traps
  • its mass vetting of Soviet troops who had been prisoners of the Germans
  • its arrest and persecution of Red Army generals
  • its infiltration of Nazi spy schools
  • its participation in military tribunals and 'Special Board' of the NKVD
  • its participation in the Nuremberg trials and the 'Sovietization' of Eastern Europe
  • its investigation into Adolph Hitler's death and the discovery of his body.

The book also includes many archival documents translated by Dr. Birstein and includes a number of charts and figures that are extremely useful for understanding the complexities surrounding SMERSH.

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Vadim J. Birstein

Vadim J. Birstein

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Dr. Vadim J. Birstein, a Russian-American who arrived in the United States in 1991, is a historian and molecular geneticist. Born in Moscow and educated at Moscow State University, he received his Doctor of Science in 1987. Until the end of 1998 he was a Senior Research Scientist at the Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of over 150 scientific papers and three scientific books as well as the well-received history The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Westview Press, 2001), which has been re-published in paperback twice by Basic Books.

While still the Soviet Union, Dr. Birstein became a human rights activist and an expert on the subject of foreign prisoners in the Gulag, the fate of the Swedish Diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and Soviet doctors' experimentation on humans. In 1990-91, he was a member of the International Commission on Raoul Wallenberg and participated in the Commission's study of prisoner cards in Vladimir Prison and materials at the secret Special Archive in Moscow.

In 1991, he was a Visiting Scholar at the W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union. He has given seminars at Princeton, Harvard, and Washington (St. Louis) Universities and appeared in the documentary Poisons-Discover Magazine produced in 1997 by Powderhouse Productions, Inc. (Somerville, MA).

For the last ten years, Dr. Birstein has focused on researching and writing his ground-breaking history of SMERSH, which will be continued in a second volume focusing on the final years of SMERSH's chief Viktor Abakumov, when he was head of the forerunner of the infamous KGB, the MGB.

You can learn more about Dr. Birstein on his website, http://vadimbirstein.com.

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