Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII

In the early James Bond novels 007 is pitched against Smersh, a top secret Soviet agency dedicated to the subversion of the West and the assassination of Western spies. Bond’s creator Ian Fleming took his inspiration from life, but the real Smersh was far more savage than Bond’s fictional nemesis.

An abbreviation for the Russian words “Death to spies,” Smersh was the Soviet counterintelligence organization dedicated to the elimination of anti-communist activity during World War II. Smersh was Stalin’s wartime terror apparatus—a collection of torturers and killers unleashed with brutal affect in 1943 to cut a bloody swath of death across Eastern Europe. Its job was to “filter” the Red Army for spies. It was responsible for the arrest, torture, and execution of many thousands of innocent servicemen and citizens of countries occupied by the Red Army. Among its victims was Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman who saved as many as one hundred thousand Jews from the Holocaust. Vadim J. Birstein reveals new evidence suggesting Wallenberg was shot as a spy in 1947.

Despite its significant role during and after the war (it was charged with finding Hitler and did so), Smersh is almost unknown outside Russia. Partly because its savagery casts a shadow even today, partly because of the complete secrecy that surrounded its existence. In Smersh: Stalin’s Secret Weapon, Birstein makes comprehensive use of recently released Russian military archives in Moscow and speaks to survivors and victims of Smersh to tell, for the first time, one of the darkest stories in Soviet Russia’s history.

Vadim J. Birstein, PhD, is a historian, human rights activist, and molecular geneticist. He is the author of The Perversion of Knowledge: The True History of Soviet Science.