We're absolutely thrilled to announce that Dr Vadim J. Birstein's Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII has won the St. Ermin’s Intelligence Book of the Year Award 2012! It's the first year for the annual award, which has been created in recognition of the St Ermin’s Hotel's long connection with the intelligence community.
They said of the book: Unquestionably one of the most comprehensive, insightful contributions to intelligence literature, and undoubtedly now regarded as the standard work on what many of us would have considered an almost impossible subject to undertake. However, this is a very absorbing, thoroughly readable, extraordinarily detailed account of an organisation that many people thought was a figment of Ian Fleming’s imagination. SMERSH had terrible, bloody history and the author tells us every compelling detail.
The ceremony took place this lunchtime, and I hear that there was some rather delicious champagne on offer. It's worth it when your book has won such an accolade! Congratulations, Vadim!
SMERSH, an acronym of the Russian phrase ‘Death to Spies’, is primarily known to readers in English as James Bond’s sinister opponent in Ian Fleming’s spy novels. Yet SMERSH was a real organization and was just as diabolical as its fictional counterpart. No information was available on this 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 counterintelligence organization dedicated to fighting Nazis, SMERSH spent considerable time and effort terrifying its own servicemen, including author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested for writing a letter to a fellow officer. Its activities also often strayed into the political sphere, exemplified by the arrests of many political leaders and foreign diplomats in Eastern Europe, including the famous rescuer of Hungarian Jew, Raoul Wallenberg, at the end of the Second World War.
While it was formally part of the Defence 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 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 the ‘Special Board’ of the NKVD, and its participation in the Nuremberg trials and the ‘Sovietization’ of Eastern Europe. Now, after ten years of research, a critical missing piece of the history of WWII and the Soviet secret services is finally exposed to the light of day.