Until now, no work in the English language has ever come close to giving us a detailed study of Stalin's diabolical counterintelligence organization. SMERSH was Stalin's wartime terror apparatus; a collection of torturers and killers unleashed in 1943 to cut a bloody swath across Eastern Europe. SMERSH's mission was to "filter" the Red Army for spies and, as a result, was responsible for the arrest, torture, and execution of many thousands of innocent servicemen and citizens of countries occupied by the Red Army.
Dr. Vadim J. Birstein, a Russian historian, human rights activist, and molecular geneticist now living in the United States, gives us a comprehensive look at this ruthless death machine in his new book SMERSH. The book gleans much from recently declassified documents from the Russian archives uncovered for the first time, shining a much needed harsh light into the murky dealings of the Stalinist police state. Though SMERSH was part of the government, it was not under the military's control. In fact it was instead an independent secret organization whose director, Viktor Abakumov, reported daily to Stalin himself.
continue at The Huffington Post.
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