The name 'SMERSH' is well-known in the West as is what the acronym stands for: 'Death to Spies'. (1) However, in spite of its name being widely known very few people in the Anglophone world know much about Stalin's shadowy counter-espionage and state security organisation made famous by Ian Fleming in his James Bond novels. We are fortunate therefore that a Russian jewish scholar Vadim Birstein has published an excellent English language history of SMERSH. (2)
Birstein is somewhat of an anomaly in that he is both jewish and happily intellectually honest in his work on his subject matter. I may disagree with Birstein about the extent of jewish involvement with SMERSH, but never-the-less Birstein admits it was significant even if not as widespread as I would argue that it was. One of the principle themes of Birstein's book is his opposition to current heavily jewish 'spookocracy' that governs Russia and in particular its systematic attempts to re-write and re-cast Soviet history - particularly that associated with Stalin's reign - in a positive light and ignore/minimize the massacres he and his often jewish minions committed in the name of Marxism-Leninism through 'official' and associated FSB (the modern successor to the famous KGB) historians.
Indeed Birstein rightly points out that works actually celebrating Beria - Stalin's longest serving head of state security and architect of some Stalin's worst excesses - have now appeared and do not mention that Beria himself was a paedophile (he liked having little girls abducted and brought to him so that he could rape them [the body was then disposed of and the family either bought off or sent into the Gulag system]) or the fact that he was responsible for mass killings on a truly gargantuan scale. Beria - in spite of many claims to the contrary - was not himself jewish (he was actually Georgian) but a significant number of his most trusted subordinates were.
Another man who Russia's 'spookocracy' has sought to rehabilitate is SMERSH's wartime head and like Beria a major architect of mass genocide although in this case centred on Axis countries and Russian prisoners of war and civilians in formerly German-administered areas of the then Soviet Union: Viktor Abakumov.
Abakumov's long-time jewish deputy Solomon Milshtein (3) (and later head of the 3rd Directorate of the NKGB [successor to the NKVD]) (4) is recorded by Birstein to have helped organise SMERSH killings (most famously at Katyn) and also took charge of censoring letters home from the Red Army soldiers at the front in order to 'keep up civilian morale'. (5)
In practice this meant that if you wrote anything SMERSH deemed not to be positive about the war or anything 'useful to the enemy' (i.e., roughly where you were) then you would be arrested by SMERSH officers and tried by a special military tribunal and often then executed or put into the Gulag system. This was the very same process that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes himself being caught up in in his famous book: 'The Gulag Archipelago'. (6)
Indeed, the scale of murders and killings undertaken by SMERSH was truly phenomenal as Birstein records in that between 1941 and 1945 SMERSH's field tribunals alone sentenced at least 164,678 'traitors to the motherland' for similar offences to Solzhenitsyn's famous arrest and detention: 'spreading anti-Soviet propaganda'. Of that number at least twenty were Generals in the Red Army. (7) When one reads Birstein's account of the condition detainees were held in it is little surprise how badly it has affected the lives of those who went through the 'system' and the apparent urge to talk about what happened to them. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn is perhaps understating the conditions he and his fellow inmates endured for fear they would not be believed!
It is little wonder Solzhenitsyn and other survivors of the Gulag system have such animus for their jewish former Soviet masters such as the jewish apologist for Stalin's slave labour program Aron Solt and jewish NKVD Camp Commandant Naftaly Frenkel. (8)
Throughout Birstein's work we find consistent and damning documentation of the significant and vitally important jewish role in the early Soviet Union and in spite of Birstein's general rejection of the thesis: his superb understanding of the internal dynamics of Stalin's reign beautifully illustrates the absurd attempts - most recently and notably championed by jewish historian Benjamin Pinkus - to divorce jewry from its actions in support of Lenin and Stalin. (9)
Birstein's memorable characterisation of Stalin's rule as being that of a 'mafia boss' who periodically eliminates those who 'know too much' makes Stalin's apparent alleged 'turn' against Soviet jewry and its diaspora comprehensible.
To explain: the standard jewish/philo-Semitic hypothesis regarding Stalin is that he 'started out' with 'anti-jewish prejudices' and for this they can only provide circumstantial inferences derived from Stalin's time as Commissar for Nationalities under Lenin and articles that he wrote before and during that time (he was a natural for the post being a Georgian and one of Lenin's right-hand men in the pre-war socialist underground in Russia). This coupled with Stalin's anger at his son over his engagement to the jewess Yulia Meltzer is taken as 'proof' of Stalin's alleged 'latent anti-jewish sentiment', which then - so the story goes - found its ultimate expression in the purges against the 'rootless cosmopolitans' and the Doctor's Plot. (10)
This simple linear storyline of how 'evil Stalin' deceived and then started murdering the jews (nobody denies jews were frequently both left-wing and pro-Soviet at this time politically right across Europe and North America) seems reasonable doesn't it?
Well put it into context a moment: Stalin had from the get-go been killing and imprisoning anybody who he was suspicious about - as remember in Stalin's thought process he was leading Russia to a great socialist future (thus opposition in any form was to Stalin ipso facto counter-revolutionary and/or reactionary) - irrespective of whether they were jewish or not.
Several excellent examples are afforded by Birstein: the most notable of which are Abakumov (the head of SMERSH) - who was removed for no other discernible reason that he knew a lot of Stalin's dirty laundry and had thus himself become a security threat to Stalin - and Pavel Rychagov (the head of the Air Force Directorate and Deputy Defense Commissar in 1941); who had blurted out a criticism of Stalin's lack of provision of suitable aircraft for Red Air Force pilots to train on [i.e. ones that weren't as he put it 'flying coffins'] and therefore had to be removed because he had openly questioned Stalin. (11)
Another example is afforded by a recent biography of the Communist Party of Great Britain's most famous chief industrial organiser and sometime informal ambassador to the Warsaw Pact countries: Bert Ramelson (nee Baruch Rachmilevitch). (12)
Now Ramelson being typical of the circumcised Communists of the time (13) was a Russian jew although he - like his fellow high-ranking jewish Bolshevik Raisa Browder in the United States - (14) went in the opposite direction (from Russia to the West) from the more famous early jewish emigrants who - in spite of claims that it is a myth - really did emigrate back to Russia in droves. (15)
Three of Ramelson's sisters were Bolsheviks and the fourth was a Social Revolutionary: (16) however, the most successful of them was Rosa Rachmilevitch who 'converted' Ramelson (17) and even took him to see their fellow jewish Bolshevik Trotsky speak in public about the revolution and alleged introduction of socialism into Russia. It was the Bolshevik's overt jewishness and opposition to anti-Semitism that - according to Ramelson himself - affected his own conversion to the cause of international socialism. (18)
Rosa was in many respects a typical early jewish Bolshevik protégée: an early member of the Komsomol (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's youth wing) who married and became pregnant by a Red Army officer (whether he was also jewish is unstated although this is quite possible even likely): who Seifert and Sibley assure us wanted 'to rid her country of poverty, illiteracy and anti-Semitism' with 'a pistol in her belt'. (19) Indeed Rosa progressed far under Lenin's regime and was made a Professor of Economics at Sverdlov University (20), but under Stalin's rule her husband was executed as part of the purges and she herself was placed in the Gulag system for a decade: presumably on the charge of being a 'Left Deviationist' better known as 'Trotskyites'. (21)
I would add - as a brief aside - that Rosa strongly reminds me of Haydee Tamara Bunke - Che Guevara's jewish mistress and communist intelligence asset (just whose is a matter of some dispute) - who her jilted Afro-Cuban lover Ulises Estrada describes in not dissimilar terms in his hagiographic account of her life and times. (22)
What happened to Rosa and her presumably Leninist husband is exactly what happened to Abakumov and Rychagov, but rather than being viewed as significant individual threats to Stalin's vision of socialism: Rosa and her husband were viewed as members of a significant group threat to that same vision of socialism. In that Rosa was a Trotskyite - or at least in sympathy with the ideas propounded by Trotksy's 'Fourth Internationale' - from what I can discern so therefore to Stalin she was quite literally a subversive and a counter-revolutionary by dint of belonging to an opposing Marxist ideological group.
This means in effect that Stalin wasn't targeting Rosa or any other jew just because they were jewish or that he had some form of 'latent anti-Semitism' which made him pick on jews in particular (in fact he didn't). What Stalin was targeting was those he perceived as being opposed and therefore probably subversive (as Stalin is well-known to have been utterly paranoid at the best of times) to his vision of Russia's (and the world's) socialist future.
When Stalin rejected Yulia Meltzer as his son's bride-to-be: he did so more than likely not because she was jewish (which was merely incidental) but because Yakov hadn't told him about it before doing the deed and therefore seeking his approval 'after the fact'. Stalin liked to be in control at all times and Yakov's action clearly took some of that control away: leading not unpredictably to Stalin's violent response and subsequent strident dislike of Yakov.
As with Stalin's later purges against 'rootless cosmopolitans': the fact that many of these writers and intellectuals were jewish is largely incidental precisely because jews made up a large percentage of the Soviet intelligentsia. So, it would be rather odd if the jews were not badly hit: as they were in the purges of the late 1930s by Stalin's removal of any and all those he perceived opposition to his ideas in.
However few proponents of the 'Stalin was an anti-Semite' claim note that one of the reasons that Stalin was more likely to go after the significant jewish segment of the Soviet intelligentsia was that during the Second World War: they had (encouraged by Stalin ironically enough) developed very close contacts with American and European jewry as well as with international Zionist organisations. (23) This - as with returning Soviet prisoners of war - led by the logic of Soviet jewish intellectuals having been 'exposed' to a significant amount of non-Soviet influences to these same jewish intellectuals being viewed by Stalin as potential threats to his vision of Russia's socialist future.
Thus, the simple linear presentation of the 'anti-Semitic Stalin' persecuting the jews in some sinister preconceived master plan is as much of a contrived defensive jewish nonsense as the claim that Karl Marx was an 'anti-Semite' - on the basis of his early essay 'The Jewish Question' - as was frequently alleged during the second great American anti-Communist epoch of the late 1940s to the 1960s (24) and which is complete and utter nonsense. (25)
The beauty of Birstein's characterisation of Stalin's rule as a 'mafia boss' type scenario is that it at a stroke removes all the preconceptions about 'victimisation' that necessarily come into play when we are dealing with one of the greatest mass murderers in history. It at a stroke removes the jewish ability to plead their case as 'Stalin's eternal victims' and places them instead in the defendant’s dock on three separate issues:
A) Playing a prominent role in the Bolshevik Revolution and the power struggles that allowed Stalin to come to power in the first place.
B) Aiding and abetting Stalin's various ethnic cleansing campaigns, genocidal operations and his mass purges of the Soviet citizenry as well as foreign communists and cadre both abroad and in the USSR itself. (26)
C) Causing - by their own infatuation with jewishness and Zionist projects as solutions to their identity crisis - Stalin's paranoid eye to fall on them causing mass suffering to themselves, those who investigated them on Stalin's behalf (who were later prosecuted during Nikita Khrushchev's time in office) and those who were caught up in the mass purges that they helped initiate by their own thoughtless and irresponsible actions.
Birstein certainly would not see it quite like this: however, that is the necessary consequence of his excellent characterisation regardless of how he may or may not like to spin it.
Another point that Birstein makes especially well is in relation to Vasilii Ulrikh - long-time chairman of the Soviet Military Collegium - which was part of the Soviet Supreme Court under Stalin and who was basically an engineer with no legal training whose wife Anna Kassel had worked closely with Lenin in his private office and had aggressively promoted her husband's career through her contact with both Lenin and Stalin. Ulrikh supervised literally thousands of extra-judicial executions of Tsarist officers in the Crimea during 1922 alone and during the Great Terror of the 1930s Ulrikh personally sentenced 25,355 people to death and sent 11,651 into the Gulag system. Ulrikh - perhaps on Stalin's insistence - also carried out at least one of his executions himself when he shot Yan Berzin - former head of the Red Army's Intelligence Directorate - on the 28th July 1938. (27)
Birstein also gratifying endorses the 'Icebreaker' hypothesis of the beginning of hostilities between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union when he tells us that 'though Hitler had planned the invasion of the Soviet Union for some time, his fears of a Soviet military build-up were not unfounded.' (28) Birstein also frequently supports revisionist analyses of the origin of the World War II and has little truck with the usual quasi-apologia of the 'unprepared Stalin' that has been decisively debunked (yet again) by John Mosier (29) although Birstein himself cites Joachim Hoffmann's deconstruction of the Stalinist victim myth. (30)
I would further point out that Birstein adroitly agrees with Mosier's argument that had not the United States - at the behest of the many later discovered jewish Comintern/GRU [Soviet Military Intelligence] agents (Harry Dexter White probably being the most important in this particular respect) - ploughed hundreds of thousands of tonnes of military and economic aid into the USSR during 1941 and 1942: the USSR would have simply imploded with the advent of Operation Typhoon (the German assault on Moscow). There we enter the realm of alternative history, but it is never-the-less utterly damning that the United States actually saved a country that was explicitly dedicated to destroying it at the behest of later discovered largely jewish traitors.
Other points of interest Birstein discusses are other prominent Soviet jews such as Semyon Krivoshein (a Soviet tank commander) who was a favourite of Stalin's and a hero of Soviet propaganda. (31) One may wonder with good reason whether Krivoshein had actually done anything particularly brave or whether he was just the 'right man, in the right place at the right time' or in modern corporate parlance: his face fitted.
Another was David Ortenberg: the jewish editor-in-chief of the official Red Army newspaper 'Krasnaya Zvezda' in 1941. Ortenberg exhorted Soviet soldiers to murder anyone who disagreed with Stalin and particularly anyone who happened to be German (as they were the 'German fascist scoundrels'). (32) Much as the notorious Soviet jewish propagandist Ilya Ehrenberg was to do later, which culminated in vast numbers of war crimes and the famous mass rape of Europe by the Red Army and its significantly jewish officer and commissar corps. (33)
Yet another example - but a rank and file one in this instance - is Yeleazer Meletinsky who was a GRU officer attached to 56th Army and who was arrested and accused of espionage fundamentally because he could speak German and had a Russian-German phrase book. (34) The SMERSH officers questioning him weren't interested in whether he was jewish or whether he was actually guilty of espionage: they were 'hunting traitors' and they had to meet their quota. If they didn't meet their quota on the same logic that I elucidated above they would be judged to be impeding Stalin's vision of a socialist Russia and thus be 'counterrevolutionaries' and/or 'reactionaries' themselves.
It is therefore little surprising that - as Birstein notes - 'the level of hidden anti-Semitism was very high among Russian privates' of the Red Army. (35) The reason is the proverbial elephant in the room of the early Soviet Union: the amount of high-ranking Bolsheviks who were jews. (36)
Thus explaining why Birstein notes that this anti-Semitism was 'vague' (37) as to be specific the Russian private in the Red Army would lay himself open to be charged and probably shot by the NKVD or SMERSH as a 'counter-revolutionary', 'spreading anti-Soviet propaganda' (as German propaganda leaflets frequently used such charges) and/or 'espionage agent' (as only those expressing 'reactionary' views could possibly be German 'White Guard' spies).
All in all Birstein's work on SMERSH is an excellent one and one that deserves to grace the library of any serious anti-Communist or anti-jewish individual as it provides you with a wealth of information - intentionally or not - about the extent of jewish power in the USSR as well all the reasons you will ever need to argue that Marxism is about as intellectually truthful as a back-peddling Rabbi.
References
(1) Smert' Shpiona
(2) Vadim Birstein, 2011, 'SMERSH: Stalin's Secret Weapon. Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII', 1st Edition, Biteback: London
(3) Ibid., p. 98
(4) Ibid., p. 180
(5) Ibid., pp. 94; 120
(6) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 2003, 'The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation', 2nd Edition, The Harvill Press: London
(7) Birstein, Op. Cit., p. 124
(8) Solzhenitsyn, Op. Cit., pp. 205-208
(9) Benjamin Pinkus, 1984, 'The Soviet Government and the Jews1948-1967: A Documented Study', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York
(10) See Gennadi Kostyrchenko, 1995, 'Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin's Russia', 1st Edition, Prometheus: New York for a clear statement of this thesis.
(11) Birstein, Op. Cit, p. 84
(12) Roger Seifert, Tom Sibley, 2012, 'Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson', 1st Edition, Lawrence & Wishart: London, p. 23
(13) Compare to Robert Service's notes on Maxim Litvinov and the jewish Bolshevik diaspora in Britain and America in Robert Service, 2011, 'Spies and Commissars: Bolshevik Russia and the West', 1st Edition, MacMillan: London, pp. 13-14; 82-87
(14) Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, 1994, 'The Secret World of American Communism', 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, pp. 243-245
(15) Service, Op. Cit., p. 49
(16) Social Revolutionaries were a competing and more unorthodox form of Marxism to that propounded by Lenin (leader of the Bolsheviks) and Martov (the jewish leader of the Mensheviks). The SR's difference with the Social Democratic Party (which Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were differing factions of) was in their identification of the revolutionary class. Lenin and Martov agreed with Marx and Engels in holding the industrial workers [the 'urban proletariat'] to be the most 'class conscious' and thus the principal class agent in revolutionary change: the SR's disagreed and held (in keeping with liberal religious discourse (a-la Tolstoy) and home-grown Russian socialist thought) that the rural communes and peasantry were that class. At its most basic the SR's saw themselves as championing peasants rights and interests, while the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks saw themselves as championing industrial workers rights.
(17) Seifert, Sibley, Op. Cit., p. 26
(18) Ibid., p. 27
(19) Ibid., p. 24
(20) Ibid., p. 25
(21) Ibid., p. 338
(22) Ulises Estrada, 2005, 'Tania: Undercover with Che Guevara in Bolivia', 1st Edition Ocean Press: Melbourne, pp. 32-33
(23) Joshua Rubenstein, Vladimir Naumov, 2005, 'Stalin's Secret Progrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee', 2nd Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, pp. 7-40
(24) Zygmund Dobbs, 1949, 'Karl Marx: Father of Modern Anti-Semitism', pp. 400-404 in Isaac Don Levine (Ed.), 1976, 'Plain Talk: An Anthology from the leading Anti-Communist Magazine of the 40s', 1st Edition, Arlington House: New York
(25) Jerry Z. Muller, 2010, 'Capitalism and the Jews', 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 34-45
(26) On this see William Chase, 2001, 'Enemies Within the Gates?: The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939', 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven
(27) Birstein, Op. Cit., pp. 64-65
(28) Ibid., p. 85
(29) Cf. John Mosier, 2010, 'Deathride: Hitler versus Stalin: The Eastern Front, 1941-1945', 1st Edition, Simon & Schuster: New York
(30) Cf. Joachim Hoffmann, 2001, 'Stalin's War of Extermination 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation', 1st Edition, Theses & Dissertations Press: Capshaw
(31) Birstein, Op. Cit., p. 75
(32) Ibid., pp. 106-107
(33) Hoffmann, Op. Cit., pp. 228-242
(34) Birstein, Op. Cit., p. 117
(35) Ibid., p. 119
(36) Orlando Figes, 1997, 'A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924', 1st Edition, Pimlico: London, p. 696
(37) Birstein, Op. Cit., p. 120