SMERSH : Stalin's secret weapon

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 true life, but the real Smersh was far more savage than Bond's fictional nemesis.

Smersh is the acronym for the Russian words Death to spiesA" which was the name of the Soviet counterintelligence organisation dedicated to the elimination of anti-communist activity during the Second World War.

Far from the kitsch villains of Fleming's imagining, Smersh was a key part of Stalin's terror apparatus - a collection of torturers and killers unleashed with brutal affect in 1943 to cut a bloody swathe of death across Eastern Europe until being absorbed into the NKVD, predecessor of the KGB, after the war.

Under the aegis of the notoriously brutal Viktor Abakumov, who would personally torture prisoners, Smersh was used to filterA" the Red Army for spies, saboteurs, and traitors. In reality it was responsible for the arrest, torture and execution of many thousands of Soviet servicemen, as well as innocent citizens of countries occupied by the Red Army as it fought the Nazis across Europe.

So intrinsic was Smersh to Stalin's regime as Soviet armies began their conquest of German territory that the outfit was charged with capturing Hitler, eventually finding and identifying the charred remains of Hitler and Eva Braun.

Despite its significant role during and after the war, Smersh's activities are almost completely unknown outside the Soviet Union.

Partly because its savagery casts a shadow, even now, across Russia and Eastern Europe; partly because of the complete secrecy that surrounded its existence.

In Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon, Dr. Vadim 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.