<span>Although published over FIFTY YEARS AGO, Ronald Seth's account of Soviet murders and abductions from the 1930s to the 1960s is STILL useful(esp in the light of the "wet jobs" perpetrated against Aleksandr Litvinenko in 2006 and more recently GRU defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia in 2018). My only complaint is that he uses the term "SMERSH" for the generic murder apparat of the Soviet secret services, attributing to it things like the 1940 murder of Leon Trotsky when(as a real life SMERSH defector Captain Boris Baklanov noted his 1972 autobiography, SMERSH per se did not exist- it was founded in 1943 and disbanded in 1946; Ian Fleming makes the same mistake in his "Casino Royale"). Seth also attributes or implies that the growth in the 1960s of the international drug trafficking and addiction is due to SMERSH, thus giving it more influence and power than it could realistically have; left wingers and liberals have made similar overestimations of the influence and power of the "Company"- the CIA), when a more realistic assessment would have laid it at the feet of organized crime. One good thing is that by the conclusion of his book, "wet jobs" by the Soviets appear to have been on the wane- only TWO were reported between 1972 and 1979, Monahajudin Gadiz, a prominent anti-Communist Afghan editor and the coutnry's president just before the December 1979 Soviet invasion. Detente with the West, the growth and influence of groups championing human rights such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Society For Human Rights, (and as of July 1, 2002), the International Criminal Court, all made Moscow(both Soviet and post Soviet) decide to"watch its step"!</span>

The Executioners: The Story of SMERSH PDF

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