Spectre, Executive Special for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. Doctor No looks pleased as he explains to James Bond (Sean Connery) and Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), his prisoners, the meaning of that sinister acronym, the pronunciation of which evokes the supernatural. It’s 1962, the movie is Licence to kill first of the James Bond saga produced by the Broccoli brothers and also the first time that fans of the British agent hear about Spectre. Yes, because in Ian Fleming’s novels there is not the Spectre, but an equal one fearsome and real organization.
Death to Spies
Donovan Grant, Rosa Klebb, Doctor No and Goldfinger, Le Chiffre, Mr. Big, all famous bad guys of the big screen, in Fleming’s pages they are SMERSH agents (in Russian SMERŠ), an acronym which stands for “Smert’ Špionam”, literally “death to spies”. And it’s not fiction, it’s pure reality.
Division of the NKVD (Narodnyj komissariat vnutrennich del – People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) SMERSH was in fact specialized in counter-espionage, like Spectre.
The unit was operational during the Second World War until 1946, when its tasks were absorbed by theMGB (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoj bezopasnosti – ministry for state security) which had replaced the NKVD and which was in turn transformed into the more famous KGB, after Stalin’s death.
Field use
In his short but bloody period of activity, SMERSH followed the operations of the Red Army in the territories reconquered from the Germans, carrying out the tasks of gathering information and eliminating collaborators, anti-Soviet partisans or Soviet citizens themselves who were guilty of defeatism or self-harm, the latter crimes which, to tell the truth, were also considered by the other belligerent armies.
It is no coincidence that Ian Fleming chose SMERSH as Bond’s sworn enemy. Secret agent during the world war, cousin of another spy destined for great fame in the world of entertainment, Christopher Lee Carandini, Fleming constructed his character at the beginning of the Cold War, based on the knowledge learned in the world of intelligence and on his personality. In fact, Bond has a lot of “dad Ian”: rebellious character, charm, love for women and for the game, refinement and resourcefulness.
As for the main antagonist of the British agent, what better than SMERSH? Enemy nationality and sinister charm in a single acronym…
Against the Poles…
Washington and London had given Stalin control over post-war Poland. In the summer of 1944 the Poles still don’t know about it. Then, the August 1st Warsaw rises up against the Nazi occupiers. Two months of street battle between the Armija Krajowa (national army) and the troops of General von Dem Bach: massacres, rapes, murders. Warsaw, reduced to a pile of rubble, is the perfect setting for a horror film. The Red Army is just outside Warsaw but does not intervene, much less allow the Western Allies to airdrop aid. The USSR is now master of Poland and any external interference must be avoided. As for the Polish patriots, SMERSH will take care of them. In the capital, but also in Lublin and Lviv (historically cities of Polish culture) terror, arbitrary arrests and deportations to the gulags move in parallel with the annihilation of Poland’s identity. What the Germans spared SMERSH destroyed.
… and against Bandera
In 2001, in the research bulletin of the Charles University of Prague, Bouhslav Litera reported interesting data about SMERSH activity against Ukrainian nationalism. In 1946, the last year of its activity, SMERSH accomplished 166 operations against the UPA (Ukrains’ka povstans’ka armija – Ukrainian insurgent army), resulting in the destruction of almost fifty clandestine units and the execution of over nine hundred members.
Among the latest operations conducted by SMERSH is the attempt to eliminate the Ukrainian nationalists Lev Rebet and Stefan Bandera, the latter also linked to the National Socialist circles with which he had collaborated during the German occupation of Ukraine. For the Soviets he therefore represented a traitor, as well as a dangerous element capable of rekindling the national feelings of the Ukrainians.
Bandera is in Munich with his family, in the US occupation zone and the SMERSH agents try to take him out, but without success. The USSR vainly requested his extradition for years, until the death of the nationalist leader, found dead in a pool of blood with traces of cyanide in his body. Death still today covered in a veil of mystery…
London: the return of SMERSH
When the Specter makes its first appearance, SMERSH has already been deactivated for fifteen years. Or, at least, that’s officially the case. However, 1962 was the year of Cuban Missile Crisis therefore, to avoid further elements of friction between East and West, the production of 007 replaces the Soviet acronym with Spectre. The idea is successful, the figure of James Bond becomes a cultural icon, Specter is the bad guy par excellence. But suspicion about SMERSH remains, because little information leaks from the USSR and because London has been a historic adversary of the Russians, since well before the October Revolution. Suspicions, more or less founded, which survived the collapse of the Wall and the end of the USSR. Today, in the third year of the invasion of Ukraine, the British are even talking about a new SMERSH under Putin’s orders. And it’s not a tabloid tabloid doing it, but the British Ministry of Defense publishing an indiscretion on X: the Russians would have reactivated it.
From an artistic point of view, it is curious to note how any pop work always has a real origin: Moby Dick the sinking of the Essex, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs And Do not open that door the criminal exploits of the serial killer Ed Gein, The shark the Jersey Shore attacks of 1916, Dracula Vlad the Impaler. And the Specter is the SMERSH, a tangible sign that novelists and screenwriters do their research carefully before creating their fictional works.
Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for analysts and politicians who sometimes tend to “inflate” reality a little too much: what sense would there be in reconstituting SMERSH if the tasks of counter-espionage and elimination of potential opponents have always been carried out with , tragic “efficiency”, from KGB and FSB? Plausible answer could be the desire to influence sentiment of public opinion on countries that we thought would collapse after a couple of months of sanctions and which, instead, are still there… alive, well and undefeated.
