About the book: 2011 / No matter what anti-Stalinist propaganda lies, the legendary SMERSH was not a branch of the underworld, and military security officers were incarnations of hell and demons in the flesh. Rather, military counterintelligence is comparable to Purgatory, through which during the Great Patriotic War hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war and millions of Soviet citizens passed through, escaping from the “cauldrons”, returning from enemy captivity and from forced labor. Contrary to popular myths, SMERSH’s activities were not limited to forceful detentions with “swinging the pendulum” and shooting with both hands “Macedonian style” - basically it was routine, thorough, scrupulous work on collecting and analyzing information, maybe not as spectacular as in action movies, but much more effective. On account of the Main Directorate of Counterintelligence, “Death to Spies!” NGOs of the USSR, tens of thousands of exposed German agents and war criminals, collaborators of the enemy and punitive forces, but most importantly, thanks to the operational search and investigative work of military security officers, suspicions were removed from millions of honest Soviet people. “Moments of truth” and the exploits of Stalin’s “wolfhounds”, cleaning up the rear The Red Army from enemy spies and saboteurs, the pursuit of the “blue-eyed demons of the Reich”, the hunt for traitors and executioners - this book for the first time sheds light on unknown episodes of the secret war, paying tribute to the best military counterintelligence in history - the invincible and legendary SMERSH.