Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster

More than any other work I've seen, Special Tasks illuminates the Soviet experience. Its author lived it from beginning to end, joining the Red Army in 1919 at the age of 12 and offering his opinion 7 decades later on what Gorbachev did wrong in his attempts to keep the Soviet Union together. During those 70 years Sudoplatov is at or close to the very center of all the Soviet leadership was known for. He lived through the purges of the Thirties, directed the assassins of Trotsky, played a major role in the defeat of the Nazis, coordinated the theft of atomic secrets from the US, was arrested and imprisoned and tortured, then spent another 20 years in a sort of twilight struggle for rehabilitation, which was finally granted him just days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The breadth of this memoir is truly astounding. And while at times it becomes difficult to read due to his tendency to digress into details about persons most readers would not know the significance of, the details about well-known persons and events keep one reading past the digressions: Oppenheimer and Fermi feeding atomic secrets to the Russians in the altruistic belief that a balance of power was preferable to an American monopoly (one thinks of the recent Pakistani scientist who spread nuclear knowledge around for the same reason); Ramon Mercador killing Trotsky with an ice ax while his mother waited in a car outside; then giving all the details of the assassination to Sudoplatov in person in 1969--thirty years later--when they'd both done many, many hard years in prison: the control of emigre scientists in America such as George Gamow through threats to their families in Russia... Sudoplatov makes no apologies nor seems to have any regrets about what he and Stalin and the others did. He states plainly in the Prologue: "We did not believe there was any moral question involved in killing Trotsky or any other of our former comrades who had turned against us. We believed we were in a life and death struggle for the salvation of our grand experiment..." So we are left to wonder whether Sudoplatov, who seems to be a basically decent person playing rough in the service of his country really believes that 10-15 million of his former comrades had really turned against communism and deserved to die for the "salvation" of the "grand experiment". Are we to believe that he believes all of Stalin's purges were justified and Kruschev's were not? Like Albert Speer, Sudoplatov is more than a little reticent about the mass murders he was a witness to. A Ukranian by birth, he says nothing about the millions of Ukranians who died during Stalin's collectivization and subjugation of that country, though he worked in Ukraine for the Party through the Twenties, when those horrors took place. There is not the slightest mention of the famines or the shipping off of entire Ukranian villages to death camps. In a way, one can't blame him. There is a limit to the amount of such things a p

This book is ESSENTIAL to understand Power in the former Soviet Union. It's almost the history of the first decades of the soviet intelligence services written in a reasonably detailled manner. It's revealing on the nature of Power under Stalin rule. I also recommend the Portuguese translation (if you happen to speak Portuguese) since it was very carefully done. If you study this subject in particular get every translation you are able to read! Great book!

I read the first edition and bought the second edition just to read the reactions which are printed in the book. Predictably, many still cling to their version of sugar-coated history. Fortunately, historians like Robert Conquest know the real truth. And Conquest said "This is the most sensational, the most devastating, and in many ways the most informative autobiography ever to emerge from the Stalinist milieu". In the updated foreword he again defends the overall veracity of this document. He has good reason to do this. You won't believe the documentation in the back of the book. Atomic espionage documents, Katyn Forest Massacre, and more.

4/28/99 Pavel Sudoplatov joined the secret police as a boy, and rose to be one of Beria's most trusted assistants, in charge of sabotage, assassinations, and atomic bomb espionage. Though Sudoplatov sometimes gets things wrong (not suprising when working from memory fifty years later), he has a wealth of information on how Stalin's secret police worked, and presents a chilling picture of the kind of people who thought they were building a better world through mass murder. After reading this, you'll have better understanding of how so many Westerners could betray their countries to the USSR, and why so many are still trying to pretend it didn't happen. This new edition has some interesting material that answers criticisms made of the first edition, especially his claim that Los Alamos director J. Robert Oppenheimer passed on information about the atomic bomb (I seem to be the only serious student of the Oppenheimer case who believes Sudoplatov on this). Recommended.

Sudoplatov has written a book which, in its simplistic style and throroughness, compels the reader to see through the haze that has surrounded the turbulent years of Stalins rule. Too often here in the West, our narratives describing this period have been tainted by the prejudicial judgement of our authors, the lack of availability of proper documentation, and the almost universal unwillingness to rewrite past assertions. The timeframe of his book being published, in my opinion, hopefully shall spur renewed interest by researchers from all countries to begin anew the quest to find answers to questions long thought unanswerable. This is an excellent book!!!