4/8: The Spy Who Changed History: The Untold Story of How the Soviet Union Won the Race for America’s Top Secrets by Svetlana Lokhova (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1934
On a sunny September day in 1931, a Soviet spy walked down the gangplank of the luxury transatlantic liner SS Europa and into New York. Attracting no attention, Stanislav Shumovsky had completed his journey from Moscow to enrol at a top American university. He was concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students heading to prestigious academic institutions. But he was after far more than an excellent education.
Recognising Russia was 100 years behind the encircling capitalist powers, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had sent Shumovsky on a mission to acquire America’s vital secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. The road to victory began in the classrooms and laboratories of MIT – Shumovsky’s destination soon became the unwitting finishing school for elite Russian spies. The USSR first transformed itself into a military powerhouse able to confront and defeat Nazi Germany. Then in an extraordinary feat that astonished the West, in 1947 American ingenuity and innovation exfiltrated by Shumovsky made it possible to build and unveil the most advanced strategic bomber in the world.
Following his lead, other MIT-trained Soviet spies helped acquire the secrets of the Manhattan Project. By 1949, Stalin’s fleet of TU-4s, now equipped with atomic bombs could devastate the US on his command. Appropriately codenamed BLÉRIOT, Shumovsky was an aviation spy. Shumovsky’s espionage was so successful that the USSR acquired every US aviation secret from his network of agents in factories and at top secret military research institutes.
In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the reader on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation. She pieces together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives, exposing how even Shirley Temple and Franklin D. Roosevelt unwittingly advanced his schemes
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You can't rely on blind faith to get the pregnancy support you deserve. |
| 0:05.2 | Ritual's essential prenatal multivitamin is the only leading prenatal backed by its own human clinical trial. |
| 0:12.6 | Essential prenatal is proven to deliver key nutrients, including folate, biotin, and vitamin D during pregnancy. |
| 0:20.3 | Get 25% off when you visit ritual.com slash clinical. |
| 0:25.5 | These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. |
| 0:27.6 | This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. |
| 0:33.8 | I'm John Batchewis, Fetlana Lakova. |
| 0:36.2 | It's July, 1937, a very large aircraft, experimental. |
| 0:41.3 | Tuploff A&T-25R-D. |
| 0:44.6 | That's the initials of Andreiovich Tupilov. |
| 0:50.5 | We've already met rambling at America, studying manufacturing. However, he builds |
| 0:55.6 | this gigantic aircraft, monoplane, and it flies transpolar and lands in California. This is a |
| 1:03.2 | spectacular event promoted by Shumovsky, the man in the white suit. There's a picture in |
| 1:09.0 | in his Fadlado's, it's hard to believe. |
| 1:12.2 | It's the three Soviet heroes having flown over the Arctic and landed in California. |
| 1:18.9 | And there's Shirley Temple in the front row. |
| 1:20.9 | This is the Hollywood movie in Old Chicago with Shirley Temple 1937. |
| 1:26.3 | Why are they with Shirley Temple? What was |
| 1:28.3 | Shumoski thinking? Well, he's just a genius. And I keep saying, you know, this story, |
| 1:34.5 | indeed, is very, very difficult to believe. Because this is a man who born to this Polish |
| 1:39.5 | noble family, but then ends up in this horrible civil war hostilities, then ends up being an aviator, |
| 1:47.8 | then ends up, you know, being an engineer and designer. And then now he's a PR person |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.