6/8: 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
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
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.
1931
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel was Fedelado Lakova, who's written a book that is stunning in the scale of |
| 0:11.0 | Soviet espionage in America in the 1930s, 1940s, and afterwards, long before the whole idea of |
| 0:17.4 | finding communists in a State Department. This is actual genuine Soviet espionage |
| 0:23.0 | activity for the top secrets of America, the spy who changed history. But Trotsky is in Mexico. |
| 0:33.3 | Stalin is in Moscow. They hate each other, and they both have launched plots to assassinate one |
| 0:42.0 | of the others. Somebody's going to die first. We know now from history that Trotsky dies first, |
| 0:47.8 | and that ends the plot against Stalin. However, Stalin wasn't satisfied. |
| 0:53.4 | Svetlata, did Stalin arrest all these spies because he thought they were Trotskyites |
| 0:58.7 | or because it just, the process ran away from him. |
| 1:01.4 | He lost control of it. |
| 1:03.7 | Well, there is two parts to it. |
| 1:05.4 | So first of all, the, from the 75s who went to the MIT, the person who was arrested was Mikhail Ternovsky, |
| 1:13.6 | and he was the military intelligence as opposed to the civilian intelligence, |
| 1:18.4 | which was represented by Schumovsky and others, so the NKVD. |
| 1:22.2 | And what happened with him is in 1935, and this is how I came across this whole story. I was writing my PhD |
| 1:31.0 | on a subject called the Crimean Affair. And what happened is a man called Kirov, who was a Stalin's successor, |
| 1:40.0 | chosen successor, was shot at the party headquarters. |
| 1:45.9 | And that got the security services to investigate the security in the Kremlin. |
| 1:51.6 | And the Kremlin now, obviously, you know that as a landmark. |
| 1:56.2 | But in those days, it was where the Soviet leadership lived as well as worked. |
| 2:01.3 | And it transpired that there were a lot of people within the Kremlin who were plotting |
| 2:04.8 | against Stalin and the leadership because a lot of people disagreed with their policies. |
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