8/8: 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
🗓️ 1 July 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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.
1945
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| 0:59.6 | I'm John Mattcher was Fetlano Lakova, the author of this bio-changed history, the untold story |
| 1:04.4 | of how the Soviet Union stole America's top secrets. We've moved from MIT in 1931 to the end of the war, the atomic bombs used over Japan, Japan's surrender, |
| 1:16.0 | and now the Cold War is not yet ready to launch, but it certainly is in the immediate future. |
| 1:22.9 | It's dated generally from 48, but you can start it earlier in the contest. However, all of his |
| 1:29.6 | names and many more, some were rewarded, some were arrested, some were executed. We're going |
| 1:36.7 | to begin with the big one. Stanislav Antonovich Schemowski. What happened to him? Where did he go |
| 1:43.4 | after the war ended, Svetlana? |
| 1:46.4 | So he worked for the, he in fact put together, first of all, he worked for the construction |
| 1:53.9 | and design bureaus. Then he created the Moscow version of MIT. So effectively he transported |
| 2:00.7 | the MIT to Russia. And he worked on |
| 2:05.3 | other numerous projects like that to the point where he's called one of the fathers of Soviet |
| 2:10.4 | aviation. And he even worked on projects which involved, you know, what would become space |
| 2:17.1 | projects in the future. |
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