Word: cheka
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...founded the Cheka—the Bolshevik secret police force that produced, in the words of Russian historian Orlando Figes, a “machinery of terror” during the nation’s civil war (1917-1921). Figes has estimated that the Cheka killed “certainly several hundred thousand, if one includes all those in its camps and prisons as well as those who were executed or killed by [its] troops in the suppression of strikes and revolts...
...orders, captured “enemies” of the regime were often sent to forced labor and concentration camps or else just summarily killed in their jail cells. On one night alone in 1919, some 1,500 Moscow prisoners were executed at Dzerzhinsky’s command. His Cheka was also feared for its particularly sadistic methods of torture. These included shoving victims into tanks of boiling water, sawing their bones in half and allowing rats to eat through their internal organs. The Cheka later evolved into the infamous KGB, a similarly murderous, clandestine security organ that would paralyze...
...very pleased. It has demystified the conservative image of Harvard," said Dr. Cheka Cosmas, a representative of the German Corporation of Technical Assistance in Cameroon...
...Felix Dzerzhinsky School in Erkner, a suburb of East Berlin, is named after a Russian of Polish descent who founded the dreaded Cheka, the forerunner of the Soviet KGB, in 1917. Two months ago, half a year after the Berlin Wall fell, the teachers asked the town council to drop the name. They are still awaiting action, but they are patient and confident -- with some reservations. "It would not be proper to ignore our entire history," says Barbel Dudelitz, an English-language teacher who has yet to take down portraits of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in her classroom...
...taking such high-handed actions, Lenin now had the weapon of a new police force known as the Cheka, which authorized local soviets to "arrest and shoot immediately" all members of "counterrevolutiona ry organizations." When a Socialist Revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin in the neck, the Cheka rounded up and executed 500 of her party comrades in one night. Lenin's view: "We have never renounced and cannot renounce terror." As for the future role of the Communists, the Eighth Party Congress decreed in 1919 that "the Russian Communist Party should master for itself undivided political supremacy...