Word: cheka
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...chief administrator of Stalin's domestic and foreign policies was the NKVD,* a huge secret bureaucracy with absolute powers which grew out of Lenin's Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The Cheka was a picked group of Bolshevik revolutionaries whose duty, during the 1918-1920 Civil War, was to instill Marxism in soldiers, workers and peasants and to liquidate anti-Bolshevik activity. Stalin made the NKVD the "inner temple" of Communism, and its dedicated, anonymous thousands of operators not only controlled the police, espionage, security and surveillance agencies, but by dominating innumerable inspection, control, auditing and credentials committees and commissions...
...personnel files to the NKVD (central secret police), thus putting them in a position to purge most of Ordzhonikidze's engineers and to get rid of the troublesome old Commissar himself. The new man: a hulking, fresh-faced peasant with an impeccable record in the revolutionary Cheka, Sergei Kruglov...
...convert its most devoted adherents into a dark, anonymous army committed as a duty to crime, duplicity and terror. The main spy organization is the GB (Gosudarstvennaya Bezopasnost -State Security), whose list of names reads like alphabet soup, e.g., GPU, NKVD, MGB, since it began life as the CHEKA in 1917. Furthermore, allied and sometimes competing with the GB are the spy apparats of the Red army, the Ministry of Trade and the Communist Party itself. Their strength lies in two things: 1) size, i.e., their agents probably outnumber, says Dallin, the intelligence officers of all other nations combined...
...crucial months before the Revolution. He thus qualifies as one of the few Old Bolsheviks still in power in the Kremlin (the others: Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich). Bulganin served his apprenticeship as an agitator, making trouble among the textile workers. After the fighting, he switched to the Cheka, where he bloodily put the agitators down. It was Kaganovich who sent Bulganin to Moscow to serve on the High Soviet of People's Economy. The High Soviet's appointed task: "To catch up with and surpass America...
...animal grace and his life of action and violence. This paradox shaped Babel's life and writing. Before he was mysteriously imprisoned in the late 1930s, some say for making indiscreet remarks about the Stalinist regime. Babel had worked as a Bolshevik propagandist, been a member of the Cheka. and ridden with Budenny's Red Cossack cavalry as a supply officer in the Polish campaign of 1920. The meek intellectual with "spectacles on [his] nose and autumn in [his] heart" as Babel described himself, spent the young manhood of his life honing his squeamish conscience on "the simplest...