Word: cheka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book's few revelations concerns the extent of her involvement with the Soviet secret police. Her husband had been an early employee of the Cheka, and she pursued the association by welcoming agents to gatherings at the apartment the Briks shared with Mayakovsky. One of the lovers Lili took when Mayakovsky was still alive was a high-level secret police official. But the most shocking anecdote is provided by Rita Rait, now one of Russia's most distinguished translators from English. In the '20s, Lili sought to recruit Rait to spy on Russian emigres in Berlin...
...Russian abbreviation for Committee for State Security) is a descendant of secret police agencies maintained over the centuries by anxious Russian czars; after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Communists called their secret police, successively, the CHEKA, GPU, OGPU, GUCB/NKVD and MGB, the KGB'S forerunner. Today the agency has a force of 300,000 men under arms to guard Soviet borders, as well as a corps of customs agents. Intourist too works closely with the KGB; tourist guides can steer chosen visitors to restaurants that have hidden microphones...
...Cite the page, liars! This is how I am quoted in order to incite my uninformed countrymen against me: 'Solzhenitsyn equates the Soviet people with the Nazi murderers.' That was a neat bit of word juggling. Yes, I did equate Nazi murderers with the murderers from the Cheka, the G.P.U. and the N.K.V.D. [secret police under Lenin and Stalin]. But Literary Gazette substitutes 'the Soviet people' for the police, so our own executioners can hide more easily in the crowd...
...favorite remark was "Listen, let me have him for one night, and I'll have him confessing he's the King of England." In later years, says Khrushchev, even Stalin grew to fear his fellow Georgian and the power he wielded as absolute master of the vast Cheka, or secret-police, organization. The sweeping postwar purge of the Leningrad party, Khrushchev believes, was part of a scheme masterminded by Beria and his "battering ram," former Premier Georgy Malenkov; the object was to wreck the careers of a troika of promising young men whom they regarded as a threat...
...coercive system he built as a temporary necessity. It is, of course, true that Lenin's ultimate goal was the liberation of humanity, and the creation of an egalitarian Utopia when the state, as envisioned by Marx, had withered away. Yet it was under Lenin that the CHEKA was created-the brutal, terrorizing model for all later Soviet secret-police systems. Many former capitalists were sent to forced labor camps or summarily shot. It was Lenin who started the campaign of harassment against well-to-do peasants, which escalated into open warfare when thousands of detachments of Bolsheviks forcibly...