Word: cheka
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...