Word: cheka
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...wanted a picture of himself below the giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the man who started the Cheka, progenitor of the KGB. The statue stands in a circle in front of the building. Helms tried to make his way across the congested street but could not. The policeman refused to halt the rushing traffic. Helms stopped, chuckled and went off -- just as George Smiley would have done...
...offered the most detailed account he has yet given of his own religious pilgrimage. His first memory is of being hoisted above the heads of adults during an Orthodox service so that he could see what was happening: "Through a crowded church passed a number of men from the Cheka, the early form of security services, in their high, triangular caps, of course without taking their hats off as is the custom in any church. They tramped through all the way to the altar and began grabbing all the sacred vessels...
Outside the Soviet Union, the KGB seems to embody Western fear and loathing of the Soviet system. Almost from its inception as an instrument of "revolutionary justice" following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet secret police, known successively as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and, since 1954, the KGB, has been synonymous with terror and coercion. It brings to mind the worst excesses of the Stalinist period: the public show trials and confessions exacted through torture, the random arrests and midnight executions in the infamous Lubyanka prison. KGB "sleepers" penetrating to the heart of Western intelligence services...
...your review "Blood Relatives" [Aug. 9] you say that our brother Alexander Pasternak was a member of Stalin's secret police, the Cheka. As an architect who designed one lock of the Moscow-Volga Canal. Alexander was employed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1936. The NKVD not only controlled all construction projects, like the canal and the metro, but had also taken over the functions of the Cheka. Accordingly, the NKVD uniform that Alexander was obliged to wear carried unpleasant associations, associations he detested because he was afraid of one department being confused with another, more...
From Olga Freidenberg's diary, which Editor Mossman has used to illuminate the letters, we also learn that Pasternak's brother Alexander was a member of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, during the Great Purge. An architect, Alexander helped design and supervise the construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal, which was built by slave labor in 1936. According to the diary, when Alexander was slated to receive a medal from Soviet Chairman Mikhail Kalinin for his work on the canal, Cousin Sasha on the eve of his arrest pleaded with the Chekist to try to save...