Word: cheka
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...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...
...family paid for him to go to school, though his official biography now disguises his unproletarian origin. Bulganin. aged 22, joined the party as an organizer a few crucial months before the Revolution, is thus one of the few old Bolsheviks still in high places. Assigned to the dread CHEKA during the bloody civil war. he showed so much efficiency in jailing and executing the "People's enemies." and in putting down a workers' revolt in his old home town, that Stalin called him to Moscow. He knew nothing about business management...
...merged it with the Communists and took command. He was Catalonia's Minister of Agriculture and Economy and its strongman when the civil war broke out. Through the war, he commuted regularly between Barcelona and Moscow to relay party orders. He policed the Catalonian party with his own Cheka, men in black leather jackets, crisscrossed by cartridge bandoleers. Their knock on a door in Catalonia usually meant torture and death to the man who answered...
Fainsod traces the history of the first director of the Cheka and OGPU, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who "gave no evidence of Napoleonic ambitions and died in 1926 without attaining Politburo status...
...Soviet Union's all-embracing police system had its origin about 35 years ago as an extraordinary emergency commission, called the Cheka, to combat sabotage and counter-revolutionary activities, In the civil war it became a kind of battle gendarmerie empowered to execute Whites and waverers in the Red army. With the end of the civil war, the Cheka switched its attention back to civil affairs, but it never loosed its hold on the army. The system of commissars and political instructors, which extends down through the army command to company level, is Chekist, and popularly called so, though...