Word: chekas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, 88, one of Soviet Communism's ranking figures for half a century; in Moscow. Voroshilov was a tireless agitator during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, rallying workers and soldiers, helping to organize the dreaded Cheka (secret police); during the civil war that followed, he distinguished himself as one of the founders of the Red armed forces, and in 1925 was appointed Commissar of War. Blindly loyal to Stalin, in 1935 he was named a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and rose to the post of assistant chairman of the party's defense committee. With Stalin...
...returned instead to the Sociology department he had founded at the University of Petrograd. Among the daily auditors in his classes, Sorokin says, were two spies from CHEKA (the new government's secret police) who reported his lectures as ideologically objectionable...
...Charenton, a progressive booby-bin that housed sex criminals and lunatics in post-Revolutionary France, and sheltered the Marquis de Sade for the last distracted years of his life. Sade was no more popular with the Comstocks of the Napoleonic era than he had been with the Bourbons' cheka; both regimes jailed him for the same apolitical crimes. But Charenton's enlightened director M. Coulmier encouraged him to write and direct plays for the inmates, and Charenton became a sort of high camp Vauxhall for the Parisian upper crust, who appeared regularly to see the former Marquis' bombastic plays...
...disperse the assembly. Thereafter the "Little Robespierre," as Trotsky called him, launched his own Terror. The Czar and his family were executed, and Lenin systematically began the liquidation of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Comrade Zinoviev cried triumphantly: "The capitalists killed separate individuals. But we kill whole classes." The Cheka (secret police) was organized. Sometimes, mistakes were made, but from Lenin's point of view they were just as good as deliberate acts. At one party meeting, Lenin passed a note to his Cheka chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, asking how many reactionaries were held in Moscow's jails. Dzerzhinsky...
Even more startling is the picture that emerges of the Soviet police as either numskulls or brutes. Two unlovely types are the Cheka plainclothesmen: Boiko, with his dimples and "effeminate, rosy cheeks," and Khizhnak, who has a knife scar running from ear to chin and has been known, during an "interrogation." to gouge out the eye of a suspect. Both are murdered by White officers who prove gentlemanly enough to spare the Cossack driver: "Several shots had been sent after him, but evidently more in order to frighten him than to hit him, for he said they whistled high above...