Word: chekas
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...came of a poor peasant family in the Sukhum region. At 18, he became a member of the Russian Social Democratic (Bolshevik) Party. He worked underground, was jailed by the post-Czarist government of Azerbaijan, released on the plea of Russian Ambassador Kirov, after which he joined the Cheka (secret police) and took an active part in overthrowing the governments of the Transcaucasian republics and their forcible incorporation in the Soviet Union...
...benefactor, Kirov, had been sensationally murdered about this time, and the Soviet Union was on the verge of a political bloodbath. The instrument of the purge set off by the Kirov assassination was Genrikh Yagoda, a leather-capped roughneck who was then head of NKVD (successor to the Cheka). Yagoda did a thorough job and, in due time, he got his reward: he was charged, like thousands of his victims, with being an enemy of the people, imperialist spy, etc. Yagoda was the third of the great cops, following Felix Dzerzhinsky, the lean, cat-eyed Polish aristocrat, who lies buried...
...power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution . . . [Trotsky displays] too far-reaching a self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs." But after a word with Cheka Boss Dzerzhinsky about the affairs of Rabkrin and Orgburo, Lenin added a postscript: "Stalin . . . becomes unbearable in the office of General Secretary ... I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin . . . and appoint another man . . . more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less...
...directive of Grigory Zinoviev, then chairman of the Comintern: "If out of 100,000,000 population, 10,000,000 do not want to obey the Soviets, they have to be destroyed physically." Nobody will ever know how many hundreds of thousands were killed by Dzerzhinsky's CHEKA...
...Persian art and higher mathematics. He wrote erotic poetry and read pornographic novels in his office between executions. He was plump, languid, soft-voiced, given to blue moods. He said: "Our task is to bring culture to the masses at a terrific speed." His OGPU, successor to the CHEKA,' brought death by execution and starvation to millions of Ukrainian and other peasants...