Word: chekists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bloody Past. Trained at Moscow's Frunze Military Academy to be a professional soldier, Serov was assigned on graduation to the NKVD. He first caught the Kremlin's approving eye in the '30s as chief Chekist in the Ukraine (where Nikita Khrushchev also served as Stalin's troubleshooter). shooting and deporting to certain death in Siberian slave camps hundreds of thousands of peasants who resisted collectivization. When World War II began, Serov, an equal in bloodstained iniquity to Nazi Germany's Himmler, specialized in genocide and in exterminating "anti-Soviet elements" in the new Soviet...
...women Communists tended to be of two kinds: either freewheeling intellectuals like the handsome and dashing Aleksandra Kollantay, sometime U.S.S.R. ambassador, who advocated free speech and practiced free love, or professional revolutionaries like somber, spectacled Rozalia Zemliachka, the civil war liquidator of the Crimea, and the white-haired oldtime Chekist Elena Stasova. Although Stalin liquidated thousands of male members of the party apparatus in the great 1937 purges, he left these and other top women alone. But Stalin did not trust old revolutionaries, men or women...
...Next Day-Pfft." Bulganin's career illustrates this interlocking of interests among the Kremlin gang. As a Chekist in home-town Nizhni Novgorod, he served under Kaganovich (1918), Molotov (1919), Mikoyan (1920). The official Soviet biography makes Bulganin a proletarian, born of a "worker's family," but his father was probably a clerk, and sufficiently beyond the proletariat to be able to send his boy Nikolai to technical high school, where he got a solid grounding in math, physics and German...
...Army and a novel called When the Gods Are Silent (TIME, Jan. 5, 1953), was once military correspondent for Izvestia, where he learned to find his way safely among the Red army's biggest monsters. He too can tell shocking stories about the secret police-about the porcine Chekist who ravaged a whole Cossack village but lost his own life when attacked by five cavalrymen after killing its last naked, crazed peasant; about the Communist who had the girl who jilted him arrested at her wedding reception, and permitted his most tigerish investigator to rape and shoot...
Last week in Moscow, Bulganin called a meeting of the top army Chekists and a sprinkling of those genuine fighting marshals who are regularly on call to give luster to Chekist authority. Purpose of the meeting: to pledge support of Premier Georgy Malenkov's arrest of Internal Affairs (MVD) Minister Lavrenty Beria, himself an oldtime Chekist (TIME, July 20). The declaration was intended to 1) end speculation that the army may have acted independently of the government in the arrest of Beria, and 2) preserve the front of solidarity behind which the struggle for power is raging. It could...