Word: chekists
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...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 the official name has changed many times -OGPU, GPU, NKVD...
...control is ruthless: when a group of high army officers, led by Marshal Tukhachevsky, tried to throw off Chekist control in 1937, they were liquidated, along with some 30,000 regular career officers. Behind every high Red army commander in World War II stood a Chekist with the power to veto military orders. The system paid off: Chekist disregard for life accounted for some of the Red army's more daring and costly victories. With the war's end, many of the Red army's greatest marshals were not soldiers, but cops. Such a one is goateed...
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...
...hard-working young Chekist he had his ups & downs, never amounted to much until he wrote a book. It was not about police work as understood in Western countries. But for Communist police work it was just the thing to commend him to his superiors. It was called On the History of the Bolshevik Organization in Trans-Caucasia. Largely through fictitious evidence it disputed Leon Trotsky's charge that Stalin never amounted to much as a pre-revolutionary theorist. Beria's Stalin is always right, always on the Leninist beam, always out in front of "the toiling masses...