Word: gpu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Whatever his standing with God, Orwell had small status among political men. He stood apart from what he called "the smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls." He had enjoyed the painful honor of being wounded by fascists and hunted for his life by the gunmen of the GPU. He had fought against Franco in Spain, but with the wrong mob-the semi-anarchist POUM instead of the Stalinist-sponsored International Brigade. Back in London, he had found himself nudged into near oblivion by the fellow-traveling leftist press. Such experiences toughened his mind and help to explain his standing...
Trotsky was not lonely for long. Friends, reporters, curiosity seekers and a few GPU undercover agents flocked to the island. Trotsky plunged into an enormous correspondence with Trotskyites, who formed devoted, quarrelsome little groups in just about every country in the West. Trotsky did his best to unite them and boost their morale. He was genuinely appalled by Stalin's mass slaughter of Russia's peasantry and said so. But he confused his followers by scrupulously refusing to call for Stalin's overthrow and by defending Stalin's incredibly Machiavellian foreign policy-even the invasion...
...engineer who never works at his profession, Kavalerov's pal Ivan has taken to haranguing crowds in beer halls, excoriating the regime for destroying human feelings. Picked up and questioned by the GPU, he proclaims: "I believe that many human feelings are scheduled for liquidation." The interrogator: "Such as?" Ivan: "Pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, love-in a word, almost all the feelings of which the human soul was made up. I want to organize a final parade of those feelings." A fine state of mutual contempt exists between the subversive team of Ivan-Kavalerov and the living symbols...