Word: gpu
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...trials to come. The charge : promoting Western military intervention to destroy the Soviet state. He pleaded guilty. Once in jail, however, he wrote an indignant appeal to the government - now run by the "grey blur" - and circulated a copy through the jail. Among other things, Sukhanov demanded that the GPU honor its promise "to release those willing to make untrue confessions." No one ever heard from him again...
...equally mysterious and never explained "doctors' plot" against the army (Vasilevsky, Shtemenko, Konev). Even the now deposed Malenkov can be described as a former police official, for as clerk of the 2,500,000 dossiers, he was actually Stalin's finger man in the great GPU purges...
Serov did not belong either to the presidium of party or government. An old GPU agent, whose most notable exploits were liquidating the Baltic and Chechen peoples during World War II, Serov is a tall, cadaverous man who walks unevenly. The Germans knew him as "the one with the limp." They made his acquaintance in the Ukraine, where he is said to have worked with Khrushchev...
...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...
When it was all over, perhaps 7,000,000 people had disappeared, either into the GPU mass burial pits or into the vast slave camps of Siberia. But Stalin could rest: he had destroyed many innocent people, but with the good grain he had also burned the chaff of the old Bolshevik Party, the chief challenge to his power. He himself slept well. The new generation of party members, which he set about recruiting and educating, were functionaries, meek & mild bureaucrats, with a mortal fear in their bowels...