Word: nkvd
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...first Russian leader ever to commemorate Stalin's mass executions of Poles alongside a Polish leader. Prime Minister Tusk had flown in to Smolensk that day for the ceremony in the village of Katyn, where most of the 22,000 political murders were carried out by Stalin's NKVD secret police, a forerunner...
...Ukraine's Day of Remembrance for Victims of Political Repression, Yushchenko gave a speech at the Bykivnya forest, a mass grave near Kiev where the bodies of an estimated 100,000 victims of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, were dumped between 1937 and 1941. In the speech, he equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany: "They are comparable in their hatred towards human beings. They are identical in the unprecedented scale of their mass killings...
...Danylo had been born in Ukraine. His father, the director of the Medical Institute in Lviv, was murdered in 1941 by the Soviet NKVD because he freed some students who had been arrested. Causa pietatis, Dan (who made it to the U.S. with his mother in 1949) became an intellectual leader of the Ukrainian diaspora, working to keep alive in exile the culture that the Soviets were doing their best to destroy at home. Danylo presided (as managing editor and later as editor in chief) over a massive five-volume Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, which he assembled, with loving, exhausting labor...
...KREMLIN went on all night. he would sit at a long table and force his ministers and cronies to drink, hour after hour, while he plotted and probed and flattered and terrified them. At dawn, when their brains were numb with fear and vodka and confusion, the NKVD might lead one or two of the men away, without explanation, to be shot. That was the physics of paranoia under laboratory conditions: for every action, an opposite (if, in the Kremlin, somewhat unequal) reaction. Paranoia induces paranoia. Stalin refracted violent fear through alcohol, then presided over a reciprocal mind game that...
...photo of the unmarked wooden crosses in the northern tundra reminded me of my youth. In 1945, my physician father and I were taken by the Soviet NKVD (more recently the KGB) from our home in Budapest, Hungary, and, though innocent, accused of espionage. (After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the charges were dropped.) We were shipped to the labor camps (Gulag) of the dreaded Kolyma region of northeastern Siberia, where I spent eight years between life and death. At one point, I weighed 85 lbs., and only a miracle saved me from joining those wooden crosses. My father...