Word: nkvd
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...conditions for counterrevolution ary activity." What gave the Chinese terror speed and weight was tested techniques borrowed from the Soviet Union at a time when Stalin was at the top of his power. But the Chinese system differs in one important respect from the Russian: Stalin's NKVD and MVD worked in secret, but Mao's terror gets the utmost publicity...
...shove out many a stubborn old Bolshevik. At the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, where old-line Commissar Ordzhonikidze gave notice that he would resist purging, Malenkov quietly put in his own security chief. The new man quickly turned over the commissariat's personnel files to the NKVD (central secret police), thus putting them in a position to purge most of Ordzhonikidze's engineers and to get rid of the troublesome old Commissar himself. The new man: a hulking, fresh-faced peasant with an impeccable record in the revolutionary Cheka, Sergei Kruglov...
Seven Lines in Pravda. But the big tip-off that all was not well with Kruglov came recently with the report that six former NKVD interrogators had been tried and executed for the murder of Ordzhonikidze, who in 1937 was said to have died naturally. Last week a seven-line paragraph on the back page of Pravda announced that Kruglov had been "released"' and would be replaced by Nikolai P. Dudorov, a little-known bureaucrat with Khrushchev connections...
...Komsomol (Young Communist) at the age of 17, he rose to be a regimental commander in the Red army, but in the early '30s transferred to the Osoby Otdel (Special Department) of the NKVD. Sent to the Ukraine, he worked with Stalin's Ukrainian troubleshooter, Nikita Khrushchev. Together they supervised the deportation and liquidation of hundreds of thousands of peasants who resisted collectivization. After the conquest and partition of Poland, Serov was assigned to the job of eliminating "anti-Soviet elements" in the newly annexed territories. Infamous secret order No. 001223, outlining procedures to be adopted for executions...
...NKVD had become such a huge, unwieldy organization that Stalin split it into two parts: the MGB (Security, under Abakumov) and the MVD (Slave Labor, under Kruglov). Having swelled the ranks of slave labor by several millions, Serov was a natural for the MVD. He was made Kruglov's deputy, got a third Order of Lenin for whipping his slaves into completing the Volga-Don canal. But after Stalin's death, his membership in MVD and not in MGB probably saved his life. The Beria liquidation process carried off the entire top level of the security forces...