Word: nkvd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Pravda reporter in Europe and occasional Soviet spy, whose life goals have been reduced to a desire to outlast Stalin's purges. As the novel opens in 1937, Szara, a Russified Polish Jew, is caught in the midst of a blood feud in the Soviet secret services between his NKVD friends, mostly Jewish intellectuals, and Stalin's Georgian thugs. The fear that dominates Szara's nomadic life is palpable: a typically chilling passage is about his return to Russia aboard a Soviet freighter with a human cargo of condemned men who know that homecoming means an executioner's bullet...
...about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II, then vanished when the Soviets occupied Budapest. Soviet authorities have maintained that Wallenberg died in prison in 1947 and the file of his case was destroyed. The latter assertion most assuredly is untrue: NKVD and KGB investigation files are stamped TO BE PRESERVED FOREVER; pages may be removed on instructions from the top, but a file is never completely eradicated...