Word: nkvd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...enough cornflakes and milk. Stalin for years conducted the Soviet Union's business at rambling, sinister, alcoholic dinner parties that began at 10 and ended at dawn. All his ministers attended, marinating in vodka and terror. Sometimes one of them would be taken away at first light by the NKVD, and never seen again...
DARK STAR by Alan Furst (Houghton Mifflin; $22.95). Plot is less important in this impressive spy novel than description, the re-creation of the nightmarish tensions that erupted during the 1930s between Soviet NKVD agents and Stalin's Georgian thugs...
Szara's safety net is espionage; he becomes a full-time NKVD operative in Paris charged with maintaining ties to an imperiled Jewish industrialist in Berlin, who somehow knows how many bombers Germany is building each month. Fear not; Dark Star never becomes one of those breathless adventures that build fake suspense around schemes to stop Hitler. Plot is less important than Furst's powerful descriptive writing, particularly his account of Szara's nightmare flight across Poland in the first days of the war. What carries the book to a level beyond the cynicism of spy novels is its ability...