Word: nkvd
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When Soviet Secret Police Boss Ivan Serov, lately notorious in Hungary (see FOREIGN NEWS), set up headquarters in Warsaw in 1944, he realized that the NKVD was for the first time operating in a country with a Catholic majority. He favored a gradual undermining of the Church's position rather than a direct frontal attack, picked a Polish political adventurer named Boleslaw Piasecki to lead a group of "progressive," i.e., proCommunist, Catholics. Piasecki had learned the tricks of his trade as an agent for Mussolini and later for the Gestapo, had organized shock troops to liquidate Red partisans...
...World War II, after the spectacular failure in Spain, Serov, Pedro, Walter & Co. had remained faithful Stalinists, though their ways parted. Tito in Yugoslavia organized a Communist-controlled partisan army; Serov back in Russia rounded out his NKVD career as the liquidator of minority nationalities, numbering some millions of people who saw the war as a chance to throw off the Soviet yoke; Pedro became a big wheel in Moscow's Free Germany Committee, and later, under the name of Erno Gero, Stalin's agent in Hungary. When Tito, protected by his 33-division Yugoslav army, broke with...
...subjected to terrible torture during which he was ordered to confess false information concerning himself and other persons. He was then brought to the office of Zakovsky [chief interrogator], who offered him freedom on condition that he make before the court a false confession fabricated in 1937 by the NKVD concerning sabotage, espionage and diversion in a terroristic center in Leningrad. With unbelievable cynicism Zakovsky told about the vile mechanism for the crafty creation of fabricated 'anti-Soviet plots.' . . . 'You yourself [he told Rosenblum] will not need to invent anything. The NKVD will prepare...
...from Moscow. He exchanged quips with the farmers, drank buckets of vodka, and got a laugh out of most situations. Behind the facade of bonhomie he was ruthlessly liquidating all who stood in the way of Stalin's plans. Stubborn peasants were turned over to his friend, NKVD Colonel Ivan Serov. and shipped off in boxcars to Siberia; Jewish culture in the Ukraine was (to use a recent Communist phrase) "wiped...
Civil War Hero V. A. Antonov-Ovseyenko (he led the Bolshevik attack on the Winter Palace in the 1917 uprising in Leningrad) was recalled from Barcelona where he was a Soviet military adviser during the Spanish civil war, hauled out of his train by the NKVD. so the story went, and shot beside the tracks...