Word: nkvd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lieut. Colonel John H. Reynolds, of the U.S. Army, a former contact of Gaik Ovakimian, former head of the Soviet Secret Intelligence (NKVD) in New York, is also apparently involved in the Soviet espionage activities stemming from Washington...
...successors, Menzhinsky, Yagoda, and Yezhov, were either political nonentities or scapegoats in purges. Beria's rise, the author believes, was evidence of Stalin's tutelage rather than a boost from NKVD leadership...
...switched its attention back to civil affairs, but it never loosed its hold on the army. The system of commissars and political instructors, which extends down through the army command to company level, is Chekist, and popularly called so, though the official name has changed many times -OGPU, GPU, NKVD...
Benevolent Exterior. With his pince-nez and some carefully cultivated propaganda about his being a pianist and a profound student of architecture, Beria brought an air of respectability to the secret police, which had become almost unmentionable, so greatly was it feared. The whole apparatus of the NKVD was reorganized. Thousands were released from the prisons and the story put about that this was Stalin's (and Beria's) clemency, and that the real instigators of the purge had been Yagoda and Yezhov. Beneath this relatively benevolent exterior, Beria turned the NKVD into the most ruthless and extensive...
...Beria who expanded the slave camps and exploited the labor of prisoners in the interest of the state, a system which developed to the point where, cautious students of Russia estimate, not less than 15 million people are forcibly engaged. He also developed the military arm of the NKVD, creating a force of something like 15 divisions of elite troops, resembling Hitler's SS. He extended the system of informers to embrace every institution, factory, farm and, indeed, every building in the Soviet Union. Within the party itself he had spies watching spies, reporting back to the NKVD...