Word: nkvd
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...