Word: nkvd
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Vulko Chervenkov (born Volov-his party name means The Red Wolf), a Bulgarian-born, longtime NKVD tough who spent 1923-44 in Moscow, became the late Georgi Dimitrov's bodyguard and brother-in-law. After Dimitrov's death, Vulko succeeded in liquidating his rival, Traicho Rostov (TIME, Dec. 26), became undisputed boss of Bulgaria, recently swore "loyalty to the last breath" to Stalin...
...shoved into a small room with a half-wrecked stove and a barred window without panes . . . The temperature [was] below freezing . . . Occasionally a bit of bread was thrown in to me . . . Every [few] days . . . NKVD men would burst in at night and carry out a most careful examination of the cell and of my person [including] the long beard which had grown during my imprisonment and which was stiff from pus that had run into it from my frostbitten face. I was kicked and beaten on these occasions...
...Lubianka. When Anders still refused to join the Red Army and to confess to crimes he had never committed, he was taken to Moscow's Lubianka prison. Here he was again submitted to the NKVD treatment-sometimes being wooed with cigarettes and tea, at other times being smashed in the face and kicked...
...NKVD, he discovered, knew every detail of his personal and military history. They even showed him photographs of himself "at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam and at the international horseshow in Nice"-snapshots which he had never known existed. "We have such a file for every military and political personage in the whole world," said the proud interrogator...
Anders spent more than a year in Lubianka, much of the time in solitary confinement under an electric lamp so powerful that it nearly made him blind. Then, suddenly, he was summoned before NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria, who informed him that Germany had attacked Russia, and that Anders had been "elected" commander of all Poles in the U.S.S.R...