Word: nkvd
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...informing him of the 1934 murder of Leningrad Party Chief Sergei Kirov by a Trotskyite dissident. It was that event that set the stage for one of the most terrifying eras of modern history: the Great Purges of the 1930s, or, as Khrushchev calls them, "the meat mincer." The NKVD, Stalin's secret police and precursor of today's KGB, suddenly became all-powerful, and thousands of party officials and army officers began to vanish. Khrushchev survived the grim era in willing ignorance. "I don't know where these people were sent," he says. "I never asked...
...first tried it. He would say: "Look, here are the giblets, Nikita. Have you tried them yet?" Khrushchev, knowing that his host wanted some for himself but was afraid to be first, would reply, "Oh, I forgot." The only member of his circle exempt from this tasting ritual was NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria, who ate only food transported from his own dacha...
...claimed that Escalante had tried to arrange a trip to Moscow with "Russian Journalist" Vadim Lestov-actually, an NKVD agent-"to put forth his opinions" on how the Kremlin could whip Castro into line. In a secret report to Lestov, which ended up in Raúl's hands, Escalante criticized the government and warned that Fidel was planning to expand trade ties with France, thereby lessening Russian leverage...
...isolation was brutal. Stalin sur rounded his "little housekeeper" with NKVD agents and made her a prisoner shifted between Kremlin and countryside. The description of her first love affair at 17 becomes an episode in the life of a girl who for the first time since her mother's death feels the pull of approval by another human being. The man was a 40-year-old film director, Alexei Kapler. When Stalin had the whole story-telephone transcriptions, letters, trysts-he ordered Kapler arrested as a British spy, had him sentenced to ten years of exile and prison...
...bang his fist on the table, to give marks." But the reader is mistaken who thinks he is listening in on James Dean complaining to Dad because he can't have the family car for a double date. Seryosha's father has been taken away by the NKVD, and the boy has encountered in Joseph Stalin and the local commissar a pair of fa ther images worthy of hate...