Word: nkvd
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...chief administrator of Stalin's domestic and foreign policies was the NKVD,* a huge secret bureaucracy with absolute powers which grew out of Lenin's Extraordinary Commission (Cheka). The Cheka was a picked group of Bolshevik revolutionaries whose duty, during the 1918-1920 Civil War, was to instill Marxism in soldiers, workers and peasants and to liquidate anti-Bolshevik activity. Stalin made the NKVD the "inner temple" of Communism, and its dedicated, anonymous thousands of operators not only controlled the police, espionage, security and surveillance agencies, but by dominating innumerable inspection, control, auditing and credentials committees and commissions...
...number of high Politburo-crats halted any defiance from on high. The result was, says Robert C. Tucker, who spent 5½years in the U.S. embassy in Moscow as an attache, an "inward migration'' of the Russian people. Boredom, cynicism, and mediocrity-what the NKVD called "formalism"-characterized almost all cultural and political life...
...past four years is that the Soviet inner power struggle, of which the Malenkov banishment is only one chapter, began at this point. It is not only a fight between known men, but a struggle among powerful institutions-the party as a political organization, the party in the NKVD, the party in the Soviet Army-and involved in this struggle are others, as well as the faces the world knows, with degrees of power the world can only guess at. They want no new autocracy, but the inevitable impulse, Soviet Communism being what it is, has been one head...
Though an able administrator and an adroit politician. Georgy Malenkov was probably too ruthless an intriguer for the big institutions (NKVD, the army, etc.) to entrust their future to. Though he lasted 23 months as Premier of the Soviet Union. Malenkov lasted only 16 days as First Secretary of the party, the crucial job Stalin willed him. Next in line after Malenkov in the hierarchy was Beria (who was quickly liquidated, a sop to popular anti-Stalin feeling, as much as for the crimes he had committed). Then came Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan...
...charge of the lay organization Serov put a bumptious, indestructible gangster named Boleslaw Piasecki. Piasecki had worked as an agent for Mussolini, later for the Gestapo; when he was picked up by the NKVD, he eagerly ratted on his associates, most of whom were promptly liquidated. But nervous Boleslaw, casting about for further life insurance, landed in Pax-officially called the Social Radical Movement of Polish Catholics. The organization had the monopoly on religious publishing, plus the manufacture and sale of all religious articles. The resulting flow of cash provided Piasecki with a luxurious villa, where he kept a Jaguar...