Word: ogpu
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Outside the Soviet Union, the KGB seems to embody Western fear and loathing of the Soviet system. Almost from its inception as an instrument of "revolutionary justice" following the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet secret police, known successively as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and, since 1954, the KGB, has been synonymous with terror and coercion. It brings to mind the worst excesses of the Stalinist period: the public show trials and confessions exacted through torture, the random arrests and midnight executions in the infamous Lubyanka prison. KGB "sleepers" penetrating to the heart of Western intelligence services...
...latest acronym for an organization that was founded in 1917 as the Cheka and was successively known as GPU, OGPU, NKVD and MGB. A fief within the Soviet state, the KGB is an intelligence agency, counterintelligence organization and internal security police with its own uniformed military branch. Administratively it is divided into various "directorates" whose number and function are frequently scrambled, partly to confuse rival foreign intelligence services...
...Russian abbreviation for Committee for State Security) is a descendant of secret police agencies maintained over the centuries by anxious Russian czars; after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Communists called their secret police, successively, the CHEKA, GPU, OGPU, GUCB/NKVD and MGB, the KGB'S forerunner. Today the agency has a force of 300,000 men under arms to guard Soviet borders, as well as a corps of customs agents. Intourist too works closely with the KGB; tourist guides can steer chosen visitors to restaurants that have hidden microphones...
...elite, one for the masses), and found it especially hard to stomach the Party's leadership. Like so many other writers, Dos Passos wavered a long time before he finally broke with the Party; but his break could have been predicted. (In his case, it came when the OGPU shot a friend of his in Spain--unlike Hemingway, Dos Passos found the Spanish Civil War a bitterly disillusioning experience...
...when things really got tough in Nazi Germany, Ulbricht was one of the first to run out. As a Communist agent he took refuge in Prague, then Paris. In between, there were the months in civil war-torn Spain when, from his base at Albacete, he took on the OGPU-assigned task of purging the West European "Trotskyites," i.e.. anti-Stalinists. What made Walter Ulbricht famous in Spain was his ingenious torture chamber, a cell of granite blocks too small for a man to stand...