Word: ogpu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Commissar Yakovleva, 52, is an Old Bolshevik, a veteran of the bloody fruitless days of 1905, who was exiled to Siberia under the Tsar. After the 1917 revolution she did valiant service in the ruthless Cheka, the pre-Ogpu secret police, gradually rose to be Vice Commissar for Education and finally Russia's first and only female Finance Commissar...
...host of 55,000 sinners, Russians who transgressed against their State and were sent to the purgatory of digging immense canals under the lash of Ogpu overseers, last week were redeemed by the mercy of Joseph Stalin. Making one of his rare public appearances the Dictator took an inconspicuous seat while the official pardon of the 55,000 was read out. How many more thousands died in the Soviet purgatory and how many are busy redeeming themselves in it still with picks and shovels, the State did not say. Most of Russia's 55,000 redeemed sinners sweated under...
...countries adjoining the Soviet Union last week that Dictator Stalin's hated onetime creature Yagoda had been arrested only upon demand of the Red Army in the person of its popular leader Marshal Klimentiy ("Klim") Voroshilov and Marshals Blucher, Yegorov, Tuckachevsky, and Budenny. Up to now the Ogpu has had its own troops, numbering some 240,000, and individually much better equipped than Red Army troops. As the Dictator's elite guards, these have rushed about Russia, here mercilessly mowing down a peasant revolt, there breaking a strike, next subduing a mutinous Red Army unit. Without need...
...Stalin gets results, and soon Moscow presses were saying that Yagoda never was his creature, that the Dictator never really liked him, long wanted to be rid of him. More and more lurid stories followed, with Comrade Yagoda swelling in horrid infamy until it appeared that Ogpu evenings under him resembled Roman Saturnalia. The picture of debauchery was made to look a trifle brighter by suggesting that the Ogpu Chief's most depraved carousing and seductions came toward the close of his public career when he realized that jail was but a few jumps ahead. Item: the State press...
This suggested to most Moscowites that Yagoda may not have his confession-spouting day in court as a "Trotskyist," may simply be shot by the Ogpu. The Old Bolshevik who knows most about Soviet law is Eugene Bronislavovich Pashukanis, Vice-Commissar of Justice, Director of the Institute of Soviet Construction & Law, editor of The Soviet State, law journal, and author of the Soviet Union's chief standard works on jurisprudence used in its law schools. Suddenly last week all law books by Pashukanis had to be confiscated, Soviet law students and their professors were left stranded. Reason: Old Bolshevik...