Word: ogpu
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Into the world's vocabulary and stock of notions restive Russians have injected "kulaks," "FiveYear Plans." "Ogpu" and State-sponsored "Godlessness." Last week the Soviet Union was busy winding up 1935 with Russia's most recent and most sweeping innovation since the so-called "liquidation of the kulaks" and "fulfillment of the First Five-Year Plan." The great new addition to vocabularies: Stakhanovism. To liquidate the kulaks was a bloody, brutal process in which Russia's more prosperous small farmers were shot by the thousands and deported to Siberia by the hundreds of thousands for opposing Dictator...
...height of Stakhanovite celebrations in Moscow, Dictator Stalin said grimly that in the Soviet transport sector, anti-Stakhanovites have had their teeth knocked, in and been booted from their jobs. He clearly indicated that he means to enforce speedups throughout Russia by the same methods of OGPU terror which have forced 85% of all Russian peasants who were not wiped out to join collective farms...
...years. Members of the dread Tsarist Okhrana were remarkably successful in insinuating themselves into the Cheka of Lenin which conducted the original so-called "Red Terror." So odious did the Cheka become that it was finally supposed to have been purged of its baser elements and was renamed the Ogpu. Under the late great Felix Dzerzhinsky, an extremely able and somewhat sadistic Pole, the Ogpu became internationally odious but in Russia it saved the Bolshevik Dictatorship from being overthrown by popular and democratic elements. That Arch-Terrorist Dzerzhinsky had deserved well of Bolshevism was signalized after his death when...
Still later the Ogpu was given yet another name to make it seem more like a normal European Ministry of Interior, became the Commissariat of Interior, under the reigning Ogpu chief, smudge-mustached, pudgy-fingered Comrade Genrikh ("Henry") Grigorevitch Yagoda. Moscow's official daily Pravda ("Truth") hailed the terrorist clique in its new role as Commissariat of Interior thus: "Long has the Ogpu worn a halo formed of the deep love of tens of millions of workers and peasants both in our Soviet land and abroad!"* Last week Comrade Yagoda's Commissariat of Interior became the Commissariat General...
...this love the Ogpu, according to minimum estimates, has tried in its own star chamber courts and executed in its cellars not less than 10,000 Russians; has shipped off to Siberia not less than 1,000,000 and today employs in its penal labor gangs not less than...