Word: ogpu
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...disembodied symbol of rebellion. More human than Laverne is Ivan Stepanoff, an Old Bolshevik who has miraculously escaped from Stalin's prisons and who feels himself increasingly a historical anachronism. When Stepanoff is arrested, "his first concrete thought [takes] the form of a triple question . . . Vichy? Gestapo? OGPU? ... He [knows] how to recognize the agents of the OGPU," for he has had enough experience with them. But this time it is the Gestapo, which wishes him to become a Russian Lord Haw-Haw. Stepanoff gathers together the tag-ends of heroism, starves himself and cuts his wrist...
...This policeman was interested in Persian art and higher mathematics. He wrote erotic poetry and read pornographic novels in his office between executions. He was plump, languid, soft-voiced, given to blue moods. He said: "Our task is to bring culture to the masses at a terrific speed." His OGPU, successor to the CHEKA,' brought death by execution and starvation to millions of Ukrainian and other peasants...
...succeeded by a shrieking little man named Nikolai Yezhov, who wanted to get back at the world for the years he had spent in bitter poverty. He began his reign by purging the ranks of the NKVD, successor to the OGPU. Next he purged Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and practically the entire High Command of the Red Army. He gave his name to two of the Red Terror's maddest years (1936-38), the "Yezhovshchina." In the Yezhovshchina, the most fantastic denunciations were accepted at face value by the NKVD; no one was safe. Terror was completely indiscriminate, torture equal...
...husband had been assigned to Japan; they spent a year there, and another six in Moscow. One night in Moscow in 1936, her husband woke her and said: "We have visitors." Two OGPU officers ransacked the apartment while a soldier barred the door; the next morning they marched her husband off to be "examined." She never saw him again...
...Valtin, ex-OGPU agent who told all in his best-selling Out of the Night (1941), was jugged (and then released) as an undesirable alien (1942), served with the armed forces in the Pacific, and finally became a U.S. citizen last January, was still roller-coastering. In New Haven, Conn., the U.S. Attorney went to court to appeal the order giving him citizenship...