Word: policemanly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...sort of understanding of Beria, the new kind of policeman whose beat runs around the world, the citizens of democracy, where his type is unknown, must look into his antecedents...
Something New. Russia, long before the Bolsheviks, developed the sinister side of the policeman's role much farther than any democracy has to this day. The reason has an important bearing on Beria. The 19th Century Russian satirist, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, noted: "In every other country little boys wear trousers, but not our boys . . . everywhere else reason rules, but here only the whistle of the lash. . . . [In Russia] no independent form of social order [has] yet developed...
...Lenin picked as first policeman of the proletarian revolution was borrowed from the Polish aristocracy. When Felix Dzerzhinsky was made head of the Bolshevists' CHEKA, he wrote to his wife: "I am now in the front line and I want to be merciless, to tear the enemy to pieces as a watchdog would...
After the revolution, Prophet Menzhinsky became the Leninists' knout. Lenin called him "the decadent neurotic." 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...
...human mind, even the Communist mind, turns toward order. In a land where brother cannot trust brother, fear of the policeman must serve instead. The policeman has to be everywhere, because there is no other cement in the society. The spy, the informer and the censor are the aristocrats of the Communist world. The cop at the keyhole is king...