Nkvd Quotes

They came for him near midnight, seven hard-faced men arriving simultaneously in a matching set of Zis 101s, the black-lacquered saloon car so shamelessly modeled on the American Buick Roadmaster, and so capriciously favored by the sinister flying squads of the NKVD. Ironically, the arrest when it came did not shock Batya. He had prepared for it.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

Andrius turned. His eyes found mine. "I'll see you," he said. My face didn't wrinkle. I didn't utter a sound. But for the first time in months, I cried. Tears popped from their dry sockets and sailed down my cheeks in one quick stream. I looked away. The NKVD called the bald man's name. "Look at me," whispered Andrius, moving close. "I'll see you," he said. "Just think about that. Just think about me bringing you your drawings. Picture it, because I'll be there." I nodded. "Vilkas," the NKVD called. We walked toward the truck and climbed inside. I looked down at Andrius. He raked through his hair with his fingers. The engine turned and roared. I raised my hand in a wave good-bye. His lips formed the words "I'll see you." He nodded in confirmation. I nodded back. The back gate slammed and I sat down. The truck lurched forward. Wind began to blow against my face. I pulled my coat closed and put my hands in my pockets. That's when I felt it. The stone. Andrius had slipped it into my pocket. I stood up to let him know I had found it. He was gone.

Andrius turned. His eyes found mine. I'll see you he said. My face didn't wrinkle. I didn't utter a sound. But for the first time in months I cried. Tears popped from their dry sockets and sailed down my cheeks in one quick stream. I looked away. The NKVD called the bald man's name. Look at me wispered Andrius moving close. I'll see you he said. Just think about that. Just think about me bringing you your drawings. Picture it because I'll be there.

My art teacher had said that if you breathed deeply and imagined something, you could be there. You could see it, feel it. During our standoffs with the NKVD, I learned to do that. I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength there.

Not 79,950 but five times as many people would be shot in the kulak action. By the end of 1938, the NKVD had executed some 386,798 Soviet citizens in fulfillment of Order 00447.51

A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938.57

In the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, NKVD officers recorded 682,691 executions of supposed enemies of the state, most of them peasants or members of national minorities.

All Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North, except for its NKVD informers, was arrested. They even went after schoolteachers. In Sverdlovsk one case involved thirty secondary schoolteachers and the head of the Provincial Education Department, Perel. 37 One of the terrible accusations against them was that they had made arrangements to have a New Year's tree in order to burn down the school. And the club fell with the regularity of a pendulum on the heads of the engineers—who by this time were no longer "bourgeois" but a whole Soviet generation of engineers.

The Great Terror took place during a state of exception that required all policemen to subordinate themselves to the NKVD and its special tasks.

Lying as a way of life is a dangerous game”, the Pole went on. “And not just because you risk the vengeance of the NKVD. You risk the integrity, the coherence, of your own soul.

The Cheka, precursor of the OGPU, NKVD, KGB and today’s FSB, had absolute supralegal power over life and death. ‘In that case why should we bother with a People’s

In the Great Terror in the Soviet Union, NKVD officers recorded 682,691 executions of supposed enemies of the state, most of them peasants or members of national minorities

Some Russian anticommunist writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and many U.S. anticommunist liberals, maintain that the gulag existed right down to the last days of communism. If so, where did it disappear to? After Stalin's death in 1953, more than half of the gulag inmates were freed, according to the study of the NKVD files previously cited. But if so many others remained incarcerated, why have they not materialized? When the communist states were overthrown, where were the half-starved hordes pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of travail?

Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.

As soon as Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, I was picked up by the NKVD and put into prison. I was taken by train to the dread Lubianka Prison in Moscow for interrogation as a “Vatican spy.” I remained there all through the war years, undergoing periodic and often intense questioning by the NKVD. Then, after five years, I was sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor in the prison camps of Siberia. Along with thousands of others, I was put to work in labor brigades doing outdoor construction in the extreme arctic cold, or in coal and copper mines, ill clothed, ill fed, and poorly housed in the timber barracks surrounded by barbed wire and a “death zone.” Men died in those camps, especially those who gave up hope. But I trusted in God, never felt abandoned or without hope, and survived along with many others.

Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. P. 196

the Great Terror in the Soviet Union of 1937–38 and the Holocaust of European Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany in 1941–45. Yet we make a great mistake if we imagine that the Soviet NKVD or the Nazi SS acted without support. Without the assistance of regular police forces, and sometimes regular soldiers, they could not have killed on such a large scale.

The law meant that anyone who had ever laughed at an anti-socialist joke or read an anti-socialist book, visited Europe or given his wife a western perfume could be picked up by NKVD officers without any warning or explanation — preferably at dawn. Of the twenty-one men on the Central Committee in 1917, only one was left alive by 1938: the man of steel himself.

One of Beria’s most cynical ruses was carried out in August 1941: NKVD agents disguised as Nazi parachutists were dropped into the Volga German autonomous region, to test the loyalty of its citizens. Villages where the new arrivals were offered shelter were liquidated wholesale; the entire region’s surviving population was eventually deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

There were once again believers, who this time were unwilling to work on Sundays. (They had introduced the five-and the six-day week.) And there were collective farmers sent up for sabotage because they refused to work on religious feast days, as had been their custom in the era of individual farms. And, always, there were those who refused to become NKVD informers. (Among them were priests who refused to violate the secrecy of the confessional, for the Organs had very quickly discovered how useful had very quickly discovered how useful it was to learn the content of confessions—the only use they found for religion.) And members of non-Orthodox sects were arrested on an ever-wider scale. And the Big Solitaire game with the socialists went on and on.

By now Khrushchev was throwing his weight around in higher circles too. The NKVD sent two agents to western Ukraine (one of them, William Fisher, aka Colonel Rudolf Abel, was arrested by the FBI in 1957 and called the highest-ranking Soviet spy ever caught in the United States) to recruit German residents allowed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact’s secret protocol to return to German-occupied territory.

The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps. True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote: You can pray freely But just so God alone can hear. (She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code--in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received 'tenners,' the longest term then given. (In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent prostitutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the 'nuns.' Those lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three-year sentences under a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever returning to their children and their home areas.)

Confessions were elicited by torture. The NKVD and other police organs applied the “conveyer method,” which meant uninterrupted questioning, day and night. This was complemented by the “standing method,” in which suspects were forced to stand in a line near a wall, and beaten if they touched it or fell asleep. Under time pressure to make quotas, officers often simply beat prisoners until they confessed. Stalin authorized this on 21 July 1937. In Soviet Belarus, interrogating officers would hold prisoners’ heads down in the latrine and then beat them when they tried to rise. Some interrogators carried with them draft confessions, and simply filled in the prisoner’s personal details and changed an item here or there by hand. Others simply forced prisoners to sign blank pages and then filled them in later at leisure. In this way Soviet organs “unmasked” the “enemy,” delivering his “thoughts” to the files.54

On 20 November, front-line troops got 500 grams of bread per day, factory workers received 250, and everyone else 125 (that is, two slices). ‘Twigs were collected and stewed,’ records an historian of the siege. ‘Peat shavings, cottonseed cake, bonemeal was pressed into use. Pine sawdust was processed and added to the bread. Mouldy grain was dredged from sunken barges and scraped out of the holds of ships. Soon Leningrad bread was containing 10% cottonseed cake that had been processed to remove poisons. Household pets, shoe leather, fir bark and insects were consumed, as was wallpaper paste which was reputed to be made with potato flour. Guinea pigs, white mice and rabbits were saved from vivisection in the city’s laboratories for a more immediately practical fate. ‘Today it is so simple to die,’ wrote one resident, Yelena Skryabina, in her diary. ‘You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on your bed and you never get up again. Yet some people were willing to go to any lengths in order to survive: 226 people were arrested for cannibalism during the siege. ‘Human meat is being sold in the markets,’ concluded one secret NKVD report, ‘while in the cemeteries bodies pile up like carcasses, without coffins.

The Nazis were tedious in their self-righteousness and triumphalism. They were like a winning soccer team at the after-match party, getting drunker and more boring and refusing to go home. He was sick of them. Some people might say that the USSR was similar, with its secret police, its rigid orthodoxy, and its puritan attitudes to such pleasures as abstract painting and fashion. They were wrong. Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.

…for only someone who has lived in a totalitarian state can appreciate the true character of paranoia. In 1937, when my father returned to Kiev from Luhansk, the whole country was bathed in a miasma of paranoia. It seeped everywhere, into the most intimate crevices of people's lives: it soured the relationship between friends and colleagues, between teachers and students, between parents and children, husbands and wives. Enemies were everywhere. If you didn't like the way someone has sold you a piglet, or looked at your girlfriend, or asked for money you owned, or given you a low mark in an exam, a quick word to the NKVD would sort them out...

Lying as a way of life is a dangerous game”, the Pole went on. “And not just because you risk the vengeance of the NKVD. You risk the integrity, the coherence, of your own soul. I’ve seen it happen to friends of mine, professional naval officers, who thought they could work for Lenin and then for Stalin—Russia is Russia after all—and hold on to their own truth while knowing that the politburo is a gang of murderers, except perhaps for a few idealists whom Stalin has killed, and while knowing what happened to contemporaries of ours because they were the sons of landowners or spoke French or were caught wearing a holy medal. What happened to many of these officers was a sentence to exile in Siberia with no right of correspondence—meaning death.

half-century before, at Stalin’s direct order, NKVD executioners slaughtered fifteen thousand Polish military officers and threw the bodies into rows of mass graves. The month-long operation in Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk was part of Stalin’s attempt to begin the domination of Poland. The young officers had been among the best-educated men in Poland, and Stalin saw them as a potential danger, as enemies-in-advance. For decades after, Moscow put the blame for the killings on the Nazis, saying the Germans had carried out the massacres in 1941, not the NKVD in 1940. The Kremlin propaganda machine sustained the fiction in speeches, diplomatic negotiations, and textbooks, weaving it into the vast fabric of ideology and official history that sustained the regime and its empire.

This was, of course, true. Germany’s Nuremberg laws of 1935 excluded Jews from political participation in the German state and defined Jewishness according to descent. German officials were indeed using the records of synagogues to establish whose grandparents were Jews. Yet in the Soviet Union the situation was not so very different. The Soviet internal passports had a national category, so that every Soviet Jew, every Soviet Pole, and indeed every Soviet citizen had an officially recorded nationality. In principle Soviet citizens were allowed to choose their own nationality, but in practice this was not always so. In April 1938 the NKVD required that in certain cases information about the nationality of parents be entered. By the same order, Poles and other members of diaspora nationalities were expressly forbidden from changing their nationality. The NKVD would not have to “rummage around in old documents,” since it already had its own.47 In 1938, German oppression of Jews was much more visible than the national operations in the USSR, though its scale was much smaller.

On another plane, only a brute in a state of irrational fury can imagine that men should be sadistically tortured in order to obtain their consent. Such an act only accomplishes the subjugation of one man by another, in an outrageous relationship between persons. The representative of rational totality is content, on the contrary, to allow the object to subdue the person in the soul of man. The highest mind is first of all reduced to the level of the lowest by the police technique of joint accusation. Then five, ten, twenty nights of insomnia will culminate an illusory conviction and will bring yet another dead soul into the world. From this point of view, the only psychological revolution known to our times since Freud's has been brought about by the NKVD and the political police in general. Guided by a determinist hypothesis that calculates the weak points and the degree of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques have once again thrust aside one of man's limits and have attempted to demonstrate that no individual psychology is original and that the common measure of all human character is matter. They have literally created the physics of the soul.

He guessed the NKVD didn’t even know that Waffen-SS men could be identified by the blood-group tattoos on the underside of their left arms, usually near the armpit. Richter didn’t have one. He’d been classed as a non-combatant, as he’d said, at least for a portion of the war. He decided it could be weeks before they found out who he was. But Volsky’s confidence appeared to have been restored too, now. He said, ‘And the vat of incense?’ ‘I had the incense brought from the remnants of a Christmas smoker factory. Silly little hollow figurines invented by toymakers in the Ore Mountains. Cone incense burns down inside the figurines and the smoke emerges from the open mouths. There was a glut of them,’ Richter said, truthfully. ‘Berliners were shocked and saddened after Stalingrad. But they lost the will to celebrate after the Battle of Kursk. They knew the Red Army was coming. The puerile little incense smokers were redundant, together with the incense they were to hold. Except it didn’t go to waste. The vat was taken from a merchant’s house. It’s from Hong Kong, I think.’ Volsky leaned back in his chair. He said, ‘Why go to all the trouble?’ That’s a good question, Richter thought. He stifled a smile. ‘To mask the smell.

Sometimes I wish you were less bloody-minded,” Alexander says. He had managed to receive a three-day furlough. They’re in Leningrad—the last time they’re in Leningrad together, their last everything. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?” He grunts. “Yes. I wish the kettle were less black.” He snorts in frustration. “There are women,” he says, “I know there are, who listen to their men. I’ve seen them. Other men have them—” She tickles him. He does not seem amused. “All right. Tell me what to do,” she says, lowering her voice two notches. “I will do exactly as you say.” “Leave Leningrad and go back to Lazarevo instantly,” Alexander tells her. “Go where you will be safe.” Rolling her eyes, she says, “Come on. I know you can play this game.” “I know I can,” Alexander says, sitting on her parents’ old sofa. “I just don’t want to. You don’t listen to me about the important things…” “Those aren’t the important things,” Tatiana says, kneeling in front of him and taking hold of his hands. “If the NKVD come for me, I will know you are gone and I will be happy to stand against the wall.” She squeezes his hands. “I will go to the wall as your wife and never regret a second I spent with you. So let me have this here with you. Let me smell you once more, taste you once more, kiss you once more,” she says. “Now play my game with me, sorrowful as it is to lie down together in wintry Leningrad. Play the miracle with me—to lie down with you at all. Tell me what to do and I will do it.” Alexander pulls on her hand. “Come here.” He opens his arms. “Sit on top of me.” She obeys. “Now take your hands and place them on my face.” She obeys. “Put your lips on my eyes.” She obeys. “Kiss my forehead.” She obeys. “Kiss my lips.” She obeys. And obeys. “Tania…” “Shh.” “Can’t you see I’m breaking?” “Ah,” she says. “You’re still in one piece then.

Не могу здесь удержаться от комментария, как в те времена люди понимали события. Едва был убит Киров, как сейчас же все заговорили, что Киров убит по приказу Сталина. То же самое об Орджоникидзе. О Горьком упрямо говорили, что он отравлен, так как не был согласен со Сталиным. Никто никогда не отделял Сталина от НКВД. В Киев Сталиным был послан Вышинский, занял под свою резиденцию Октябрьский дворец и принялся подписывать смертные приговоры сразу под огромными списками. Многих убивали тут же во дворце и сбрасывали трупы из окон в овраг. Все Это Киев прекрасно знал, и даже на что уж темная, глухая Куреневка и та точно ориентировалась в событиях. Поэтому, когда много лет спустя Хрущев занялся «разоблачениями» Сталина, в Советском Союзе это не составило новости. Новостью был лишь сам курс на «разоблачение» и нескончаемые ряды чудовищных подробностей. И тут некие «честные коммунисты» стали бить себя в грудь и кричать, что они, оказывается, ничего не знали. Или, что знали, но верили, что уничтожаются подлинные враги. Или, что думали, будто во всем виновато НКВД, а любимый Сталин не знает, и партия — свята. Появилось много таких «честных коммунистов», отделяющих Сталина и партию от «ежовских» или «бериевских» преступлений. Лицемеры. В душе все прекрасно все знали и понимали. Лишь только тот, кто НЕ ХОТЕЛ ЗНАТЬ — «не знал». И лицемерил, и спасался лицемерием, и был стоек в своем лицемерии, и не без его помощи выжил, и оказался уже настолько органически лицемерием пропитан, что и сейчас лжет, доказывая, что миллионы членов партии были так умственно недоразвиты. Так после разгрома Гитлера некоторые «честные фашисты» заявляли, что они не знали о чудовищных злодеяниях в лагерях смерти, или, что верили, будто во всем виновато лишь одно гестапо. Лицемеры. Еще раз повторяю: не знал лишь тот, кто не хотел знать [90—91].

This Uzbek novel gives the reader two for the price of one. The ‘frame’ novel is documentary fiction, a reconstruction of the last months of its main protagonist, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy, as he spend most of 1938 in an NKVD prison during Stalin’s Great Terror, in which three quarters of a million innocent citizens were shot, and several million sent to be worked to death in the Gulags. In Uzbekistan, as in other republics of the USSR, the terror was even worse than in Moscow, for it virtually eliminated, on spurious charges of spying and counter-revolution, not just the Communist Party and local government elite, but much of the country’s intelligentsia and trained professionals.

Established in 1923, the OGPU replaced the Cheka as Russia’s central organ of the secret police. In 1934, the OGPU would be replaced by the NKVD, which in turn would be replaced by the MGB in 1943 and the KGB in 1954. On the surface, this may seem confusing. But the good news is that unlike political parties, artistic movements, or schools of fashion—which go through such sweeping reinventions—the methodologies and intentions of the secret police never change. So you should feel no need to distinguish one acronym from the next.]

There’s more in it than that,” Ludwik broke in. “We’ve got to admit that the Bolsheviks have raised the nation considerably. Russia under the czars was comparable to the Middle Ages; its slavery had no equal in Europe. The ignorance of the masses, the illiteracy, the clerical witchcraft, subordinated to the demands of the czarist regime, were terrible. Conditions today are far better than they were before the Revolution. Illiteracy is being fought with good results, and people are becoming a little more civilized. Slavery of masses of peasants under one landlord no longer exists. The industrialization, the development of communication, motorization, and education are all worthy of admiration. “On the other hand, communism has bred a new prototype of a Russian slave, the slave of the party, of a regime without scruples. The iron police system of NKVD is a thousand times more terrible than the Okhrana (the czarist police). The NKVD holds in its power the life and death of every individual in Russia. Without giving reasons, it sends men and women to prisons and forced-labor camps in the most damned and godforsaken places in the world, where they spend ten to twenty years rotting to death, often not knowing the nature of the crime for which they are being punished. On the rare occasions when a man is freed after ten years of torture, he is informed briefly that his arrest was a mistake. “If now, faced by war, the people are

The SS and local Ukrainian collaborators discovered a series of mass graves of Ukrainian rebels that the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, had murdered in Lvov, Vinitsia, and Dubno, near what is today the Ukrainian-Polish border. The Germans aggressively publicized the NKVD killings to divert attention from the new executions undertaken by their own Einsatzkommando squads.2 The Soviets vehemently denied the German claims, but the Germans turned out to be telling the truth about the NKVD murders, even as they lied about their own.

It was hard to imagine that war raged somewhere in Europe. We had a war of our own, waiting for the NKVD to choose the next victim, to throw us in the next hole.

I managed to escape the NKVD while sitting right in front of them.

He barely had the strength to scream as his skin turned burning hot as the fireball rapidly expanded reaching nearly a thousand yards into the channel enveloping everything in its path.   The NKVD agent didn’t live to see the next tanker go up or the next after that because his blackened corpse now floated in the Dutch inland

Rather, Putin cherry-picked a series of ideas that coalesced together and became his guiding star: ultra-nationalism; hatred of the other; contempt for a free press and free speech; intolerance of mockery and humour; profoundly conservative social values; an unfree market in hock to political power; a reverence for ‘the organs’, the KGB and its alphabetic spaghetti predecessors (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, MGB) and offshoots (SVR, FSB). Without articulating it, with no announcement, Putin was a Russian fascist.

His father had been in Perm in 1936, and his epaulets had read, “NKVD” – the acronym of the state police. The joke was that it stood for Ništó Krepše Vorovskoy Druzbyt—“Nothing stronger than friendship among thieves.

It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest parts of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into the stillness within ourselves. We found strength there.

Thieves and prostitutes. Our mothers were in that car, along with a teacher, a librarian, elderly people, and a newborn baby - thieves and prostitutes.

When the Soviet army liberated war-ravaged Eastern Europe, they had promised the people free elections with Hitler gone. At first, Stalin kept his promise. But when communist parties in Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Austria lost in the free elections of ’45 and ’46, Stalin set his secret police, the NKVD, in motion. The secret police reopened former Nazi concentration camps, Auschwitz to imprison Poles and Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen to imprison East Germans. The communists built sixteen new camps to hold Hungarians.

The Queue consists entirely of fragments of ochered’ dialogue, a linguistic vernacular anchored by the long-suffering word stoyat’ (to stand). You stood? Yes, stood. Three hours. Got damaged ones. Wrong size. Here’s what the line wasn’t: a gray inert nowhere. Imagine instead an all-Soviet public square, a hurly-burly where comrades traded gossip and insults, caught up with news left out of the newspapers, got into fistfights, or enacted comradely feats. In the thirties the NKVD had informers in queues to assess public moods, hurrying the intelligence straight to Stalin’s brooding desk. Lines shaped opinions and bred ad hoc communities: citizens from all walks of life standing, united by probably the only truly collective authentic Soviet emotions: yearning and discontent (not to forget the unifying hostility toward war veterans and pregnant women, honored comrades allowed to get goods without a wait).

Solzhenitsyn described this: It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools… People can shout at you from all sides: ‘You must!’ And your own head can be saying also: ‘You must!’ But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.

Alexei Ivanovich Pushkov, the chief of the Magnitogorsk NKVD during 1937, was himself purged in 1939 for his excessive ardor in purging the people of Magnitogorsk.

POSMATRAM FOTOGRAFIJU Posmatram fotografiju grada u kome sam se rodio, njegove bujne bašte i krivudave ulice, brda, katoličke krovove i kupole pravoslavnih crkava u kojima nedeljom pevaju snažni basovi, od kojih se okolno drveće povija kao da divlja uragan; dugo posmatram tu fotografiju i ne mogu da odvojim pogled sa nje, odjednom počinjem da zamišljam da svi oni i dalje tu žive, kao da se ništa nije dogodilo, da neprestano trče na predavanja, čekaju voz, voze se plavim tramvajem, uznemireno gledaju u kalendar, staju na vagu, slušaju Verdijeve arije i omiljene operete, čitaju novine koje su još bele, žive u žurbi, u strahu, neprekidno kasneći, malčice su besmrtni, ali to ne znaju, neko od njih neuredno plaća kiriju, neko se boji sušice, neko ne može da završi raspravu o Kantovoj filozofiji, ni da shvati šta su stvari same po sebi, moja baka ponovo ide u Bžuhovice noseći tortu na ravnim ramenima koja se ne opuštaju, u apoteci stidljivi mladić traži lek protiv stidljivosti, devojka posmatra svoje male grudi u ogledalu, moj rođak izlazi u park odmah posle kupanja ne sluteći da će uskoro dobiti zapaljenje pluća, ponekad puca oduševljenje, zimi žute lampe stvaraju krug bliskosti, u julu muve bučno svetkuju veliku svetlost leta i pevuše mračne himne, događaju se pogromi, ustanci, deportacije, okrutni Vermaht u elegantnim uniformama, nailazi podli NKVD, crvene petokrake obećavaju prijateljstvo, mada su znak izdaje, ali oni to ne vide, takoreći to ne vide, imaju toliko stvari da obave, treba nabaviti ugalj za zimu, naći dobrog lekara, rastu gomile pisama bez odgovora, bledi mrko mastilo, u sobi svira radio, najnovije parče nameštaja koje će emitovati muziku i loše vesti, ali oni su umorni od običnog života i običnog umiranja, nemaju ni za šta vremena, izvinjavaju se zbog toga, pišu dugačka pisma i lakonske razglednice, stalno kasne, beznadno kasne, kao i mi, baš kao i mi, kao i ja.

Suddenly I became aware that the citizen was a kind of prisoner, the individual was somehow in confinement, with very limited personal freedom. At that time we didn't think about crime in the streets, it was almost non- existent. Yet crime, on a gigantic scale, came not from the streets but from the top, from the Kremlin. Stalin and his most trusted man in power, Lavreti Beria, the head of the N.K.V.D. (to-day K.G.B.) and the rest of the Politbureau had a stranglehold on the entire population. They exercised such unlimited control over the lives of the entire, vast, conglomerate of nations that make up the Soviet Union. It is impossible, at this point, to figure out how many millions of people were annihilated by them, at their whim.

The official position of the present Cuban government is that President Machado had Mella assassinated, but it recognizes that both Vittorio Vidali and the vivacious Tina Modotti were Stalinist operatives. Vidali was well known in Spain as Carlos or Comandante Contreras, the Commander of the Communist 5th Régiment of the Republican Militia. He was greatly feared, being a known assassin, and was allegedly responsible for the deaths of many anti-Stalinists within the Communist ranks. Later when he returned to Mexico, Vidali was acknowledged as having been involved in the May 24, 1940, failed attack on Trotsky’s life. On August 20, 1940, another Stalinist and Soviet NKVD agent, Ramón Mercader, an accomplice to Vidali, sank a mountaineering pickaxe deep into Trotsky’s skull. Taken to a Mexico City hospital, Trotsky lingered long enough to identify his attacker and died the following day. Mercader was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in a Mexican prison for the murder. During his time in prison, Joseph Stalin as leader of the Soviet Union awarded him the Order of Lenin, in absentia. After his release in 1961, Mercader officially became a Hero of the Soviet Union. On October 18, 1978, at the age of 65, Ramón Mercader died in Havana.

The scene at Moscow’s Khodynka Aerodrome that day was striking. Along the runway, swastikas fluttered alongside the ubiquitous hammer and sickle banners of the Soviet Union. The swastikas had been requisitioned, as Roger Moorhouse notes in The Devils’ Alliance, from “local film studios, where they had recently been used for anti-Nazi propaganda films.” No less jarring was the musical accompaniment, with a Soviet military band serenading Ribbentrop with “Deutschland über alles,” before switching over to the socialist “Internationale.” More ominous were the handshakes of secret policemen. As one German diplomat observed, “Look how the Gestapo officers are shaking hands with their counterparts of the NKVD and how they are all smiling at each other. They’re obviously delighted finally to be able to collaborate. But watch out! This will be disastrous, especially when they start exchanging files.”27 The

final ration from the Soviet state, the NKVD’s ‘nine grams of lead’.

Why did the Russian people not rise up in protest?” Maria asked. “They rose to overthrow the Romanovs, but not Stalin. Explain it to me.” Ludmilla replied, “The fear crept up gradually. It was easier to keep quiet while the NKVD were terrorizing someone else’s family. When my mother was arrested I couldn’t find a single person to testify on her behalf. They said she shouldn’t have been so stupid as to make a stand over religion. They thought silence would keep them safe—then they started getting arrested anyway.

In 1970, the Kremlin finally decided to dispose of the body in absolute secrecy. The funeral rites of the Third Reich’s leader were indeed macabre. Hitler’s jaws, kept so carefully in the red box by Rzhevskaya during the victory celebrations in Berlin, had been retained by SMERSH, while the NKVD kept the cranium.

Там" якщо й звільняють, то хіба тільки в землю.

This was the first time that the British Ambassador had succeeded in making such an arrangement. Every precaution was taken by the police. One of my guests, M. Vyshinsky, on passing some of the N.K.V.D. armed guards on our staircase, remarked, “Apparently the Red Army has had another victory. It has occupied the British Embassy.

Stalinova tajná policie NKVD se rozrostla do obřích rozměrů a spravovala říši Gulag, v níž se ocitne skoro deset milionů státních otroků.

It was not the Soviet government or the NKVD versus Walter Ciszek. It was God versus Walter Ciszek. God was testing me by this experience, like gold in the furnace, to see how much of self remained after all my prayers and professions of faith in his will.

Even the NKVD in Moscow provided a shopping list of items wanted from police forensic laboratories.

If the Poles described the Ukrainian insurgents as savages, and the Jews saw them as “worse than the Germans,” from their own point of view they were martyrs of a just and holy cause, the liberation of their land from foreign oppression: the goal justified the means, including massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Many of them died in battle, were executed by the NKVD, or spent long years in gulags. Others fled to the West, where they formed the nationalist hard core of the Ukrainian diaspora. Vilified by the communists as fascist collaborators, they emerged from obscurity and were celebrated as the harbingers of the nation after Ukrainian independence in 1991, especially in Western Ukraine. Two decades later, as a newly resurgent Russia sought to reassert its influence on Ukraine, the UPA again came to symbolize the country’s historical struggle against its mighty eastern neighbor: in 2016 the black-and-red banner of the insurgent army was again fluttering from the remnants of the medieval Polish castle overlooking Buczacz. History was back to its old tricks. UPA flag on top of the castle in Buczacz, 2016.

Horror stories like this — and the issue of Leningrad cannibalism as a whole — could not be talked about openly during the Soviet period. Such an admission of the breakdown of society was considered demoralizing. Only in 2002 were NKVD files opened so academics could discover the gruesome statistical realities of person-eating.

This made crime much easier: The informer, the torturer, and the NKVD executioner did not denounce, cause suffering, or kill people; they merely eliminated some sort of abstraction that was not beneficial to the common good.

[Soviet NKVD Director Lavrenty] Beria, going back to the 1930s, said the most important goal in the United States was to destroy Christianity.” —Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt, Senior Policy Advisor,

Every apartment block and workplace had informers who would run to the NKVD at the slightest provocation. They might be jealous because you had a better apartment or a more pleasant job than them; perhaps they thought you had not been effusive enough when greeting them in the street. Maria did her best to be friendly with everyone, as had always been her way, but you never knew who were your true friends and who were secret enemies. As the Komsomol meetings proved, one could turn into the other in the blink of an eye.

there was no question in her mind that Raisa was an NKVD informer. She was exactly the type they would target because she would love the self-importance.

Meanwhile, in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Soviet secret police, in an operation approved by Stalin, murdered more than twenty thousand Polish citizens, including eight thousand army officers taken prisoner in the 1939 invasion. It was a preemptive attack, organized by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and its utterly ruthless leader, Lavrenty Beria, aimed at eliminating any independent Polish leadership for the foreseeable future. The Soviets pinned blame for this signal and unforgivable atrocity on the Germans, an audacious lie that was believed around the world for decades.

The POUM leaders were handed over to NKVD operatives and taken to a secret prison in Madrid, a church in the Calle Atocha. Nin was separated from his comrades and driven to Alcalá de Henares, where he was interrogated from 18 to 21 June. Despite the tortures he was subjected to by Orlov and his men, Nin refused to confess to the falsified accusations of passing artillery targets to the enemy. He was then moved to a summer house outside the city which belonged to Constancia de la Mora, the wife of Hidalgo de Cisneros and tortured to death. A grotesque example of Stalinist play-acting then took place. A group of German volunteers from the International Brigades in uniforms without insignia, pretending to be members of the Gestapo, charged into the house to make it look as if they had come to Nin’s rescue. ‘Evidence’ of their presence was then planted, including German documents, Falangist badges and nationalist banknotes. Nin, after being killed by Orlov’s men, was buried in the vicinity. When graffiti appeared on walls demanding ‘Where is Nin?’ communists would scribble underneath ‘In Salamanca or in Berlin’. The official Party line, published in Mundo Obrero, claimed that Nin had been liberated by Falangists and was in Burgos.

En el instante más crítico contemplé la muerte desde la perspectiva del yo, y no como lo que es realmente: el momento de volver a Dios. «El que persevere hasta el final, ese se salvará»: tal es la conclusión de todos los textos del Evangelio que se refieren a la confianza en el Espíritu, a no dejarnos inquietar por lo que diremos en tiempos de persecución. Yo había interpretado esos textos al pie de la letra y esperaba que el Espíritu me instruyera para ser capaz de vencer a mi interrogador, a mi perseguidor. ¡Qué necio y qué soberbio! En Lubianka no era la Iglesia la que estaba siendo probada. Ni era aquella una cuestión entre el gobierno soviético o el NKVD y Walter Ciszek, sino entre Dios y Walter Ciszek.

in 1936, the NKVD mood-watchers noted the opinion that Soviet foreign policy was too soft and Hitler’s boldness was to be admired. Hitler was described as charismatic, “very intelligent,” and a man who had worked his way up from the bottom; a student said, “The Fascists are constructing socialism in a peaceful way. Hitler and the fascists are clever people.” In the hungry winter of 1936– 37, approving comments on Hitler multiplied. “People say ‘Better in Germany.’ ‘If Hitler takes power, it will be better in Russia. Only Hitler can give life to the people.