Quotes About Cheka

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

The Cheka relied on its fearsome reputation. Pravda carried reports of Cheka victims being flayed alive, impaled, scalped, crucified, tied to planks that were pushed slowly into roaring furnaces or into containers of boiling water. In winter, the Cheka was said to pour water over naked prisoners, creating ice statues, while some prisoners were said to have their necks twisted to such a degree their heads came off.107 True or not, such tales contributed to the Cheka mystique.

The shameless criminality of Lenin, Stalin, and the Cheka cast a long shadow, but I don't see their kind returning anytime soon.

What with the political monopoly, the Cheka and the Red Army, all that now existed of the 'Commune-State' of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The war, the internal measures against counterrevolution, and the famine (which had created a bureaucratic rationing apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive, and when? The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give day to reaction.

The revolution died a self-inflicted death in 1918 with the establishment of the Cheka.

Vladimir Zazubrin, in 1918 a deserter from the White forces and later a lively writer of fiction and memoirs, shot by Stalin in 1938 for his frankness, recalled the hard life of the Cheka executioners: White, grey carcasses (undressed people) collapsed onto the floor.

In 1921, in newly conquered Tbilisi, the chekisty published an anthology, The Cheka's Smile. The contribution by Aleksandr Eiduk, executioner and roving military emissary, ran: There is no greater joy, not better music

In the Cheka and the party, Lenin feared, Jewish brains were as much a drawback as an advantage, and the Jews themselves were only too aware of the backlash they might provoke. Lenin took care to see that Trotsky's name was removed from the commission set up to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church.