Quotes About NKVD

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.