Cheka

I'd say it was a fairly even split between like those kind of two perspectives.

And then obviously, you know, as, um, as, as kind of the, as, as the real crisis, the inner warriors set in, you know, as, uh, as, uh, as, as the early Bolshevik period, like it really did become, you know, like, uh, you, you had these like truly like savage kinda, you know, Cheka-type partisans, like throughout, you know, the Soviet Union, and they were overwhelmingly Jewish, just like settling scores with, you know, people they didn't like.

I mean, then, then like all bets were off, and every, and any, you know, any Jewish guy who wasn't some sort of bigoted extremist or who had any sense about him realized like, this is really, really, really bad.

You know, uh, something terrible's gonna happen.

I mean, Stalin often gets accused of, um, of setting up at this period the architecture of what is going to become the sort of hallmarks of the repressive Soviet regime.

So people might be familiar with the Cheka.

The Cheka was the, the secret police, which would then become the much more familiar KGB.

There would be the forced labor camps.

There'd be, you know, the one-party state that was set up, and everyone sort of nowadays says, well, that this was Stalin who set this up while he was acting as political commissar during the civil war.

But this, I think, shows a complete misunderstanding actually of Lenin's role, because it was Lenin who set up the architecture, and it was Stalin who then exploited it for his own political, you know, fortunes and future.

So the Cheka, of course, is a, a very interesting organization because it will become the absolute sort of benchmark of state brutality, uh, listening in on people, arresting them, uh, torturing them, and executing them.

I, I think it's really important what you've just said because, you know, in, in our retrospective history, it's often said, you know, actually Stalin was the corrupting influence.

If he looks at that hollow stack and writes down the truth, that the quota was missed, he has to report a failure to his superiors in the NKVD.

The Cheka, you see.

And in Stalin's system, missing an economic quota isn't just incompetence.

It is categorized as deliberate anti-Soviet sabotage.

He knows her, maybe, eh? I wonder if he knows the man who came in with her.

Why? Who is the man? Pavlov, head of the Cheka, the Russian secret police.

Hmm, I have

heard of that one.

Here you are.

Oh, by the way, you fellows.

I hear the Cheka has a list of all counter-revolutionaries.

We shall feature.

But this went a long way to undermining Soviet rule because Muslims were targeted with as much hostility as the Orthodox were.

you know, and Goebbels himself made the point that the early Soviet cadres, the NKVD and the Cheka, they hated the Muslims for ethno-sectarian reasons as much as they did the Christians and viewed them as their oppressors and did incredibly brutal things and tried to extricate religious sensibility from Islamic communities.

very much authorities also, they very much cultivated, you know, the Ulama in Eastern territories and the Balkans, especially that's how headway was made.

And as, uh, the Balkan theater became this counterinsurgency quagmire that became very important.

How naturally instinct leads the dregs of all political parties and all shades of political opinion to gravitate to and hang about the Tilleries, Herzen, 1850.

Once Zinoviev said, the Cheka is the pride and joy of the Communist Party.

But though accommodation is a matter of personal opinion, I myself believe that Latsis came nearer to the truth when he said, The Cheka is at least the best that Soviet institutions can evolve and thereby pronounce the death warrant of Sovietism.

One of the prime causes of the degeneration of the Cheka activity into tyranny and violence was the quality of the Cheka personnel.

Political fanaticism alone will not explain the horrors which I have described.

It is only sadists and madmen, it is only social elements which life has rejected, and greed of gain and lust of power have attracted, that can engage in bloodshed on such a colossal scale.

Yet the mentality even of a healthy-minded individual would have broken down amid the atmosphere of orgy which has prevailed in Russia for five years past.

and therefore a type of study of the sort of functionary who figured on and was employed by Chekas is bound to offer both the alienist and the historian a most interesting field of investigation.