Secret Police.

Background Information

From the beginning of their regime, the Bolsheviks relied on a strong secret, or political, police to buttress their rule. The first secret police, called the Cheka, was established in December 1917 as a temporary institution to be abolished once Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power. The original Cheka, headed by Feliks Dzerzhinskii, was empowered only to investigate "counterrevolutionary" crimes. But it soon acquired powers of summary justice and began a campaign of terror against the propertied classes and enemies of Bolshevism. Although many Bolsheviks viewed the Cheka with repugnance and spoke out against its excesses, its continued existence was seen as crucial to the survival of the new regime.

Once the Civil War (1918-21) ended and the threat of domestic and foreign opposition had receded, the Cheka was disbanded. Its functions were transferred in 1922 to the State Political Directorate, or GPU, which was initially less powerful than its predecessor. Repression against the population lessened. But under party leader Joseph Stalin, the secret police again acquired vast punitive powers and in 1934 was renamed the People's Comissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. No longer subject to party control or restricted by law, the NKVD became a direct instrument of Stalin for use against the party and the country during the Great Terror of the 1930s.

The secret police remained the most powerful and feared Soviet institution throughout the Stalinist period. Although the post-Stalin secret police, the KGB, no longer inflicted such large-scale purges, terror, and forced depopulation on the peoples of the Soviet Union, it continued to be used by the Kremlin leadership to suppress political and religious dissent. The head of the KGB was a key figure in resisting the democratization of the late 1980s and in organizing the attempted putsch of August 1991.

Investigation and Deportation of a Member of the Press

1. To Comrade Stalin.
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2. Copies to all members of the Politburo.
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For some time now, particularly during the period of the Genoa Conference, the Moscow representative of the American Telegraph Agency "United Press" citizen Gullinger has started sending abroad telegrams tendentiously reflecting events in Russia. This has been particularly so in his telegrams on the removal of church properties and in telegrams that have anticipated the "united front" of Germany and Russia at the Genoa Conference. We have repeatedly brought to his attention the distortion of the facts permitted by him in his telegrams; we have not let pass several of his telegrams, while in others we have expunged the particularly tendentious passages that might serve as the basis for propagating false rumors about Russia abroad. In response to this, citizen Gullinger has begun to slip into his telegrams phrases about the tightening of censorship in Moscow. On April 26, he brought for transmission a telegram, a copy of which is enclosed with this letter. This telegram was not let through; nevertheless, Gullinger sent it, apparently through some mission, as we learned from the response he received to his suggestion.

I feel that it is intolerable to permit such crooks to live in Moscow and to continue to do such dirty tricks. I suggest that he be deported immediately.

....

Since it is necessary to deport him immediately, I would request that the question be resolved by Thursday by an arrangement over the telephone. (A copy of this letter has been circulated to all members of the Politburo).

With Communist Greetings

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Stamp (bottom right):
Secret Archive of the Central Committee
of the All-Union Communist Party
(of Bolsheviks)
Inventory No 290; Convocation; F-GR;
Archive No.--

The GULAG

The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first established in 1919 under the Cheka, but it was not until the early 1930s that the camp population reached significant numbers. By 1934 the GULAG, or Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps, then under the Cheka's successor organization the NKVD, had several million inmates. Prisoners included murderers, thieves, and other common criminals--along with political and religious dissenters. The GULAG, whose camps were located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the Far North, made significant contributions to the Soviet economy in the period of Joseph Stalin. GULAG prisoners constructed the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Baikal-Amur main railroad line, numerous hydroelectric stations, and strategic roads and industrial enterprises in remote regions. GULAG manpower was also used for much of the country's lumbering and for the mining of coal, copper, and gold.

Stalin constantly increased the number of projects assigned to the NKVD, which led to an increasing reliance on its labor. The GULAG also served as a source of workers for economic projects independent of the NKVD, which contracted its prisoners out to various economic enterprises.

Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh. Prisoners received inadequate food rations and insufficient clothing, which made it difficult to endure the severe weather and the long working hours; sometimes the inmates were physically abused by camp guards. As a result, the death rate from exhaustion and disease in the camps was high. After Stalin died in 1953, the GULAG population was reduced significantly, and conditions for inmates somewhat improved. Forced labor camps continued to exist, although on a small scale, into the Gorbachev period, and the government even opened some camps to scrutiny by journalists and human rights activists. With the advance of democratization, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience all but disappeared from the camps.

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