ENGLISH

The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police

By George Leggett

Book information

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Year
1981
ISBN
0198225520, 9780198225522
Language
english
Format
DJVU
Filesize
10 MB (10910904 bytes)
Edition
Hardcover
Pages
534\550
Time added
2018-12-03 16:41:45

Description

Established by Lenin just six weeks after the coup of October 1917, the Cheka was Soviet Russia's first political police organization. This closely documented study chronicles the Cheka's emergence as a vast, ubiquitous, and all-purpose apparatus for the suppression of internal opposition. Answerable solely to the Central Committee of the Communist Party as its "special organ of merciless summary justice," aspiring to security surveillance over the entire society, the Cheka set the scene for the 20th-century totalitarian police state and the succession of formidable Soviet political police agencies, from Stalin's OGPU and NKVD to today's KGB.

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