THE DREAD OGPU

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 90, 13 October 1934, Page 6

THE DREAD OGPU

A POLITICAL • POLICE

HOW IT WORKS IN RUSSIA

THE KECEXT CHANGES

Cheka-Ogpu-Narkomvnudel. Those hybrid words, compounded out of the first syllables of Soviet titles, stand for three stages in the development of the policy of terrorist repression which has, always been an integral feature of Soviet administration (writes in the London "Observer" tho former Moscow correspondent of that journal). The recent replacement of tho Ogpu (the full title of this formidable political police was United State Political Administration) by the Narkonivnudcl, or Commissariat for Internal Affairs, like tho reorganisation of the Cheka into the Ogpu twelve years ago, marks a shift of emphasis in Soviet methods of internal administration. The Cheka was a terrorist police force, which grew up during tho civil war for tho purpose of combating coun-ter-revolution. It ranks high among tho institutions for the perpetration of organised homicide .which have existed since the beginning of history and left the Trench Committee of Public Safety well behind in the iiumber of its victims. According to its own official .figures it put to death G3OO people in twenty provinces of Central Russia during the single year 1918; if one takes into account the unnumbered victims in other parts of the country and the fact that 1910 and 1920 were also years of sanguinary struggle, it seems probable that the. number of executions carried out by the Cheka was in the neighbourhood of 50,000. Many of. its. victims wore shot as "hostages," in reprisal, for attacks on Communist leaders. Over 500 persons were .put to death in Petrograd, according to an official announcement, as a reprisal for the killing of a high Petrograd Communist official TJrtizky, and for the wounding of Lenin, at the end,of August, 1918. DZEEZHINSKY'S RULE. Early in 1922 the Cheka was replaced by the Ogpu. The head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, remained head of the Ogpu until his death in 1026; and a considerable part of the Cheka personnel continued to servo in tho n£w institution. With the end of civil war and foreign intervention, the Soviet leaders considered that wholesale massacres were no longer necessary for the maintenance of their power; and at first the Ogpu was denied the right to execute persons without a court trial. This right was soon restored to it, howover;, and was exercised with special frequency when forcible collectivism of the peasant holdings and growing hunger in the towns created a good deal of discontent in the country after 1929. ■ -Three instances when the Ogpu, by its own admission, "liquidated" large batches of prisoners without troubling about tho formality of a public trial, occurred in 1927, when twenty prisoners were shot out of hand as a reprisal for the assassination of the Soviet Anibassadqr in Warsaw, Voikov, by an emigre; in 1930^ when forty-eight specialists in tho food industry were shot on a strange and unconvincing charge of sabotage; and in tho spring of 1933, when thirty-five officials . of, the Commissariat for Agriculture were put to death on equally curious accusations, including alleged plots to burn inacjjine-tractor stations and "to promote the growth of weeds." It is difficult to estimate how many people the Ogpu put to death, because many of its executions were kept secret. Two of my! acquaintances who were shot without trial and without any public statement were Julius Eozinsky, a clork in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, and Sergei Treiyas, a former sccrotary of Voks, an institution which undertakes to maintain cultural relations between- the Soviet Union and the outside world. Treivas's untimely taking off was a grim but illuminating footnote to the glowing expositions of Soviet cultural achievements with which ho was in the habit of entertaining sympathetic foreign visitors. CRACK TROOPS. The Ogpu had special Iregiments of crack troops for use against the everpresent spectre of internal counterrevolution; it also had a corps of redcapped transport -guards on the railroad lines, and of groenrcappod frontier guards. The 'militia, or ordinary police force, was subordinated to it in the winter of 1932-33. It maintained a vast army of voluntary and con^ scripted spies and informers, whose duty it .was to penetrate into every class of Russian society ■ and report what they overheard, and who also were utilised in an effort to' gain information from and about foreign diplomats and business men. Since 1929, when deportations on- an enormous scale, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, became the order of the day as .a .result of the decision to "liquidate"—i.e., to banish to hard labour, with confiscation, of thpir property, the kulaks, or formerly, well-to-do peasants, and when wholesale ai> rests of engineers and other specialists on suspicion of sabotage became common, the Ogpu assumed an important new function; that of taskmaster for the building of canals and railroads, the felling of timber, and other work which is being carried out entirely or largely with the agency of forced labour of exiles and prisoners,. Early in tho present yoar rumours of a fundamental reorganisation of the Ogpu began to -circulate, in Moscow; they were confirmed by; the organisation of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs on July 10. Income respects the new police organisation is so similar to the Ogpu which it replaces as to furnish some colour of plausibility to the cynical remark of a foreigner when the impending reorganisation of the Ogpu was being discussed: "Oh, it's just a case of renaming a dog with a bad reputation for biting people. First you call the dog John, then you call him Jack in the hope- that people will forget it is the same animal," Both the head of the-new Commissariat, lleinrich Tagoda, and his two assistants, Agranay and Prokofiev, are veteran Chekists; and it may bo assumed that most of the Ogpu agents will find employment in the Commissariat. Like tho Ogpu, the Commissariat controls tho police, the frontier, and transportation guards, and tho forced labour camps. It has the right to pass sentences of expulsion from the country or. of banishment or imprisonment at hard labour up to five years without public trial. PUBLIC TRIAL, There' are, however, two important changes. The right to shoot without public trial is' withheld from the new Commissariat, and the Ogpu troops will apparently pass into the regular Rod Army. . Several causes contributed to tho reorganisation. The Ogpu had become .so powerful that Stalin may well have seen in it an organisation incompatible with his personal dictatorship. The tendency of tho Ogpu to shoot people out of hand without explanation, and to stage fantastically improbable-sabo-tage trials, was not compatible with the Soviet effort to make a good impression on Western foreign opinion, simultaneously with the resumption of relations with, the United States and

the impending entrance into tlie League, of Nations. The Metro-Vk-kers trial showed how much linrm the uncontrolled power of th,e Ogpu could iullict on Soviet foreign relations.

The infliction of the death sentence will now bo tho prerogative of the ordinary and of tho special military Courts, it must bo said that somu Soviet laws are sufficiently dracouic to compensate for tho disappearance of the Ogpu's privilege of summary shooting. Death is the ponalty for any theft of State property (which in Russia means almost all property), and a recent law, which certainly has no parallel in the legislation of any civilised country, threatens with deprivation of food cards and banishment to remote regions of Siberia even quite innocent relatives, of Soviet citizens who floe across the border.

It will bo interesting to see whether the now Commissariat remains within the limits which have been marked out for it, or whether, like the Ogpu, it will reassunic the right to shoot without trial, and hence carry on the Choka-Ogpu tradition of arbitrariness and ruthlessness.