THE OGPU

Southland Times, Issue 22508, 16 February 1935, Page 9

THE OGPU

RUSSIAN SECRET POLICE PROPOSED REORGANIZATION. Cheka-Ogpu-Narkomvnudel. These 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. The recent replacement of the Ogpu (the full title of this formidable political police was United State Political Administration) by the Narkomvnudel, or Commissariat for Internal Affairs, like the reorganization of the Cheka into the Ogpu twelve years ago, marks a shift of emphasis in Soviet methods of internal administration. (Says a writer in The London Observer.) The Cheka was a terrorist police force which grew up during the civil war for the purpose of combating counter-revo-lution. It ranks high among the institutions for the perpetration of organized homicide which have existed since the beginning of history and left the French Committee of Public Safety well behind in the number of its victims..

According to its own official figures it put to death 6300 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 1919 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 fifty thousand. Many of its victims were shot as “hostages,” in reprisal for attacks on Communist leaders. Over five hundred persons were put to death in Petrograd, according to an official announcement, as a reprisal for the killing of a high Petrograd Communist official, Uritzky, and for the wounding of Lenin, at the end of August, 1918. Dzerzhinsky’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 1926; and a considerable part of the Cheka personnel continued to serve in the new 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, however; and was exercised with special frequency when forcible collectivization 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 the 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 Ambassador in Warsaw, Voikov, by an emigre, in 1930, when forty-eight specialists in the food industry were shot on a strange and unconvincing charge of sabotage; and in the spring of 1933, when thirty-five officials of the Commissariat for Agriculture were put to death on equally curious accusations, including alleged plots to bum machine-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 who were shot without trial and without any public statement of their fate were Julius Rozinsky, a clerk in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, and Sergei Treivas, a former Secretary 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 he was in the habit of entertaining sympathetic foreign visitors. The Crack Troops. The Ogpu had special regiments of crack troops for use against the ever present spectre of internal counter-re-volution; it also had a corps of redcapped transport guards on the railroad lines, and of green-capped frontier guards. The militia, or ordinary police force, was subordinated to it in the winter of 1932-1933. It maintained a vast army of voluntary and conscripted spies and informers, whose duty it was

to penetrate into every class of Russian society and report what they overheard and who also were utilized 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 their property, the kulaks, or formerly well-to-do peasants, and when wholesale arrests 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 an! railroads, the felling of timber, and other work which is being carried out entirely or largely with the agency of the forced labour of exiles and prisoners. Early last year rumours of a fundamental reorganization of the Ogpu began to circulate in Moscow; they were confirmed by the organization of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs on July 10. In some respects the new police organization 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 reorganization 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, Heinrich Yagoda, and his two assistants. Agranov and Prokofiev, are veteran Chekists; and it may be assumed that most of the Ogpu agents will find employment in the Commissariat. Like the Ogpu the Commissariat controls the police, the frontier and transportation guards, and 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. 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 Red Army. Several causes contributed to the reorganization. The Ogpu had become so powerful that Stalin may well have seen in it an organization incompatible with his personal dictatorship. The tendency of the Ogpu to shoot people out of hand without explanation, and to stage fantastically improbable sabotage 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 the League of Nations. The Metro-Vickers trial showed how much harm the uncontrolled power of the Ogpu could inflict on Soviet foreign relations. The infliction of the death sentence will now be the prerogative of the ordinary and of the special military courts. It must be said that some Soviet laws are sufficiently draconic to compensate for the disappearance of the Ogpu’s privilege of summary shooting. Death is the penalty 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 civilized country, threatens with deprivation of ’’rod cards and banishment to remote r - ’ions of Siberia even quite innocen. relatives of Soviet citizens who flee across the border.

It will be interesting to see whether the new Commissariat remains within the limits which have been marked out for it, or whether, like the Ogpu, it will reassume the right to shoot without trial, and hence cany on the ChekaOgpu tradition of arbitrariness and ruthlessness.