OGPU METHODS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 109, 11 May 1933, Page 10

OGPU METHODS

REFINED TORTURE AMERICAN’S OBSERVATIONS. Tho part which tho Russian secret political police (the Ogpu) plays in maintaining the Soviet regime and the terrorist methods adopted by that organisation, are described by Mr. Walter Arnold Rukeyser in his book “Working for the {Soviets,” which was published last year. Mr. Rukeyser is an American engineer who worked for nearly four years—l92B to 1931—for tho {State Trust, by which tho asbestos industry in Russia is administered. “The Ogpu,” Mr. Rukeyser states, “is tho most powerful, the best organised, tho outstanding organisation of its kind that history records to date. It has its physical representation in every village, town and city throughout European and Asiatic Russia. In every mine, factory, hotel, railway station and office may bo found an agent of the secret police, although they are not easily recognised. Tho greatest, if not the only, sin in Russia to-day is the act. deed, or thought directed against the State. Tho bogey of counter-revo-lution has become the monomania of the Kremlin. Under Constant Suspicion. “Every man, woman ami child in Russia—even members of tho Communist Party —is under constant, suspicion of this dread organisation. No act too petty, no word too light, that some deeper, sinister significance may not bo attached thereto. Ono’s best friend may be a provocateur; a child’s innocent remark at play or at school may cost his father's life; that pitiful extra ounce of white flour from a foreigner mav bo observed, reported, and construed as a reward for revealing to the ‘capitalistic representative’ some State secret. “Is it a wonder, then, especially when one considers that once the Ogpu strikes, the victim is considered guilty unless ho can prove himself innocent—tho price of guilt in the past was so often death—that the Russian engineer or office worker lives under an omnipresent dread? To intensify his fears. | all manner of subtle psychological I methods are employed. Arrests arc 4 Usually made at night—for the most

part, I was told, between midnight and dawn, at the hour when human resistance is at its lowest ebb. Two fold Organisation. “The nature of the organisation is twofold; first, a division of secret agents circulating through tho population at large, their identity very probably unknown even to ono another; second, an open, uniformed personnel of officers and men, who have distinctive uniforms, special barracks, the best quarters in Russia, whose annunciatory signs, with the letters ‘Ogpu’ above cause an involuntary shudder even in the passing foreigner. Among the Russian people of to day, only the members of tho Ogpu have nothing to fear from contact with foreigners. They are police, judge and jury. They are the dictatorship. ’ ’ Describing the “third degree” methods employed in the examination of a suspected person, the author states: —“For three or four days an» nights on end, without being permitted one single wink of sleep, the prisoner is interrogated by different officer* working in unbroken shifts. A powerful light is made to play upon the top of the head. The questions arc disjointed and apparently without purpose —psychological torture of the most refined sort.’’