#ogpu

[official-german-puns]

Von drauß' vom Aldi komm' ich her und muss euch sagen: Es weihnachtet sehr.

[cannibalguy]

Stalin’s workers’ paradise: CANNIBAL ISLAND

One of the most horrendous abuses of the Stalinist era was the mass deportation of 6,700 prisoners to what became known as “Cannibal Island”. This was a small island called Nazino in the Ob River in western Siberia (now the Tomsk Oblast). The island was 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) long and 600 meters (660 yards) wide and had no possibility of feeding the thousands of new residents. The only thing…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“FOUR BRITISH SUBJECTS ARE HELD IN RUSSIA,” Owen Sound Sun Times. March 13, 1933. Page 8.  ----- Metropolitan-Vickers Representatives Are in Custody ---- REASON PUZZLE ---- All-Night Search Made of Homes and Office for Documents --- (Associated Press Despatch) MOSCOW, March 13.-Four British subjects, representing the firm Metropolitan-Vickers in Russia, and four of the company's Russian employees, including two women, have been arrested following raids upon their homes and offices by secret police. 

Beginning Saturday night and continuing in the early hours of Sunday, the raiders, numbering more than a score who carried search and arrest warrants, first visited the home in Perlovka, a suburb of Allan Monkhouse, Metropolitan-Vickers director. They seized a number of papers and documents, for which they gave receipts, and then took Monkhouse; his assistant, W. H. Thornton; their Russian chauffeurs, a woman typist and a woman secretary away under arrest. 

Later another raiding party visited the Moscow apartment of John Cushny, another of Monkhouse's assistants, and seized papers there. They also arrested Cushny and W. L. MacDonald, one of the company's installation engineers, who had been in Moscow only two days after several months in the field.

Metropolitan-Vickers is one of the largest British firms doing business in Russia. It is engaged in selling and installing electrical machinery and turbines and in furnishing technical advice to the Soviet Government. 

War Is Discussed LONDON. March 13 - The part Great Britain would play in the event of another European conflict attracted the attention of the London press today. 

"At no time since 1914 has there been so much open and alarmed talk about war or a situation more immediately threatening," said the Sunday Times. 

The opinion was widely held here that what Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and Sir John Simon, his Secretary for Foreign Affairs, may have intended to be a conference with Premier Daladier of France on resuscitation of the Disarmament Conference was turned by the French into an opportunity to make an appeal for a new Franco-British front in the event of renewal of European hostilities.

[tomorrowusa]

You know things are terrible for Russia when Russian military personnel are paying bribes to be stationed in faction-torn Syria rather than Ukraine.

Even with its ongoing instability and abrupt outbursts of violence, Syria looks like a better option for Russians than ending up as cannon fodder in Ukraine.

BONUS TRACK: Maybe Russian troops will want to go to Syria just to get away from Russia. 😆

Ukrainian drones a few hours ago struck both an oil facility and a drone factory in Russia about 1,300 km into Russian territory. That's more than twice the distance between Ukraine's eastern city of Kharkiv and Moscow.

Ukraine war: Deepest Ukraine drone attack into Russian territory injures 12

Here's a video report in Ukrainian on the two attacks. Subtitles are available in English.

[random-brushstrokes]

Vitaly Gavrilovitsj Tichov - Stakhanovite from the OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate) factory (ca. 1930s)

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Stalinist attitudes towards homosexuality and the events surroudning criminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Union in 1934 - excerpts from professor Dan Healey’s book „Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi”

In the same chapter I analyze the Soviet return to a ban on “sodomy” in 1933-34. It was a Stalinist measure, proposed by the security police and backed with relish by Stalin and his Politburo. Stalin personally edited the new penal article. This was the moment when the Soviet state adopted a modern anti-homosexual politics, the birth of modern Russian political homophobia. (…)

On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August-September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.” From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. (…)

When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a figure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August-September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card-indexes either as “anti-social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. (…)

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other significant document was published from the same file in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907-60), an ex­ patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity.

Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “Constitutional homosexuals, as an insignificant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignificant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. (…)

The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers. Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals - and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.”

[mariacallous]

A high-ranking GRU officer, deputy commander of Russia's Special Operations Forces Training Center, was shot dead at point-blank range in the village of Melenki in Moscow Oblast, Russian media iStories reported on Telegram on Oct. 16.

The incident occurred in the Moscow suburb, where an unknown assailant shot 44-year-old Nikita Klenkov, who had recently returned from the war in Ukraine, according to the Russian media outlet RBC.

The Telegram channel VChK-OGPU reported that Klenkov was the deputy commander of a military unit and served in one of the special forces units—military unit 43292, which is the Training Center for Special Operations Forces, as reported by the journalists of iStories.

Additionally, geolocation data from leaks indicate that Klenkov ordered food deliveries to the GRU headquarters and visited a polyclinic near the GRU building.

He owned a Hyundai Palisade, in which he was shot, according to a video published by the Investigative Committee. Klenkov also owned a Mercedes Benz E300, a Hummer H3, and a Ford.

According to the Telegram channel Baza, a gray Mitsubishi Outlander is being sought in connection with the murder. Sources from the channel reported that the killer fired eight shots at Klenkov.

[thomasthetankieengine]

hyperions-fate naively believing that "unending wars, occupations, drone assassinations, kidnappings and renditions, black site torture camps, strategies of ethno-sectarian tension, and all kinds of criminality" were only invented or regarded as acceptable methods of foreign policy since 1994. The only thing new about any of that are specifically drone assassinations as opposed to the apparently good old ways where you assassinated people with knives, swords, guns, or poison.

Trying to claim that Russia especially had to learn about forever wars, torture, kidnappings, prison camps, and ethnic hostility from "Western powers" is especially funny because… well…

Hyperion, buddy, do you not know what the Oprichnik and Cheka/OGPU/NKVD/KGB were?

Have you never heard of the Siege of Ryazan, Massacre of Novgorod, conquest of Siberia, Circassian genocide, Bloody Sunday, Red Terror, White Terror, Tambov rebellion, Katyn massacre, Medvedev Forest massacre, or Novocherkassk massacre? What about the numerous pogroms in the Russian Empire and during the Russian Civil War?

Are you somehow unaware of what happened to the Tsars, Feodor II, False Dmitry I, Ivan VI, Peter III, Paul I, and Alexander II? Or the other Russian royals, Saints Boris and Gleb or Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich of Russia?

Are you unfamiliar with the fates that Boris Savinkov, Sidney Reilly, Alexander Kutepov, Yevhen Konovalets, Yevgeny Miller, Leon Trotsky, Andreu Nin, Noe Ramishvili, Yu Xiusong, and Raoul Wallenberg met at the hands of Soviet security forces?

From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't seem like Putin and co. had to draw inspiration from the supposedly "new" tactics (though, of course, they were nothing of the sort) that Western countries had embraced c. 1994.

[mastomysowner]

On September 11, 1877, 147 years ago, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed Iron Felix, was born.

He is known as a Soviet political figure, founder and first head of the Cheka/GPU/OGPU, People's Commissar of Railways and, at the same time, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs.

Felix Dzerzhinsky was also the chairman of the commission to combat homelessness, and the initiator of the creation of the Dynamo sports society. He died in 1926 from a heart attack.

[misanthropiccatboy]

realistically speaking it's hard to compare the internal security to any one agency because the scope of the cheka-nkvd-gpu-ogpu-smersh-mvd-kgb kept changing every few years! at different points they were like ICE, CIA, FBI, homeland security, spec ops, and they even had substantial military units in wwii. they also had the gulags and were responsible for processing large numbers of criminals.

[oscarjcarlisle]

In the 1920’s Isaac had distinguished himself in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution, and had some small influence on the Party. He was among the nomenklatura and used his connections in the Red Army to found a secret Paranormal Affairs division of the OGPU, later folded into the NKVD. Isaac met Stalin several times in person, and after Stalin’s accent to power Isaac demonstrated his immortality, convincing Stalin (though he needed little convincing) that magic was real and a possible threat to the Union. Thereafter Stalin committed essentially any resources Isaac requested to the Paranormal Affairs division. In actuality, magic users posed very little threat to the Soviet Union and all Isaac did was help them hide themselves from the persecution that Stalin would have levied against them.

Isaac despised Stalin, and tried several times to have him assassinated while also maintaining his good standing, but failed. Instead he did his best to mitigate the damage the rest of the NKVD was doing to the ethnic and religious minorities in Siberia.

Beryozka, the large tiger pictured here, was one of Isaac’s lieutenants and a personal friend. He was abducted from his village of reindeer Samoyedic reindeer herders in the Far North as a boy during the revolution, and fought in the Red Army, where he met Isaac. He speaks a Samoyedic dialect and is very familiar with the folklore and cryptids of Siberia, making him one of the division’s top field agents.

Beryozka is also gay and mostly closeted, Isaac was one of the first people he came out to, and while neither of them consider themselves to be in a relationship, they are very affectionate to each other. Only the other officers of the Paranormal Affairs division really know, and Isaac hand picked all of them to be fairly open-minded, anti-statist individuals, the type who’d rather let the two of them be gay together than report it to anyone because they hate the oppressive state more than they’re icked out by two guys cuddling.

[official-german-puns]

Von drauß' vom Walde komm ich her und muss euch sagen es ist verfickt wimdig.

[nanshe-of-nina]

If anyone's interested, this is an English translation of one of the poems that got Kluyev arrested.

That was the White Sea canal of death Akimushka dug it, So did Prov from Vetliuga and Auntie Fiokla. Great Russia got soaked To the bones with the red shower And hid its tears from people, From others’ eyes in alien bogs [ . . . ] Russia! Better to be in smoke and soot Than the blood of canal locks and the lice of brushwood causeways From Ararat to the Northern seas.

The canal Kluyev was speaking of was the White Sea Baltic Canal. It was constructed between 1931 and 1933 using the labor of Gulag inmates. Working conditions were ridiculously hazardous and at least 12,000 inmates died during its construction.

While the project was completed ahead of schedule and under-budget, the canal itself was shoddily constructed and of limited use. To quote from historian, Donald Rayfield:

The canal had been built on Iagoda’s initiative by OGPU’s political prisoners, kulaks, and convicts. Even the engineers were prisoners. Iagoda prided himself on the speed and cheapness with which he built this canal—under two years, for a fifth of the budget—which showed Stalin what OGPU might do for the economy. The death toll was well above 100,000. Some 300,000 prisoners —underfed, freezing in winter, tormented by midges in summer— had cut through bogs and granite. There was little reinforcing iron for the concrete; human bones and tree branches were used. All for nothing. The canal was too shallow for ships that could withstand the Arctic Ocean; it was ice-free only for half the year and in any case the canal duplicated an all-weather railway to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. Before it was finished it was crumbling and has since been reconstructed twice.

Iagoda saw the White Sea canal as a personal triumph. His brother-in-law Leopold Averbakh, with Semion Firin, deputy chief of the GULAG, and Gorky, led boats laden with Soviet intelligentsia. Averbakh, Firin, and Gorky contributed to a book glorifying OGPU’s humanity and expertise, and the re-education of criminals and subversives by labor. Among the writers who volunteered for, or were cajoled into, this act of prostitution were the “Soviet Count” Aleksei Tolstoy and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. Prince Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirsky, recently repatriated from England, and the innovative Victor Shklovsky were two literary critics on the flotilla of ships, and the graphic Hemingway style of the 600-page panegyric to slave labor betrays the latter’s hand. Imprisoned writers like the futurist Igor Terentiev were presented to the tourists as seekers of redemption by labor. Nobody on board could have been fooled. The statistics in The Stalin White Sea–Baltic Canal are lies: a figure of 100,000 laborers is given—the number at any one time and a third of those actually used. Fewer than 13,000 of the survivors were freed when the canal was finished.

[otthonzulles]

Prigozsin már telesírt több csomag százas zsebkendőt, hogy nem kap a Wagner lőszert (~ugyanannyit kap arányosan mint a reguláris orosz erők), de ennél is izgalmasabb a helyzet: az orosz katonai körökhöz köthető VChK-Ogpu telegram csatorna szerint ilyen berozsdált, berohadt lőszereket kapnak a fronton. Nekünk csak jó.

via ChrisO_wiki twitter

[tomorrowusa]

Ho-hum. Another day, another unexplained death of a Russian businessman, current/former official, or dissident.

It's true that Igor Kotelnikov was on the sketchy side – he was in pretrial detention on a bribery charge. But he was 52 which is still below Russia's plummeting life expectancy. No cause of death was released by official sources.

Somebody up top may have been worried about Kotelnikov's upcoming testimony and decided to silence him once and for all. After falling out of windows, dying while in custody under mysterious circumstances seems to be a favored way for the dictatorship to get rid of people it doesn't want around.

A Russian businessman charged with bribing senior Defense Ministry officials on behalf of suppliers has died in pretrial detention, according to a member of the country's human rights council. Igor Kotelnikov, 52, died on July 8 after feeling unwell in the Moscow pretrial detention center, Yeva Merkacheva said. She did not give a cause of death but said he had been held in a part of the center that has tough conditions. "Rights defenders, examining the pretrial detention center, repeatedly noted that these cells are packed with people. [The cells] are small, hot in warm weather, cold in the winter. In addition, some detainees sit there all day," Merkacheva wrote in a column for the popular daily Moskovsky Komsomolets. She said that Kotelnikov's death was not the first in such cells and that other detainees have committed suicide. Kotelnikov allegedly operated as a middleman in the bribery scheme that rocked the ministry earlier this year, leading to the arrest of former Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov and two other businessmen. Kotelnikov denied the charges.

The Russian defense establishment is notoriously corrupt. Kotelnikov probably knew a lot about the sleaze.

According to the Telegram channel CHEKA-OGPU, officials from the Federal Security Service (FSB) visited Kotelnikov in detention on several occasions to encourage him to finger Ivanov. The channel claimed that when Kotelnikov refused, the FSB officials began pressuring him and later moved him to a punishment cell. CHEKA-OGPU is reportedly close to Russia’s security services. According to the Telegram channel, prison doctors said Kotelnikov should not be held in a punishment cell due to chronic illness and had him sent back. However, prison officials, allegedly under FSB pressure, had him returned, CHEKA-OGPU said. Ivanov, who oversaw the military-industrial complex for the ministry, was arrested in April on charges of taking more than 1 billion rubles ($11.4 million) in bribes from contractors. Ivanov, whose family flaunted its wealth, has denied the charges.

A reminder that this régime is admired by many Republicans in the US who are hoping for a Putin victory in Ukraine – despite the endemic incompetence and corruption in Russia's military. Russia is their model for how to run a country.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 11.5 (before 1940)

1138 – Lý Anh Tông is enthroned as emperor of Vietnam at the age of two, beginning a 37-year reign. 1499 – The Catholicon, written in 1464 by Jehan Lagadeuc in Tréguier, is published; this is the first Breton dictionary as well as the first French dictionary. 1556 – Second Battle of Panipat: Fighting begins between the forces of Hem Chandra Vikramaditya, the Hindu king at Delhi and the forces of the Muslim emperor Akbar. 1605 – Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes is arrested in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, where he had planted gunpowder in an attempt to blow up the building and kill King James I of England. 1688 – Prince William III of Orange lands with a Dutch fleet at Brixham to challenge the rule of King James II of England (James VII of Scotland). 1757 – Seven Years' War: Frederick the Great defeats the allied armies of France and the Holy Roman Empire at the Battle of Rossbach. 1768 – The Treaty of Fort Stanwix is signed, the purpose of which is to adjust the boundary line between Indian lands and white settlements set forth in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 in the Thirteen Colonies. 1780 – French-American forces under Colonel LaBalme are defeated by Miami Chief Little Turtle. 1811 – Salvadoran priest José Matías Delgado rings the bells of La Merced church in San Salvador, calling for insurrection and launching the 1811 Independence Movement. 1828 – Greek War of Independence: The French Morea expedition to recapture Morea (now the Peloponnese) ends when the last Ottoman forces depart the peninsula. 1834 – Founding of the Free University of Brussels by Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen. 1862 – American Civil War: Abraham Lincoln removes George B. McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac. 1862 – American Indian Wars: In Minnesota, 303 Dakota warriors are found guilty of rape and murder of whites and are sentenced to death. Thirty-eight are ultimately hanged and the others reprieved. 1872 – Women's suffrage in the United States: In defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time, and is later fined $100. 1881 – In New Zealand, 1600 armed volunteers and constabulary field forces led by Minister of Native Affairs John Bryce march on the pacifist Māori settlement at Parihaka, evicting upwards of 2000 residents, and destroying the settlement in the context of the New Zealand land confiscations. 1895 – George B. Selden is granted the first U.S. patent for an automobile. 1898 – Negrese nationalists revolt against Spanish rule and establish the short-lived Republic of Negros. 1911 – After declaring war on the Ottoman Empire on September 29, 1911, Italy annexes Tripoli and Cyrenaica. 1912 – Woodrow Wilson is elected the 28th President of the United States, defeating incumbent William Howard Taft. 1913 – King Otto of Bavaria is deposed by his cousin, Prince Regent Ludwig, who assumes the title Ludwig III. 1914 – World War I: France and the British Empire declare war on the Ottoman Empire. 1916 – The Kingdom of Poland is proclaimed by the Act of 5th November of the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary. 1916 – The Everett massacre takes place in Everett, Washington as political differences lead to a shoot-out between the Industrial Workers of the World organizers and local police. 1917 – Lenin calls for the October Revolution. 1917 – Tikhon is elected the Patriarch of Moscow and of the Russian Orthodox Church. 1925 – Secret agent Sidney Reilly, the first "super-spy" of the 20th century, is executed by the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union.