(64) "Spetssobshchenie ekonomicheskogo upravleniia
OGPU SSSR ob epidemii sypnogo tifa v Ivanovskoi promyshlennoi oblasti," 22 May 1933, Doc.
Deribas to mobilize the best part of the
OGPU staff to conduct a decisive purge of the railroads of Japanese agents, diversionists, wreckers, hooligans, counterrevolutionary social alien and disorganizing elements in order to comply with the Party Central Committee's and the Council of Poeple's Commissars decree of 1 June 1934.
No
OGPU criteria defined the "rich kulak"; jealous denunciation certainly played a role in designations.
He ended his letter: "The removal of those Monarchist and Social Revolutionary doctors [whom he named] making presentations from positions of leadership should be agreed with the
OGPU." In other words, the secret police were to deal with the offending "anti-Soviet" physicians.
2003: The Economy of the
OGPU, NKVD, and MVD of the USSR, 1930-1953: the Scale, Structure, and Trends of Development.
OGPU (the secret police) got wide extrajudicial rights to arrest, deport, and execute offenders in the cities.
Writers like Ruth Fischer and Franz Borkenau pointed out a generation ago that, for example, the
OGPU and the Gestapo had decided that whatever the result of the Reichstag fire trial, the Bulgarian communist defendant Dimitrov would go free.
Applebaum insists that he carefully ensured that the camps fell within the remit of the
OGPU, his police-state apparatus.
The
OGPU interrogator, Nilcolay Kristoforovich Shivarov, told Mandeistam in turn "that it was useful for a poet to experience fear ('you yourself told me so')...
As a result, the KGB and its predecessors--the Cheka,
OGPU and NKVD--each had its own specially trained personnel.
Its functions were: "(1) to monitor, on behalf of the state, all governmental agencies, economic organs, public associations, private organizations, and individuals, and to prosecute officials who violated the law and to scrutinize the validity of their decisions; (2) to directly supervise the investigative agencies, such as the militia and the
OGPU (later known as the KGB); (3) to conduct prosecutions in court; and (4) to supervise the penitentiary system." Id.
According to the
OGPU (Ob" edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, the security police) report on the incident a "massive scandal resulted which compromised the whole brigade." [1] The brigade, however, was in fact already compromised by its tendency to indulge in "tactless activites".
The canal that was built entirely by manual labor not only linked the two seas but also reeducated the enemies of the system, thus "overcoming the last obstacles of the past on the road to a brighter future." Nonetheless, in keeping with the character of Soviet totalitarianism, the book was banned in 1937 largely because it glorifies not only Stalin but also Genrikh Yahoda, the head of the
OGPU, who had been in charge of building the canal but was subsequently purged by Stalin.
