RUSSIA: Ogpu Cabinet

At Moscow occurred last week an extraordinary change in Government. It was as if in Washington Attorney General Homer S. Cummings had abruptly been created “Cabinet-Minister-General,” with six bureau chiefs of the Department of Justice becoming “Cabinet-Ministers-of-the-First Rank.” Such a change in Washington would mean that U. S. citizens were being handed over to be governed by G-men.

In Russia the Soviet secret service has had a long and fascinating history, increasing in respectability with the years. Members of the dread Tsarist Okhrana were remarkably successful in insinuating themselves into the Cheka of Lenin which conducted the original so-called “Red Terror.” So odious did the Cheka become that it was finally supposed to have been purged of its baser elements and was renamed the Ogpu. Under the late great Felix Dzerzhinsky, an extremely able and somewhat sadistic Pole, the Ogpu became internationally odious but in Russia it saved the Bolshevik Dictatorship from being overthrown by popular and democratic elements. That Arch-Terrorist Dzerzhinsky had deserved well of Bolshevism was signalized after his death when a Soviet steamer which today plies between Leningrad and London was named the S. S. Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Still later the Ogpu was given yet another name to make it seem more like a normal European Ministry of Interior, became the Commissariat of Interior, under the reigning Ogpu chief, smudge-mustached, pudgy-fingered Comrade Genrikh (“Henry”) Grigorevitch Yagoda. Moscow’s official daily Pravda (“Truth”) hailed the terrorist clique in its new role as Commissariat of Interior thus: “Long has the Ogpu worn a halo formed of the deep love of tens of millions of workers and peasants both in our Soviet land and abroad!”* Last week Comrade Yagoda’s Commissariat of Interior became the Commissariat General, with himself as Commissar General. Since the Cabinet of Russia is known as the Commissariat or Council of Peoples Commissars, this creation of a Commissariat-General was indeed extraordinary. What it meant Russians and the world were left to guess—probably no more than that the Russian spy clique is little by little openly assuming some trappings of the power it has wielded for years. In effect an Ogpu Cabinet had been created alongside the State’s Cabinet. The new Cabinet of Yagoda: Commissar Yakov S. Agranov of the so-called Ogpu Secret Section devoted to unmasking and destroying Enemies of the Regime. On his hurry call to Leningrad after a Communist assassinated Joseph Stalin’s “Dear Friend Sergei” Kirov (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934), industrious Ogpuer Agranov had 66 men and five women shot in four days of star chamber proceedings, caused some 25,000 Leningraders (according to correspondents’ guesses) to be deported to Siberia, this example of zeal being known in Russia as “Stalin’s Revenge.” Commissar Grigoriy Prokofiev of the Ogpu Industrial Section, who attends to such matters as having Russian engineers, after a factory breakdown, “shot for sabotage.” Commissar Terenty Deribas of the Ogpu Far East Section, perhaps its most romantic branch. In Mongolia and other nomadic border lands the natives are under an impression, perhaps mistaken, that a local chieftain whom the Ogpu considers superfluous often dies from the prick of a poisoned nail in his saddle. Commissar Stanislas Redens of the Ogpu Moscow Section. Commissar Leonid Zakovsky of the Ogpu Leningrad Section. Vsevolod Balitsky of the Ogpu Ukranian Section. Decidedly able, Commissar-General Yagoda is credited with having devised perhaps the Ogpu’s brightest idea from the viewpoint of entrenching the Ogpu as a permanent and self-supporting organ of the State. The idea: to embark on major Soviet Five-Year-Plan building projects with Ogpu prisoners for workers and the Ogpu Terror to goad them to superhuman efforts in completing the project on time. Greatest of such Ogpu projects thus far was the famed Stalin Canal (linking the White Sea via Lake Onega with the Baltic Sea), finished two years ago (TIME, Aug. 14, 1933). Uncensored sources told of men & women driven with whips amid the flare of torches to pick-ax frozen ground during the long Arctic nights. Censored sources presented the Stalin Canal as a glorious social achievement in which “criminals redeemed themselves” and official Soviet newsreels have spread this throughout the world.

*To win this love the Ogpu, according to minimum estimates, has tried in its own star chamber courts and executed in its cellars not less than 10,000 Russians; has shipped off to Siberia not less than 1,000,000 and today employs in its penal labor gangs not less than 500,000.