TMOGV, Chapter 5b, The Red Terror (Continued)

The Cheka grew rapidly and became a very large, very cruel state security organization. It’s organizational structure was changed several times over the following years, as was its name, from Cheka to GPU, to NKVD, and finally to KGB, but its mission remained essentially the same. Cheka offices were set up in every city and town. By 1921 a single branch of the Cheka called, “The troops for the internal Defense of the Republic,”numbering 200,000, was given the responsibility of policing and actually running the massive Gulag system of labor camps. There is no way to know the precise number of deaths the Cheka was responsible for, but it surely ran into the scores of millions. This would include victims of forced collectivization, the forced famine, of which more later, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death in the Gulag. Harvard historian Richard Pipes (himself a Jew), in his book “The Russian Revolution”(1990), verifies that “three quarters of the staff [of the Cheka] were Jews, many of them riff raff, incapable of any other work, cut off from the Jewish community, although careful to spare fellow Jews.”