Nkvd Quotes

On another plane, only a brute in a state of irrational fury can imagine that men should be sadistically
tortured in order to obtain their consent. Such an act only accomplishes the subjugation of one man by
another, in an outrageous relationship between persons. The representative of rational totality is content,
on the contrary, to allow the object to subdue the person in the soul of man. The highest mind is first of
all reduced to the level of the lowest by the police technique of joint accusation. Then five, ten, twenty
nights of insomnia will culminate an illusory conviction and will bring yet another dead soul into the
world. From this point of view, the only psychological revolution known to our times since Freud's has
been brought about by the NKVD and the political police in general. Guided by a determinist hypothesis
that calculates the weak points and the degree of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques have once
again thrust aside one of man's limits and have attempted to demonstrate that no individual psychology is
original and that the common measure of all human character is matter. They have literally created the
physics of the soul. ~ Albert Camus

My art teacher had said that if you breathed deeply and imagined something, you could be there. You could see it, feel it. During our standoffs with the NKVD, I learned to do that. I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength there. ~ Ruta Sepetys

The International Brigade was not formed to protect freedom and democracy. It was founded as a tool of of the Comintern, to promote the interests of the Soviet Union - and thereby of Joseph Stalin, the butcher of millions. It made political sense for the International Brigade to recruit non-communists - useful fools was what Lenin had called such people in an earlier manipulation of gullible decency - but of course most were then vetted by the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police. ~ Kevin Myers

Thieves and prostitutes. Our mothers were in that car, along with a teacher, a librarian, elderly people, and a newborn baby - thieves and prostitutes. ~ Ruta Sepetys

He guessed the NKVD didn't even know that Waffen-SS men could be identified by the blood-group tattoos on the underside of their left arms, usually near the armpit. Richter didn't have one. He'd been classed as a non-combatant, as he'd said, at least for a portion of the war. He decided it could be weeks before they found out who he was.
But Volsky's confidence appeared to have been restored too, now. He said, 'And the vat of incense?'
'I had the incense brought from the remnants of a Christmas smoker factory. Silly little hollow figurines invented by toymakers in the Ore Mountains. Cone incense burns down inside the figurines and the smoke emerges from the open mouths. There was a glut of them,' Richter said, truthfully. 'Berliners were shocked and saddened after Stalingrad. But they lost the will to celebrate after the Battle of Kursk. They knew the Red Army was coming. The puerile little incense smokers were redundant, together with the incense they were to hold. Except it didn't go to waste. The vat was taken from a merchant's house. It's from Hong Kong, I think.'
Volsky leaned back in his chair. He said, 'Why go to all the trouble?'
That's a good question, Richter thought.
He stifled a smile. 'To mask the smell. ~ Gary Haynes

The Nazis were tedious in their self-righteousness and triumphalism. They were like a winning soccer team at the after-match party, getting drunker and more boring and refusing to go home. He was sick of them. Some people might say that the USSR was similar, with its secret police, its rigid orthodoxy, and its puritan attitudes to such pleasures as abstract painting and fashion. They were wrong. Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime. ~ Ken Follett

I managed to escape the NKVD while sitting right in front of them. ~ Ruta Sepetys

There were once again believers, who this time were unwilling to work on Sundays. (They had introduced the five-and the six-day week.) And there were collective farmers sent up for sabotage because they refused to work on religious feast days, as had been their custom in the era of individual farms.
And, always, there were those who refused to become NKVD informers. (Among them were priests who refused to violate the secrecy of the confessional, for the Organs had very quickly discovered how useful had very quickly discovered how useful it was to learn the content of confessions - the only use they found for religion.)
And members of non-Orthodox sects were arrested on an ever-wider scale.
And the Big Solitaire game with the socialists went on and on. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

All Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North, except for its NKVD informers, was arrested. They even went after schoolteachers. In Sverdlovsk one case involved thirty secondary schoolteachers and the head of the Provincial Education Department, Perel. 37 One of the terrible accusations against them was that they had made arrangements to have a New Year's tree in order to burn down the school. And the club fell with the regularity of a pendulum on the heads of the engineers - who by this time were no longer "bourgeois" but a whole Soviet generation of engineers. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

On 20 November, front-line troops got 500 grams of bread per day, factory workers received 250, and everyone else 125 (that is, two slices). 'Twigs were collected and stewed,' records an historian of the siege. 'Peat shavings, cottonseed cake, bonemeal was pressed into use. Pine sawdust was processed and added to the bread. Mouldy grain was dredged from sunken barges and scraped out of the holds of ships. Soon Leningrad bread was containing 10% cottonseed cake that had been processed to remove poisons. Household pets, shoe leather, fir bark and insects were consumed, as was wallpaper paste which was reputed to be made with potato flour. Guinea pigs, white mice and rabbits were saved from vivisection in the city's laboratories for a more immediately practical fate. 'Today it is so simple to die,' wrote one resident, Yelena Skryabina, in her diary. 'You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on your bed and you never get up again. Yet some people were willing to go to any lengths in order to survive: 226 people were arrested for cannibalism during the siege. 'Human meat is being sold in the markets,' concluded one secret NKVD report, 'while in the cemeteries bodies pile up like carcasses, without coffins. ~ Andrew Roberts

The Queue consists entirely of fragments of ochered' dialogue, a linguistic vernacular anchored by the long-suffering word stoyat' (to stand). You stood? Yes, stood. Three hours. Got damaged ones. Wrong size. Here's what the line wasn't: a gray inert nowhere. Imagine instead an all-Soviet public square, a hurly-burly where comrades traded gossip and insults, caught up with news left out of the newspapers, got into fistfights, or enacted comradely feats. In the thirties the NKVD had informers in queues to assess public moods, hurrying the intelligence straight to Stalin's brooding desk. Lines shaped opinions and bred ad hoc communities: citizens from all walks of life standing, united by probably the only truly collective authentic Soviet emotions: yearning and discontent (not to forget the unifying hostility toward war veterans and pregnant women, honored comrades allowed to get goods without a wait). ~ Anya Von Bremzen

Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.
Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.

P. 196 ~ Timothy Snyder

The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps.

True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code--in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children wh ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn