OGPU, GPU e o Camarada Menzhinsky

De todos os canalhas que fizeram parte do regime soviético, um dos mais importantes e, paradoxalmente, ignorado, é o camarada Menzhinsky, chefe da polícia secreta G.P.U.. Segundo Donald Rayfield "Menzhinsky, the effective chief of the secret police from 1921 until his death in 1934, a man of such satanic genius and cool control that Stalin overcame his distaste for bourgeois intellectuals and trusted his advice as he trusted no one else’s. Menzhinsky can be held responsible for more deaths than all the other secret police heads taken together". Um interessante artigo da Times de 1931, cuja capa é ilustrada por uma foto do assassino polaco, faz uma instigante descrição da ditadura comunista: "Where the trouble is of a more personal character, the G. P. U. is equipped to carry an individual through the stages of arrest, interrogation, sentence and if necessary execution without going outside its own organization. For this reason it is said that "The Ogpu is the State." But as Josef Stalin controls both the Ogpu and the Government it is more correct to say that he is the state, or that in Russia there are two parallel states.(...) At its best the G. P. U. is patriarchal, at its worst it is the most efficient means for extorting graft ever devised".