Directed from Petrograd at first the commission had several regional departments ( Gubcheks ) that were officially titled Provincial Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage and were generally known as the Kiev Cheka, Kharkov Cheka, Odessa Cheka, etc.

With the creation of the Soviet Union all the Cheka departments were consolidated into the State Political Directorate of NKVD that consisted of the respective republican ministries.

Part of Soviet secret police ( Cheka, GPU, NKVD, ...) departments ( names vary over the time ).

Many thousands of dissidents, deserters, or other people were arrested, tortured or executed by various Cheka groups.

Originally, the members of the Cheka were exclusively Bolshevik ; however, in January 1918, the Left SRs also joined the organization The Left SRs were expelled or arrested later in 1918, following the attempted assassination of Lenin by an SR, Fanni Kaplan.

In addition, border security Chekas were included in the system of local Cheka bodies.

There 40 anarchists were killed by Cheka forces, and about 500 were arrested and jailed after a pitched battle took place between the two groups.

In May 1919, two Cheka agents sent to assassinate Makhno were caught and executed.

Many victims of Cheka repression were ' bourgeois hostages ' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary act.

Approximately 500, 000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and close to 800, 000 in 1920, by troops of the ' Special Punitive Department ' of the Cheka, created to punish desertions.

Some believe it is possible more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in battle.

Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror.

* The Cheka were popular staples in Soviet film and literature.

" Nicholas Roerich and his son George were waiting in the Cheka office to see Dzerzhinsky when they heard of Dzerzhinsky's death.

In March 1919 after a failed workers revolt against Bolshevik rule thousands of people were executed by the Cheka under orders from Sergey Kirov.

When nearly half of Makhno's troops were struck by a typhus epidemic, Trotsky resumed hostilities ; the Cheka sent two agents to assassinate Makhno in 1920, but were captured and after confessing, were executed.

Among the commanders leading the Red Army in the coming offensive were Leon Trotsky, Tukhachevsky ( new commander of the Western Front ), Alexander Yegorov ( new commander of the Southwestern Front ), the future Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin, and the founder of the Cheka ( secret police ), Felix Dzerzhinsky.

With the end of the Polish-Soviet War and the defeat of General Wrangel, the RKKA could divert its regular troops into the area-in total over 100, 000 Red Army soldiers were deployed, including special Cheka detachments.

Documents relating to the rebellion were found by the local ethnographer Boris Sennikov in 1982 while he was engaged in clearing sand from the altar of the Winter Church of the Kazan monastery-during the 1920s the monastery had been requisitioned for use as the local Cheka headquarters and the church had served as the archive of the Tambov Military Commissariat.

Its privileged employees were the Cultural Revolution equivalent of Vladimir Lenin ’ s Cheka and Adolf Hitler ’ s Gestapo.

With the devastation of the economy during the Russian Civil War and the period of war communism with its policy of prodrazvyorstka ( food requisition by state ), meshochniks from countryside were seen as profiteers and persecuted by the Cheka.

In this, the Cheka said that they targeted " class enemies " such as the bourgeoisie, and members of the clergy ; the first organized mass repression began against the libertarians and socialists of Petrograd in April 1918.

" The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a " day of Red Terror " to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town.

As a libertarian socialist, Serge protested against the Red Terror organized by Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka.

W. H. Chamberlin claims, " It is simply impossible to believe that the Cheka only put to death 12, 733 people in all of Russia up to the end of the civil war.

) Brik was not only a literary modernist, he was strongly left-wing in politics, and on June 8, 1920 he joined the Cheka.

At these times, there were numerous reports that Cheka interrogators utilized torture methods which were, according to Orlando Figes, " matched only by the Spanish Inquisition.

Bailey eventually had to flee for his life from the city, and only escaped after taking on the guise of an Austrian POW and joining the Cheka, with an assignment to find a rogue British agent-that is, himself.

They also made big hits with Cheka.

By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had been created in various cities, at multiple levels including: oblast, guberniya (" Gubcheks "), raion, uyezd, and volost Chekas, with Raion and Volost Extraordinary Commissioners.

Depending on Cheka committees in various cities, the methods included: being skinned alive, scalped, " crowned " with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, or rolled around naked in internally nail-studded barrels.

The Cheka was also used against the armed anarchist Black Army of Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine.

Films featuring the Cheka include Ostern's Miles of Fire, Nikita Mikhalkov's At Home among Strangers, the miniseries The Adjutant of His Excellency, and also Dead Season ( starring Donatas Banionis ), and the 1992 Russian drama film The Chekist.

Utkin also told the White Russian Army investigators that the injured girl, whom he treated at Cheka headquarters in Perm, told him, " I am the daughter of the ruler, Anastasia.

According to Emma Goldman, the anarchist, who secretly met Spiridonova in July 1920, she was also tortured by being taken out at night and informed that she was to be shot on a spot-a favored method of the Cheka at that time.

The prisoners enjoyed relative freedom ; a side from having to report to Cheka Headquarters once a week, they could come and go as they wished, and took long walks around the town, visiting and dining with each other frequently.

In late November, the Second All-Russian Conference of the Extraordinary Commissions accepted a decision after the report of I. N. Polukarov to establish at all frontlines and army sections of the Cheka and granted them the right to appoint their commissioners in military units.

** Shooting of the Romanov family: By order of the Bolshevik Party and carried out by the Cheka, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, their children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei, and retainers are executed at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, Russia.

In 1922, at the end of the Civil War, the Cheka was renamed as the GPU ( State Political Directorate ), a section of the NKVD.

In September 1919, a grenade attack at a meeting of the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Party was used as a pretext for mass arrests of anarchists all over Russia by Bolshevik Red Army forces and the Cheka.

According to David Christian, the Cheka ( the rogue secret police created by Communist Party officials at the time ) reported 118 separate peasant uprisings alone in February 1921.

For instance, unlike the Cheka, it didn't have the right to shoot suspected " counter-revolutionaries " at will.

" The Cheka at the Kholmogory camp adopted the practice of drowning bound prisoners in the nearby Dvina river.

" At Odessa the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water ; In Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims ' hands to produce " gloves "; The Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails ; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Dnipropetrovsk ; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants ; in Orel, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues ; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape.