He placed the letter in the prisoners ' ' complaints box ' whence it was sent, as a curiosity, to Genrikh Yagoda the secret police bureaucrat who eventually became leader of the Cheka ; it is said that Yagoda immediately demanded to meet with the letter's author.

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

" 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.

After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver.

Without the uniform, they could be shot as spies, though it probably would not have made much difference to the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police.

As a result, the Cheka grip in Georgia was relatively eased ( for example, Catholicos Patriarch Ambrose and the members of the Patriarchal Council were released ), military pacification was completed and an appearance of normality returned to the country, but Georgians had suffered a shock from which they were never able to completely recover.

Ridiculing Herbert Wells («… I can guess why he ’ s drawn to Bolsheviks: they ’ ve leapfrogged him …»), she wrote of Cheka atrocities (« In Kiev 1200 officers killed ; legs severed, boots carried off », — February 23: " In Rostov teenager cadets shot down — for being mistakenly taken for other Kadets, the banned ones ", — March 17 ), of mass hunger and her own growing feeling of numb indifference: « Whoever had soul, now walk like dead men: neither protesting, nor suffering, waiting for nothing, bodies and souls slumped in hunger-induced dormancy ».

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.

At the direction of Lenin, the Cheka performed mass arrests, imprisonments, and executions of " enemies of the people ".

To politically control the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Red Army soldiery, the Cheka operated Special Punitive Brigades which suppressed anti-communism, deserters, and enemies of the state.

They are syllabic abbreviations typical for the Russian language of the early Soviet era, although many Cheka and Internal Troops units such as OMSDON used a osobovo naznacheniya designation in their full names.

After 1922, Cheka groups underwent a series of reorganizations, with the NKVD, into bodies whose members continued to be referred to as " Chekisty " ( Chekists ) into the late 1980s.

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.

His brother, Simon, was killed in action, while his family members were arrested and his father-in-law was later executed by the Cheka.

In 1925, several Rote Hilfe members were put on trial in Leipzig in what was known as the Cheka Trial.

In October 1924, following the issuance of the commission ’ s report, some members of the Georgian Cheka were purged as " unreliable elements " who were presumably offered up as scapegoats for the atrocities.

; Moscow Cheka ( 1918 – 1919 )

; Petrograd Cheka ( 1918 – 1919 )

; Kharkov Cheka

; Kiev Cheka

; Odessa Cheka

; Simferopol Cheka

In the wake of the October Revolution, the old Russian Imperial Army had been demobilized ; the volunteer-based Red Guard was the Bolsheviks ' main military force, augmented by an armed military component of the Cheka, the Bolshevik state security apparatus.

Julian Semyonov was an influential spy novelist, writing in the Eastern Bloc, whose range of novels and novel series featured a White Russian spy in the USSR ; Max Otto von Stierlitz, a Soviet mole in the Nazi High Command, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka.

This did not diminish Dzerzhinsky's power ; he was Minister of the Interior, director of the Cheka / GPU / OGPU, Minister for Communications, and director of the Vesenkha ( Supreme Council of National Economy ) from 1921 – 24.

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.

Cheka ( ЧК-чрезвыча ́ йная коми ́ ссия chrezvychaynaya komissiya, Extraordinary Commission, ) was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations.

One of the first founded was the Moscow Cheka.

* 1917 – Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, is founded.

In December 1917, the Cheka was founded as the Bolshevik's first internal security force following the failed assassination attempt on Lenin's life.

The first head of the 4th Directorate was Janis Karlovich Berzin, a Latvian Communist and former member of the Cheka, who remained in the post until 28 November 1937, when he was arrested and subsequently liquidated during Joseph Stalin's purges.

First mentioned in 1606 as Rastyapino (), it has been named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Bolshevik leader who was the first head of the Soviet Cheka ( secret police ), since 1929.

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.

The first chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, Cheka foreign department ( Inostranny Otdel — INO ), was Yakov Davydov.

The first secret police after the Russian Revolution, created by Vladimir Lenin's decree on December 20, 1917, was called " Cheka " ( ЧК ).

After the Russian Revolution, the club eventually found itself under the authority of the Interior Ministry and its head Felix Dzerzhinsky, chief of the Soviet Union's first secret police force, the notorious Cheka.

* Cheka, first of a succession of Soviet state security organization

They include persons as diverse as Apollo Korzeniowski, writer, political activist and father of Joseph Conrad ; Romuald Traugutt, leader of the 1863 January Uprising ; Jarosław Dąbrowski, later military chief of the 1871 Paris Commune ; Feliks Dzierżyński, a leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and founder of the Cheka secret police ; the Marxist theoretician and revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg ; the future Marshal of Poland, Józef Piłsudski ; Piłsudski's political archrival, Roman Dmowski ; and Eligiusz Niewiadomski, assassin of Poland's first president, Gabriel Narutowicz.

Detachments of the Red Army and Cheka attacked the first insurgent towns in western Georgia — Chiatura, Senaki and Abasha — as early as 29 August and managed to force the rebels into forests and mountains by 30 August.

Cheka departments were organized not only in big cities and guberniya seats, but also in each uyezd, at any front-lines and military formations.

" 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.