May 31, 2025

The Cheka, as the forerunner of the KGB was known, has few peers in history with its deep-seated wickedness and love for inflicting pain and suffering. The members were chosen for their talent to perform extreme violence on their victims. For them, no method of torture was too cruel, no screaming in pain was too loud, and no amount of tears shed in despair was enough to quench their thirst for violence. Everything was allowed in fulfilling their evil duties in support of Lenin’s evil rule.

This feature is meant as a reminder of what today’s russia really is. Some people have been grossly misled to believe that the country was turned into a democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union, albeit with a stronger ruler than what most other democratic countries have. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Today’s russia is an evil reincarnation of the entity that was created out of the ashes of Czarist Russia, known as the Soviet Union. From the very dawn of its creation, this would be what once the great Ronald Reagan had famously called the Evil Empire.

And evil it was. Reading what the Cheka had done to their fellow human beings is like reading a barbaric horror story. However, those are not stories, invented by twisted minds, but reality, performed by exceedingly evil minds. It’s for a good reason that the period of their activity was known in russia’s history as The Red Terror.

The Cheka

FORMATION

*Like most significant bodies of the new regime, the Cheka began with a decree from Lenin and Sovnarkom, dated December 19th 1917. The decree ordered the formation of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. The name Cheka was an abbreviated form of Chrezvychainaia Komissiia, the Russian for ‘Extraordinary Commission’.

The Cheka’s directive was to “persecute and break up all acts of counter-revolution and sabotage all over Russia, no matter what their origin”; to “bring before the Revolutionary Tribunal all counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs and to work out a plan for fighting them”; and to “make preliminary investigation only, enough to break up [counter-revolutionary acts]”. A week later, the phrase “combating profiteering” was also added to the Cheka’s mission.

The decree forming the Cheka was broadly worded and contained few specific instructions about how it should operate. Lenin preferred to leave the group’s operational details and methods to the man he chose to lead it: Felix Dzerzhinksy.

Given a virtual blank cheque by Lenin, Dzerzhinsky ordered the recruitment of thousands of new agents. He also organised Cheka paramilitary units, which by the autumn of 1918 numbered 33 battalions and more than 20,000 men. By 1919, the Cheka employed more than 100,000 people and was one of the largest and best-funded agencies in the fledgling Soviet state.

Unbound by the law

During its four-year lifespan, the Cheka carried out arrests, interrogations, executions and campaigns entirely of its own accord. Dzerzhinsky was technically accountable to the Soviet executive, Sovnarkom, but only reported Cheka operations after they had taken place.

In 1918, the Cheka came into conflict with the Commissariat of Justice, which demanded to be notified before the arrest of suspects. This infuriated Dzerzhinsky, who queried how it was possible for him to “crush counter-revolution with legal niceties”. Lenin subsequently altered Soviet regulations so the Cheka was only required to notify the Commissariat of an arrest or execution after it had happened, not before.

From that point, the Cheka was never restricted by the rule of law or any obligation to due process or the rights of suspects. Chekists operated as investigators, arresting authorities, interrogators, prosecutors, judges, juries and executioners.

Methods of torture

Cheka agents also developed inventive but ghastly means of torture and psychological torment to extract information from suspects, and possibly create a public deterrent. Written records of these methods were generally not kept, so they are only anecdotally known and likely exaggerated.

According to historian Edward Peters, some of the torture methods employed by the Cheka included beating, burning, branding and scalping. Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes that some Cheka victims were force-fed large amounts of salted fish but prevented from drinking water. Other Cheka methods are described by historian Orlando Figes in his 1996 book, A People’s Tragedy:

“The ingenuity of the Cheka’s torture methods was matched only by the Spanish Inquisition. Each local Cheka had its own speciality. In Kharkov they went in for the ‘glove trick’ – burning the victim’s hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off: this left the victims with raw and bleeding hands and their torturers with ‘human gloves’. The Tsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims’ bones in half. In Voronezh, they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels. In Armavir, they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head. In Kiev, they affixed a cage with rats to the victim’s torso and heated it so that the enraged rats ate their way through the victim’s guts in an effort to escape. In Odessa, they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water. A favourite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living ice statues.”

Dzerzhinsky neither denied nor retreated from the Cheka’s brutal role, declaring that “we stand for organised terror, terror being absolutely indispensable in the current revolutionary conditions”.*

Over the years, the newest russian dictator, vladimir putin, has made no secret of his desire to recreate this evil empire. Its first victim is, of course, Ukraine. Remember that in the kremlin, there still lies Lenin, the original devil of Bolshevism, nauseatingly and seedily embalmed to be honored to this very day by russians. And so is the other devil being honored again, called Josef Stalin, the mass slaughterer who surpassed even Adolf Hitler in creating millions of skeletons. Like the current vampire in charge, both devils had a special hate for Ukraine and were not shy to abuse the country to quench their thirst for human blood. Lenin’s tool for this was the Cheka, Stalin’s was the spawn of the Cheka called the NKVD, and for putin, it’s the FSB and his entire military.

Wanting good relations with this country, this regime, this personification of evil, is the same as wanting good relations with Nazi Germany, or any other of history’s evil empires … or the devil himself. Either, Trump and his collection of clowns are totally oblivious to what today’s russia embodies, or they know it and just don’t care. Choose, which is worse.

What is honor? What is righteousness? What is dignity? What is compassion? What is integrity? Does the President of the United States know these virtues? Does he possess any of them? How can he not, having been elected as the leader of our once great nation? Yet, in the very office that represents our nation, Trump had treated the representative of a nation fighting for its very survival as a serf, attacking him like a junkyard dog, turning this highest office into a schoolyard sandbox. He and his two-faced vice president, Vance, acted like filthy bullies, throwing sand at the little kid. Concurrently, Trump always treats the dictator of the russian terrorist federation as a good friend.

With dismay, I, and every other ethical human being, must accept the truth that the current POTUS has sided with and befriended a very dark wraith, the offspring of the Cheka. Ukraine is now suffering the third attempt of genocide at the hands of russia. This should be more than enough reason why it wants no part of this bloodthirsty terrorist. Ever again.

** Taken from Alpha History https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/cheka/