Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

It didn’t take long for the Council of People’s Commissars to start a secret political police force, called the Cheka, led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, whose statue was in the courtyard of the KGB’s Lubyanka Center in 1975. The main power that was given to the new secret police was the right to hold trials outside the normal judicial system. The Cheka was also empowered to execute anyone it found guilty. No appeals. No second chances. No defense attorneys. No writs of habeas corpus. All of it to protect the revolution.

Over the coming years the Cheka’s name was changed to the GPU, the OGPU, the NKGB, the NKVD, and finally the Komitet Gosudarstvennov Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security, the KGB. But each of these organizations was charged with doing the same things: finding the bad guys, giving them a down-and-dirty trial in secret, and either sending them to a gulag or giving them what was called their nine ounces or, sometimes, their Russian insurance, which was a 9mm bullet to the back of the head at contact or near-contact range.

Over the history of the Chekas and the KGBs, untold millions of Russians—civilians and military—plus a lot of foreign citizens were stalked, surveilled, arrested, and tried by what were called troikas, or triplets, which were special courts-martial in which three judges, but no jury, listened to the one-sided evidence and passed judgment, very often within minutes.

Witnesses and informers did not have to show up in court to offer their testimony. Most of the time they weren’t even named.

The accused was very often persuaded through his KGB interrogators to cooperate with the court and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

All of this was legal under Soviet law, to protect the revolution and later the state from what were called public enemies.

Thousands of mass graves have been found across the Soviet Union, some of the graves containing the bodies of more than one thousand public enemies, each of them with the same wound, a bullet to the back of the head. That’s not counting the untold millions killed by the military or the militia on Moscow’s orders. These are just the known graves of the KGB’s victims.

At one point quotas were established specifiying the number of people who were to be arrested, tried, and executed by the KGB. The public enemies were divided into categories, each with its own quota: former members of the royal familes, clergy, military officers, or Ukranians, Germans, and Tatars. Most often the quotas included the children and entire familes of the accused, under what was called NKVD Order 00486.

Very often a purge would have to be organized in order to fill a quota, decided by the Politburo of the Comunist Party in Moscow. For a time engineers became suspect and thousands were arrested and tried and got their nine ounces. It was the so-called Shakhty Case.

Another time it was medical people who were purged in what was called the Doctors’ Plot.

Or it would be military officers who might have begun to think they were better than everyone else, and might have thought about overthrowing Stalin’s government. This was just before the start of WWII and the vast number of capable officers who got their Russian insurance seriously hurt the Soviet military’s ability to fight back.

But there was some poetic justice even in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s regime when the officers of the NKVD—the executioners themselves—were purged and executed by the tens of thousands. The bells surely rang in Moscow on those days.

And it wasn’t just inside the Soviet Union where executions took place. During the Spanish Civil War the NKVD set up a dozen or more secret prisons in and around Madrid to try and then murder enemies of the state.

Until the treaty between Hitler and Stalin went south at the beginning of WWII the NKVD regularly turned over enemies of the state to the Gestapo, and the Germans very often returned the favor, especially in Poland.

Probably the worst of the KGB executions occurred during the winter of 1932-33 in the Ukraine, where Stalin forced millions of independent farmers, called kulaks, into collectives. It was the new Soviet way of doing business. The kulaks objected, so Stalin sent twenty-five thousand Party militants to bring the 10 million farmers into line, executing the tens of thousands who disagreed by shooting them in the back of the head.

But murder on such a vast scale was too slow, so Stalin ordered that in addition to meting out Russian insurance he would take away all the food. All grain, silage, seeds, and farm animals were trucked off. Secret service agents, with the help of the army, sealed off all the roads and rail lines so that not one scrap of anything edible could get in.