I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
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Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
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...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT LENIN'S CORPSE and other hitherto NKVD secrets of WWII. Great stuff revealed from the NKVD files, and reviewed at the CIA's "Studies In Intelligence."
This is the third in a series of historical monographs based on declassified documents from the Central Archive of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the KGB. The other two books, Stalingrad Epoch and The Agony and Death of Adolf Hitler, were published in 2000, although neither has yet appeared in English.1 Vasilii Khristoforov, chief editor and coauthor of the introductory essay, is chief of the FSB's archival services.2
All three books address the history of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs during World War II and cast the infamous NKVD in a patriotic and heroic light—no mean task, since it was the most murderous secret-police apparatus in modern history.
[...]
Lubyanka in the Days of the Battle for Moscow documents the NKVD's part in staving off Hitler's attempt to capture Moscow during October-November 1941 and subjugate the Soviet Union. The story has been told only once in English—in 1994, in Pavel Sudoplatov's controversial Special Tasks3—and is not well known even in Russia. The Khristoforov collection substantiates and expands on Sudoplatov's admittedly biased account.
[...]
The title page teaser is enough to summarize the contents and whet the historian's appetite. It reads:
From declassified documents of the FBS RF:7
Camouflaging the Kremlin
Evacuation of Lenin's Corpse
Mining of Key Sites and Organization of the Underground
Creation of Military Counterintelligence and Behind-the-Lines Groups
Letters from Soldiers of the RKKA8 and the Wehrmacht
[...] On the night of 15-16 October, the government evacuated to Kuibyshev (Samara) east of the Urals, which became the temporary Soviet capital. Stalin deliberated for 24 hours and then decided to remain in Moscow.
[...]
The most important evacuee was already dead. On 26 June, the Politburo decided to remove Lenin's corpse, which had been on public display for 17 years in a mammoth red granite mausoleum in Red Square, and ship it in a special paraffin-sealed coffin on board an NKVD-guarded "fast" train to Tyumen, a west Siberia town small enough and distant enough to keep Vladimir Ilich (or what was left of him) safe from Luftwaffe bombers.
Lenin did not make the trip alone. The NKVD moved an entire laboratory and a group of scientists headed by a father-and-son team of embalming specialists to Tyumen.9 The scientists spent the rest of the war surrounded with chemicals and refrigeration equipment and worked on "re-embalming" the corpse, which had fallen into disrepair. Several documents deal with this bizarre episode.
Stalin's Potemkin Village
Deception (maskirovka) is a Russian specialty that dates at least to the time of Count Potemkin and his eponymous village. Because of certain natural and man-made landmarks in the Moscow area, the Soviets decided that Luftwaffe pilots would not have much trouble finding key targets. The NKVD appointed two special commissions to determine ways to camouflage the Kremlin and the Lenin Mausoleum, among other sites. The Kremlin's walls were repainted to look like house fronts, and major roads were made to look like rooftops. The Soviets disguised key factories and built phony ones out of wood and cardboard. The Lenin mausoleum was sandbagged and covered with netting.
[...]
The documents reveal that Stalin was prepared to destroy Moscow to deny it to Hitler, just as Alexander I had denied the city to Napoleon by ordering its destruction in 1812. The French emperor had hoped to replenish his army with grain, gunpowder, and ammunition. Instead, he found a smoldering ruin, a ghost town that had been burned to the ground. Still, Napoleon lingered for a month, expecting the Russian emperor to sue for peace. He was disappointed. Hitler evidently learned nothing from Bonaparte's experience and might have repeated the same scenario if his forces had taken Moscow.
In 1812, Moscow was a city of wood, and Muscovites were able to destroy it by setting fires. In 1941, the situation was more complicated. A new NKVD special operations force called OMSBON (Independent Motorized Brigade for Special Operations) was formed in October 1941. It was the only unit with the technicians and explosives needed to mine the city's most famous sites, including the Kremlin, the orchestra pit of the Bolshoi Theater, the Metropole and National hotels, the Cathedral of the Epiphany, the residence of the Soviet foreign minister, the Foreign Ministry building, and the dachas (country houses) of all Soviet leaders except Stalin, who was afraid that the explosives might be used against him.11 Plans were made to destroy Moscow's telephone system, its water supply, and its power stations, as well as other parts of the urban infrastructure, which would have made the city all but uninhabitable.
The reviewer takes no note, but I will point out that Iraq was a client state of the Soviet Union for many years, armed by the USSR, and many Iraqis trained in the Soviet Union; the KGB had many contacts with the Mukharabat; surely some tutelage and training was involved. I'll come back to this.
[...] During the major battle of October-November 1941, NKVD special forces mined 70 kilometers of highways and 19 bridges, planted 12,000 anti-tank and 8,000 anti-personnel mines, and set 160 large explosive charges in strategic positions. They also blew up sections of the Leningrad highway and a major bridge across the Moscow River to slow the German advance.
While preparing to defend the city sector-by-sector with elaborate combat plans, NKVD forces also geared up for the worst. They organized two autonomous underground networks to wage urban guerrilla warfare, terrorist attacks, and assassinations in the event the Germans captured and occupied Moscow. The combatants (called podpol'shchiki, literally "undergrounders") were recruited from the ranks of loyal communists with experience in special operations during the Russian and Spanish civil wars.12 The NKVD established fixed and mobile radio stations, both to communicate with the guerrillas and to broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda. Members of the "illegal" rezidenturas (intelligence stations) were given operational legends and false documents and were assigned to jobs from which they could conduct sabotage and assassinations. For example, an NKVD officer received false documents and was assigned as chief of water and sewage systems in the Moscow suburb where Stalin's dacha was located. Had the Germans occupied the city, he would have run sabotage operations, using agents hidden in water and sewage tunnels.
My point should be obvious now; think the Mukharabat learned anything from the KGB (successor to the NKVD, of course)?
The NKVD recruited many artists and performers, including ballet dancers and even circus jugglers and acrobats, and armed them with weapons and grenades on the assumption that they could get close enough to German officers and soldiers to kill them. A special case was that of composer Lev Knipper and his wife, Margareta. Knipper was related to a well-known Russian actress living in Berlin, who was a favorite of Nazi bigwigs, including Hitler's air minister, Hermann Göring. If the Nazis won, and Hitler decided to come to Moscow on a victory tour like the one he made to Paris after conquering France, the NKVD reckoned that he might pay the Knippers a (fatal) visit. The Knippers kept grenades close at hand for an opportunity that never presented itself.
[...]
One of the most dramatic events in Soviet history was the 7 November 1941 military parade in Red Square on the USSR's national holiday. Stalin was determined to hold the event, even though some German forces were so close that they could see the spires of the Kremlin. It was a bold act of national defiance.13
[I insert the footnote: 13. The situation was so tense that the traditional 6 November Kremlin reception was held underground in a Moscow subway station instead of at the Bolshoi Theater.]
The NKVD provided security for the extraordinary celebration, and OMSBON detachments marched along with regular army officers and soldiers—an indication of their high standing at the time. The assembled troops passed by the Lenin Mausoleum, which had been decamouflaged for the day. Stalin, the Politburo, and the high command saluted the passing troops from the reviewing stand as they proceeded directly to the nearby front.
Between 1945 and 1995, more than 5,000 books on World War II were published in the Soviet Union. Only a handful make reference to the NKVD or its spin-off wartime special military counterintelligence unit, SMERSH ("death to spies"). The NKVD, to be sure, had a good war. Members of the Fourth Department (special operations) and OMSBON were the most highly decorated units of the Battle of Moscow. They killed 137,000 German officers and soldiers, assassinated 87 high-ranking officials through terrorist acts, and liquidated more than 2,000 Nazi agents and collaborators. They claimed destruction of 30 enemy tanks, 20 armored vehicles, 68 troop carriers, 19 light vehicles with officers, and 53 motorcyclists. And they dispatched 212 guerilla units behind enemy lines; sent 7,316 of their own officers, trained technicians, and saboteurs to the Red Army; and parachuted 3,000 guerillas behind enemy lines.
So why have Soviet historians ignored the NKVD? The main reason is its association with Stalin's massive crimes.
[...]
The Soviet military establishment, which dominated the writing of World War II history, had a special animus toward the NKVD. Stalin encouraged rivalry between the two institutions as a way of keeping potential opposition forces weak and divided. Rivalry turned into a blood feud during the Great Terror of 1936-37. The NKVD arrested and tortured 45,000 Red Army officers and soldiers, wiping out the high command and much of the senior officer corps—15,000 were executed. Even when the enemy was at the gates of Moscow, the NKVD kept on torturing and killing members of the armed forces. The most senior officers were transported from Lubyanka by trains heading east in mid-October. The others, at least 300, were shot because there was no space for them on the trains.
I've left out a lot of interesting stuff here. But here's a bit from a sidebar on how so much of this was unknown until now:
OMSBON
The mere existence of the wartime NKVD special operations detachments remained classified during the Cold War. All omsbonovtsevi took a secrecy oath. The first veterans to acknowledge their wartime activities did not do so until 1994, and then only in the Western press.
And an extremely important point: why has this been leaked now? 2+2: what is the personal employment history of the present leader of Russia?
In this connection, it is interesting to note that the FSB recently organized a special exhibit to honor SMERSH, the wartime military counterintelligence organization, which, if possible during its brief existence (1943-46), was more fearsome than the NKVD. Is any of this accidental in a country where, according to a recent poll, more than half the population believes that Stalin was a positive figure in Russian history; in a country that has little reason to be optimistic about the future and therefore looks to its sole past glory (the defeat of the Nazi juggernaut); in a country governed by a former KGB officer whose grandfather was one of Stalin's chefs? One wonders.
Indeed. Comforting, isn't it?
But we should definitely follow Vladimir Putin's endorsement of George Bush for President; his preferences are almost as important as those of Iran!
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