The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police; The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (December 1917 to February 1922)

New York: Clarendon, Oxford University Press, 1986. Reprinted with corrections (new as paperback) 1986. Trade paperback. Very good. xxxv, [1], 514, [10] pages. Cover has minor wear and soiling. Ink notation on half-title page. Very scarce. Preferred edition due to corrections. Preface to First Edition, Foreword, Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations; Prologue; Epilogue; Notes; Appendix A: Chronology; Appendix B: Biographical Notes; and Appendix C: Deaths Attributable to the Chekas. Also includes Bibliography and Index Includes chapters on The Origin and Foundation of the Vecheka; Organizational Development, Phase 1: Improvisation; Lenin, the Lars, Terror, an Revolutionary Justice; The Left Socialist Revolutionary Rising; Organizational Development, Phase II: Consolidation; The Red Terror Erupts; State within State: Vecheka versus NKVD and Judiciary; The Party, Lenin, and the Vecheka; Revolutionary Justice: The Machinery of Repression; Organizational Development, Phase III: Proliferation; Vecheka Versatility under Dzerzhinsky; Dzerzhinsky and His Chekists; Combating Conspiracies; Civil Liberties, Socialist Opposition, and Peasant Rebellion; and From Vecheka to GPU. Established by Lenin just six weeks after the coup of October 1917, the Cheka was Soviet Russia's first political police organization. This closely documented study chronicles its emergence as a vast, ubiquitous, and all-purpose apparatus for the suppression of internal opposition. Answerable solely to the Central Committee of the Communist party as its "special organ of merciless summary justice", aspiring to security surveillance over the whole of society, the Cheka set the scene for the totalitarian police state of the twentieth century. This paperback edition is reprinted, with corrections and some added material, from the hardback published by the Clarendon Press in 1981.