Times Online - WBLG: The Top 10 KGB operatives
Excerpt: Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve
Vyacheslav Konstantinovich was head of the Okhrana, the Tsars' state security outfit, from 1881 to 1904.
Solzhenitsyn ironically mocks his soft-heartedness, his squeamishness about 'perlustration' (the ungentlemanly practice of opening other people's mail) and the pitifully small number of people he sent to Siberia.
Perhaps for these reasons, the institution he once led signally failed in 1917 - a lesson not lost on Lenin and his successors.
Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky
Though not strictly a Russian secret policeman, it is impossible to omit this austere Pole, who was the founding father of the modern Russian state security apparatus.
An intimate associate of Lenin, he was a Jesuitical ideologue who believed that their revolutionary ends had the historical, even the eschatological, importance to justify any means.
Though he died in 1926, the influence of Iron Feliks echoed on throughout the Soviet period.
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Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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