Chekism

Chekism (Russian: Чекизм) is a term that relates to the situation in the Soviet Union where the secret police strongly controlled all spheres of society.

[1][2][3] The term can refer to the system of rule itself, and to the underlying ideology that promotes and popularizes political police violence and arbitrariness against real and imagined enemies of the state.

Chekism is described as a product of the set of beliefs, practices, and assumptions in the security police introduced and developed for more than a decade by Felix Dzerzhinsky.

In his book "Getting rid of the KGB", published in 1992, he described the origin and meaning of Chekism as follows: The system of suppression established after the October Revolution carried from its first steps the rapidly growing germ of permissiveness and immorality that was justified by revolutionary purposefulness ...

By carrying out arrests, investigations, sentences, executions, and mass shootings of "hostages" with the sanction of the Party at its own discretion, the Cheka elevated terror and lawlessness to the category of state policy.

From that time of revolutionary arbitrariness originated the particular ideology of "Chekism", which has been polished and licked clean by subsequent generations of Communist Party ideologists and publicists parasitising on "criminal-patriotic" romance.

[6]According to former Russian Duma member Konstantin Borovoi, "[Vladimir] Putin's appointment is the culmination of the KGB's crusade for power.

"[7] Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Elites, has found that up to 78% of 1,016 leading political figures in Russia have served previously in organizations affiliated with the KGB or FSB.

[10] Soon after becoming prime minister of Russia, Putin also perhaps somewhat jokingly claimed that "A group of FSB colleagues dispatched to work undercover in the government has successfully completed its first mission.

[8] Moreover, the FSB leadership and their partners own the most important economic assets in the country and control the Russian government and the State Duma.

They have custody of the country’s 6,000 nuclear weapons, entrusted to the KGB in the 1950s, and they now also manage the strategic oil industry renationalized by Putin.

The KGB successor, rechristened FSB, still has the right to electronically monitor the population, control political groups, search homes and businesses, infiltrate the federal government, create its own front enterprises, investigate cases, and run its own prison system.

And hanged on it.”[24] Political scientist Yevgenia Albats found such attitudes deplorable: "Throughout the country, without investigation or trial, the Chekists [of an earlier generation] raged.

They impaled people, beat them with an iron glove, put wet leather 'crowns' on their heads, buried them alive, locked them in cells where the floor was covered with corpses.