UNDER THE UNIFORM OF TERROR – Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MGB. 1917–1953

Drawing on the best sources currently available, the author presents for the first time a fully illustrated panorama of the Soviet repressive apparatus, from Lenin to Khrushchev, from the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 to the surprising rehabilitations generated by the denunciation of the "excesses of the cult of personality" in 1956.

This book takes us to the heart of the Soviet system, where rewards, privileges, bonuses, and medals reflect both the splendour and the wretchedness of its political police. It dissects the structures and workings of the "human mincing machine", revealing the actions and fates of the architects and craftsmen of terror. More than 600 photographs, most of them unknown to the general public, are here captioned to illustrate previously unpublished organisational charts, insignia, and documents never before disclosed.

The specific attributes of the secret police thus give us full access to the inner workings of the USSR's security "organs".

The author, a university lecturer in Geneva in the 1980s and press attaché in Moscow after the break-up of the USSR, Gaston Erlom spent twenty-five years gathering largely unpublished documents on the security apparatus of the Soviet Union. This work, which complements and illustrates his earlier research published in Au Goulag ! La police politique dans les camps sous Lénine et Staline, published by Histoire & Collections, now brings it all together in a single synthesis.