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| | Stalin and his Hangmen - BooksReviews - www.theage.com.au |
 | | This is a harrowing account, occasionally painful to read, of a time when "terror" was a daily reality rather than a political buzzword worn hollow. |
 | | Rayfield's approach is to analyse the relationships between Stalin and Feliks Dzierzynski, Viacheslav Mezkhnisky, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov and Lavrenti Beria - the chiefs, consecutively, of Russia's security services. |
 | | Yet referring to the Cheka and its successors, the OGPU, NKVD and KGB, as "security services" at all is almost to collude, because by all accounts they secured only Stalin, never his country. |
| www.theage.com.au /articles/2004/06/23/1087845001778.html?oneclick=true (751 words) |
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