Reference Library
Three Yezhov Documents of 1937
Korean translation of three documents issued under Yezhov's name during the Great Terror: the stenographic record of his report to the February-March 1937 Central Committee plenum, the NKVD secret letter on the “Polish Military Organization” that underpinned the Polish operation, and an excerpt from his special report to Stalin tallying the arrests of churchmen and sectarians. The operational orders circulated alongside it are collected in a separate document.
Read the full text → Intelligence & investigation recordsFrinovsky's Statement to Beria (April 11, 1939)
Full text of the confession statement that Frinovsky, First Deputy People's Commissar of the NKVD, submitted to Beria after his arrest: the doctoring of interrogation records, rehearsed confrontations, and the conduct of the mass operations, described by their executor. Stalin's marginal notes are included as source-editor annotations.
Read the full text → Intelligence & investigation recordsInterrogations of Nikolai Yezhov (1939-1940)
Korean translation of Grover Furr's compilation of every published text from the Yezhov investigation, April 1939 to February 1940: interrogation records, confessions and confrontations, with Furr's editorial notes, Pavlyukov's summaries, the full April 26 and August 4 protocols, the last words at trial with textual apparatus, and the 1998 rehabilitation review, all in one document. Frinovsky's statement is a separate document.
Read the full text → Intelligence & investigation recordsCIA ORE 29-48, 'Possible Program of Future Soviet Moves in Germany' (1948)
The CIA Office of Reports and Estimates' assessment of 28 April 1948, two months before the Berlin blockade. It reads the March walkout from the Allied Control Council and the interference with Berlin traffic as the first steps of a program already under way: a Soviet-zone government through the People's Congress, the abolition of the Control Council, the Western Powers forced out of Berlin, a German army under Soviet 'protection', and pressure on Western Germany to 'rejoin the Reich', each step feasible, in its judgment, without military force.
Read the full text → Intelligence & investigation recordsThe Poznań Rising in the CIA Current Intelligence Bulletin (1956)
The Poznań items of the CIA Current Intelligence Bulletin of 29 and 30 June 1956, the day after the workers' rising and the day after that. The first reports how a protest over wages and food turned into a political demonstration that tore down Soviet flags, and the use of tanks; the second sets the regime's admission of 38 dead and 270 wounded beside the East German rising of 1953 and judges that the riots will slow the 'liberalization' program.
Read the full text → Intelligence & investigation recordsAmbassador Kohler's Telegram 1183 on the Fall of Khrushchev (1964)
The analytical telegram Ambassador Foy Kohler sent from Moscow four days after Khrushchev's removal: the irony that the principle Khrushchev himself established, the Central Committee as custodian of power, was used to remove him; a leadership arrangement that invites conspiracy by a few Presidium members; and the prospect that Brezhnev now faces the same pitfalls, in five points.
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