Cheka

At first the commission had a few dozen staff and narrow tasks: fighting counter-revolution and sabotage by officials. It soon acquired, without any legal basis, the power to arrest, interrogate and shoot without trial, to take hostages and to hold people in camps. In March 1918 it moved to Moscow with the government, and in 1918 speculation and abuse of office were added to its name. It was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, a revolutionary from a Polish gentry family.

After the murder of the German envoy Mirbach in July 1918 the Cheka crushed the rising of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. After the attempt on Lenin's life, the Council of People's Commissars' resolution on the Red Terror of 5 September 1918 gave it the right to carry out mass executions of "class enemies". The Cheka's own figures give just under 13,000 people shot in 1918–1920, but historians put its victims at tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand. In 1922 it was renamed the GPU; its successors were the OGPU, the NKVD and the KGB.