The Rise of Communism in Russia "Unless we accept the claim that Lenin's coup d'etat gave birth to an entirely new state, and indeed to a new era in the history of mankind, we must recognize in today's Soviet Union the old empire of the Russians -- the only empire that survived into the mid 1980's" (Luttwak, 1). In their Communist Manifesto of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels applied the term communism to a final stage …showed first 75 words of 2121 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2121 total…of unlimited arrest and summary execution of suspects and hostages. The principle of such police surveillance over the political leanings of the Soviet population has remained in effect ever since, despite the varying intensity of repression and the organizational changes of the police -- from Cheka to GPU (The State Political Administration) to NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) to MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) to the now well-known KGB (Committee for State Security) (Pipes, 140).