20 The Intourist employees were the regular police and border guards of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, more commonly known as NKVD. The Cheka (Extraordinary Commission), a Russian State security agency established and organized by Stalin in 1917 to combat counter-revolution and sabotage, was succeeded by the State Political Administration (GPU) in 1922, which in turn was reorganized in 1934 as the NKVD. In 1946, the NKVD and the NKGB (a separate unit of the NKVD) were renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Security, respectively. In 1954, they were combined into the present-day KGB (or the Committee of State Security), a group that was finally dissolved in 1991 (Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalin, 652, 657–58, and 878).

21 Traditional anti-Semitism, honed by Stalin over many years, was seen by his successors as a fundamental element of the Russian psyche (Shlapentokh, “Putin’s Jewish Anomaly Comes as a Surprise”). During Stalin’s reign, anti-Semitism was introduced as official Soviet state ideology. However in the late 1930s, during Stalin’s Great Purge—that saw the execution of more than half a million Soviet citizens, including almost all of the Bolsheviks who played an important role in the Russian Revolution—neither ethnic nor religious Jews were targeted. But in 1939, after Germany and Russia signed the friendship pact, Stalin handed over a large group of German antifascists and Jews who had fled the Gestapo to the Soviet Union (Lewis, “Why Russian Jews Are Not Russian”; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 435).

22 The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was indeed a battlefield for clashing ideologies, in effect a dress rehearsal for World War II. Spain’s Republican Coalition, which had come to power 1931, was under attack from both communists and fascists and in the general election of February 1936, the communist-influenced Popular Front, an electoral coalition, swept into power. Both Hitler and Mussolini backed Franco, the leader of the party, while Stalin supported the Republic, saying, “The liberation of Spain from the oppression of fascist reactionaries is not the private affair of the Spaniards but the common cause of all advanced and progressive mankind” (quoted in Crozier, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 53–58).