The Communist secret police, which underwent many name changes, including Cheka, OGPU, GPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, and KGB, was the most feared police agency in the history of the world, having imprisoned, tortured, or murdered more than 40 million Russians and Eastern Europeans. Even the more conservative Soviet historians of the 1960s were placing the number of murdered at about 35 to 40 million - figures that do not include the millions more who were dispossessed, imprisoned, exiled, tortured, and displaced. Nobel Prizewinner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his opus, The Gulag Archipelago, using the research of a Soviet statistician who had access to secret government files, I. A. Kurganov, estimated that between 1918 and 1959, at least 66 million died at the hands of the Communist rulers of Russia. In Gulag Archipelago II, Solzhenitsyn affirms that Jews created and administered the organized Soviet concentration-camp system in which tens of millions died. Pictured on page 79 of the Gulag Archipelago II are the leading administrators of the greatest killing machine in the history of the world.¹ They are Aron Solts, Yakov Rappoport, Lazar Kogan, Matvei Berman, Genrikh Yagoda, and Naftaly Frenkel. All six are Jews.

Interestingly, though, during this period of murder and mayhem, Jews were a protected class, so much so that the Communist Party took the unprecedented step of making expressions of anti-Semitism a counter-revolutionary offense, and thus punishable by death.²

The Jewish Voice in January, 1942, stated: "The Jewish people will never forget that the Soviet Union was the first country — and as yet the only country in the world — in which anti-Semitism is a crime."³ The Congress Bulletin (Publication of the American Jewish Congress) stated:^{4 5 6}

Anti-Semitism was classed as counter-revolution and the severe punishments meted out for acts of anti-Semitism were the means by which the existing order protected its own safety.

The Russian Penal Codes of 1922 and 1927 even went so far as to make anti-Semitism punishable by death. The book Soviet Russia and the Jews by Gregor Aronson and published by the American Jewish League Against Communism (1949 NY) quotes Stalin remarking on the policy in an interview in 1931 with the Jewish Telegraph Agency:

...Communists cannot be anything but outspoken enemies of anti-Semitism. We fight anti-Semites by the strongest methods in the Soviet Union. Active Anti-Semites are punished by death under law. ⁷