What torture technique did the successor of the Cheka agency use?
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Tean zu Tean zu () is one technique of torture that was used in ancient China. For interrogation of female suspects without threatening life or limb, zánzhǐ was generally applied. It consisted of a set of six wooden sticks positioned around and between the fingers and connected by strings. Each time the prisoner refused to testify or confess, the string was pulled, slowly, agonisingly squeezing the fingers between the sticks until their bones were crushed. The Soviet KGB used a variant of this for crushing fingers or toes. The kia quen, a similar device applied exclusively to men, was used to crush the feet or ankles.
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KGB The KGB, an initialism for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Russian: "Комите́т Госуда́рственной Безопа́сности" ("КГБ") ; ] ), translated in English as Committee for State Security, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until its break-up in 1991, as a direct successor of such preceding agencies as Cheka, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, a committee was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", acting as internal security, intelligence and secret police. Similar agencies were constituted in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from Russia, and consisted of many ministries, state committees and state commissions.
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Operation Kufire Operation Kufire was a program that sought to identify and track all communist party members who had flocked to Guatemala during the Arbenz regime. "Via Kufire, the CIA was intent on charting their movements and monitoring or frustrating their machinations." This operation introduced the CIA to Ernesto "Che" Guevara and one member of the CIA team was unsure as to whether it was even necessary to open a file and track Guevara's movements. Ultimately, operation Kufire signified the fear that communism would spread throughout Latin American. Furthermore, it feared a domino effect, whereby if one nation in America were to fall to communism, then it was likely that others would follow. Operation Kufire was intended to safeguard against any further communist uprisings and to track the activities of known communists throughout all America.
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Zura Barayeva Zura Barayeva (died October 26, 2002) was the widow of Arbi Barayev, a notorious Chechen warlord. She was killed during the Moscow theater hostage crisis in October 2002, in which she headed a female unit.
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Taganka Prison Taganka Prison (Russian: Таганская тюрьма) was built in Moscow in 1804 by Alexander I, emperor of Russia. It gained notoriety for its use as a prison for political prisoners, both by the ruling tsars and during the years of the Soviet Union, by the Communist Party. During the Great Purge, the prison housed foreign enemies of the state, such as the German communist, Gustav Sobottka, Jr., as well as Russians. The prison became immortalized in poems and songs dating from before the October Revolution in 1918. The prison was razed in the 1950s.
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Semyon Gendin Semyon Gendin (1902 – February 23, 1939) was head of the was the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Army General Staff of the Soviet Union. He served in the Cheka, the Joint State Political Directorate and NKVD. His rank was equivalent to that of a Soviet Red Army Komdiv (division commander). He was a recipient of the Order of Lenin (1937), the Order of the Red Banner (1927, 1938) and the Jubilee Medal "XX Years of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army" (1938). During the Great Purge, he was arrested on October 22, 1938, sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on February 22, 1939 and executed the next day.
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Mikhail Tukhachevsky Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky (Russian: Михаи́л Никола́евич Тухаче́вский ; February 16 [O.S. February 4] 1893  – June 12, 1937) was a leading Soviet military leader and theoretician from 1918 to 1937. He commanded the Soviet Western Front in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920–1921 and served as chief of staff of the Red Army from 1925 through 1928, as assistant in the People's Commissariat of Defense after 1934 and as commander of the Volga Military District in 1937. He contributed to the modernization of Soviet armament and army force structure in the 1920s and 1930s and became instrumental in the development of aviation, mechanized, and airborne forces. As a theoretician, he was a driving force behind Soviet development of the theory of deep operations. The Soviet authorities accused him of treason and had him shot during the military purges of 1937–1938, but rehabilitated his reputation in the 1960s.
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Mam Nai Mam Nai or Mam Nay, "nom de guerre" Comrade Chan is a war criminal and former lieutenant of Santebal, the internal security branch of the Khmer Rouge communist movement, which ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979. He was the leader of the interrogation unit at Tuol Sleng (S-21), assisting Kang Kek Iew (Comrade Duch), the head of the camp where thousands were held for interrogation, torture and subsequent killing.
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Walling Walling is a method of torture used by the CIA in which a person's neck is encircled by a collar, and the collar then used to slam the person against a wall. According to information gathered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from six detainees, "walling" meant "beating by use of a collar", in at least one instance against a concrete wall.
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Project ARTICHOKE Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence.
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Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov (Russian: Николай Иванович Кузнецов ) (July 27, 1911–March 9, 1944) was a semi-legendary Soviet intelligence agent and partisan who operated in Nazi-occupied Ukraine (Reichskommissariat Ukraine) during World War II who personally killed six high-ranking German officials. His file is still not fully disclosed and will be held until 2025 in the FSB archives. It was not until 1990 that Kuznetsov was officially recognized as a NKVD agent. He used several pseudonyms during his intelligence operations: e.g. Rudolf Schmidt, Nikolai Vasilevitsh Grachev (Николай Васильевич Грачёв) and Oberleutnant Paul Siebert. Kuznetsov was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.
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Unit of Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture The Unit of Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture (URVT) has operated in Cyprus since 2005.
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Ruslan Gelayev Ruslan (Hamzat) Gelayev (Russian: Руслан (Хамзат) Гелаев ) (1964 – February 28, 2004) was a prominent commander in the Chechen separatist movement against Russia, in which he played a significant, yet controversial, military and political role in the 1990s and early 2000s. Gelayev was commonly viewed as an "abrek" and a well-respected, ruthless fighter. His operations spread well beyond the borders of Chechnya and even outside the Russian Federation and into Georgia. He was killed while leading a raid into the Russian republic of Dagestan in 2004.
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Mikheyev v. Russia Mikheyev v. Russia was a 2006 court case involving Alexey Mikheyev and the Russian Federation. The case became notable as "the first serious victory in a case of torture" brought to the European Court of Human Rights against Russian government. The case was brought forward by Russian NGO Committee Against Torture.
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MVD special camp MVD Special camps of the Gulag (Russian: Особые лагеря МВД, особлаги , "osobye lagerya", osoblags) was a system of labor camps established addressing the February 21, 1948 decree 416—159сс of the USSR Council of Ministers by the February 28 decree 00219 of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs exclusively for a "special contingent" of political prisoners, convicted according to the more severe sub-articles of Article 58: treason, espionage, terrorism, etc., for various real political opponents, such as Trotskyites, "nationalists", white émigré, as well as for fabricated ones.
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U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals The U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals are seven controversial military training manuals which were declassified by the Pentagon in 1996. In 1997, two additional CIA manuals were declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by "The Baltimore Sun". The manuals in question have been referred to by various media sources as the "torture manuals".
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Wooden horse (device) A wooden horse, Spanish donkey or cavaletto squarciapalle, is a torture device, of which there exist two variations; both inflict pain by using the subject's own weight by keeping the legs open, tied with ropes from above, while lowering down the subject. The French called this instrument the Chevalet, from the French diminutive of "cheval", horse.
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Psikhushka Psikhushka (Russian: психу́шка ; ] ) is a Russian ironic diminutive for psychiatric hospital. In Russia, the word entered everyday vocabulary. This word has been occasionally used in English, since the Soviet dissident movement and diaspora community the West used the term. In the Soviet Union, psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons, in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. As such, psikhushkas were considered a form of torture. The official explanation was that no sane person would be against socialism.
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Cheka Cheka (Russian: ЧК ; ] ) was the initialism for the first of a succession of Soviet secret police organizations. Established on December 20, 1917 by a decree from Vladimir Lenin, it came under the leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat-turned-communist. By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had sprung up in various cities at the oblast, guberniya, raion, uyezd, and volost levels.
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Pavel Bulanov Pavel Petrovich Bulanov (1895 – March 15, 1938) was a NKVD officer and one of the defendants in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites". He was secretary to Genrikh Yagoda, who became head of the NKVD in July 1934. In September 1936, Yagoda, who has being removed from his post at the NKVD, ordered Bulanov to spray poison on the walls of the office of his successor, Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov had implicated Yagoda in the December 1, 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov. On March 29, 1937, both Yagoda and Bulanov were arrested on Yezhov's orders. Both were put on trial with 19 others on March 2, 1938. On March 13, 1938, all defendants were found guilty. Bulanov, Yagoda and 16 others were executed two days later. Although Bulanov was rehabilitated after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1956, Yagoda was never rehabilitated.
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Necklacing Necklacing is the practice of summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tire, filled with petrol, around a victim's chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The victim may take up to 20 minutes to die, suffering severe burns in the process.
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Khattabka Khattabka (Russian: хаттабка ) is a popular Russian and Chechen name for a homemade hand grenade. It was dubbed so after Ibn Al-Khattab and used by various North Caucasus rebels.