They called themselves Chekists – the sword and shield of the Soviet Union. They were proud of what they were. Some served as concentration camp guards. Others were executioners. Many were just clerks or cooks or those ordinary guys who mop up the mess after the torturers are done.
Over the years they had different names – Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, SMERSH and, most notoriously, KGB. Yet their job description didn’t change. They were killers. They murdered whomever their masters wanted dead. Their victims numbered in the millions.
There were decades when they were more active, years when they were less so, but they were always there. Some of their leaders were sadists, like Nikolai Yezhov, who said during a Kremlin meeting that his shirt sleeves were speckled because he had spent the night torturing an “enemy of the people.” Yezhov was later shot on Stalin’s orders. In Yalta, chatting with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, Stalin described Lavrenty Beria, Yezhov’s successor, as “our [Heinrich] Himmler.” Beria was also later executed on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s orders.
“Those who live by the sword die by the sword” is, unfortunately, not always true. Not only are some veterans of Josef Stalin’s secret police alive, but they are living in Canada and elsewhere.
Their presence among us has been known for years. How many there are is not certain. Even one is too many.
Remarkably, they haven’t been hiding. A few have boasted publicly about what they did. One wrote a book, obligingly including a photograph posing in his NKVD lieutenant’s uniform. Another described her role in a SMERSH execution squad.
An intrepid journalist broke this story in a national Canadian newspaper in April 2005. Yet, after that original expose, follow-up stories have been lacking. Even more intriguing is how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s War Crimes Unit, asked to investigate allegations about Communist collaborators in Canada, responded with the rather limp finding that they had insufficient evidence upon which to act.
Apparently, when a man admits he was in the NKVD and brags about the people he killed and provides his memoirs in English in a book available in public libraries, the police don’t see that as proof of any wrongdoing. Maybe they’re waiting for Hollywood to turn the manuscript into a movie.
After World War II, screening procedures were supposed to exclude Nazis and Communists from Canada. So if a man declares he was in the NKVD and broadcasts that fact from Toronto, either he is a liar or he lied to get into Canada. In any case, we know that Communist killers are here. They shouldn’t be.
All of Stalin’s surviving minions are elderly. Yet it’s not too late to see justice done. They deserve no more mercy than they meted out. And now they should be expelled. They can finish out their lives as burdens upon those whom they served. I’d bet they won’t find Moscow or Minsk as comfortable as Montreal.
Canadians are compassionate. Not only do we strive to do what’s right, we also honor the righteous. We did in 1985 when Canada conferred honorary citizenship on Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Yet it was not the Nazis who did him in. SMERSH agents abducted Wallenberg in Budapest in January 1945, then carted him off to the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow. Probably no one now here was directly involved, yet all who served Stalin in those days are complicit. No one wants such scoundrels here. You’d think a Conservative government would get that. Apparently they don’t. They will.
Lubomyr Luciuk chairs the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (www.uccla.ca) which has launched a “No KGB In Canada!” campaign.
More columns by Lubomyr Luciuk:
Georgia-invading troops leave Stalin shrine intact. Pity.
Holodomor: A crime of unparalleled brutality
