Give Me the Man, I'll Find the Crime – How the Soviet Terror Machine Worked. "Give me the man, and I'll find the crime." The line is attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, head of Stalin's secret police. Whether or not he said it, it describes the whole machine. 1. It began in December 1917, six weeks after the revolution: the Cheka, the "Extraordinary Commission." Its founder was Felix Dzerzhinsky – a Pole by birth. Twenty years later, the machine he built would make Poles its largest group of national victims. 2. The principle was set from the start. In 1918 a Cheka chief instructed his men: don't look for evidence of what the accused did. Ask what class he belongs to, what his origin, education and profession are – that decides his fate. Guilt was no longer a matter of acts. It was a matter of categories. 3. The machine changed its name – GPU, OGPU, NKVD – and kept growing. And it ran like the rest of the Soviet economy: on a plan. Regions received quotas of people to arrest, shoot or deport, and local chiefs asked Moscow for higher ones. Three-man tribunals passed sentences in minutes. Terror by quota – a planned economy of death. 4. In 1937 Nikolai Yezhov – a small man, barely five feet tall, later known as "the bloody dwarf" – took the machine to its peak. He would not survive it. Confessions were extracted by torture, officially permitted. Neighbors denounced each other for an apartment, colleagues for a promotion. Being accused was proof enough: the accused confessed to plots that never existed, and named others, who confessed in turn. 5. Then came the anti-Polish operation – the clearest proof that the machine was never looking for the guilty. Order 00485, August 1937, targeted a "Polish Military Organization" that had been dissolved in 1921. The categories were written so that almost any Pole would fit, and in Leningrad officers combed the address registers for Polish-sounding names. A Catholic prayer book was evidence. A letter from a cousin in Warsaw was espionage. Interrogators wrote the confessions, torture got the signatures, and the verdicts came in "albums" – a few lines per person, signed in Moscow by the hundred. Killing as paperwork. Nearly four in five of those sentenced were shot: about 111,000 people. A Pole in the Soviet Union was some forty times more likely to be shot than an average citizen. The goal was not to find the guilty. It was to erase inconvenient people from existence. And the Poles, with their unyielding character and love of freedom, were always inconvenient for any totalitarian system. Reminds you of anyone today? 6. The machine devours its own. Yezhov was arrested in 1939 and shot – and then erased even from the photographs, the same erasure he had applied to others. His successor, Beria, proposed in March 1940 the execution of Polish officers, policemen and intellectuals held as prisoners. Around 22,000 were shot – Katyn. At the same time, in the West, the Germans were murdering Poland's elites too. On this, the two totalitarian systems fully agreed. When Stalin died, Beria was arrested and shot too. 7. And the apparatus never really died. It became the KGB, then the FSB. Russia's security officers still celebrate "Chekist Day" every December 20. Its president is a former KGB officer. The method outlived the regime as well. Find the man first – then search his life for the crime. In the West, the soft version is called lawfare: the process is the punishment. The West reads about this in history books. In Poland, it is family memory. That is why we recognize the method instantly – in any language, under any name. —— The picture below says it all. Literally erasing people: Nikolai Yezhov, the "Bloody Dwarf" – small and bloody in more than one way – walking beside Stalin. Then the same photograph, a few years later. Now you see him. Now you don't.