Bombs & Executions

Clang! Clang!--an ambulance rushed through Moscow, turned with a lurch into the Boulevard Lubianka, and pulled up before the most dread address in Russia, No. 2.

Leaping from their seats two white clad internes picked up a stretcher and rushed into the Bureau of the Union State Political Department, notorious as the "Cheka" or O. G. P. U., the dread police-spy service of the Soviet Union.

Two men Had thrown bombs. Now a wall of the O. G. P. U. building gaped with a great jagged hole. As the white clad stretcher bearers rushed within, a crowd of ambulance chasers gathered speculatively upon the pavement. Perhaps they would see the great V. G. Menzhinsky, Chief of the "Cheka," carried forth, maimed and bleeding upon a strip of canvas stretched between two poles.

Actually the stretcher bearers panted forth with a huge but unimportant Red Guard, one Artemiv Walkov. Lucky, he had escaped the Death which struck down his companion on guard duty, Michail Ivanov. No other casualties were reported.

Almost at once the O. G. P. U. was able to announce that its efficient police-spies had tracked down the bombers. One, stated to be Colonel Georgi Nikolaevich, a onetime officer in the White Russian Army of Baron Wrangel, was chased by O. G. P. U.-ers and shot through the heart as he fled. The other bomb heaver, unidentified, was taken alive in the suburbs of Moscow through the aid of loyal peasants who betrayed his hiding place to the 0. G. P. U.

Four days later the prestige of the 0. G. P. U. was further upheld by the execution of five of the engineers recently sentenced to Death at the great Shahkta Trial (TIME, July 2; July 16). "Cheka" agents had assembled the evidence on which they were convicted. Soldiers attached to the O. G. P. U. fired, last week, the five final volleys.