Furkasovsky Alley

Between Dzerzhinsky Street and Little Lubyanka Street in the heart of Moscow, on Furkasovsky Alley, stands a new yellow brick, nine-story building, resplendent with black marble pilasters. Sentries are posted at the doors. Up and down, the Alley plainclothesmen saunter with studied unconcern. This is the home of the all-powerful EKU (Ekonomicheskoe Upravlenie), economic division of NKVD.

What goes on inside? Probably no one outside of the Politburo could tell the whole story, but the Russian writer Konstantin Zhikharev, ex-Red army major, has sketched in the outline in the new Russian-language Paris periodical, Narodnaya Pravda (The People's Truth). "The EKU," writes Zhikharev, "is divided into two main sections which direct political control of the whole domestic economy, and economic espionage throughout the world." The first maintains a secret police network covering all Russian economic enterprises, keeps all production statistics (which are state secrets), and administers forced labor. But the activities of the EKU "stretch out far beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R. Here the main aim of the EKU is the disorganization of the world economy: inciting class war, aggravating industrial crises, organizing strikes." In short, the EKU's "Foreign Sector" is Russia's High Command for her war against the Marshall Plan.

Into the brick building on Furkasovsky Alley come reports on each country's military and industrial potential, on conditions in local Communist parties. Briefs are prepared for the Kremlin, where the facts are correlated with reports from other intelligence agencies, such as INO (Inostranny Otdel), the foreign espionage department of the NKVD, and Razvedupra, the reconnaissance division of the Red army. Thus fortified from Furkasovsky Alley, Messrs. Stalin, Molotov & Co. revise their foreign policies and issue new directives to Communist parties abroad.

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