Cheka
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The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, abbreviated as VChK, and commonly known as Cheka, was the first of a succession of Soviet secret-police organizations known for conducting the Red Terror. Established on December 5 1917 by the Sovnarkom, it came under the leadership of Bolshevik revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky. By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had sprung up in the Russian SFSR at all levels.
Members of the presidium of VCheKa (left to right) Yakov Peters, Józef Unszlicht, Abram Belenky (standing), Felix Dzerzhinsky, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, 1921
Smolny, the seat of the Soviet government, 1917
Grigory Petrovsky
Felix Dzerzhinsky in a meeting among other members of the Presidium of the Cheka, 1919
Chekism
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Chekism is a term that relates to the situation in the Soviet Union where the secret police strongly controlled all spheres of society. It is also used to point out similar circumstances in post-Soviet intelligence states such as modern Russia. The term can refer to the system of rule itself, and to the underlying ideology that promotes and popularizes political police violence and arbitrariness against real and imagined enemies of the state.
The Lubyanka Building in Moscow has served as the headquarters for Soviet and Russian intelligence agencies since 1917, and the term Lubyanka has become a metonym for the secret police.
A 1932 Soviet propaganda poster with the text "15 Years of Guarding the October Gains" shows a list of alleged anti-Soviet conspiracies getting struck by Cheka—OGPU lightning.