He saw evidence of secret-police competitions, formal ones—like when different departments within the NKVD (the precursor agency to the KGB) raced one another to highest number of political probes launched—and informal ones, like when three of the NKVD brass took three thousand cases with them on a train journey, got drunk, and engaged in a speed challenge: Who could go through a stack of cases fastest, marking each with the letter P. They were not reading the cases. The letter P—pronounced r in Russian—stood for rasstrel, “execution.”
