Lenin was interested in the technical details of its operations. It was he, in a note to Dzerzhinsky soon after the Cheka was set up, who suggested that ‘it would be useful to carry out arrests at night’. The knock at the door in the small hours became the classic modus operandi of ‘the organs’ throughout the Communist years

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 381