In the mid-1930s in the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin's leadership, the NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB) drove around Moscow and other cities in trucks with the word ХЛЕБ on the side. This translates into English as “Bread,” leaving the appearance that these were bakery trucks distributing fresh bread throughout the city. The stories are well told by some of the great dissident Soviet writers of the time, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, his …