1.
Collectivization in the Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union enforced the collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan, the policy aimed to consolidate individual landholdings and labour into collective farms, mainly kolkhozy and sovkhozy. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927 and this problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program. In the early 1930s over 91% of agricultural land became collectivized as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, the sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, peasants gained control of half of the land they had previously cultivated. The Stolypin agricultural reforms between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I, the Russian Provisional Government accomplished little during the difficult World War I months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, when the Russian Civil War ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy and specifically, the policy of prodnalog or food tax. This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, the pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained small. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed laborers, the small shares of most of the peasants resulted in food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to production levels, the large estates which had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced manufactured goods, the peasants chose to consume their produce rather than sell it, as a result, city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force and this demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2-million-ton shortfall in grains purchased by the Soviet Union from neighbouring markets, Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by kulaks. Instead of raising the price, the Politburo adopted a measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain. In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method of grain procurement, also, massive hoarding and illegal transfers of grain took place
2.
Kolkhoz
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A kolkhoz was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union. Kolkhozes existed along with state farms or sovkhoz, the 1920s were characterized by spontaneous emergence of collective farms, under influence of traveling propaganda workers. Initially a collective farm resembled a version of the traditional Russian commune, the generic farming association, the association for joint cultivation of land. This gradual shift to farming in the first 15 years after the October Revolution was turned into a violent stampede during the forced collectivization campaign that began in 1928. The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, suggesting collective ownership, on the other hand, sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство, suggesting state ownership. As a collective farm, a kolkhoz was legally organized as a production cooperative, the Standard Charter of a kolkhoz, which since the early 1930s had the force of law in the USSR, is a model of cooperative principles in print. It speaks of the kolkhoz as a form of agricultural cooperative of peasants that voluntarily unite for the purpose of joint agricultural production based on collective labor. Importantly, remuneration had always been in proportion to labor and not from residual profits, implying that members were treated as employees and they imposed detailed work programs and nominated their preferred managerial candidates. Since the mid-1930s, the kolkhozes had been in effect an offshoot of the state sector, nevertheless, in locations with particularly good land or if it happened to have capable management, some kolkhozes accumulated substantial sums of money in their bank accounts. Subsequently, numerous kolkhozes were formally nationalized by changing their status to sovkhozes, essentially, his administration recognized their status as hired hands rather than authentic cooperative members. The guaranteed wage provision was incorporated in the 1969 version of the Standard Charter, the question of internal organization was important in the new kolkhozes. The most basic measure was to divide the workforce into a number of groups, generally known as brigades, by July 1929 it was already normal practice for the large kolkhoz of 200-400 households to be divided into temporary or permanent work units of 15-30 households. The brigade was headed by a brigade leader and this was usually a local man. After the kolkhoz amalgamations of 1950 the territorial successor of the old village kolkhoz was the complex brigade, brigades could be subdivided into smaller units called zvenos for carrying out some or all of their tasks. See collectivisation in the USSR and agriculture in the Soviet Union for general discussion of Soviet agriculture. In a kolkhoz, a member, called a kolkhoznik, received a share of the product and profit according to the number of days worked. In practice, most kolkhozy did not pay their members in cash at all. In 1946,30 percent of kolkhozy paid no cash for labor at all,10.6 paid no grain, in addition the kolkhoz was required to sell its grain crop and other products to the State at fixed prices
3.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
4.
Mass murder
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Mass murder is the act of murdering a number of people, typically simultaneously or over a relatively short period of time and in close geographic proximity. The FBI defines mass murder as murdering four or more persons during an event with no cooling-off period between the murders, a mass murder typically occurs in a single location where one or more people kill several others. Many acts of mass murder end with the perpetrator dying by suicide or suicide by cop, a mass murder may be committed by individuals or organizations whereas a spree killing is committed by one or two individuals. Mass murder is the hypernym of genocide, which requires additional criteria, some of these mass murders have been found to be genocides and others to be crimes against humanity, but often such crimes have led to few or no convictions of any type. The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings and it is defined as the intentional and indiscriminate murder of a large number of people by government agents. Examples are shooting of unarmed protesters, lobbing of grenades into prison cells, actions in which the state caused the death of large numbers of people, which political scientist R. J. Many terrorist groups in recent times have used the tactic of killing many victims to fulfill their political aims, certain cults, especially religious cults, have committed a number of mass killings and mass murder-suicides. Mass murderers may fall into any of a number of categories, including killers of family, of coworkers, of students, a notable motivation for mass murder is revenge, but other motivations are possible, including the need for attention or fame. Average response time by law enforcement to a shooting is typically much longer than the time the shooter is engaged in killing. In many instances, immediate action by victims, bystanders, or law enforcement officers has saved lives, commentators have pointed out that there are a wide variety of ways that homicides with more than several victims might be classified. Such incidents can be, and have been even in recent decades, classified many different ways including as a shooting, as a school shooting, as mass murder. As a crime involving a rifle, as a case of a mentally ill person committing acts of violence. How such rarely occurring incidents of homicide are classified tends to change significantly with time and it was understood that the key feature of cases was a high body count. Place, Did the killings occur in a location, or in a variety of places. Method, How were the victims killed, in the late decades of the 20th century and early years of the 2000s, the most popular classifications moved to include method, time and place. Crimes against humanity List of mass murderers List of rampage killers Mass grave Massacre School shooting Suicide attack Terrorism War crime What makes a Mass Killer. Mass Murder, A Small Persons Way to Immortality Mass shootings interactive map Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence The real causes of mass murder by James Alan Fox
5.
Deportation
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Deportation is the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. The term expulsion is often used as a synonym for deportation, through expulsion is often used in the context of international law. Definitions of deportation apply equally to nationals and foreigners, transportation is by way of punishment of one convicted of an offense against the laws of the country. Extradition is the surrender to another country of one accused of an offense against its laws, there to be tried, deportations widely occurred in ancient history. Deportation was practiced as a policy toward rebellious people in Achaemenid Empire, one notable example was the deportaion of the Mards in Charax, near Rhages by Phraates I. The 10,000 Roman prisonors of war after the Battle of Carrhae appear to have been deported to Alexandria Margiana near the border in 53 BC. It is hypothesized that some of them founded the Chinese city of Li-Jien after becoming soldiers for the Hsiung-nu, Deportation was widely used by the Sasanians, especially during the wars with the Romans and the Byzantines. During Shapur Is reign, the Romans who were defeated at the Battle of Edessa were deported to Persis, other destinations were Parthia, Khuzestan, and Asorestan. There were cities which were founded and were populated by Romans prisoners of war, including Shadh-Shapur in Meshan, Bishapur in Persis, Wuzurg-Shapur, agricultural land were also given to the deportees. These deportations initiated the sread Christianity in the Sassanian empire, in Rēw-Ardashīr, Persis, there was a church for the Romans and another one for Carmanians. After the Arab incursion into Persia during Shapur IIs reign, he scattered the defeated Arab tribes by deporting them to other regions, some where deported to Bahrain and Kirman, possibly to both populate these unattractive regions and bringing the tribes under control. The author of the text Liber Calipharum has praised the king Yazdegerd I for his treatment of the deportees, major deportations occurred during the Anastasian War. Major deportations occurred during the campaigns of Khosrau I from the Roman cities of Sura, Beroea, Antioch, Apamea, Callinicum, the city was founded near Ctesiphon especially for them, and Khosrow reportedly did everything in his power to make the residents want to stay. The number of the deportees is recorded to be 292,000 in another source, in 1954, the executive branch of the U. S. government implemented Operation Wetback, a program created in response to public hysteria about immigration and immigrants from Mexico. Operation Wetback led to the deportation of nearly 1.3 million Mexicans from the United States, already in natural law of the 18th century, philosophers agreed that expulsion of a nation from the territory that it historically inhabits is not allowable. Deportation often requires a process that must be validated by a court or senior government official. It should not be confused with administrative removal, which is the process of a country denying entry to an individual at a port of entry and expelling them. Deportation can also happen within a state, when an individual or a group of people is forcibly resettled to a different part of the country, if ethnic groups are affected by this, it may also be referred to as population transfer
6.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
7.
Ukrainian language
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Ukrainian /juːˈkreɪniən/ is an East Slavic language. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic script, historical linguists trace the origin of the Ukrainian language to the Old East Slavic of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus. After the fall of the Kievan Rus as well as the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, the Modern Ukrainian language has been in common use since the late 17th century, associated with the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate. From 1804 until the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian language was banned from schools in the Russian Empire and it has always maintained a sufficient base in Western Ukraine, where the language was never banned, in its folklore songs, itinerant musicians, and prominent authors. The Ukrainian language retains a degree of intelligibility with Belarusian and Russian. The first theory of the origin of Ukrainian language was suggested in Imperial Russia in the middle of the 18th century by Mikhail Lomonosov and this theory posits the existence of a common language spoken by all East Slavic people in the time of the Rus. Another point of view developed during the 19th and 20th centuries by linguists of Imperial Russia, like Lomonosov, they assumed the existence of a common language spoken by East Slavs in the past. This general point of view is the most accepted amongst academics worldwide, the supporters of this theory disagree, however, about the time when the different languages were formed. Soviet scholars set the divergence between Ukrainian and Russian only at time periods. During the time of the incorporation of Ruthenia into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and this point of view is, however, at variance with some historical data. In fact, several East Slavic tribes, such as Polans, Drevlyans, Severians, Dulebes, White Croats, Tiverians, notably, some Ukrainian features were recognizable in the southern dialects of Old East Slavic as far back as the language can be documented. In contrast, Ahatanhel Krymsky and Alexei Shakhmatov assumed the existence of the spoken language of Eastern Slavs only in prehistoric times. According to their point of view, the diversification of the Old East Slavic language took place in the 8th or early 9th century, Ukrainian linguist Stepan Smal-Stotsky went even further, denying the existence of a common Old East Slavic language at any time in the past. Similar points of view were shared by Yevhen Tymchenko, Vsevolod Hantsov, Olena Kurylo, Ivan Ohienko, according to this theory, the dialects of East Slavic tribes evolved gradually from the common Proto-Slavic language without any intermediate stages during the 6th through 9th centuries. The Ukrainian language was formed by convergence of tribal dialects, mostly due to a migration of the population within the territory of todays Ukraine in later historical periods. This point of view was supported by George Shevelovs phonological studies. During the 13th century, when German settlers were invited to Ukraine by the princes of Galicia-Vollhynia and their influence would continue under Poland not only through German colonists but also through the Yiddish-speaking Jews. Often such words involve trade or handicrafts, examples of words of German or Yiddish origin spoken in Ukraine include dakh, rura, rynok, kushnir, and majster
8.
Arrest
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Police and various other bodies have powers of arrest. The word arrest is Anglo-Norman in origin, derived from the French word arrêt meaning to stop or stay, lexicologically, the meaning of the word arrest is given in various dictionaries depending upon the circumstances in which word is used. There are numerous terms for being arrested throughout the world. In British slang terminology, the term nicked is often synonymous with being arrested, and nick can also refer to a station. In the United States and France the term collared is sometimes used, the term lifted is also heard on occasion. According to Indian law, no formality is needed during the procedure of arrest, the arrest can be made by a citizen, a police officer or a Magistrate. The person must then appear in court on the date provided on the citation, prior to the court date, the prosecution will decide whether to file formal criminal charges against the individual. When the accused appears in court, they will be advised if formal criminal charges have been filed, if charges are filed, they will be asked to plead guilty or not guilty at the initial court hearing, which is referred to as the arraignment. When a person is arrested for a crime, in California for example. The accused will be advised of the amount, which is based upon a bail schedule that is established on an annual basis by the judges in each county. When law enforcement agents believe to have cause to arrest a person for a serious crime. The accused will have their mug shot taken and be held in a station or jail pending their ability to post bail. If the accused cannot post bail, they appear at their arraignment where the judge will determine if the bail set by the schedule should be raised, lowered. Also, in states, the prosecution has 48 hours to decide whether or not to file formal charges against the accused. For example, in California, if no charges are filed within the 48-hour period. If formal charges are filed, the accused will be asked to appear at their arraignment, at the arraignment, the accused will be asked to plead guilty or not guilty, and the judge will set a bail amount for the accused. In 2010, the FBI estimated that law enforcement agencies made 13,120,947 arrests. Of those persons arrested,74. 5% were male and 69.4 percent of all persons arrested were white,28.0 percent were black, Arrests under English law fall into two general categories—with and without a warrant—and then into more specific subcategories
9.
Capital punishment
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Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is a government sanctioned practice whereby a person is put to death by the state as a punishment for a crime. The sentence that someone be punished in such a manner is referred to as a death sentence, etymologically, the term capital in this context alluded to execution by beheading. Fifty-six countries retain capital punishment,103 countries have abolished it de jure for all crimes, six have abolished it for ordinary crimes. Capital punishment is a matter of controversy in various countries and states. In the European Union, Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits the use of capital punishment, also, the Council of Europe, which has 47 member states, prohibits the use of the death penalty by its members. The United Nations General Assembly has adopted, in 2007,2008,2010,2012 and 2014, non-binding resolutions calling for a moratorium on executions. Although most nations have abolished capital punishment, over 60% of the population live in countries where executions take place, such as China, India. Execution of criminals and political opponents has been used by nearly all societies—both to punish crime, in most countries that practise capital punishment it is reserved for murder, terrorism, war crimes, espionage, treason, defection or as part of military justice. In many countries use the death penalty, drug trafficking is also a capital offence. In China, human trafficking and serious cases of corruption are punished by the death penalty, in militaries around the world courts-martial have imposed death sentences for offences such as cowardice, desertion, insubordination, and mutiny. The use of formal execution extends to the beginning of recorded history, most historical records and various primitive tribal practices indicate that the death penalty was a part of their justice system. Communal punishment for wrongdoing generally included compensation by the wrongdoer, corporal punishment, shunning, banishment, usually, compensation and shunning were enough as a form of justice. The response to crime committed by neighbouring tribes or communities included a formal apology, a blood feud or vendetta occurs when arbitration between families or tribes fails or an arbitration system is non-existent. This form of justice was common before the emergence of a system based on state or organized religion. It may result from crime, land disputes or a code of honour, acts of retaliation underscore the ability of the social collective to defend itself and demonstrate to enemies that injury to property, rights, or the person will not go unpunished. However, in practice, it is difficult to distinguish between a war of vendetta and one of conquest. Elaborations of tribal arbitration of feuds included peace settlements often done in a religious context, compensation was based on the principle of substitution which might include material compensation, exchange of brides or grooms, or payment of the blood debt. Settlement rules could allow for animal blood to replace human blood, the person offered for execution did not have to be an original perpetrator of the crime because the system was based on tribes, not individuals
10.
Peasant
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A peasant is a member of a traditional class of farmers, either laborers or owners of small farms, especially in the Middle Ages under feudalism, or more generally, in any pre-industrial society. In Europe, peasants were divided into three classes according to their status, slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in fee simple, or hold land by any of several forms of tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold. The implication of the term is that the peasant is uneducated, ignorant, the word peasant is also commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and under-developed countries of the world. The word peasant is derived from the 15th century French word païsant, meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society. The majority of the people in the Middle Ages were peasants, more generally, the word peasant is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be lower class, perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower income. The open field system of agriculture dominated most of northern Europe during medieval times, under this system, peasants lived on a manor presided over by a lord or a bishop of the church. Peasants paid rent or labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land, fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor and it was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land. This process happened in a pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original medieval path until the 18th and 19th centuries, even before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within the empire had decreased from 45-50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century. In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the well into the 19th century. They belonged to a body and helped to manage the community resources. In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land, a peasant is called a Bauer in German and Bur in Low German. In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents, Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange marriages for his children. Much of the communal life centered on church services and holy days
11.
First five-year plan
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The first five-year plan of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a list of economic goals, created by General Secretary Joseph Stalin and based on his policy of Socialism in One Country. It was implemented between 1928 and 1932, in 1929, Stalin edited the plan to include the creation of kolkhoz collective farming systems that stretched over thousands of acres of land and had hundreds of peasants working on them. This disruption led to a famine in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan as well as areas of the Northern Caucasus. Despite the ruinous loss of life, the introduction of collective farms allowed peasants to use tractors to farm the land, unlike before when most had been too poor to own a tractor. Public machine and tractor stations were set up throughout the USSR, peasants were allowed to sell any surplus food from the land. However, the government planners failed to notice of local situations. In 1932, grain production was 32% below average, to add to this problem, agricultural production was so disrupted that famine broke out in several districts. Because of the reliance on rapid industrialization, major cultural changes had to occur in tandem. As this new social structure arose, conflicts occurred among some of the majority of the populations, in Turkmenistan, for example, the Soviet policy of collectivization shifted their production from cotton to food products. Prior to the enactment of the first Soviet five-year plan, the Soviet Union had been experiencing threats from external sources. The first war threat emerged from the East in 1924 and this war scare arose when Western nations, like Great Britain, began cutting off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. This created fear among the Soviets that the West was preparing to attack the Soviet Union again, during the Russian Civil War, foreign powers had occupied portions of Soviet territory. The fear of invasion from the west left the Soviets feeling a need for rapid industrialization to increase Soviet war making potential, at the same time as the war scare of 1927, dissatisfaction among the peasantry was emerging in the Soviet Union. This dissatisfaction arose from the famine of the early 1920s, as well as a growing mistreatment of the peasants, also during this time the secret police or the NKVD had begun rounding up political dissenters in the Soviet Union. The central aspect of the first Soviet five-year plan was the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, the need for rapid industrialization was once again out of the fear of impending war from the West. If war were to break out between the Soviet Union and the West, the Soviets would be fighting against some of the most industrialized nations in the world, the rapid industrialization would inhibit fears of being left unprotected if War between the Soviets and the West were to occur. To meet the needs of a war, the Soviet leaders set unrealistic quotas for production. To meet those needs, the facilities had to be constructed to quickly facilitate material production before goods could be produced
12.
Counter-revolutionary
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A counter-revolutionary is anyone who opposes a revolution, particularly those who act after a revolution to try to overturn or reverse it, in full or in part. The adjective, counter-revolutionary, pertains to movements that would restore the state of affairs, or the principles, for example, the transitory success of Agis and Cleomenes of ancient Sparta in restoring the constitution of Lycurgus was considered by Plutarch to be counter-revolutionary in a positive sense. In some ways, the supporters of Jacobitism may be placed in this category, the Jacobites were supporters of the Stuart houses claim to the English throne since 1688. The Jacobites survive to this day in their support for the Stuart familys claim to the English throne, more recently, it has been used in France to describe political movements that reject the legacy of the 1789 Revolution, which historian René Rémond has referred to as légitimistes. The royalist legitimist counter-revolutionary French movement survives to day, albeit marginally. After the French Revolution, anti-clerical policies and the execution of King Louis XVI led to the Revolt in the Vendee and this counter-revolution produced what is debated to be the first modern genocide. Monarchists and Catholics took up arms against the revolutionaries French Republic in 1793 after the government asked that 300,000 Vendeans be conscripted into the Republican military, the Vendeans would also rise up against Napoleons attempt to conscript them in 1815. In Italy, after the conquer of the Napoleons army in the late 18th century, a resurgence of the phenomenon happened during the Napoleons second Italian campaign in the early 19th century. Another example of counter-revolution was the rebellion in Southern Italy after the national unification, fomented by the Bourbon government in exile. The revolt, labelled as brigandage, resulted in a civil war that lasted almost ten years. The supporters of Carlism during the 19th century to the present day are perhaps the oldest surviving counter-revolutionary group in Spain, supporters uphold the legitimist view of royal succession, as well as regional autonomy under the monarchy, tradition and Catholicism. The Carlist cause began with the First Carlist War in 1833, general Victoriano Huerta, and later the Felicistas, attempted to thwart the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. In the late 1920s, Mexican Catholics took up arms against the Mexican Federal Government in what known as the Cristero War. The President of Mexico, Plutarco Elias Calles, was elected in 1924, Calles began carrying out anti-Catholic policies which caused peaceful resistance from Catholics in 1926. The counter-revolution began as a movement of resistance against the anti-clerical laws. In the Summer of 1926, fighting broke out, the Spanish Civil War was in some respects, a counter-revolution. Supporters of Carlism, monarchy, and nationalism joined forces against the Spanish Republic in 1936, the counter-revolutionaries saw the Spanish Constitution of 1931 as a revolutionary document that defied Spanish culture, tradition and religion. On the Republican side, the acts of the Communist Party of Spain against the rural collectives can also be considered counter-revolutionary, more recently, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion into Cuba was conducted by counter-revolutionaries who hoped to overthrow the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro
13.
Socialism
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Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective, or cooperative ownership, to citizen ownership of equity, or to any combination of these. Although there are varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them. Socialist economic systems can be divided into both non-market and market forms, non-market socialism aims to circumvent the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with capital accumulation and the profit system. Profits generated by these firms would be controlled directly by the workforce of each firm or accrue to society at large in the form of a social dividend, the feasibility and exact methods of resource allocation and calculation for a socialist system are the subjects of the socialist calculation debate. Core dichotomies associated with these concerns include reformism versus revolutionary socialism, the term is frequently used to draw contrast to the political system of the Soviet Union, which critics argue operated in an authoritarian fashion. By the 1920s, social democracy and communism became the two dominant political tendencies within the international socialist movement, by this time, Socialism emerged as the most influential secular movement of the twentieth century, worldwide. Socialist parties and ideas remain a force with varying degrees of power and influence in all continents. Today, some socialists have also adopted the causes of social movements. The origin of the term socialism may be traced back and attributed to a number of originators, in addition to significant historical shifts in the usage, for Andrew Vincent, The word ‘socialism’ finds its root in the Latin sociare, which means to combine or to share. The related, more technical term in Roman and then medieval law was societas and this latter word could mean companionship and fellowship as well as the more legalistic idea of a consensual contract between freemen. The term socialism was created by Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the founders of what would later be labelled utopian socialism. Simon coined socialism as a contrast to the doctrine of individualism. They presented socialism as an alternative to liberal individualism based on the ownership of resources. The term socialism is attributed to Pierre Leroux, and to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud in France, the term communism also fell out of use during this period, despite earlier distinctions between socialism and communism from the 1840s. An early distinction between socialism and communism was that the former aimed to only socialise production while the latter aimed to socialise both production and consumption. However, by 1888 Marxists employed the term socialism in place of communism, linguistically, the contemporary connotation of the words socialism and communism accorded with the adherents and opponents cultural attitude towards religion. In Christian Europe, of the two, communism was believed to be the atheist way of life, in Protestant England, the word communism was too culturally and aurally close to the Roman Catholic communion rite, hence English atheists denoted themselves socialists. Friedrich Engels argued that in 1848, at the time when the Communist Manifesto was published, socialism was respectable on the continent and this latter branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany
14.
Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker
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Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker was an American journalist and author. He was nicknamed Red Knickerbocker from the color of his hair, a son of Rev. Hubert Delancey Knickerbocker, H. R. Knickerbocker was born in Yoakum, Texas. He graduated from the Southwestern University in Texas, then studied psychiatry at Columbia University before becoming a career journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize, Knickerbocker was noted for reporting on German politics before and during World War II. From 1923 to 1933 he reported from Berlin, but because of his opposition to Hitler he was deported when Hitler came to power, back in America, he continued writing about the threat posed by Nazism. On April 15,1933, he wrote in the New York Evening Post, hundreds of Jews have been beaten or tortured. Thousands of Jews have been, or will be, deprived of their livelihood, after World War II, Knickerbocker went to work for radio station WOR, in Newark, New Jersey. He was on assignment with a team of journalists touring Southeast Asia when they were all killed in a crash near Bombay, India. He plays a role in Erik Larsons non-fiction 2012 book, In the Garden of Beasts, Love, Terror. Fighting the Red Trade Menace The New Russia Soviet Trade and World Depression The Soviet Five Year Plan, the German Crisis Germany-Fascist or Soviet. The Truth about Hitlerism The Boiling Point, Will War Come in Europe, Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, Journalists Memorial, The Newseum
15.
Vladimir Lenin
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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924, under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party socialist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism, born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brothers execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empires Tsarist regime and he moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, after his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent party theorist through his publications. In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP ideological split, Lenins government was led by the Bolsheviks—now renamed the Communist Party—with some powers initially also held by elected soviets. It redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry, opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign orchestrated by the state security services, tens of thousands were killed and others interned in concentration camps. Anti-Bolshevik armies, established by both right and left-wing groups, were defeated in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922, responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin promoted economic growth through a mixed economic system. Seeking to promote world revolution, Lenins government created the Communist International, waged the Polish–Soviet War, in increasingly poor health, Lenin expressed opposition to the growing power of his successor, Joseph Stalin, before dying at his Gorki mansion. He became a figurehead behind Marxism-Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement. Lenins father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was from a family of serfs, his origins remain unclear, with suggestions being made that he was Russian, Chuvash, Mordvin. Despite this lower-class background he had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University before teaching at the Penza Institute for the Nobility, Ilya married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. Well educated and from a prosperous background, she was the daughter of a German–Swedish woman. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the governments plans for modernisation. His dedication to education earned him the Order of St. Vladimir, the couple had two children, Anna and Alexander, before Lenin—who would gain the childhood nickname of Volodya—was born in Simbirsk on 10 April 1870, and baptised several days later. They were followed by three children, Olga, Dmitry, and Maria. Two later siblings died in infancy, Ilya was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although Maria – a Lutheran – was largely indifferent to Christianity, a view that influenced her children. Every summer they holidayed at a manor in Kokushkino
16.
Czar
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Tsar /zɑːr/ or /tsɑːr/, also spelled tzar, csar, or czar, is a title used to designate certain Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, occasionally, the word could be used to designate other secular supreme rulers. Simeon II, the last Tsar of Bulgaria, is the last person to have borne the title Tsar, the title Tsar is derived from the Latin title for the Roman emperors, Caesar. In the history of the Greek language, basileus had originally meant something like potentate and it gradually approached the meaning of king in the Hellenistic Period, and it came to designate emperor after the inception in the Roman Empire. Thus, tsar was not only used as an equivalent of Latin imperator but was used to refer to Biblical rulers. From this ambiguity, the development has moved in different directions in the different Slavic languages, thus, the Bulgarian language and Russian language no longer use tsar as an equivalent of the term emperor/imperator as it exists in the West European tradition. Currently, the term refers to native sovereigns, ancient and Biblical rulers, as well as monarchs in fairy tales. The title of king is sometimes perceived as alien and is by some Russian-speakers reserved for European royalty, foreign monarchs of imperial status, both inside and outside of Europe, ancient as well as modern, are generally called imperator, rather than tsar. Biblical rulers in Serbian are called цар and in Croatian kralj, in the Polish language however tsar is always used as imperator, never as king. The term tsar is very used to refer to the Russian rulers after Peter the Great. In 705 Emperor Justinian II named Tervel of Bulgaria Caesar, the first foreigner to receive this title, the sainted Boris I is sometimes retrospectively referred to as tsar, because at his time Bulgaria was converted to Christianity. However, the tsar was actually adopted and used for the first time by his son Simeon I. Since in Byzantine political theory there was place for two emperors, Eastern and Western, the Bulgarian ruler was crowned basileus as a spiritual son of the Byzantian basileus. In Latin sources the Emperor of Bulgaria is sometimes designated Emperor of Zagora, various additional epithets and descriptions apart, the official style read Emperor and autocrat of all Bulgarians and Greeks. During the five-century period of Ottoman rule in Bulgaria, the sultan was referred to as tsar. This may be related to the fact that he had claimed the legacy of the Byzantine Empire or to the fact that the sultan was called Basileus in medieval Greek, after Bulgarias liberation from the Ottomans in 1878, its new monarchs were at first autonomous prince. With the declaration of independence, Ferdinand I of Bulgaria adopted the traditional title tsar in 1908. However, these titles were not generally perceived as equivalents of emperor any longer, in the Bulgarian as in the Greek vernacular, the meaning of the title had shifted
17.
Capitalism
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Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, economists, political economists, and historians have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include laissez-faire or free market capitalism, welfare capitalism, different forms of capitalism feature varying degrees of free markets, public ownership, obstacles to free competition, and state-sanctioned social policies. Most existing capitalist economies are mixed economies, which elements of free markets with state intervention. Capitalism has existed under many forms of government, in different times, places. Following the decline of mercantilism, mixed capitalist systems became dominant in the Western world, Capitalism has been criticized for prioritizing profit over social good, natural resources, and the environment, and that is a cause of inequality and economic instabilities. Supporters believe that it provides better products through competition, and creates strong economic growth, the term capitalist, meaning an owner of capital, appears earlier than the term capitalism. It dates back to the mid-17th century, capitalist is derived from capital, which evolved from capitale, a late Latin word based on caput, meaning head – also the origin of chattel and cattle in the sense of movable property. Capitale emerged in the 12th to 13th centuries in the sense of referring to funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money, by 1283 it was used in the sense of the capital assets of a trading firm. It was frequently interchanged with a number of other words – wealth, money, funds, goods, assets, property, the Hollandische Mercurius uses capitalists in 1633 and 1654 to refer to owners of capital. In French, Étienne Clavier referred to capitalistes in 1788, six years before its first recorded English usage by Arthur Young in his work Travels in France, David Ricardo, in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, referred to the capitalist many times. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet, used capitalist in his work Table Talk, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the term capitalist in his first work, What is Property. To refer to the owners of capital, benjamin Disraeli used the term capitalist in his 1845 work Sybil. The initial usage of the term capitalism in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the capitalistic system. And to the capitalist mode of production in Das Kapital, the use of the word capitalism in reference to an economic system appears twice in Volume I of Das Kapital, p.124, and in Theories of Surplus Value, tome II, p.493. Marx did not extensively use the form capitalism but instead those of capitalist, and capitalist mode of production, also according to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used the phrase private capitalism in 1863. Capital has existed incipiently on a scale for centuries, in the form of merchant, renting and lending activities. Simple commodity exchange, and consequently simple commodity production, which are the basis for the growth of capital from trade, have a very long history
18.
Political repression in the Soviet Union
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Throughout the history of the Soviet Union tens of millions of people became victims of political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. Its heritage still influences the life of modern Russia and other former Soviet states, early on, the Leninist view of the class struggle and the resulting notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat provided the theoretical basis of the repressions. Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58 in the code of Russian SFSR, at times, the repressed were called the enemies of the people. Punishments by the state included summary executions, sending innocent people to Gulag, forced resettlement, at certain times, all members of a family, including children, were punished as traitor of the Motherland family-members. Repression was conducted by the Cheka and its successors, and other state organs, periods of the increased repression include Red Terror, Collectivisation, the Great Purges, the Doctors Plot, and others. The secret-police forces conducted massacres of prisoners on numerous occasions, Repression took place in the Soviet republics and in the territories occupied by the Soviet Army during World War II, including the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. During the Tambov rebellion Tukhachevsky allegedly authorized Bolshevik military forces to use weapons against villages with civilian population. Prominent citizens of villages were taken as hostages and executed if the resistance fighters did not surrender. Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests, the Red Terror was officially announced on September 2,1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918. However Sergei Melgunov applies this term to repressions for the period of the Russian Civil War. Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to individual land and labour into collective farms. As the peasantry, with the exception of the poorest part, resisted the collectivization policy, in his conversation with Winston Churchill Stalin gave his estimate of the number of kulaks who were repressed for resisting Soviet collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported. The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1937-1938. Estimates of the number of associated with the Great Purge run from the official figure of 681,692 to nearly 2 million. In Soviet Union, political repressions targeted not only individual persons, in most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas. Entire nations and ethnic groups were punished by the Soviet Government for alleged collaboration with the enemy during World War II. Population transfer in the Soviet Union led to millions of deaths from the inflicted hardships, koreans and Romanians were also deported. Mass operations of the NKVD were needed to deport hundreds of thousands of people and this led to deaths of millions of people in the affected area
19.
Red Terror
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The Red Terror was a campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression conducted by the Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. Soviet historiography describes the Red Terror as having officially announced in September 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov. However, the term was applied to political repression during the whole period of the Civil War. The Cheka conducted the mass repressions, estimates for the total number of people killed in the Red Terror range from 10,000 to over one and a half million. The original Red Terror was a campaign against perceived counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921. Leon Trotsky described the context in 1920, The severity of the dictatorship in Russia. There was one continuous front, on the north and south, in a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and bridges. A revolutionary class which has conquered power with arms in its hands is bound to, where it has against it a hostile army, it will oppose to it its own army. Where it is confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or rising, ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror, the bitter struggle was described succinctly from the Bolshevik point of view by Grigory Zinoviev in mid-September 1918, To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russias population, as for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed, It is necessary – secretly and urgently to prepare the terror, anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to concentration camp. There followed the decree On Red Terror, issued on 5 September 1918 by the Cheka, on 15 October, the leading Chekist Gleb Bokii, summing up the officially ended Red Terror, reported that in Petrograd 800 alleged enemies had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Casualties in the first two months were between 10,000 and 15,000 based on lists of executed people published in newspaper Cheka Weekly. The list could go on and on and they had been promised amnesty if they would surrender. This is one of the largest massacres in the Civil War, on 16 March 1919, all military detachments of the Cheka were combined in a single body, the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic, which numbered 200,000 in 1921. These troops policed labor camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, and put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army
20.
Great Purge
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The Great Purge or the Great Terror was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov and it has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. In the Western world, Robert Conquests 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase, Conquests title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The term repression was used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party, most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society, intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as too rich for a peasant, a series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being fifth column communities. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas. Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of political crimes, they were quickly executed by shooting. Many died at the labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis, one secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van. The campaigns were carried out according to the line, and often by direct orders. The threat of war heightened Stalins perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical fifth column of wreckers, terrorists. The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people, but from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. Stalins opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption and these tendencies may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalins suspicions and he enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism. In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and this required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious old guard of revolutionaries
21.
Gulag
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The Gulag was the government agency that administered and controlled the Soviet forced-labor camp system during Joseph Stalins rule from the 1930s up until the 1950s. The term is commonly used to reference any forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union. The camps housed a range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas, the Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The agencys full name was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and it was administered first by the State Political Administration, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s, the author likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. Natalya Reshetovskaya, the wife of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said in her memoirs that The Gulag Archipelago was based on folklore as opposed to objective facts. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates and 423 labor colonies in the USSR, todays major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners. About 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953, according to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953. According with other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of more than 465,000 were political prisoners. The institutional analysis of the Soviet concentration system is complicated by the distinction between GULAG and GUPVI. In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG and its major function was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union. The top management of GUPVI came from the GULAG system, the major noted distinction from GULAG was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both systems were similar, hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, and high mortality rate. According with the estimates, in total, during the period of the existence of GUPVI there were over 500 POW camps. According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934–53. Some independent estimates are as low as 1.6 million deaths during the period from 1929 to 1953. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time
22.
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
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There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called psychopathological mechanisms of dissent, Article 58-10 of the Stalin-era Criminal Code, Anti-Soviet agitation, was to a considerable degree preserved in the new 1958 RSFSR Criminal Code as Article 70 Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. In 1967 a weaker law, Article 190-1 Dissemination of fabrications known to be false and these laws were frequently applied in conjunction with the system of diagnosis for mental illness, developed by Academician Andrei Snezhnevsky. Together they established a framework within which non-standard beliefs could easily be defined as a criminal offence, the KGB routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing publiс trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. Highly classified government documents which have become available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that the authorities consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent. The Russian Federation acknowledged that before 1991 psychiatry had been used for political purposes and it entails the exculpation and committal of citizens to psychiatric facilities based upon political rather than mental health-based criteria. Many authors, including psychiatrists, also use the terms Soviet political psychiatry or punitive psychiatry to refer to this phenomenon, Psychiatry possesses an inherent capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine. The diagnosis of disease can give the state license to detain persons against their will. In addition, receiving a psychiatric diagnosis can in itself be regarded as oppressive, Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have argued, governmental and medical institutions have at times classified threats to authority during periods of political disturbance. In many countries political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions. In the Soviet Union dissidents were often confined in the so-called psikhushka, Psikhushka is the Russian ironic diminutive for mental hospital. One of the first psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan, in 1939 it was transferred to the control of the NKVD on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD. International human rights such as Walter Reich have long recorded the methods by which Soviet psychiatrists in Psikhushka hospitals diagnosed schizophrenia in political dissenters. Western scholars examined no aspect of Soviet psychiatry as thoroughly as its involvement in the control of political dissenters. As early as 1948, the Soviet secret service took an interest in this area of medicine, Russian psychiatrist Pyotr Gannushkin also believed that in a class society, especially during the most severe class struggle, psychiatry was incapable of not being repressive. A system of abuse of psychiatry was developed at the end of Joseph Stalins regime. Punitive psychiatry was not simply an inheritance from the Stalin era, however, the GULag, or Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps, was an effective instrument of political repression
23.
Religion in the Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union was established by the Bolsheviks in 1922, in place of the Russian Empire. At the time of the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church was deeply integrated into the autocratic state and this was a significant factor that contributed to the Bolshevik attitude to religion and the steps they took to control it. Under the doctrine of atheism in the Soviet Union, there was a government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism conducted by Communists. In 1925 the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the persecution, science was counterposed to religious superstition in the media and in academic writing. The main religions of pre-revolutionary Russia persisted throughout the entire Soviet period, generally, this meant that believers were free to worship in private and in their respective religious buildings, but public displays of religion outside of such designated areas were prohibited. In addition, religious institutions were not allowed to express their views in any type of mass media, as the founder of the Soviet state, V. I. Lenin, put it, Religion is the opium of the people, marxist–Leninist atheism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Christians belonged to various churches, Orthodox, Catholic, and Baptist, the majority of the Muslims in the Soviet Union were Sunni. Other religions, practiced by a number of believers, included Buddhism and Shamanism. Orthodox Christians constituted a majority of believers in the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s, three Orthodox churches claimed substantial memberships there, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Georgian Orthodox Church, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. They were members of the confederation of Orthodox churches in the world. The first two functioned openly and were tolerated by the regime, but the Ukrainian AOC was not permitted to function openly. According to both Soviet and Western sources, in the late 1980s the Russian Orthodox Church had over 50 million believers, over 4,000 of these churches were located in the Ukrainian Republic. The distribution of the six monasteries and ten convents of the Russian Orthodox Church was equally disproportionate, only two of the monasteries were located in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Another two were in Ukraine and there was one each in Belarus and Lithuania, seven convents were located in Ukraine and one each in Moldova, Estonia, and Latvia. The Georgian Orthodox Church, another member of Eastern Orthodoxy, was headed by a Georgian patriarch. In the late 1980s it had 15 bishops,180 priests,200 parishes, in 1811 the Georgian Orthodox Church was incorporated into the Russian Orthodox Church, but it regained its independence in 1917, after the fall of the Tsar. Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox Church did not officially recognize its independence until 1943, the Ukrainian AOC separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1919, when the short-lived Ukrainian state adopted a decree declaring autocephaly from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
24.
Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union
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Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, there were periods where Soviet authorities suppressed and persecuted various forms of Christianity to different extents depending on State interests. Soviet Marxist-Leninism policy consistently advocated the control, suppression, and ultimately, the elimination of religious beliefs, the state advocated the destruction of religion, and it officially pronounced religious beliefs to be superstitious and backward. In 1925 the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the persecution, the total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime has been estimated to range between 12-20 million. The Soviet regime had a commitment to the complete annihilation of religious institutions. Militant meant an uncompromising attitude toward religion and the effort of winning the hearts, Militant atheism became central to the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a high priority policy of all Soviet leaders. Convinced atheists were considered to be politically astute and virtuous individuals. The state established atheism as the only scientific truth, Soviet authorities forbade the criticism of atheism and agnosticism until 1936 or of the states anti-religious policies, such criticism could lead to forced retirement. Soviet law never officially outlawed the holding of religious views, the persecution of religion took place officially through many legal measures designed to hamper religious activities, through a large volume of anti-religious propaganda, and through education. In practice the state sought to control religious bodies and to interfere with them. To this effect, the sought to control the activities of the leaders of the different religious communities. Religious believers always found themselves subject to propaganda and legislation that restricted religious practice. They frequently suffered restrictions within Soviet society, rarely, however, did the Soviet state officially ever subject them to arrest, imprisonment or death simply for holding beliefs. Instead, the methods of persecution represented a reaction to the perception of their resistance to the broader campaign against religion. The tactics varied over the years and became more moderate or more harsh at different times, among common tactics included confiscating church property, ridiculing religion, harassing believers, and propagating atheism in the schools. Actions toward particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals. Many Orthodox were also subjected to punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them to give up their religious convictions. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops, many others were imprisoned or exiled. In the Soviet Union, in addition to the closing and destruction of churches
25.
Islam in the Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union was a state comprising fifteen communist republics which existed from 1922 until its dissolution into a series of separate nation states in 1991. Of these fifteen republics, six had a Muslim majority, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, the Bolsheviks wanted to include as much as possible of the former Russian Empire within the Soviet Union. This meant they were faced with a number of contradictions as they set out to establish the Soviet Union in regions with strong Islamic influences, although actively encouraging atheism, Soviet authorities permitted limited religious activity in all the Muslim republics. Mosques functioned in most large cities of the Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan, however, the government also announced plans to permit training of limited numbers of Muslim religious leaders in courses of two- and five-year duration in Ufa and Baku, respectively. In the late 1980s, Islam had the second largest number of believers in the Soviet Union, all working mosques, religious schools, and Islamic publications were supervised by four spiritual directorates established by Soviet authorities to provide governmental control. The Spiritual Directorate for Transcaucasia dealt with both Sunni and Shia Muslims, the overwhelming majority of the Muslims were Sunnis, only about 10 percent, most of whom lived in the Azerbaijan, were Shias. Unlike the Russian Orthodox Christian church, the Muslims of the Soviet Union originally encountered a larger degree of freedom under the new Bolshevik rule. Under the Tsars, Muslims were brutally repressed and the Eastern Orthodox Church was the official religion, know that your rights, like those of all the peoples of Russia, are under the mighty protection of the revolution. See Basmachi movement Left-wing socialists in the Muslim areas of the former tsarist empire developed a variant of communism that continued in the USSR until 1928. The Muslims believed the fate of world revolution depended on events in Asia not Europe and they also argued alliances with the national bourgeoisie were necessary for the duration of the liberation struggle. Revolutionary activity along the Soviet Unions southern border, Soviet decision makers recognized, would draw the attention of capitalist powers and it also happened in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and the Young Bukharians. When Joseph Stalin consolidated power in the half of the 1920s. Mosques were closed or turned into warehouses throughout Central Asia, religious leaders were persecuted, religious schools were closed down and Waqfs were outlawed. The Soviet government took the veil that the women wore as evidence that the Muslim women were oppressed. This backfired, and the became more popular than ever among the workers, whereas prior to this was mostly used by the middle. Stalins cult of personality left virtually no place for any religious sentiment, during World War II, particularly in 1943-44, the Soviet government conducted a series of deportations to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Treasonous collaboration with the invading Germans and anti-Soviet rebellion were the reasons for these deportations. Six of the seven nationalities of the Crimea and the northern Caucasus that were deported, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushs, Balkars, Karachays, severe incidental losses of life were incurred during and after these deportations
26.
Censorship in the Soviet Union
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Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced. The Soviet government implemented mass destruction of pre-revolutionary and foreign books, only special collections, accessible by special permit granted by the KGB, contained old and politically incorrect material. Towards the end of Soviet rule, perestroika led to loosened restrictions on information, Soviet books and journals also disappeared from libraries according to changes in Soviet history. Often Soviet citizens preferred to destroy politically incorrect publications and photos, works of print such as the press, advertisements, product labels, and books were censored by Glavlit, an agency established on June—6,1922, to safeguard top secret information from foreign entities. From 1932 until 1952, the promulgation of socialist realism was the target of Glavlit in bowdlerizing works of print, while Anti-Westernization and nationalism were common tropes for that goal. To limit peasant revolts over the Holodomor, themes involving shortages of food were expunged. ”As peasant uprisings defined pre-World War II Soviet censorship, nationalism defined the period during the war. Defeats of the Red Army in literature were forbidden, as were depictions of trepidation in Soviet military characters. ”Since Stalin regularly read Pravda, which was itself censored by Glavlit, it was wise for an author to obey Pravda’s advice. Also, Joseph Stalin handpicked who received the Stalin Prize, further incentivizing an author’s pandering to Stalin’s tastes, besides the obvious risks involved with disregarding them. With the start of the Cold War a curse on the Anti-Westernization was proclaimed, religious intolerance and atheism was another goal of post-World War II censorship, and was an extension of Anti-Westernization. In the childrens novel Virgin Soil Upturned, references to God making mist out of tears shed by the poor, the “Khrushchev Thaw beginning in 1953 with Stalins death brought liberation of previously banned literature, and greater liberty to the authors writing during this time. Glavlit’s authority to censor literature decreased after they became attached to the USSR Council of Ministers in 1953. ”Anti-Westernization was also suppressed, however, censorship was not completely absent from this era. Emmanuil Kazakevich’s 1962 novel, Spring on the Oder, was injected in 1963 with descriptions of American bigotry, selfishness. These examples of Anti-Westernization indicate that works were still expurgated for propaganda, repressed persons were routinely removed not only from texts, but also from photos, posters and paintings. Censorship of film was commonplace since the USSR’s inception, beginning with the Russian Civil War, censoring film effectively advanced socialist realism, a mode of art production that positively portrays socialism and constituents of socialist nations. Film censorship peaked during the rule of Stalin, acting as the chief censor for films, Stalin was demanding meticulous revisions in a way befitting his interpretation, as if a co-author. One famous letter Stalin wrote to Alexander Dovzhenko pertained to The Great Citizen, Stalins letter made several intrusive revisions on the characters, props, and vital scenes such that the entire film needed restructuring. More moderate cases were recorded, such as a picture by Ivan Pyryev, however, movies which Stalin thought did not cohere with socialist realism were denied being released to the public, The Party Card was not such a film. This picture’s screenplay was written during the time of a campaign to renew individual party cards
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Censorship of images in the Soviet Union
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Censorship of images in the Soviet Union was widespread in the USSR. The USSR curtailed access to pornography, which was prohibited by Soviet law. While nude shots appeared in a number of Soviet films before the glasnost reform of the 1980s, pornographic images and videotapes were smuggled into the Soviet Union for illegal distribution. In addition to the law, such smuggling was prohibited by legal provisions giving the Soviet state the exclusive right to conduct foreign economic trade. This image taken by the Moscow Canal was taken when Nikolai Yezhov was water commissar, after he fell from power, he was arrested, shot, and had his image removed by the censors. Yezhov was born in Saint Petersburg on May 1,1895 and he joined the Bolsheviks on May 5,1917, in Vitebsk, a few months before the October Revolution. During the Russian Civil War 1919–1921 he fought in the Red Army, after February 1922, he worked in the political system, rising in 1934 to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, in the next year he became a secretary of the Central Committee. From February 1935 to March 1939 he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control, in 1935 he wrote a paper in which he argued that political opposition must eventually lead to violence and terrorism, this became in part the ideological basis of the Purges. He became Peoples Commissar for Internal Affairs and a member of the Presidium Central Executive Committee on September 26,1936, yezhovs crimes were discovered and on April 10,1939, he was arrested. On February 4,1940, he was executed, on May 5,1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground was Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev, the photo was later altered and both were removed by censors. Leon Trotsky was a Ukrainian-born ethnically-Jewish Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist and he was also among the first members of the Politburo. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge, trotskys ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a variation of communist theory, which remains a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism. On November 7,1919, this image was snapped of the Soviet leadership celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution. After Trotsky and his allies fell from power, a number of figures were removed from the image, including Trotsky, Kamenev was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker and a Russian Orthodox housewife. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1901 and its Bolshevik faction when the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in August 1903. He climbed the ranks of the Soviet leadership and was briefly the head of the Soviet state in 1917. They were tried in January 1935 and were forced to admit moral complicity in Kirovs assassination, zinoviev was sentenced to 10 years in prison, Kamenev to five years in prison
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Antisemitism in the Soviet Union
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The 1917 Russian Revolution overthrew a centuries-old regime of official antisemitism in the Russian Empire. The success of the Soviet Union in dealing with this legacy of antisemitism. This culminated in the so-called Doctors plot, in which a group of doctors had allegedly conspired to murder Stalin, there were also numerous antisemitic publications of the era which gained widespread circulation. This stance was retained by the later Bolshevik governments, the October Revolution abolished the laws which regarded the Jews as an outlawed people. Several prominent members of Soviet government institutions and the Communist Party came from Jewish backgrounds, the Council of Peoples Commissars adopted a 1918 decree condemning all antisemitism and calling on the workers and peasants to combat it. At the same time, religious traditions among the Jewish population were suppressed, in August 1919 Jewish properties, including synagogues, were seized and many Jewish communities were dissolved. The anti-religious laws against all expressions of religion and religious education were being taken out on all religious groups, many Rabbis and other religious officials were forced to resign from their posts under the threat of violent persecution. This type of persecution continued on into the 1920s, in March 1919, Vladimir Lenin delivered a speech On Anti-Jewish Pogroms in a gramophone recording. Lenin sought to explain the phenomenon of antisemitism in Marxist terms, according to Lenin, antisemitism was an attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews. Stalin has been accused of resorting to antisemitism in some of his arguments against Trotsky and those who knew Stalin, such as Khrushchev, suggest that Stalin had long harbored negative sentiments toward Jews that had manifested themselves before the 1917 Revolution. As early as 1907, Stalin wrote a letter differentiating between a Jewish faction and a true Russian faction in Bolshevism, Stalins secretary Boris Bazhanov stated that Stalin made crude antisemitic outbursts even before Lenins death. Its also possible that Stalins attitudes towards Trotsky, a Russian Jew, Stalin adopted antisemitic policies which were reinforced with his anti-Westernism. Antisemitism in the Soviet Union commenced openly as a campaign against the rootless cosmopolitan, in this campaign against the rootless cosmopolitan, many leading Jewish writers and artists were killed. Terms like rootless cosmopolitans, bourgeois cosmopolitans, and individuals devoid of nation or tribe appeared in newspapers, the Soviet press accused the Jews of groveling before the West, helping American imperialism, slavish imitation of bourgeois culture and bourgeois aestheticism. Victimization of Jews in the USSR at the hands of the Nazis was denied, Jewish scholars were removed from the sciences, the Stalinist antisemitic campaign ultimately culminated in the Doctors plot in 1953. According to Patai and Patai, the Doctors plot was clearly aimed at the liquidation of Jewish cultural life. Communist antisemitism under Stalin shared a common characteristic with Nazi and fascist antisemitism in its belief in Jewish world conspiracy, immediately following the Six-Day War in 1967 the antisemitic conditions started causing desire to emigrate to Israel for many Soviet Jews. A Jewish Ukrainian radio engineer, Boris Kochubievsky sought to move to Israel, in a letter to Brezhnev, Kochubeivsky stated, Within the week he was called in to the KGB bureau and without questioning, was taken to a mental institution in his hometown of Kiev
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Holodomor
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The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed an officially estimated 7 million to 10 million people. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, during the Holodomor millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. Early estimates of the toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. Recent research has since narrowed the estimates to between 2.4 and 7.5 million, the exact number of deaths is hard to determine, due to a lack of records, but the number increases significantly when the deaths in heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban are included. Older estimates are often cited in political commentary. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement, the word Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means death by hunger, or to kill by hunger, to starve to death. Sometimes the expression is translated into English as murder by hunger or starvation, Holodomor is a compound of the Ukrainian words holod meaning hunger and mor meaning plague. The expression moryty holodom means to inflict death by hunger, the Ukrainian verb moryty means to poison somebody, drive to exhaustion or to torment somebody. The perfective form of the verb moryty is zamoryty – kill or drive to death by hunger, the word was used in print as early as 1978 by Ukrainian immigrant organisations in the United States and Canada. However, in the Soviet Union – of which Ukraine was a constituent republic – references to the famine were controlled, historians could speak only of food difficulties, and the use of the very word golod/holod was forbidden. Discussion of the Holodomor became more open as part of Glasnost in the late 1980s, the term may have first appeared in print in the Soviet Union on 18 July 1988, in his article on the topic. Holodomor is now an entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, the term is described as artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a countrys population. The famine had been predicted as far back as 1930 by academics and advisers to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic government, between 1926 and 1939, the Ukrainian population increased by 6. 6%, whereas Russia and Belarus grew by 16. 9% and 11. 7%, respectively. From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in town were cut back, and in the winter of 1932–33. The urban workers were supplied by a system, but rations were gradually cut, and by the spring of 1933. The first reports of malnutrition and deaths from starvation emerged from two urban areas of the city of Uman, reported in January 1933 by Vinnytsia and Kiev oblasts
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Polish Operation of the NKVD
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It was ordered by the Politburo against the so-called Polish spies and customarily interpreted by the NKVD officials as relating to absolutely all Poles. It resulted in the sentencing of 139,835 people, and summary executions of 111,091 ethnic Poles, the operation was implemented according to NKVD Order №00485 signed by Nikolai Yezhov. The majority of the victims were ethnically Polish but not all, according to Timothy Snyder, the remainder were suspected of being Polish, without further inquiry. In order to speed up the process the NKVD personnel reviewed local telephone books, in Leningrad alone, almost 7,000 citizens were rounded up this way. A vast majority of such nominal suspects were executed within 10 days of arrest, the Polish Operation was the largest ethnic shooting and deportation action during the Great Terror campaign of political murders in the Soviet Union, orchestrated by Nikolai Yezhov. The top secret NKVD Order No and it was distributed to the local subdivisions of the NKVD simultaneously with Yezhovs thirty-page secret letter, explaining what the Polish operation was all about. The letter was entitled, On fascist-resurrectionist, spying, diversional, defeationist, stalin demanded the NKVD to keep on digging out and cleaning out this Polish filth. The Order also established simplified the so-called album procedure, the long lists of prisoners condemned by the lower NKVD organs during the initial investigations, were collected into albums and sent to the midrange NKVD offices for a stamp of approval. After the approval of the album the executions were carried out immediately. This procedure was used in other mass operations of the NKVD. Another possible cause according to Snyder might have sprung from the necessity to explain the Soviet-made famine in Ukraine which required a political scapegoat, a top Soviet official Vsevolod Balitsky chose the Polish Military Organization which was disbanded in 1921. The NKVD declared that it continued to exist, some Soviet Poles were tortured in order to confess to its existence, and denounce other individuals as spies. Meanwhile, the Communist International helped by revisiting its files in search of Polish members, the largest group of people with Polish background, around 40 percent of all victims, came from the Soviet Ukraine, especially from the districts near the border with Poland. Among them were tens of thousands of peasants, railway workers, an additional 17 percent of victims came from the Soviet Byelorussia. The following categories of people were arrested by the NKVD during its Polish operation, as described in Soviet documents, former and present members of the Polish Socialist Party and other non-communist Polish political parties. All prisoners of war from the Polish-Soviet war remaining in the Soviet Union, members of Polska Organizacja Wojskowa listed in the special list. The operation took place approximately from August 25,1937 to November 15,1938. According to archives of the NKVD,111,091 Poles and people accused of ties with Poland, were sentenced to death and this number constitutes 10% of the total number of people officially convicted during the Yezhovshchina period, based on confirming NKVD documents
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Population transfer in the Soviet Union
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In most cases their destinations were underpopulated remote areas. This includes deportations to the Soviet Union of non-Soviet citizens from countries outside the USSR and it has been estimated that, in their entirety, internal forced migrations affected some 6 million people. Kulaks were a group of relatively affluent farmers and had gone by this term in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia. They were the most numerous group deported by the Soviet Union, resettlement of people officially designated as kulaks continued until early 1950, including several major waves. Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990,1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521, during the 1930s, categorisation of so-called enemies of the people shifted from the usual Marxist–Leninist, class-based terms, such as kulak, to ethnic-based ones. Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union led to an escalation in Soviet ethnic cleansing. Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics, by some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition. The deportations started with Poles from Byelorussia, Ukraine and European Russia 1932-1936, koreans in the Russian Far East were deported in 1937. After the Soviet invasion of Poland following the corresponding German invasion that marked the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union annexed eastern parts of the Second Polish Republic. During 1939-19411.45 million people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63. 1% were Poles, previously it was believed that about 1. From the newly conquered Eastern Poland 1.5 million people were deported, the same followed in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been deported from the Baltic in 1940-1953, in addition, at least 75,000 were sent to the Gulag. 10% of the entire adult Baltic population was deported or sent to labor camps, in 1989, native Latvians represented only 52% of the population of their own country. In Estonia, the figure was 62%, likewise, Romanians from Chernivtsi Oblast and Moldovia had been deported in great numbers which range from 200,000 to 400,000. During World War II, particularly in 1943-44, the Soviet government conducted a series of deportations, some 1.9 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics
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Joseph Stalin
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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials. Stalins invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, as it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence agreed with the Axis, Germany ended the pact when Hitler launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow, after defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States, Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea. On February 9,1946, Stalin delivered a public speech in which he explained the fundamental incompatibility of communism and capitalism. He stressed that the system needed war for raw materials. The Second World War was but the latest in a chain of conflicts which could be broken only when the economy made the transformation into communism. Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War, Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed, the exact number of deaths caused by Stalins regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions. Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Ioseb was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia and his father was Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, while his mother was Ekaterine Keke Geladze, a housemaid. As a child, Ioseb was plagued with health issues
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Social class
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Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and social historians. However, there is not a consensus on the best definition of the class, the precise measurements of what determines social class in society has varied over time. According to philosopher Karl Marx, class is determined entirely by ones relationship to the means of production, the term class is etymologically derived from the Latin classis, which was used by census takers to categorize citizens by wealth, in order to determine military service obligations. In the late 18th century, the class began to replace classifications such as estates, rank. Historically social class and behavior was sometimes laid down in law, definitions of social classes reflect a number of sociological perspectives, informed by anthropology, economics, psychology, and sociology. The major perspectives historically have been Marxism and Structural functionalism, the common stratum model of class divides society into a simple hierarchy of working class, middle class and upper class. For Marx, class is a combination of objective and subjective factors, objectively, a class shares a common relationship to the means of production. Subjectively, the members will necessarily have some perception of their similarity, Class consciousness is not simply an awareness of ones own class interest but is also a set of shared views regarding how society should be organized legally, culturally, socially and politically. These class relations are reproduced through time and this is the fundamental economic structure of work and property, a state of inequality that is normalized and reproduced through cultural ideology. Marxists explain the history of civilized societies in terms of a war of classes between those who control production and those who produce the goods or services in society, in the Marxist view of capitalism, this is a conflict between capitalists and wage-workers. Furthermore, in countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, an industrial army of workmen, under the command of a capitalist, requires, like a real army, officers and sergeants who, while the work is being done, command in the name of the capitalist. This would mark the beginning of a society in which human needs rather than profit would be motive for production. In a society with democratic control and production for use, there would be no class, no state and no need for financial and banking institutions and money. Max Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, that saw social class as emerging from an interplay between class, status and power. Weber believed that class position was determined by a relationship to the means of production. Weber derived many of his key concepts on social stratification by examining the structure of many countries. He noted that contrary to Marxs theories, stratification was based on more than simply ownership of capital, Weber pointed out that some members of the aristocracy lack economic wealth yet might nevertheless have political power. Likewise in Europe, many wealthy Jewish families in lack prestige and honor, Class, A persons economic position in a society
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