1.
MVD
–
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation is the interior ministry of Russia. Its predecessor was founded in 1802 by Alexander I in Imperial Russia, the Ministry is headquartered in Moscow. The current Minister of Internal Affairs is General of Police Vladimir Kolokoltsev, as the central government began to further partition the countryside, the ispravniks were distributed among the sections. Serving under them in their localities were commissaries. These uryadniks rapidly became the terror of the countryside and its most famous development was the so-called Third Section instituted by the emperor Nicholas I in 1826. This was entirely independent of the police, but was associated with the previously existing Special Corps of Gendarmes. By World War I, the Department had spawned a counter-intelligence section, after the February Revolution of 1917, the Gendarmes and the Okhrana were disbanded as anti-revolutionary. Having won the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks disbanded the tsarist police forces and formed an all-proletarian Workers, after the establishment of the USSR there was no Soviet NKVD until 1934. In March 1946, all of the Peoples Commissariats were redesignated as Ministries, the NKVD was renamed the MVD of the USSR, along with its former subordinate, the NKGB which became the MGB of the USSR. The NKVDs of Union Republics also became Ministries of Internal Affairs subordinate to MVD of the USSR, Secret police became a part of MVD after Lavrenty Beria merged the MGB into the MVD in March 1953. Within a year Berias downfall caused the MVD to be split up again, after that, in his efforts to fight bureaucracy and maintain Leninist principles, Nikita Khrushchev, as the Premier of the Union, called for the dismissal of the All-Union MVD. The Ministry ceased to exist in January 1960 and its functions were transferred to the respective Republican Ministries, the MVD of the Russian SFSR was renamed the Ministry for Securing the Public Order in 1962. The MVD regained its title in 1968. Another role of the reformed MVD was to combat economic crimes and this fight was never successful due to the pervasive nature of the black market. By the mid-1980s, the image of the militsiya was largely compromised by the corruption. Many high-ranking MVD officers, including the Minister himself, were revealed to be bribed by illegal shadow businesses. It currently controls the politsiya, the Main Directorate for Road Traffic Safety, since the disbanding of the Tax Police, it also investigates economic crimes. The last reorganization abolished Main Directorates inherited from the NKVD in favour of Departments, the current minister of internal affairs in Russia is Vladimir Kolokoltsev
MVD
–
Aerial view of Montevideo
MVD
–
Cerro de Montevideo as seen from the city, in 1865.
MVD
–
Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata at the beginning of the 17th century.
MVD
–
Map of Montevideo during the
Guerra Grande (1843–1851).
2.
Secret police
–
Secret police organisations are often utilised for the purposes of policing the activities of dissidents, and weakening opposition organisations. Secret police forces are only to the executive branch of the government. They operate entirely or partially in secrecy, that is, most or all of their operations are obscure and hidden from the general public, secret police agencies have often been used as an instrument of political repression. States where the secret police wield significant power are sometimes referred to as states or counterintelligence states. Despite such overview, there exists the possibility of domestic-security agencies acting unlawfully. In some cases, certain police agencies are accused of being secret police, for example, political groups and civil liberties organizations in the United States have at various times accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of being secret police. Which government agencies may be classed or characterized, in whole or part, secret police organizations can exist at sub-national levels in a political unit in which entrenched leadership is largely unaccountable. A single secret service has the weapons to arrogate to itself complete political power and it may therefore pose a potential threat to the central political authority. In dictatorships, a relative of the dictator often heads the secret police. For example, Saddam Hussein, as head of the State Internal Security Department placed his secret police under the authority of his first cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid. In addition, secret police have a tendency to view potential political enemies as concrete threats. In some cases, a dictator may manufacture such enemies for the purpose of directing national output toward a common goal, the tactics of investigation and intimidation used by secret police enable them to accrue so much power that they usually operate with little or no practical restraint. Secret police may open mail, tap telephone lines, use techniques to trick, blackmail. Secret police are notorious for raiding homes between midnight and dawn, to people suspected of dissent. People apprehended by the police are often arbitrarily arrested and detained without due process. While in detention, arrestees may be tortured or subjected to inhumane treatment, suspects may not receive a public trial, and instead may be convicted in a kangaroo court-style show trial, or by a secret tribunal. Secret police known to have used these approaches in history include the police of East Germany. Secret police have used by many types of governments
Secret police
–
A
Stasi automated machine to re-glue envelopes after mail had been opened for examination
3.
Intelligence agency
–
Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis, cooperation with other institutions, and evaluation of public sources. The assembly and propagation of information is known as intelligence analysis or intelligence assessment. Intelligence agencies can provide the services for their national governments. There is a distinction between security intelligence and foreign intelligence, security intelligence pertains to domestic threats. Foreign intelligence involves information collection relating to the political, or economic activities of foreign states, zegart, Flawed by Design, The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, Stanford, Calif. Нариси з історії розвідки субєктів державотворення на теренах України / Заг, journals The Journal of Intelligence History Reports Ruiz, Victor H.2010. A Knowledge Taxonomy for Army Intelligence Training, An Assessment of the Military Intelligence Basic Officer Leaders Course Using Lundvalls Knowledge Taxonomy
Intelligence agency
–
The
George Bush Center for Intelligence is the
headquarters of the
Central Intelligence Agency, located in the
unincorporated community of
Langley in
Fairfax County,
Virginia,
United States.
4.
Law enforcement
–
Most law enforcement is conducted by some type of law enforcement agency, with the most typical agency fulfilling this role being the police. Law enforcement agencies tend to be limited to operating within a specified jurisdiction, various specialized segments of society may have their own internal law enforcement arrangements. For example, military organizations may have military police, outline of law enforcement – structured list of topics related to law enforcement, organized by subject area Criminal law Biosecurity Commons
Law enforcement
–
Members of the
San Francisco Police Department at a protest in the
Mission District,
San Francisco,
California.
5.
Gendarmerie
–
A gendarmerie or gendarmery is a military component with jurisdiction in civil law enforcement. The term gendarmerie is derived from the medieval French expression gens darmes, in France and most Francophone nations, the gendarmerie is the branch of the armed forces responsible for internal security during wartime. This concept was introduced to several other Western European countries during the Napoleonic conquests, in the mid twentieth century, a number of former French mandates or colonial possessions such as Syria and the Republic of the Congo adopted a gendarmerie after independence. A somewhat related phenomenon has been the formation of units which fall under the authority of civilian police agencies. Since these are not strictly military forces, however, they are not considered gendarmerie, some of the more prominent modern gendarmerie organizations include the French National Gendarmerie, Italian Carabinieri, and Spanish Civil Guard. The word gendarme comes from the Old French gens darmes, meaning men-at-arms, during the Late Medieval to the Early Modern period, the term referred to a heavily armoured cavalryman of noble birth, primarily serving in the French army. The word gained policing connotations only after the French Revolution when the Maréchaussée of the Ancien Régime was renamed the Gendarmerie, historically, the spelling in English was gendarmery, but now the French spelling gendarmerie is more common. The Oxford English Dictionary uses gendarmery as the spelling, Merriam-Webster uses gendarmerie as the principal spelling. Gendarmes are often deployed in situations, sometimes in their own country. A gendarmerie may come under the authority of a ministry of defence, generally there is some coordination between a ministry of defence and a ministry of the interior over the use of gendarmes. A few forces which are no longer considered military retain the title gendarmerie for reasons of tradition, since different countries may make different use of institutional terms such as gendarmerie, there are cases in which the term may become confusing. For instance, in the French-speaking Cantons of Switzerland the gendarmeries are the civil police. In Chile, the word gendarmerie refers for historic reasons to the prison service, in some cases, a police services military links are ambiguous and it can be unclear whether a force should be defined as a gendarmerie. Some historical military units, such as South-West Africas Koevoet, were defined as police for political reasons. In 2014 the Mexican Federal Police, an armed force which has many attributes of a gendarmerie. The new force would initially number 5,000 personnel and was created with the assistance of the French gendarmerie, in countries where the gendarmerie and civilian police co-exist there may be rivalries and tensions between the forces. This was one of the reasons cited for the decision to disband the Belgian Gendarmerie, since the year 2000 four European countries—Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece and Austria—have replaced long-established gendarmeries with civilian police forces having no military links or functions. The GNA often take part in UN peace keeping missions, the use of military organisations to police civilian populations is common to many time periods and cultures
Gendarmerie
–
Gendarmes in the
rue Vernet, near the
Champs-Élysées, in
Paris
Gendarmerie
–
Cavalry of the
French Republican Guard, a gendarmerie, on parade
Gendarmerie
–
Members of Italy's gendarmerie, the
Carabinieri, on public order duties in
Florence
Gendarmerie
–
Officers of the Polish
Żandarmeria Wojskowa ("Military Gendarmerie")
6.
Border guard
–
A border guard of a country is a national security agency that performs border control, i. e. enforces the security of the countrys national borders. Some of the border guard agencies also perform coast guard. In different countries, names of particular border guard services vary significantly, the service may be called police, guard, troops or sentinel and the name would refer to the nations official term for the state border - whether it is frontier or border. Most border guards of the world use dark green-colored elements on their uniform, patrols go out regularly from the Border outposts to patrol the international border to check illegal crossings and track any footprints of those who may have crossed over illegally or attempted to. The Border Guard may also perform delegated customs and immigration control duties, wartime assistance of the Border guard to the Army is essential as they are familiar with the local terrain having patrolled it on a daily basis during peacetime. During wars, Border outposts are reworked into well fortified dug-in positions from where regular Army units can operate to defend the integrity of the country. Border Guards Bangladesh is a border security and anti-smuggling force under the Ministry of Home Affairs of Bangladesh. BGB can trace back its origin to the establishment of the Ramgarh Local Battalion in 1795 and this force is lightly armed and although its primary duty is to protect the border, during national emergencies it can also be called upon to aid the government. Canada Border Services Agency is a law enforcement agency of the Department of Public Safety, created in 2003, it amalgamated the enforcement activities performed by three separate government entities. Traditionally unarmed, the arming of Border Services Officers, Investigators, Officers are found at entry points to Canada in some conflicts such as the Six Day War. Also, many border posts are staffed by Carabinieri, the Immigration and Border Police also performs border police duties. The State Border Guard Service is the charged with controlling and maintaining the Lithuanian Border. The State Border Guard Service falls under authority of the Ministry of the Interior, Border patrol and immigration control in Macau are conducted by Public Security Police Force of Macau at land entries with China and at Macau International Airport. Customs duties are performed by Macau Customs agency, both border guards and customs officers are responsibilities of the Secretariat for Security. Before the establishment of the agency, Malaysian borders was guarded by the Malaysian Armed Forces, the Royal Marechaussee is the fourth organization within the Dutch Royal Army, besides Army, Navy and Air Force. Besides patrolling the border it also has the function of Military Police, sometime thereafter, the Border Security Bureau was enlarged to corps level and renamed the Border Security Command. Previously headquartered in Chagang Province, the Border Security Command was relocated to P’yŏngyang in 2002, the Frontier Corps is a federal paramilitary force recruited mostly by people from the tribal areas and led by officers from the Pakistan Army. The FC is stationed in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan Province, are known as FC NWFP and FC Balochistan, the Pakistan Rangers are a paramilitary force under the control of the Ministry of the Interior of the Pakistani government
Border guard
–
Soviet Border Troops patrol alpine section of the border, 1984.
Border guard
–
Chinese border guards' booth on the sea coast in
Guangdong.
Border guard
–
Chinese and Pakistani border guards at
Khunjerab Pass
Border guard
–
A
Border Guard Bangladesh Senior Warrant Officer (left in yellow/green outfit) applies a mechanical advantage control/hold to a US Marine during training.
7.
Prison
–
Besides their use for punishing crimes, jails and prisons are frequently used by authoritarian regimes against perceived opponents. Prisons often have facilities that are designed with long term confinement in mind in comparison to jails. In times of war, prisoners of war or detainees may be detained in prisons or prisoner of war camps. The use of prisons can be traced back to the rise of the state as a form of social organization, corresponding with the advent of the state was the development of written language, which enabled the creation of formalized legal codes as official guidelines for society. The best known of early legal codes is the Code of Hammurabi. Some Ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato, began to develop ideas of using punishment to reform instead of simply using it as retribution. Imprisonment as a penalty was used initially for those who could not afford to pay their fines, eventually, since impoverished Athenians could not pay their fines, leading to indefinite periods of imprisonment, time limits were set instead. The prison in Ancient Athens was known as the desmoterion, the Romans were among the first to use prisons as a form of punishment, rather than simply for detention. A variety of existing structures were used to house prisoners, such as cages, basements of public buildings. One of the most notable Roman prisons was the Mamertine Prison, the Mamertine Prison was located within a sewer system beneath ancient Rome and contained a large network of dungeons where prisoners were held in squalid conditions, contaminated with human waste. Forced labor on public projects was also a common form of punishment. In many cases, citizens were sentenced to slavery, often in ergastula, during the Middle Ages in Europe, castles, fortresses, and the basements of public buildings were often used as makeshift prisons. Another common punishment was sentencing people to slavery, which involved chaining prisoners together in the bottoms of ships. However, the concept of the modern prison largely remained unknown until the early 19th-century, Punishment usually consisted of physical forms of punishment, including capital punishment, mutilation, flagellation, branding, and non-physical punishments, such as public shaming rituals. However, an important innovation at the time was the Bridewell House of Corrections, located at Bridewell Palace in London and these houses held mostly petty offenders, vagrants, and the disorderly local poor. In these facilities, inmates were given jobs, and through prison labor they were taught how to work for a living, by the end of the 17th century, houses of correction were absorbed into local prison facilities under the control of the local justice of the peace. From the late 17th century and during the 18th century, popular resistance to public execution, rulers began looking for means to punish and control their subjects in a way that did not cause people to associate them with spectacles of tyrannical and sadistic violence. They developed systems of mass incarceration, often with hard labor, the prison reform movement that arose at this time was heavily influenced by two somewhat contradictory philosophies
Prison
–
Cell block in
Baghdad Central Prison (
Abu Ghraib,
Iraq)
Prison
–
Criminology and
penology
Prison
–
A common punishment in
Early Modern Europe was to be made a
galley slave. The galley pictured here belonged to the Mediterranean fleet of
Louis XIV, c. 1694.
Prison
–
Women in England mourning their lovers who are soon to be transported to
Botany Bay, 1792.
8.
Emergency service
–
Emergency services and rescue services are organizations which ensure public safety and health by addressing different emergencies. Some of these agencies exist solely for addressing certain types of emergencies whilst others deal with ad hoc emergencies as part of their normal responsibilities, many of these agencies engage in community awareness and prevention programs to help the public avoid, detect, and report emergencies effectively. There are three main emergency service functions, Law enforcement —enforcing the law to prevent crime, investigate crime, reach out to the community, fire departments — protecting life and property through the provision of firefighting. However, there are many countries where fire, rescue. Emergency services have one or more dedicated emergency telephone numbers reserved for emergency calls. In some countries, one number is used for all the emergency services, in some countries, each emergency service has its own emergency number. These services can be provided by one of the services or by a separate government or private body. Military — to provide specialist services, such as disposal or to supplement emergency services at times of major disaster. Coast guard — Provide coastal patrols with a security function at sea, tasked with law enforcement and search. Lifeboat — Dedicated providers of rescue services, usually at sea. Mountain rescue — to provide search and rescue in mountainous areas, cave rescue — to rescue people injured, trapped, or lost during caving explorations. Mine rescue — specially trained and equipped to rescue miners trapped by fires, explosions, cave-ins, toxic gas, flooding, technical rescue — other types of technical or heavy rescue, but usually specific to a discipline. Search and rescue — can be discipline-specific, such as urban, wildland, maritime, wildland firefighting — to size-up, contain, extinguish, and mop-up wildfires. Bomb disposal — to render safe hazardous explosive ordnance, such as terrorist devices, unexploded bombs and other. Blood/organ transplant supply — to provide organs or blood on an emergency basis, Emergency management — to provide and co-ordinate resources during large-scale emergencies. Amateur radio emergency communications — to provide support to other emergency services. HAZ-MAT — removal of hazardous materials, Air search providing aerial spotting for the emergency services, such as conducted by the Civil Air Patrol in the US, or Sky Watch in the UK. Most services do, or should, have procedures and liaisons in place to ensure this, there can sometimes be tension between services for a number of other reasons, including professional versus voluntary crew members, or simply based on area or division
Emergency service
–
Emergency Telephone in
New York City
9.
Soviet Union
–
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
Soviet Union
–
Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd with Trotsky, 1920
Soviet Union
–
Flag
Soviet Union
–
Stalin and
Nikolai Yezhov, head of the
NKVD. After Yezhov was executed, he was
edited out of the image.
Soviet Union
10.
Lubyanka (KGB)
–
The Lubyanka is the popular name for the headquarters of the KGB and affiliated prison on Lubyanka Square in Meshchansky District of Moscow, Russia. It is a large Neo-Baroque building with a facade of brick designed by Alexander V. Ivanov in 1897. The Lubyanka was originally built in 1898 as the headquarters of the All-Russia Insurance Company and it is noted for its beautiful parquet floors and pale green walls. A clock is centered in the uppermost band of the facade, following the Bolshevik Revolution, the structure was seized by the government for the headquarters of the secret police, then called the Cheka. In Soviet Russian jokes, it was referred to as the tallest building in Moscow, during the Great Purge, the offices became increasingly cramped due to staff numbers. In 1940, Aleksey Shchusev was commissioned to enlarge the building and his new design doubled the Lubyankas size horizontally, with the original structure taking up the left half of the facade. In addition he added another storey and extended the structure by incorporating backstreet buildings, shchusevs design accentuated Neo-Renaissance detailing, but only the right part of the facade was constructed under his direction in the 1940s, due to the war and other hindrances. Although the Soviet secret police changed its name many times, its headquarters remained in this building, secret police chiefs from Lavrenty Beria to Yuri Andropov used the same office on the third floor, which looked down on the statue of Cheka founder Felix Dzerzhinsky. A prison at the floor of the building figures prominently in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns classic study of the Soviet police state. Famous inmates held, tortured and interrogated there include Sidney Reilly, Raoul Wallenberg, Ion Antonescu, Genrikh Yagoda, János Esterházy, Alexander Dolgun, Rochus Misch, in addition a museum of the KGB was opened to the public. In 1990, the Solovetsky Stone was erected across from the Lubyanka to commemorate the victims of political repression, media related to KGB headquarters, Moscow at Wikimedia Commons KGB/FSB museum - Historically-demonstrative Hall
Lubyanka (KGB)
–
The Lubyanka in 2010
Lubyanka (KGB)
–
Original headquarters building of the All-Russia Insurance Company, before 1917
Lubyanka (KGB)
–
Lubyanka during renovation in 1983, with the left half still lower.
11.
Genrikh Yagoda
–
Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised the arrest, show trial, and execution of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, events that initiated the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using labor from the GULAG system. Like many Soviet secret policemen of the 1930s, Yagoda himself was ultimately a victim of the Purge and he was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937. Charged with the crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism and conspiracy, Yagoda was a defendant at the Trial of the Twenty-One, following his confession at the trial, Yagoda was found guilty and shot. Yagoda was born in Rybinsk into a Jewish family, one of his brothers was killed during the fighting in Sormovo, the other was shot for taking part in a mutiny in a regiment during the war with Germany. He said he joined the Bolsheviks in Nizhni-Novgorod at the age of 16 or 17, and was arrested and sent into exile in 1911. Before his arrest, he married Ida Averbakh, one of whose uncles, Yakov Sverdlov, was a prominent Bolshevik, in 1913, he moved to St Petersburg to work at the Putilov steel works. After the outbreak of war, he joined the army, and was wounded in action, there is another version of his early career, told in the memoirs of the former NKVD officer Aleksandr M. It can be assumed that this was put around by Yagodas successors after his fall from power. After the October Revolution of 1917, Yagoda rose rapidly through the ranks of the Cheka to become the deputy of Felix Dzerzhinsky. In 1924, he joined the USSRs head of government, Alexei Rykov on a tour of the Volga. By contrast, the chemist Vladimir Ipatieff met Yagoda briefly in Moscow in 1918, I felt then that it would be unlucky for me or anyone else ever to fall into his hands. When he saw him again in 1927, his appearance had changed considerably, he had grown fatter and looked older and very dignified. In the contemptuous opinion of Bukharins widow, Anna Larina, Yagoda traded his personal views for the sake of his career and degenerated into a criminal and a miserable coward. As deputy head of the OGPU, Yagoda organized the building of the White Sea–Baltic Canal using forced labor at breakneck speed between 1931 and 1933 at the cost of huge casualties, for his contribution to the canals construction he was later awarded the Order of Lenin. The construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal was also started under his watch and he also supervised the deportations, confiscations, mass arrests and executions that accompanied the forced collectivisation, which he reputedly opposed at the outset. The death toll is estimated to have been as high as seven million, in Ukraine, this catastrophe is known as Holodomor. In March 1934, he was rewarded by being made a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, bukharin visited Yagoda to intercede for Mandelstam, unaware of the nature of his offence
Genrikh Yagoda
–
Genrikh Yagoda in 1936
Genrikh Yagoda
–
Yagoda on police information card from 1912
Genrikh Yagoda
–
1922 exit visa hand signed by Genrikh Yagoda in Moscow.
Genrikh Yagoda
–
Yagoda (middle) inspecting the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal
12.
Nikolai Yezhov
–
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin. He was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the most deadly period of Stalins Great Purge and his time in office is known as the Yezhovshchina, a term coined during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s. After presiding over mass arrests and executions during the Great Purge and he was arrested, confessed under torture to a range of anti-Soviet activity, and was executed in 1940. By the beginning of World War II, his status within the Soviet Union became that of a political unperson, Yezhov was born either in Saint Petersburg, according to his official Soviet biography, or in Suwałki Governorate. In a form filled out in 1921, Yezhov claimed some ability to speak Polish and he completed only his elementary education. From 1909 to 1915, he worked as a tailors assistant, from 1915 until 1917, Yezhov served in the Imperial Russian Army. He joined the Bolsheviks on May 5,1917 in Vitebsk, during the Russian Civil War, 1919–1921, he fought in the Red Army. After February 1922, he worked in the system, mostly as a secretary of various regional committees of the Communist Party. In 1927, he was transferred to the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Party where he worked as an instructor, from 1929 to 1930, he was the Deputy Peoples Commissar for Agriculture. In November 1930, he was appointed to the Head of several departments of the Communist Party, department of special affairs, department of personnel and department of industry. In 1934, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, from February 1935 to March 1939, he was also the Chairman of the Central Commission for Party Control. I do not doubt that in his childhood Yezhov amused himself in just such a manner, physically, Yezhov was short in stature, standing five feet, and that, combined with his sadistic personality, led to his nickname The Poison Dwarf or The Bloody Dwarf. Yezhov married the educated and sincere Marxist Antonia Titova in 1919, Yezhov and Feigenburg had an adopted daughter, Natalia, an orphan from a childrens home. After the death of Nikolai Yezhov, Natalia was sent back to an orphanage and was forced to relinquish the Yezhov surname. Subsequently, she was known by the name Natalia Khayutina, the turning point in Yezhovs life was the response by Stalin to the murder of the Bolshevik chief of Leningrad, Sergey Kirov. Stalin used the murder as a pretext for further purges, he chose Yezhov for this task, Yezhov oversaw falsified accusations in the Kirov murder case against opposition leaders Kamenev, Zinoviev and their supporters. Yezhovs success in this led to his further promotion. He became Peoples Commissar for Internal Affairs and a member of the Central Committee on September 26,1936, following the dismissal of Genrikh Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov
–
Yezhov wife Yevgenia with their adopted daughter
Nikolai Yezhov
–
Nikolai Yezhov
Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов
Nikolai Yezhov
–
Yezhov (left) and Stalin
Nikolai Yezhov
–
In the original version of this photo (top), Yezhov is clearly visible on the right of the photograph. The later version (bottom) was altered by censors, removing all trace of his presence.
13.
Lavrentiy Beria
–
Beria was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalins secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II. Beria administered the vast expansion of the Gulag labor camps and was responsible for overseeing the secret defense institutions known as sharashkas. He also played the role in coordinating the Soviet partisans, developing an impressive intelligence. He attended the Yalta Conference with Stalin, who introduced him to U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as our Himmler, after the war, he organized the communist takeover of the state institutions of Central and Eastern Europe. Berias uncompromising ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results culminated in his success in overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project. Stalin gave it priority and the project was completed in under five years in no small part due to Soviet espionage against the West organized by Berias NKVD. Upon Stalins death in March 1953, Beria was promoted to First Deputy Premier and he was briefly a part of the ruling troika with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. Berias overconfidence in his position after Stalins death led him to misjudge other Politburo members, the compliance of the NKVD was ensured by Zhukovs troops, and after interrogation Beria was taken to the basement of the HQ of the Moscow Military District and shot by General Pavel Batitsky. Beria was born in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in the Sukhumi district of Kutaisi Governorate and he was from the Mingrelian subethnic group of Georgians and grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family. Berias mother, Marta Jaqeli, was a religious, church-going woman, she was previously married and widowed before marrying Berias father, Pavel Khukhaevich Beria. He also had a brother, and a sister named Anna, in his autobiography, Lavrentiy Beria mentioned only his sister and his niece, implying that his brother either was dead or had no relationship with Beria after he left Merkheuli. Beria attended a school in Sukhumi, and joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student in the Baku Polytechnicum. As a student, Beria distinguished himself in mathematics and the sciences, the Polytechnicums curriculum concentrated on the petroleum industry. Beria also worked for the anti-Bolshevik Mussavatists in Baku, after the citys capture by the Red Army, Beria was saved from execution only because there was likely little arrangement time and Sergei Kirov had possibly intervened. While in prison, he formed a connection with Nina Gegechkori, his cellmates niece and she was 17, a trained scientist from an aristocratic family. In 1919, at the age of twenty, Beria started his career in state security when the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic hired him while still a student at the Polytechnicum, in 1920 or 1921, Beria joined the Cheka – the original Bolshevik secret police. At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Menshevik-controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia, the Cheka became heavily involved in the conflict, which resulted in the defeat of the Mensheviks and the formation of the Georgian SSR. By 1922, Beria was deputy head of the Georgian branch of Chekas successor, in 1924 he led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising, after which up to 10,000 people were executed
Lavrentiy Beria
–
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
–
Beria on Caucasian
Party caucus, 1935. Left to right:
Filipp Makharadze,
Mir Jafar Baghirov, Beria.
Lavrentiy Beria
–
The first page of Beria's notice (oversigned by Stalin), to kill approximately 15,000 Polish officers and some 10,000 more intellectuals in the
Katyn Forest and other places in the Soviet Union
Lavrentiy Beria
–
Beria with Stalin (in background), Stalin's daughter
Svetlana, and
Nestor Lakoba (obscured)
14.
Sergei Kruglov (politician)
–
Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov was the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union from December 1945 to March 1953 and again from June 1953 until January 1956. He held the rank of Colonel General. These actions occurred in the 1940s and were carried out alongside his comrade-in-arms General Ivan Serov, Kruglov began working for the Soviet security forces in the early 1930s. In December 1938 he was made a Special Plenipotentiary of NKVD, as a part of the Great Purge and he played an active role in purging NKVD of protégés of Nikolai Ezhov. On February 28,1939 Kruglov became Deputy Commissar for Personnel of the Peoples Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, at the time of that appointment Kruglov held a relatively junior rank of Major. In 1939 Kruglov also became a Candidate Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in February 1941 Kruglov was appointed First Deputy Commissar under Lavrentiy Beria and he retained that position, with a brief interruption, until December 1945. During that period Kruglov was largely responsible in the NKVD for things such as finances, administration, personnel, during the Second World War, Kruglov had several military assignments. In 1941 he was a member of the Military Council of the Soviet Reserve Front and subsequently, in 1944-1945 Kruglov was one of the main Soviet officials in charge of the mass deportations of Chechens and Ingushes. For his role in organizing these deportations Kruglov was awarded the Order of Suvorov, first degree, in January 1944 Kruglov and Vsevolod Merkulov prepared an NKVD report on the Katyn massacre which blamed the massacre on the Germans. In 1945 Kruglov was promoted to the rank of Colonel General of NKVD, on December 29,1945 Kruglov replaced Lavrentiy Beria as the Peoples Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union. In 1946 the Soviet government transitioned to the system and the security apparatus underwent substantial reorganization. NKVD became the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs, with Kruglov as its chief, NKGB became the Soviet Ministry of State Security, and it was headed by Viktor Abakumov, who replaced Berias protégé Vsevolod Merkulov. Beria became Deputy Prime Minister and retained overall control over both MVD and MGB, which were both, however, now led by Berias adversaries. Although Kruglov rose through the ranks of Berias machine, he was not considered a Beria loyalist and after the war allied himself with Viktor Abakumov, a Beria rival. The elevation of Kruglov and Abakumov is now seen by historians as part of a strategy by Joseph Stalin to limit Berias influence after the end of the war. Kruglovs authority as the Minister of Internal Affairs fluctuated significantly over the period 1946-1953, in the beginning this authority included overall control over the Soviet Militsiya, the paramilitary Internal Troops, running of the Gulag system, border guard, and other areas. In the late 1940s and early 1950s some of this authority had been transferred from MVD to MGB, however, for most of that period Kruglov remained the head of the State Special Commission, an extrajudicial body with authority to prosecute those charged with crimes against the State. In 1948 Kruglov organized mass deportation of the German population of the Kaliningrad oblast – the area around Königsberg that was annexed by the Soviet Union at the conclusion of World War II
Sergei Kruglov (politician)
–
Sergei Kruglov
15.
Gulag
–
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
Gulag
–
The fence at the old Gulag in
Perm-36, founded in 1943
Gulag
–
Road construction by inmates of the
Dalstroy (part of the '
Road of Bones ' from Magadan to Yakutsk).
Gulag
–
Transpolar Railway was a project of the Gulag system that took place from 1947 to 1953.
16.
Soviet political repressions
–
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
Soviet political repressions
–
The Gulag Memorial in
St Petersburg is made of a boulder from the
Solovki camp — the first prison camp in the Gulag system. People gather here every year on the
Day of Remembrance of Victims of the Repression (October 30)
Soviet political repressions
–
Soviet Union
Soviet political repressions
–
The contemporary caption says "
YCLers seizing grain from
kulaks which was hidden in the graveyard, Ukraine, 1930." At the height of collectivization anyone resisting it was declared "kulak"
Soviet political repressions
–
Mikhail Tukhachevsky convicted in the
Trial of Red Army Generals in 1937
17.
Great Purge
–
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
Great Purge
–
Partial view of a plaque with photos of victims of the Great Purge who were shot in the
Butovo firing range near Moscow. The photos were taken after the arrest of each victim.
Great Purge
–
Excerpt of
NKVD Order No. 00447
Great Purge
–
A list from the Great Purge signed by
Stalin,
Molotov,
Kaganovich,
Voroshilov,
Mikoyan, and
Chubar.
Great Purge
–
Leon Trotsky, in 1929, shortly before being driven out of the Soviet Union.
18.
Joseph Stalin
–
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
Joseph Stalin
–
Stalin at the
Tehran Conference in 1943.
Joseph Stalin
–
Prior to the revolution of 1917, Stalin played an active role in fighting the Russian government. Here he is shown on a 1911 information card from the files of the Russian police in Saint Petersburg.
Joseph Stalin
–
A group of participants in the 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, 1919. In the middle are Stalin,
Vladimir Lenin, and
Mikhail Kalinin.
19.
Felix Dzerzhinsky
–
Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed Iron Felix, was a Polish and Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet statesman. His party pseudonyms were Jacek, Jakub, Pereplyotchik, Franek, Astronom, Józef and he was a member of several revolutionary committees such as the Polish Revkom as well as several Russian and Soviet official positions. Dzerzhinsky is best known for establishing and developing the Soviet secret police forces, later he was a member of the Soviet government heading several commissariats, while being the chief of the Soviet secret police. The Cheka soon became notorious for mass executions, performed especially during the Red Terror. Felix Dzerzhinsky was born on 11 September 1877 at the Dzerzhinovo family estate, about 15 km away from a town of Ivyanets, in the Minsk Region. His aristocratic family belonged to the former Polish szlachta, of the Sulima coat of arms, as a child, before taking to Marxist ideology, Felix considered becoming a Jesuit priest. His sister Wanda died at the age of 12, when she was shot with a hunting rifle on the family estate by one of the brothers. At the time of the incident, there were conflicting claims as to whether Felix or his brother Stanisław was responsible for the accident. In 1868, after a stint in Kherson gymnasium, he worked as a gymnasium teacher of physics and mathematics at the gymnasiums of Taganrog. In 1875 Edmund Dzierżyński retired due to conditions and moved with his family to his estate near Ivyanets and Rakaw. In 1882 Felixs father died from tuberculosis, as a youngster Dzerzhinsky became fluent in four languages, Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and Latin. He attended the Wilno gymnasium from 1887 to 1895, one of the older students at this gymnasium was his future arch-enemy, Józef Piłsudski. Years later, as Marshal of Poland, Piłsudski recalled that Dzerzhinsky, distinguished himself as a student with delicacy and modesty. He was rather tall, thin and demure, making the impression of an ascetic with the face of an icon, tormented or not, this is an issue history will clarify, in any case this person did not know how to lie. School documents show that Dzerzhinsky attended his first year in school twice, two months before graduating, Dzerzhinsky was expelled from the gymnasium for revolutionary activity. He had joined a Marxist group, the Union of Workers, in late April 1896, he was one of 15 delegates at the first congress of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party. In 1897, he attended the congress of the LSDP. On 18 March 1897, he was sent to Kaunas, to advantage of the arrest of the Polish Socialist Party branch
Felix Dzerzhinsky
–
Felix Dzerzhinsky in 1918
Felix Dzerzhinsky
–
Dzerzhinsky's mug shots 1909, 1914 and 1916
Felix Dzerzhinsky
–
Dzerzhinsky pictured with wife Zofia and son Janek in
Lugano,
Switzerland; October 1918
Felix Dzerzhinsky
–
Victims of the Red Terror in southern Russia
20.
Cheka
–
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created on December 20,1917, after a decree issued by Vladimir Lenin, and was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. After 1922, Cheka groups underwent a series of reorganizations, with the NKVD, in 1921 the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic numbered at least 200,000. The name of the agency was originally The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, in 1918 its name was changed, becoming All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption. A member of Cheka was called a chekist, also, the term chekist often referred to Soviet secret police throughout the Soviet period, despite official name changes over time. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn recalls that zeks in the camps used old Chekist as a mark of special esteem for particularly experienced camp administrators. The term is found in use in Russia today. The Chekists commonly dressed in leather, including long flowing coats. Western communists adopted this clothing fashion, the Chekists also often carried with them Greek-style worry beads made of amber, which had become fashionable among high officials during the time of the cleansing. In the first month and half after the October Revolution, the duty of extinguishing the resistance of exploiters was assigned to the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee and it represented a temporary body working under directives of the Council of Peoples Commissars and Central Committee of RDSRP. The VRK created new bodies of government, organized food delivery to cities and the Army, requisitioned products from bourgeoisie, one of its most important functions was the security of revolutionary order, and the fight against counterrevolutionary activity. On December 1,1917, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee reviewed a proposed reorganization of the VRK, on December 5, the Petrograd VRK published an announcement of dissolution and transferred the functions to the department of TsIK to the fight against counterrevolutionaries. On December 6, the Council of Peoples Commissars strategized how to persuade government workers to strike across Russia and they decided that a special commission was needed to implement the most energetically revolutionary measures. Peters, K. A. Peterson, V. A. Trifonov, on December 7,1917, all invited except Zhydelev and Vasilevsky gathered in the Smolny Institute to discuss the competence and structure of the commission to combat counterrevolution and sabotage. The commission should conduct a preliminary investigation. The commission should also observe the press and counterrevolutionary parties, sabotaging officials and it was decided to create three sections, informational, organizational, and a unit to combat counter-revolution and sabotage. Upon the end of the meeting, Dzerzhinsky reported to the Sovnarkom with the requested information, the commission was allowed to apply such measures of repression as confiscation, deprivation of ration cards, publication of lists of enemies of the people etc. That day, Sovnarkom officially confirmed the creation of VCheKa, the commission was created not under the VTsIK as was previously anticipated, but rather under the Council of the Peoples Commissars
Cheka
–
Members of the
presidium of VCheKa (left to right)
Yakov Peters,
Józef Unszlicht, A. Ya. Belenky (standing), Felix Dzerzhinsky,
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, 1921
Cheka
–
Smolny, the seat of the Soviet government, 1917
Cheka
–
Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich
Cheka
–
Grigory Petrovsky
21.
Forced labor
–
Unfree labour includes all forms of slavery, and related institutions. According to the Marxian economics, under capitalism, workers never keep all of the wealth they create, as some of it goes to the profit of capitalists. Slavery was common in ancient societies, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient Israel, ancient China, classical Arab states, as well as many societies in Africa. Being sold into slavery was a fate of populations conquered in wars. The term slavery is often applied to situations which do not meet the above definitions, examples are the Repartimiento system in the Spanish Empire, or the work of Indigenous Australians in northern Australia on sheep or cattle stations, from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. In the latter case, workers were rarely or never paid, in late 16th century Japan, unfree labour or slavery was officially banned, but forms of contract and indentured labour persisted alongside the period penal codes forced labour. Somewhat later, the Edo period penal laws prescribed non-free labour for the family of executed criminals in Article 17 of the Gotōke reijō. The 1711 Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes promulgated between 1597 and 1696, according to Kevin Bales, in Disposable People, New Slavery in the Global Economy, there are now an estimated 27 million slaves in the world. Convict or prison labour is another form of unfree labour. The forced labour of convicts has often been regarded with lack of sympathy, three British colonies in Australia — New South Wales, Van Diemens Land and Western Australia — provide probably the best examples of the state use of convict labour. A considerable number of Irish convicts were sentenced to transportation for treason while fighting for Irish independence from British rule, more than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868. Most British or Irish convicts who were sentenced to transportation, however and it is estimated that in the last 50 years more than 50 million people have been sent to Chinese laogai camps. Chinas Laogai system and North Koreas Kwalliso camps are current examples, about 12 million forced labourers, most of whom were Poles and Soviet citizens, were employed in the German war economy inside Nazi Germany. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between 4 and 10 million romusha were forced to work by the Japanese military, about 270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning there was a death rate of 80%. Kerja rodi, was the term for forced labor in Indonesia during Dutch colonisation, the Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population into agricultural communes. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labour camps, a specific kind of truck system, in which credit advances are made against future work, is known in the U. S. as debt bondage. Many scholars have suggested that use such systems to exploit workers and/or indebt them
Forced labor
–
Convict labourers in Australia in the early 20th century.
Forced labor
–
Slavery
Forced labor
–
American prisoner "
chain gang " laborers, 2006. Notice the shackles on the feet of the prisoners.
Forced labor
–
Female forced laborers wearing "OST" (
Ost-Arbeiter) badges are liberated from a camp near Lodz, January 1945.
22.
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
–
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
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
–
A dwelling typical to some deportees into Siberia in a museum in
Rumšiškės, Lithuania
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
–
Soviet Union
23.
NKVD Border Troops
–
Accordingly, they were known as NKVD Border Troops and KGB Border Troops. Unlike border guards of many countries, Soviet Border Troops also included the maritime borderguarding units. They became the Border Service of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation on December 30,1993, in 1934, under the NKVD, Border Troops were immediately subordinated to the GUPVO. In 1939 they were reorganized into the GUPV, NKVD Border Troops consisted of infantry, cavalry, reconnaissance, naval and airforce units. Since the 1920s, the part of Soviet Border Troops uniform was the medium-green colored parts of headwear. The color is present on a maritime Border Troops ensign. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Border Troops assisted the pacification of the newly acquired Soviet territory adjoining the state border, the mass execution of Romanian civilians known as the Fântâna Albă massacre happened at this time. Border Troops units on the western USSR frontier saw particularly fierce combat in the first weeks of the German invasion of the USSR and they bore the brunt of the initial German assault, and due to this, suffered high casualty rates. Border Troop servicemen were among the defenders of the Brest Fortress, Border troops from other parts of the Soviet border were also involved in the fighting of the war. Notably, the 105th, 157th, and 333rd Border Troops regiments took part in the Battle for Berlin in 1945. During and after the war,150 border guards were awarded the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union and over 13,000 of them were decorated with different orders, in wartime the Border Troops would become a frontline combat service. The Border Troops also saw combat in 1969 in border clashes with Chinese soldiers on islands in the Ussuri River, after the formation of the KGB, Soviet Border Troops became subordinated to this agency and remained so until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. As such, the Troops were concentrating on the tasks of preventing espionage infiltrations, the most notable in that system was the trace-control strip - a primitive labour-demanding method making surface crossing virtually impossible. The Border Troops consisted of conscripts drafted by the system as for the Soviet Army. Officers were trained in specialized academies, both conscripts and officer candidates for Border Troops were carefully selected and checked by the KGB. This made service in the troops privileged, article 28 defined the basic duties of the Border Troops. The Border Troops strength was estimated in 1989 to be in the range of 230,000 men, the Border Troops Directorate administered approximately nine border districts, which covered the nearly 63,000 kilometers of the state border. Border district boundaries were distinct from civil or military district boundaries, the nine border districts were subdivided into detachments, covering specific sections of the border, border command posts, passport control points, and border outposts
NKVD Border Troops
–
Soviet Border Guard sleeve patch
NKVD Border Troops
–
The Karpov frontier post.
NKVD Border Troops
–
Soviet Border Troops.
NKVD Border Troops
–
KGB border Troops dog in training exercise
24.
Political assassination
–
Assassination is the murder of a prominent person, often a political leader or ruler, usually for political reasons or payment. The word assassin is believed to derive from the word Hashshashin. It referred to a group of Nizari Shia Persians who worked against various Arab, founded by the Persian Hassan-i Sabbah, the Assassins were active in the fortress of Alamut in Iran from the 8th to the 14th centuries, and also controlled the castle of Masyaf in Syria. The group killed members of the Persian, Abbasid, Seljuq, the word for murder in many Romance languages is derived from this same root word. Assassination is one of the oldest tools of power politics and it dates back at least as far as recorded history. The Old Testament story of Judith illustrates how a woman frees the Israelites by tricking and assassinating Holofernes, a warlord of the rival Assyrians, with whom the Israelites were at war. King Joash of Judah was recorded as being assassinated by his own servants, Joab assassinated Absalom, King Davids son, chanakya wrote about assassinations in detail in his political treatise Arthashastra. His student Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Maurya Empire, later made use of assassinations against some of his enemies, other famous victims are Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, and Roman consul Julius Caesar. Emperors of Rome often met their end in this way, as did many of the Muslim Shia Imams hundreds of years later, the practice was also well known in ancient China, as in Jing Kes failed assassination of Qin king Ying Zheng in 227 BC. Whilst many assassination were performed by an individual or a small group, the earliest were the sicarii in 6 A. D. who predated the Middle Eastern assassins and Japanese ninjas by centuries. In the Middle Ages, regicide was rare in Western Europe, blinding and strangling in the bathtub were the most commonly used procedures. With the Renaissance, tyrannicide—or assassination for personal or political reasons—became more common again in Western Europe and this account is, however, contentious among historians, it being most commonly asserted that he died of natural causes. The myth of the Curse of King Zvonimir is based on the legend of his assassination, in 1192, Conrad of Montferrat, the de facto King of Jerusalem, was killed by an assassin. The reigns of King Przemysł II of Poland, William the Silent of the Netherlands, in Russia alone, two emperors, Paul I and his grandson Alexander II, were assassinated within 80 years. In the United Kingdom, only one Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has ever been assassinated—Spencer Perceval on May 11,1812. In the United States, within 100 years, four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, there have been at least 20 known attempts on U. S. presidents lives. Huey Long, a Senator, was assassinated in September of 1935, the Polish Home Army conducted a regular campaign of assassinations against top Nazi German officials in occupied Poland. Adolf Hitler, meanwhile, was almost killed by his own officers, indias Father of the Nation, Mohandas K. Gandhi, was shot to death on January 30,1948, by Nathuram Godse
Political assassination
–
The word "assassin" was derived from
Hasan-i Sabbah and his
Assassin's Order of Nizari Ismailism.
Political assassination
–
Assassination of King
Henry III of France
Political assassination
–
Assassination of King
Przemysł II of Poland
Political assassination
–
Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; 1865 depiction. Assassin
John Wilkes Booth on the right.
25.
Stalinism
–
Stalinism is the means of governing and related policies implemented by Joseph Stalin. These included not only people but also working-class people accused of counter-revolutionary sympathies. Rapid industrialization was accompanied with mass collectivization of agriculture and rapid urbanization, rapid urbanization converted many small villages into industrial cities. After the American private enterprises completed their tasks, Soviet state enterprises took over, the term came into prominence during the mid-1930s, when Lazar Kaganovich, a Soviet politician and associate of Stalin, reportedly declared, Lets replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism. Stalin initially met this usage with hesitancy, dismissing it as excessively praiseful, Stalinism usually denotes a style of a government, and an ideology. From 1917 to 1924, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin often appeared united, in his dispute with Leon Trotsky, Stalin de-emphasized the role of workers in advanced capitalist countries. Also, Stalin polemicized against Trotsky on the role of peasants, as in China, in Stalins view, counterrevolutionary elements will try to derail the transition to full Communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, Communist regimes influenced by Stalin have been described as totalitarian. Soviet puppet Sheng Shicai extended Stalinist rule in Xinjiang province in the 1930s, Sheng conducted a purge similar to Stalins Great Purge in 1937. Stalin blamed the Kulaks as the inciters of reactionary violence against the people during the implementation of agricultural collectivisation, in response, the state under Stalins leadership initiated a violent campaign against the Kulaks, which has been labeled as classicide. Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, in the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counterrevolutionary crime, was applied in the broadest manner. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning, a quick, Stalins hand-picked executioner, Vasili Blokhin, was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period. Many military leaders were convicted of treason and a purge of Red Army officers followed. The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a river of blood separated Stalins regime from that of Lenin. In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937, this eliminated the last of Stalins opponents among the former Party leadership. With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenins original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed
Stalinism
–
The
Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action) during
May Day demonstration in
Santiago, Chile, carrying a banner with the portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.
Stalinism
–
Manipulated photo intended to show
Vladimir Lenin with Stalin in the early 1920s.
Stalinism
–
Members of the
Communist Party of China celebrating Stalin's birthday, in 1949.
26.
Polish Operation of the NKVD
–
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
Polish Operation of the NKVD
–
Yezhov and Stalin, USSR, 1937
Polish Operation of the NKVD
–
First page of one of the copies of the Order No. 00485, archived by the Kharkov branch of the NKVD.
27.
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
–
Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky was a Polish-Russian revolutionary, a Soviet statesman and Party official who served as chairman of the OGPU from 1926 to 1934. He was fluent in over 10 languages, vyacheslav Menzhinsky, a hereditary dvoryanin, was born into a Polish-Russian family of teachers. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at Saint Petersburg University in 1898 and he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902. In 1905 he became a member of the organization of the Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP. In 1906 Menzhinsky was arrested, but was able to escape from Russia and he lived in Belgium, Switzerland, France, United States, working in foreign branches of the RSDLP. After the February Revolution of 1917, Menzhinsky returned to Russia in the summer of that year, according to G. von Schantz, Menzhinsky personally conducted the wrecking of the Russian banks, a maneuver that deprived all opponents of Bolshevikism of their financial means of warfare. From 1919 he was a member of the Presidium of Cheka, and five years became a deputy chairman of its successor. After Felix Dzerzhinskys death in July 1926 Menzhinsky became the chairman of the OGPU, at the same time, as a senior Chekist, Menzhinsky was loyal to Joseph Stalin, whose personality cult had already begun to form, coinciding with several important purges in 1930-1931. Trotsky, who had met him before the revolution, thought him unremarkable, He seemed more like the shadow of some other unrealized man, Menzhinsky spent his last years as an invalid, suffering from acute angina since the late 1920s, which rendered him incapable of physical exertion. He conducted the affairs of the OGPU while lying upon a couch in his office at the Lubyanka, Stalin tended to deal with his first deputy Genrikh Yagoda, who essentially took over as head of the organization in all but name beginning in the late 1920s. Menzhinsky died of causes in 1934. When his successor, Yagoda, made his confession under duress at the Moscow Trial of the Twenty One in 1938. Great Soviet Encyclopedia A Pince-nez Among Leather Jackets, an article at the FSB website The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
–
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky Вячеслав Менжинский
Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
–
Menzhinsky as a young revolutionary.
28.
February Revolution
–
The February Revolution, known in Soviet historiography as the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution was the first of two Russian revolutions in 1917. The revolution centered on Petrograd, then the Russian capital, arguably beginning on 8 March, Revolutionary activity was largely confined to the capital and its vicinity, and lasted about eight days. It involved mass demonstrations and armed clashes with police and gendarmes, on 12 March mutinous Russian Army forces sided with the revolutionaries. Three days later the result was the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the end of the Romanov dynasty, Russian Council of Ministers was replaced by a Russian Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov. The revolution appeared to break out spontaneously, without any leadership or formal planning. Russia had been suffering from a number of economic and social problems, bread rioters primarily women in bread lines, and industrial strikers were joined on the streets by disaffected soldiers from the citys garrison. As more and more troops deserted, and with loyal troops away at the Front, in all, over 1,300 people were killed in the protests of February 1917. A number of factors contributed to the downfall of the Imperial government in the spring of 1917, different historians apply different weights to different factors, liberal historians emphasise the turmoil created by the war, whereas Marxists emphasise the inevitability of change. Rabinowitch summarizes the main long-term and short-term causes, The February 1917 revolution, despite its occurrence at the height of World War I, the roots of the February Revolution date much further back. As historian Richard Pipes writes, the incompatibility of capitalism and autocracy struck all who gave thought to the matter. The first major event of the Russian Revolution was the February Revolution, dissatisfaction of proletarians was compounded by food shortages and military failures. Widespread strikes, riots and the mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin ensued. These conditions caused much agitation among the working and professional classes. This tension erupted into revolt with the 1905 Revolution, and again under the strain of war in 1917. The revolution was provoked by Russian military failures during the First World War, the economic challenges faced due to fighting a total war also contributed. In August 1914, all supported and virtually all political deputies voted in favour of the war. The exceptions included the Bolshevik Party and specifically Vladimir Lenin who argued it was not a war fighting. The declaration of war was followed by a revival of nationalism across Russian society, nearly six million casualties—dead, wounded and missing—had been accrued by January 1917
February Revolution
–
Wounded Russian soldiers retreating from the front
February Revolution
–
Putilov workers protesting in the streets
February Revolution
–
Meeting Germans in No Man's Land
February Revolution
–
Nikolay Chkheidze, first Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet
29.
Tsar
–
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
Tsar
–
Reception of the Tsar of Russia in the
Moscow Kremlin.
Tsar
–
Redrawing of the
epitaph of ichirgu boila Mostich. Translation (the title Tsar is enclosed): “Here lies
Mostich who was
ichirgu-boil during the reigns of Tsar Simeon and Tsar Peter. At the age of eighty he forsook the rank of ichirgu boila and all of his possessions and became a monk. And so ended his life.” Now in the Museum of Preslav.
Tsar
–
Tsar
Dušan of Serbia
Tsar
–
Władysław IV of Poland was the Tsar of Russia during the
Time of Troubles, when the
Polish forces occupied
Moscow.
30.
Militsiya
–
Militsiya, often confused with militia, is used as an official name of the civilian police in several former communist states. Eventually, it was replaced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and its regional branches are officially called Departments of Internal Affairs—city department of internal affairs, raion department of internal affairs, oblast department of internal affairs, etc. The Russian term for a department is OVD, for region department is UVD or, sometimes, GUVD. Functionally, Ministries of Internal Affairs are mostly police agencies, the Soviet and successor MVDs have usually been headed by a militsiya general and predominantly consist of service personnel, with civilian employees only filling auxiliary posts. Although such ministers are members of their respective countries cabinet, they usually do not report to the minister and parliament. Local militsiya departments are subordinated to their departments, having little accountability before local authorities. Internal affairs units within the militsiya itself are called internal security departments. The official names of particular militsiya bodies and services in post-Soviet countries are very complicated. Laws usually refer to police just as militsiya, the short term for a police officer is militsioner. Slang terms for militsioner include ment and musor, although the latter word is offensive, it originated from an acronym for the Moscow Criminal Investigations Department in Imperial Russia. Ment is an equivalent to the English slang term cop and has derived from the Lwów dialect. The organizational structure, methods and traditions of the militsiya differ significantly from those of western police, Militsiya as an organization consists of many functional departments, such as the GIBDD, a traffic police. Organized crime detectives form highly independent squads inside regional militsiya, some units may have the distinctive names which are more specific than militsiya or militsioner. Militsiya personnel ranks mostly follow those of the Army – from private, detectives hold a rank of lieutenant at least and could be promoted to major or the lieutenant colonel. The militsiya of an oblast is usually headed by a general, the rank name is suffixed with of militsiya. Militsiya personnel carry firearms, but are not permitted to carry their weapons when they are off duty, unlike in some other countries police agencies, militsioners are not assigned permanent partners, but work alone or within larger groups. Neither uniformed officers nor detectives are allowed to drive police vehicles themselves, under the Patrol Police Service Regulations a designated police officer-driver is required to have a driver license and is not allowed to abandon the vehicle. The last two are assigned to the vehicles registered to regional level MVD units
Militsiya
–
Soviet and Russian breastplates, from top left to right bottom: Soviet
Druzhinnik badge, Soviet Metropolitan Post Militia (PPS), Soviet
State Automobile Inspection (GAI), State Automobile Inspection (GAI) of the
Russian Federation, Russian
Moscow Municipal Militia Central District, and
Russian Police.
Militsiya
–
Soviet Militsiya officer's cap cockade (service/parade version).
Militsiya
–
A
Lada 2106 belonging to the Armenian State Automobile Inspection parked on a street in
Yerevan, June 2007.
Militsiya
–
A Russian
GAI inspector with a
radar gun on the side of
MKAD
31.
October Revolution
–
It took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd on 25 October 1917. During this time, urban workers began to organize into councils wherein revolutionaries criticized the provisional government and this immediately initiated the establishment of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the worlds first self-proclaimed socialist state. The revolution was led by the Bolsheviks, who used their influence in the Petrograd Soviet to organize the armed forces, Bolshevik Red Guards forces under the Military Revolutionary Committee began the takeover of government buildings on 24 October 1917. The following day, the Winter Palace, was captured, the long-awaited Constituent Assembly elections were held on 12 November 1917. The Bolsheviks only won 175 seats in the 715-seat legislative body, coming in second behind the Socialist Revolutionary party, the Constituent Assembly was to first meet on 28 November 1917, but its convocation was delayed until 5 January 1918 by the Bolsheviks. On its first and only day in session, the body rejected Soviet decrees on peace and land, as the revolution was not universally recognized, there followed the struggles of the Russian Civil War and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. At first, the event was referred to as the October coup or the Uprising of 25th, in Russian, however, переворот has a similar meaning to revolution and also means upheaval or overturn, so coup is not necessarily the correct translation. With time, the term October Revolution came into use and it is also known as the November Revolution having occurred in November according to the Gregorian Calendar. The Great October Socialist Revolution was the name for the October Revolution in the Soviet Union after the 10th anniversary of the Revolution in 1927. The February Revolution had toppled Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, however, the provisional government was weak and riven by internal dissension. It continued to wage World War I, which became increasingly unpopular, a nationwide crisis developed in Russia, affecting social, economic, and political relations. Disorder in industry and transport had intensified, and difficulties in obtaining provisions had increased, gross industrial production in 1917 had decreased by over 36% from what it had been in 1914. In the autumn, as much as 50% of all enterprises were closed down in the Urals, the Donbas, at the same time, the cost of living increased sharply. Real wages fell about 50% from what they had been in 1913, russias national debt in October 1917 had risen to 50 billion rubles. Of this, debts to foreign governments constituted more than 11 billion rubles, the country faced the threat of financial bankruptcy. In these months alone, more than a million took part in strikes. Workers established control over production and distribution in many factories and plants in a social revolution, by October 1917, there had been over 4,000 peasant uprisings against landowners. When the Provisional Government sent punitive detachments, it only enraged the peasants
October Revolution
–
Red Guards at Vulkan factory in 1917
October Revolution
–
Bolshevik (1920), by
Boris Kustodiev
October Revolution
–
A scene from the July Days. The army has just opened fire on street protesters.
October Revolution
–
Cruiser
Aurora
32.
Lenin
–
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
Lenin
–
Lenin in 1920
Lenin
–
"Volodya", aged four.
Lenin
–
Lenin, c. 1887.
Lenin
–
Lenin (left) in December 1895 and his wife Nadezhda.
33.
Bolshevik
–
The RSDLP was a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898 in Minsk in Belarus to unite the various revolutionary organisations of the Russian Empire into one party. In the Second Party Congress vote, the Bolsheviks won on the majority of important issues and they ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks or Reds came to power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, with the Reds defeating the Whites, and others during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, the RSFSR became the chief constituent of the Soviet Union in December 1922. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism, in the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, held in Brussels and London during August 1903, Lenin and Julius Martov disagreed over the membership rules. Lenin wanted members who recognise the Party Programme and support it by material means, Julius Martov suggested by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the partys organisations. Lenin advocated limiting party membership to a core of active members. A main source of the factions could be attributed to Lenin’s steadfast opinion. It was obvious at early stages in Lenin’s revolutionary practices that he would not be willing to concede on any party policy that conflicted with his own predetermined ideas and it was the loyalty that he had to his own self-envisioned utopia that caused the party split. He was seen even by fellow party members as being so narrow minded that he believed there were only two types of people, Friend and enemy—those who followed him, and all the rest. Leon Trotsky, one of Lenins fellow revolutionaries, compared Lenin in 1904 to the French revolutionary Robespierre, Lenins view of politics as verbal and ideological warfare and his inability to accept criticism even if it came from his own dedicated followers was the reason behind this accusation. The root of the split was a book titled What is to be Done. that Lenin wrote while serving a sentence of exile, in Germany, the book was published in 1902, in Russia, strict censorship outlawed its publication and distribution. One of the points of Lenin’s writing was that a revolution can only be achieved by the strong leadership of one person over the masses. After the proposed revolution had overthrown the government, this individual leader must release power. Lenin also wrote that revolutionary leaders must dedicate their lives to the cause in order for it to be successful. Lenins view of a socialist intelligentsia showed that he was not a supporter of Marxist theory. For example, Lenin agreed with the Marxist idea of eliminating social classes, most party members considered unequal treatment of workers immoral, and were loyal to the idea of a completely classless society, so Lenin’s variations caused the party internal dissonance. Although the party split of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks would not become official until 1903, as discussed in What is to be Done. Lenin firmly believed that a political structure was needed to effectively initiate a formal revolution
Bolshevik
–
Bolshevik Party meeting. Sitting (from left):
Avel Enukidze,
Mikhail Kalinin,
Nikolai Bukharin,
Mikhail Tomsky,
Mikhail Lashevich,
Lev Kamenev,
Yevgeni Preobrazhensky,
Leonid Serebryakov,
Vladimir Lenin and
Alexei Rykov.
Bolshevik
–
Boris Kustodiev ’s 1920 painting " Bolshevik "
Bolshevik
–
Left to right:
Leon Trotsky,
Vladimir Lenin, and
Lev Kamenev
Bolshevik
–
"Down with Bolshevism. Bolshevism brings war and destruction, hunger and death", anti-Bolshevik propaganda, Germany, 1919.
34.
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
–
The Republic comprised sixteen autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais, and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group, the capital of the Russian SFSR was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara. The Russian Soviet Republic was proclaimed on November 7,1917 as a sovereign state, the first Constitution was adopted in 1918. In 1922 the Russian SFSR signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, the economy of Russia became heavily industrialized, accounting for about two-thirds of the electricity produced in the USSR. It was, by 1961, the third largest producer of petroleum due to new discoveries in the Volga-Urals region and Siberia, trailing only the United States and Saudi Arabia. In 1974, there were 475 institutes of education in the republic providing education in 47 languages to some 23,941,000 students. A network of territorially organized public-health services provided health care, the effects of market policies led to the failure of many enterprises and total instability by 1990. On June 12,1990, the Congress of Peoples Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, on June 12,1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected the first President. On December 8,1991, heads of Russia, Ukraine, the agreement declared dissolution of the USSR by its founder states and established the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 12, the agreement was ratified by the Russian Parliament, therefore Russian SFSR denounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and de facto declared Russias independence from the USSR. On December 25,1991, following the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as president of the Soviet Union, on December 26,1991, the USSR was self-dissolved by the Soviet of Nationalities, which by that time was the only functioning house of the Supreme Soviet. After dissolution of the USSR, Russia declared that it assumed the rights and obligations of the dissolved central Soviet government, the new Russian constitution, adopted on December 12,1993 after a constitutional crisis, abolished the Soviet system of government in its entirety. Initially, the state did not have a name and wasnt recognized by neighboring countries for five months. Meanwhile, anti-Bolsheviks coined the mocking label Sovdepia for the nascent state of the Soviets of Workers, on January 25,1918 the third meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets renamed the unrecognized state the Soviet Russian Republic. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3,1918, on July 10,1918, the Russian Constitution of 1918 renamed the country the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. By 1918, during the Russian Civil War, several states within the former Russian Empire seceded, internationally, in 1920, the RSFSR was recognized as an independent state only by Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania in the Treaty of Tartu and by the short-lived Irish Republic. On December 30,1922, with the creation of the Soviet Union, the final Soviet name for the republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was adopted in the Soviet Constitution of 1936. By that time, Soviet Russia had gained roughly the same borders of the old Tsardom of Russia before the Great Northern War of 1700
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
–
Flag (1954–1991)
35.
Ministry of Internal Affairs (Russia)
–
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation is the interior ministry of Russia. Its predecessor was founded in 1802 by Alexander I in Imperial Russia, the Ministry is headquartered in Moscow. The current Minister of Internal Affairs is General of Police Vladimir Kolokoltsev, as the central government began to further partition the countryside, the ispravniks were distributed among the sections. Serving under them in their localities were commissaries. These uryadniks rapidly became the terror of the countryside and its most famous development was the so-called Third Section instituted by the emperor Nicholas I in 1826. This was entirely independent of the police, but was associated with the previously existing Special Corps of Gendarmes. By World War I, the Department had spawned a counter-intelligence section, after the February Revolution of 1917, the Gendarmes and the Okhrana were disbanded as anti-revolutionary. Having won the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks disbanded the tsarist police forces and formed an all-proletarian Workers, after the establishment of the USSR there was no Soviet NKVD until 1934. In March 1946, all of the Peoples Commissariats were redesignated as Ministries, the NKVD was renamed the MVD of the USSR, along with its former subordinate, the NKGB which became the MGB of the USSR. The NKVDs of Union Republics also became Ministries of Internal Affairs subordinate to MVD of the USSR, Secret police became a part of MVD after Lavrenty Beria merged the MGB into the MVD in March 1953. Within a year Berias downfall caused the MVD to be split up again, after that, in his efforts to fight bureaucracy and maintain Leninist principles, Nikita Khrushchev, as the Premier of the Union, called for the dismissal of the All-Union MVD. The Ministry ceased to exist in January 1960 and its functions were transferred to the respective Republican Ministries, the MVD of the Russian SFSR was renamed the Ministry for Securing the Public Order in 1962. The MVD regained its title in 1968. Another role of the reformed MVD was to combat economic crimes and this fight was never successful due to the pervasive nature of the black market. By the mid-1980s, the image of the militsiya was largely compromised by the corruption. Many high-ranking MVD officers, including the Minister himself, were revealed to be bribed by illegal shadow businesses. It currently controls the politsiya, the Main Directorate for Road Traffic Safety, since the disbanding of the Tax Police, it also investigates economic crimes. The last reorganization abolished Main Directorates inherited from the NKVD in favour of Departments, the current minister of internal affairs in Russia is Vladimir Kolokoltsev
Ministry of Internal Affairs (Russia)
–
A 1970s- or 80s-vintage
GAZ-24 Volga, in the period
squad car livery, installed as a monument in front of the
Nizhny Novgorod Main Directorate for Road Traffic Safety headquarters.
Ministry of Internal Affairs (Russia)
–
Ministry emblem
36.
Georgy Lvov
–
Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov was a Russian statesman and the first post-imperial prime minister of Russia, from 15 March to 21 July 1917. Prince Lvov was born in Dresden and descended from the sovereign Viking princes of Yaroslavl and his family moved home to Popovka in the Aleksin district of Tula Governorate from Germany soon after his birth. He graduated from the University of Moscow with a degree in law, during the Russo-Japanese War he organized relief work in the East and in 1905, he joined the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party. A year later he won election to the First Duma, and was nominated for a ministerial position and he married Countess Julia Alexeievna Bobrinskaya, great-great-granddaughter of Grigory Orlov and Catherine the Great, without issue. During the first Russian Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II, emperor of Russia, unable to rally sufficient support, he resigned in July 1917 in favour of his Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky. Lvov was arrested when the Bolsheviks seized power later that year and he escaped and settled in Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. There is a memorial to Prince Lvov in Aleksin as well as an exhibition on him in the town museum. In Popovka there is another memorial opposite his local church and a plaque on the wall of the school he founded. He died in Boulogne-sur-Seine and is buried in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery in France, a relative of his by the name of Prince Andre Nikita Lwoff, variously described as either Georgy Lvovs son or nephew, is buried in the old cemetery in Menton. Lvov wrote an autobiography, Воспоминания, while in exile and a biography was written in 1932 by Tikhon Polner entitled Жизненный путь князя Георгія Евгеніевича Львова. Neither has been translated but both have been reprinted and are available in Russian. Note on transliteration, An older French form, Lvoff, is used on his tombstone, Georgy can be written as Georgi and is sometimes seen in its translated form, George or Jorge. Lvov Days and memorials Aleksin Museum of Art and Regional Studies Publishers of Lvovs biographies
Georgy Lvov
–
Georgy Lvov Георгий Львов
37.
Nikolai Avksentiev
–
Nikolai Dimitrovich Avksentiev was a leading member of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He was one of the Heidelberg SRs, like V. M and these SRs were influenced by Neo-Kantian philosophy and Marxism. During the First World War Avksentiev was associated with the Defencist wing of the PSR, Avksentiev opposed the Bolshevik October Revolution and was briefly arrested by the Bolsheviks. In November 1918 he participated in the anti-Bolshevik Directorate at Omsk, briefly arrested by Kolchak, Avksentiev fled Russia via Vladivostok, with the assistance of the British military. He settled in Paris and was active in émigré circles and in Freemasonry, after the German invasion of France in 1940, Avksentiev and his wife Berthe escaped to America with an emergency visa provided by the Jewish Labor Committee and the American Federation of Labor. His daughter, Alexandra became an accomplished artist
Nikolai Avksentiev
–
N.D. Avksentiev (centre)
38.
Communist
–
Communism includes a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, anarchism, and the political ideologies grouped around both. The primary element which will enable this transformation, according to analysis, is the social ownership of the means of production. Likewise, some communists defend both theory and practice, while others argue that historical practice diverged from communist principles to a greater or lesser degree, according to Richard Pipes, the idea of a classless, egalitarian society first emerged in Ancient Greece. At one time or another, various small communist communities existed, in the medieval Christian church, for example, some monastic communities and religious orders shared their land and their other property. Communist thought has also traced back to the works of the 16th-century English writer Thomas More. In his treatise Utopia, More portrayed a society based on ownership of property. In the 17th century, communist thought surfaced again in England, criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, through such thinkers as Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Later, following the upheaval of the French Revolution, communism emerged as a political doctrine, in the early 19th century, Various social reformers founded communities based on common ownership. But unlike many previous communist communities, they replaced the emphasis with a rational. Notable among them were Robert Owen, who founded New Harmony in Indiana, in its modern form, communism grew out of the socialist movement in 19th-century Europe. As the Industrial Revolution advanced, socialist critics blamed capitalism for the misery of the new class of urban factory workers who labored under often-hazardous conditions. Foremost among these critics were Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels, in 1848, Marx and Engels offered a new definition of communism and popularized the term in their famous pamphlet The Communist Manifesto. The 1917 October Revolution in Russia set the conditions for the rise to power of Lenins Bolsheviks. The revolution transferred power to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, in which the Bolsheviks had a majority, the event generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement. Marx predicted that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development, Russia, however, was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry and a minority of industrial workers. Marx had explicitly stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeois rule, the moderate Mensheviks opposed Lenins Bolshevik plan for socialist revolution before capitalism was more fully developed. The Great Purge of 1937–1938 was Stalins attempt to destroy any possible opposition within the Communist Party and its leading role in the Second World War saw the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower, with strong influence over Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. The European and Japanese empires were shattered and Communist parties played a role in many independence movements
Communist
–
Vladimir Lenin after his return to
Petrograd
Communist
–
USSR postage stamp depicting the states ruled by self-proclaimed communist parties, launching the first artificial satellite,
Sputnik 1
Communist
–
A demonstration of the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Moscow, December 2011
39.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
–
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, abbreviated in English as CPSU, was the founding and ruling political party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The party was founded in 1912 by the Bolsheviks, a group led by Vladimir Lenin which seized power in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917. The party was dissolved on 29 August 1991 on Soviet territory soon after a failed coup détat and was abolished on 6 November 1991 on Russian territory. The highest body within the CPSU was the party Congress, which convened every five years, when the Congress was not in session, the Central Committee was the highest body. Because the Central Committee met twice a year, most day-to-day duties and responsibilities were vested in the Politburo, the Secretariat, and the Orgburo. The party leader was the head of government and held the office of either General Secretary, Premier or head of state, or some of the three offices concurrently—but never all three at the same time. The CPSU, according to its party statute, adhered to Marxism–Leninism, a based on the writings of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx. The party pursued state socialism, under which all industries were nationalized, a number of causes contributed to CPSUs loss of control and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Some historians have written that Gorbachevs policy of glasnost was the root cause, Gorbachev maintained that perestroika without glasnost was doomed to failure anyway. Others have blamed the stagnation and subsequent loss of faith by the general populace in communist ideology. The Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the worlds first constitutionally socialist state, was established by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Immediately after the Revolution, the new, Lenin-led government implemented socialist reforms, including the transfer of estates, in this context, in 1918, RSDLP became Russian Communist Party and remained so until 1997. Lenin supported world revolution he sought peace with the Central Powers. The treaty was voided after the Allied victory in World War I, in 1921, Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy, a system of state capitalism that started the process of industrialization and recovery from the Civil War. On 30 December 1922, the Russian SFSR joined former territories of the Russian Empire in the Soviet Union, on 9 March 1923, Lenin suffered a stroke, which incapacitated him and effectively ended his role in government. He died on 21 January 1924 and was succeeded by Joseph Stalin, after emerging victorious from a power struggle with Trotsky, Stalin obtained full control of the party and Stalinism was installed as the only ideology of the party. The partys official name was All-Union Communist Party in 1925, Stalins political purge greatly affected the partys configuration, as many party members were executed or sentenced for slave labour. Happening during the timespan of the Great Purge, fascism had ascened to power in Italy, seeing this as a potential threat, the Party actively sought to form collective security alliances with Anti-fascist western powers such as France and Britain
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
–
Khrushchev succeeded Stalin as the Soviet leader. His rule is best known for his liberalization of political and social life, and the end of terror as a means of social control
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
–
The Brezhnev era is commonly referred to by historians as the
Era of Stagnation, a term coined by CPSU General Secretary Gorbachev
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
–
Gorbachev, the last leader of the CPSU and the Soviet Union, as seen in 1986
40.
GULag
–
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
GULag
–
The fence at the old Gulag in
Perm-36, founded in 1943
GULag
–
Road construction by inmates of the
Dalstroy (part of the '
Road of Bones ' from Magadan to Yakutsk).
GULag
–
Transpolar Railway was a project of the Gulag system that took place from 1947 to 1953.
41.
POW
–
A prisoner of war is a person, whether combatant or non-combatant, who is held in custody by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the prisoner of war dates to 1660. The first Roman gladiators were prisoners of war and were named according to their ethnic roots such as Samnite, Thracian, typically, little distinction was made between enemy combatants and enemy civilians, although women and children were more likely to be spared. Sometimes, the purpose of a battle, if not a war, was to capture women, a known as raptio. Typically women had no rights, and were legally as chattel. For this he was eventually canonized, during Childerics siege and blockade of Paris in 464, the nun Geneviève pleaded with the Frankish king for the welfare of prisoners of war and met with a favourable response. Later, Clovis I liberated captives after Genevieve urged him to do so, many French prisoners of war were killed during the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. In the later Middle Ages, a number of religious wars aimed to not only defeat, in Christian Europe, the extermination of heretics was considered desirable. Examples include the 13th century Albigensian Crusade and the Northern Crusades, likewise, the inhabitants of conquered cities were frequently massacred during the Crusades against the Muslims in the 11th and 12th centuries. Noblemen could hope to be ransomed, their families would have to send to their captors large sums of wealth commensurate with the status of the captive. In feudal Japan there was no custom of ransoming prisoners of war, in Termez, on the Oxus, all the people, both men and women, were driven out onto the plain, and divided in accordance with their usual custom, then they were all slain. The Aztecs were constantly at war with neighbouring tribes and groups, for the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, between 10,000 and 80,400 persons were sacrificed. During the early Muslim conquests, Muslims routinely captured large number of prisoners, aside from those who converted, most were ransomed or enslaved. Christians who were captured during the Crusades, were either killed or sold into slavery if they could not pay a ransom. The freeing of prisoners was highly recommended as a charitable act, there also evolved the right of parole, French for discourse, in which a captured officer surrendered his sword and gave his word as a gentleman in exchange for privileges. If he swore not to escape, he could gain better accommodations, if he swore to cease hostilities against the nation who held him captive, he could be repatriated or exchanged but could not serve against his former captors in a military capacity. Early historical narratives of captured colonial Europeans, including perspectives of literate women captured by the peoples of North America. The writings of Mary Rowlandson, captured in the fighting of King Philips War, are an example
POW
–
Austro-Hungarian POWs in Russia, 1915
POW
–
An Iranian soldier watching Iraqi prisoners of war sitting in a pickup truck during
Iran-Iraq war.
POW
–
American prisoners captured in
Ardennes in December 1944
POW
–
Engraving of
Nubian prisoners,
Abu Simbel, Egypt, 13th century BC
42.
Red Army
–
The Workers and Peasants Red Army was the army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and after 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. The Red Army is credited as being the land force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II. During operations on the Eastern Front, it fought 75%–80% of the German land forces deployed in the war, inflicting the vast majority of all German losses and ultimately capturing the German capital. In September 1917, Vladimir Lenin wrote, There is only one way to prevent the restoration of the police, at the time, the Imperial Russian Army had started to collapse. The Tsarist general Nikolay Dukhonin estimated that there had been 2 million deserters,1.8 million dead,5 million wounded and 2 million prisoners and he estimated the remaining troops as numbering 10 million. Therefore, the Council of Peoples Commissars decided to form the Red Army on 28 January 1918 and they envisioned a body formed from the class-conscious and best elements of the working classes. All citizens of the Russian republic aged 18 or older were eligible, in the event of an entire unit wanting to join the Red Army, a collective guarantee and the affirmative vote of all its members would be necessary. Because the Red Army was composed mainly of peasants, the families of those who served were guaranteed rations, some peasants who remained at home yearned to join the Army, men, along with some women, flooded the recruitment centres. If they were turned away they would collect scrap metal and prepare care-packages, in some cases the money they earned would go towards tanks for the Army. Nikolai Krylenko was the supreme commander-in-chief, with Aleksandr Myasnikyan as deputy, Nikolai Podvoisky became the commissar for war, Pavel Dybenko, commissar for the fleet. Proshyan, Samoisky, Steinberg were also specified as peoples commissars as well as Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich from the Bureau of Commissars, at a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, held on 22 February 1918, Krylenko remarked, We have no army. The Red Guard units are brushed aside like flies and we have no power to stay the enemy, only an immediate signing of the peace treaty will save us from destruction. This provoked the insurrection of General Alexey Maximovich Kaledins Volunteer Army in the River Don region, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk aggravated Russian internal politics. The situation encouraged direct Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, a series of engagements resulted, involving, amongst others, the Czechoslovak Legion, the Polish 5th Rifle Division, and the pro-Bolshevik Red Latvian Riflemen. The Whites defeated the Red Army on each front, Leon Trotsky reformed and counterattacked, the Red Army repelled Admiral Kolchaks army in June, and the armies of General Denikin and General Yudenich in October. By mid-November the White armies were all almost completely exhausted, in January 1920, Budennys First Cavalry Army entered Rostov-on-Don. 1919 to 1923 At the wars start, the Red Army consisted of 299 infantry regiments, Civil war intensified after Lenin dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly and the Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, removing Russia from the Great War
Red Army
–
Red Guards unit of the Vulkan factory
Red Army
–
Soviet Armed Forces
Red Army
–
Vladimir Lenin,
Klim Voroshilov,
Leon Trotsky and soldiers,
Petrograd, 1921
Red Army
–
Soviet tanks in the
Battle of Khalkhin Gol, August 1939
43.
Soviet Navy
–
The Soviet Navy was the naval arm of the Soviet Armed Forces. The influence of the Soviet Navy played a role in the Cold War. The Soviet Navy was divided into four major fleets, the Northern, Pacific, Black Sea, the Caspian Flotilla was a smaller force operating in the land-locked Caspian Sea. Main components of the Soviet Navy included Soviet Naval Aviation, Naval Infantry, most of the Soviet Navy was reformed into the Russian Navy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, while some elements became the basis of the Ukrainian, Azerbaijani and Georgian navies. During the revolution, sailors deserted their ships at will and generally neglected their duties, the officers were dispersed and most of the sailors left their ships. Work stopped in the shipyards, where uncompleted ships deteriorated rapidly, the Black Sea Fleet fared no better than the Baltic. The Bolshevik revolution entirely disrupted its personnel, with murders of officers. At the end of April 1918, German troops entered Crimea, the more effective ships were moved from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk where, after an ultimatum from Germany, they were scuttled by Vladimir Lenins order. The ships remaining in Sevastopol were captured by the Germans and then, after November 1918, on 1 April 1919, when Red Army forces captured Crimea, the British squadron had to withdraw, but before leaving they damaged all the remaining battleships and sank thirteen new submarines. When the White Army captured Crimea in 1919, it rescued and reconditioned a few units, at the end of the civil war, Wrangels fleet, a White fleet, moved to Bizerta in French Tunisia, where it was interned. The first ship of the navy could be considered the rebellious Imperial Russian cruiser Aurora. Sailors of the Baltic fleet supplied the fighting force of the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution, some imperial vessels continued to serve after the revolution, albeit with different names. The Soviet Navy, established as the Workers and Peasants Red Fleet by a 1918 decree of the Soviet government, was less than service-ready during the interwar years, as the countrys attentions were largely directed internally, the Navy did not have much funding or training. The greater part of the old fleet was sold by the Soviet government to Germany for scrap, in the Baltic Sea there remained only three much-neglected battleships, two cruisers, some ten destroyers, and a few submarines. Despite this state of affairs, the Baltic Fleet remained a significant naval formation, there also existed some thirty minor-waterways combat flotillas. During the 1930s, as the industrialization of the Soviet Union proceeded, approved by the Labour and Defence Council in 1926, the Naval Shipbuilding Program included plans to construct twelve submarines, the first six were to become known as the Dekabrist class. Beginning 4 November 1926, Technical Bureau Nº4, under the leadership of B. M, malinin, managed the submarine construction works at the Baltic Shipyard. In subsequent years,133 submarines were built to designs developed during Malinins management, additional developments included the formation of the Pacific Fleet in 1932 and the Northern Fleet in 1933
Soviet Navy
–
Aurora was unofficially the first Soviet Navy vessel, after it
mutinied against
Imperial Russia in 1917.
Soviet Navy
–
Naval Ensign
Soviet Navy
–
Soviet souvenir naval cap
Soviet Navy
–
Pacific Fleet marines of the Soviet Navy hoisting the
Soviet naval ensign in
Port Arthur, on October 1, 1945.
44.
Operation Barbarossa
–
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, which was launched on Sunday 22 June 1941. In the two leading up to the invasion, the two countries signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Nevertheless, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940, over the course of the operation, about four million Axis personnel invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2, 900-kilometer front, the largest invasion force in the history of warfare. In addition to troops, the Wehrmacht employed some 600,000 motor vehicles, the offensive marked an escalation of the war, both geographically and in the formation of the Allied coalition. Despite their successes, the German offensive stalled in the Battle of Moscow and was pushed back by the Soviet winter counteroffensive. The Red Army repelled the Wehrmachts strongest blows and forced the unprepared Germans into a war of attrition, the Wehrmacht would never again mount a simultaneous offensive along the entire strategic Soviet–Axis front. The failure of the operation drove Hitler to demand further operations of limited scope inside the Soviet Union, such as Case Blue. The failure of Operation Barbarossa proved a point in the fortunes of the Third Reich. Most importantly, the operation opened up the Eastern Front, in more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in world history. The German armies captured 5,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were not granted protections stipulated in the Geneva Conventions, a majority of them never returned alive. The Nazis deliberately starved 3.1 million of the prisoners to death as part of a Hunger Plan that aimed to reduce the population of Eastern Europe, over a million Soviet Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppen death squads and gassing as part of the Holocaust. On 10 February 1939, Hitler told his commanders that the next war would be purely a war of Weltanschauungen. Totally a peoples war, a racial war, on 23 November, once World War II had already started, Hitler declared that racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, and with it, the world. The racial policy of Nazi Germany viewed the Soviet Union as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen, Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germanys destiny was to turn to the East as it did six hundred years ago. Accordingly, it was stated Nazi policy to kill, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations and repopulate the land with Germanic peoples, under the Generalplan Ost. Likening the Soviets to the forces of Genghis Khan, Hitler told Croatian military leader Slavko Kvaternik that the Mongolian race threatened Europe. Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as Jewish Bolshevik subhumans, the Mongol hordes, the Asiatic flood, German army commanders cast the Jews as the major cause behind the partisan struggle. The main guideline policy for German troops was Where theres a partisan, theres a Jew, many German troops viewed the war in Nazi terms and regarded their Soviet enemies as sub-human
Operation Barbarossa
–
Clockwise from top left: German soldiers advance through Northern Russia, German flamethrower team in the
Soviet Union, Soviet planes flying over German positions near
Moscow, Soviet POW's on the way to German prison camps, Soviet soldiers fire at German positions.
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa
–
German soldiers (Flamethrower team) in the Soviet Union, June 1941
Operation Barbarossa
–
Marshal Zhukov speaking at a military conference in Moscow, September 1941
45.
Narkomat
–
The Council of Peoples Commissars was a government institution formed shortly after the October Revolution in 1917. Created in the Russian Republic, the council laid foundations in restructuring the country to form the Soviet Union and it evolved to become the highest government authority of executive power in the government of the Soviet Union. The chairman of council was thus the head of government. The constitution enabled the Sovnarkom to issue decrees carrying the force of law when the Congress was not in session. The Congress then routinely approved these decrees at its next session, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established in December 1922, the USSR Sovnarkom was modelled on the RSFSR Sovnarkom. It was transformed in 1946 into the Council of Ministers, the first council elected by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets was composed as follows. Upon the creation of the USSR in 1922, the Unions government was modelled after the first Sovnarkom, the Soviet republics retained their own governments which dealt with domestic matters. In 1946, the Sovnarkoms were transformed into the Council of Ministers at both all-Union and Union Republic level
Narkomat
–
A Sovnarkom session between December 1917 and January 1918, with (from the left)
Isaac Steinberg,
Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov,
Boris Kamkov,
Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, V. E. Trutovsky,
Alexander Shlyapnikov, P. P. Proshyan,
Lenin,
Stalin,
Alexandra Kollontai,
Pavel Dybenko, E. K. Kosharova,
Nikolai Podvoisky,
Nikolai Gorbunov, V. I. Nevsky, Alexander Shotman,
Georgy Chicherin
Narkomat
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Lenin and Stalin in 1922
46.
SMERSH
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SMERSH was an umbrella organisation for three independent counter-intelligence agencies in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially announced only on 14 April 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph Stalin, the main reason for its creation was to subvert the attempts by German forces to infiltrate the Red Army on the Eastern Front. The organisation was officially in existence until 4 May 1946, when its duties were transferred back to the NKGB, the head of the agency throughout its existence was Viktor Abakumov, who rose to become Minister of State Security in the postwar years. The official liquidation of OO GUGB within NKVD was announced on 12 February by a joint order № 00151/003 of NKVD, the rest of GUGB was abolished and staff was moved to newly created Peoples Commissariat for State Security. Departments of former GUGB were renamed Directorates, for example, former Foreign Department became Foreign Directorate, political police represented by Secret Political Department became Secret Political Directorate, and so on. The former GUGB 4th Department was split into three sections, one section, which handled military counter-intelligence in NKVD troops become 3rd NKVD Department or OKR, the chief of OKR NKVD was Aleksander Belyanov, Commissar State Security 3rd rank. On 25 February 1941, Viktor Abakumov became NKVD deputy Commissar in charge of supervising this, the second and most significant part went to the Defense Commissariat Soviet Armed Forces becoming its 3rd Directorate or. The 3rd NKO Directorate took over most of the 4th GUGB Department Sections and was headed by division commissar Anatolii Mikheev, the third part of former OO became the Navy Commissariat 3rd Directorate. The head of navy KI was Andrei Petrov, a state security captain, UOO on every level was given much more power and a freer hand in decision making than at any time since the creation of Cheka. Also on 19 July, by the order of NKVD №00940, Navy 3rd Directorate was still under Navy control, till 11 January 1942 when it was incorporated into Directorate of Special Departments. On 2 July 1941, NKGB USSR was incorporated back into the NKVD structure, NKGB did not return as GUGB, but as separate units. The NKVD structure organisation from 31 July 1941, shows that there are independent Directorates as in the 1st, foreign intelligence, 2nd, domestic KI, and so on. P 40/91Peoples Commissariat for State Security or was created for the second time and it was based on NKVDs Directorates. For detailed organization please see NKGB, regulations of the Peoples Commissariat of State Security were approved by SNK in order № 621-191ss from 2 June 1943. After losing most of the units to the NKGB, the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs was still a very powerful government apparatus. The same order that created GUKR SMERSH within the NKO created an organisation within the Navy Commissariat. This organization was known as the Navy UKR SMERSH and headed by Peter Gladkov, in reality, Gladkov reported to Abakumov, by then deputy Commissar of the NKO, and Stalins deputy. Formally Gladkov was subordinate to his superior Peoples Commissar Nikolay Gerasimovich Kuznetsov, OKR SMERSH of the NKVD USSR was subordinate to Lavrentiy Beria, Peoples Commissar of Internal Affairs
SMERSH
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Main Directorate of Counter-Intelligence "SMERSH"
SMERSH
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Lavrentiy Beria, head of the
NKVD, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
47.
Lavrenty Beria
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Beria was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalins secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II. Beria administered the vast expansion of the Gulag labor camps and was responsible for overseeing the secret defense institutions known as sharashkas. He also played the role in coordinating the Soviet partisans, developing an impressive intelligence. He attended the Yalta Conference with Stalin, who introduced him to U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as our Himmler, after the war, he organized the communist takeover of the state institutions of Central and Eastern Europe. Berias uncompromising ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results culminated in his success in overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project. Stalin gave it priority and the project was completed in under five years in no small part due to Soviet espionage against the West organized by Berias NKVD. Upon Stalins death in March 1953, Beria was promoted to First Deputy Premier and he was briefly a part of the ruling troika with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. Berias overconfidence in his position after Stalins death led him to misjudge other Politburo members, the compliance of the NKVD was ensured by Zhukovs troops, and after interrogation Beria was taken to the basement of the HQ of the Moscow Military District and shot by General Pavel Batitsky. Beria was born in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in the Sukhumi district of Kutaisi Governorate and he was from the Mingrelian subethnic group of Georgians and grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family. Berias mother, Marta Jaqeli, was a religious, church-going woman, she was previously married and widowed before marrying Berias father, Pavel Khukhaevich Beria. He also had a brother, and a sister named Anna, in his autobiography, Lavrentiy Beria mentioned only his sister and his niece, implying that his brother either was dead or had no relationship with Beria after he left Merkheuli. Beria attended a school in Sukhumi, and joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student in the Baku Polytechnicum. As a student, Beria distinguished himself in mathematics and the sciences, the Polytechnicums curriculum concentrated on the petroleum industry. Beria also worked for the anti-Bolshevik Mussavatists in Baku, after the citys capture by the Red Army, Beria was saved from execution only because there was likely little arrangement time and Sergei Kirov had possibly intervened. While in prison, he formed a connection with Nina Gegechkori, his cellmates niece and she was 17, a trained scientist from an aristocratic family. In 1919, at the age of twenty, Beria started his career in state security when the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic hired him while still a student at the Polytechnicum, in 1920 or 1921, Beria joined the Cheka – the original Bolshevik secret police. At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Menshevik-controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia, the Cheka became heavily involved in the conflict, which resulted in the defeat of the Mensheviks and the formation of the Georgian SSR. By 1922, Beria was deputy head of the Georgian branch of Chekas successor, in 1924 he led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising, after which up to 10,000 people were executed
Lavrenty Beria
–
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrenty Beria
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Beria on Caucasian
Party caucus, 1935. Left to right:
Filipp Makharadze,
Mir Jafar Baghirov, Beria.
Lavrenty Beria
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The first page of Beria's notice (oversigned by Stalin), to kill approximately 15,000 Polish officers and some 10,000 more intellectuals in the
Katyn Forest and other places in the Soviet Union
Lavrenty Beria
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Beria with Stalin (in background), Stalin's daughter
Svetlana, and
Nestor Lakoba (obscured)
48.
Political police
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Secret police organisations are often utilised for the purposes of policing the activities of dissidents, and weakening opposition organisations. Secret police forces are only to the executive branch of the government. They operate entirely or partially in secrecy, that is, most or all of their operations are obscure and hidden from the general public, secret police agencies have often been used as an instrument of political repression. States where the secret police wield significant power are sometimes referred to as states or counterintelligence states. Despite such overview, there exists the possibility of domestic-security agencies acting unlawfully. In some cases, certain police agencies are accused of being secret police, for example, political groups and civil liberties organizations in the United States have at various times accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation of being secret police. Which government agencies may be classed or characterized, in whole or part, secret police organizations can exist at sub-national levels in a political unit in which entrenched leadership is largely unaccountable. A single secret service has the weapons to arrogate to itself complete political power and it may therefore pose a potential threat to the central political authority. In dictatorships, a relative of the dictator often heads the secret police. For example, Saddam Hussein, as head of the State Internal Security Department placed his secret police under the authority of his first cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid. In addition, secret police have a tendency to view potential political enemies as concrete threats. In some cases, a dictator may manufacture such enemies for the purpose of directing national output toward a common goal, the tactics of investigation and intimidation used by secret police enable them to accrue so much power that they usually operate with little or no practical restraint. Secret police may open mail, tap telephone lines, use techniques to trick, blackmail. Secret police are notorious for raiding homes between midnight and dawn, to people suspected of dissent. People apprehended by the police are often arbitrarily arrested and detained without due process. While in detention, arrestees may be tortured or subjected to inhumane treatment, suspects may not receive a public trial, and instead may be convicted in a kangaroo court-style show trial, or by a secret tribunal. Secret police known to have used these approaches in history include the police of East Germany. Secret police have used by many types of governments
Political police
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A
Stasi automated machine to re-glue envelopes after mail had been opened for examination
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listen (help·info)), was the leading Soviet secret police organization from 1934 to 1946. It is known for its role in political repression and for carrying out the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin.
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