1.
Nikolai Yezhov
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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
2.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
3.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
4.
Ukraine
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Ukraine is currently in territorial dispute with Russia over the Crimean Peninsula which Russia annexed in 2014 but which Ukraine and most of the international community recognise as Ukrainian. Including Crimea, Ukraine has an area of 603,628 km2, making it the largest country entirely within Europe and it has a population of about 42.5 million, making it the 32nd most populous country in the world. The territory of modern Ukraine has been inhabited since 32,000 BC, during the Middle Ages, the area was a key centre of East Slavic culture, with the powerful state of Kievan Rus forming the basis of Ukrainian identity. Following its fragmentation in the 13th century, the territory was contested, ruled and divided by a variety of powers, including Lithuania, Poland, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. A Cossack republic emerged and prospered during the 17th and 18th centuries, two brief periods of independence occurred during the 20th century, once near the end of World War I and another during World War II. Before its independence, Ukraine was typically referred to in English as The Ukraine, following independence, Ukraine declared itself a neutral state. Nonetheless it formed a limited partnership with the Russian Federation and other CIS countries. In the 2000s, the government began leaning towards NATO, and it was later agreed that the question of joining NATO should be answered by a national referendum at some point in the future. Former President Viktor Yanukovych considered the current level of co-operation between Ukraine and NATO sufficient, and was against Ukraine joining NATO and these events formed the background for the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, and the War in Donbass in April 2014. On 1 January 2016, Ukraine applied the economic part of the Deep, Ukraine has long been a global breadbasket because of its extensive, fertile farmlands and is one of the worlds largest grain exporters. The diversified economy of Ukraine includes a heavy industry sector, particularly in aerospace. Ukraine is a republic under a semi-presidential system with separate powers, legislative, executive. Its capital and largest city is Kiev, taking into account reserves and paramilitary personnel, Ukraine maintains the second-largest military in Europe after that of Russia. Ukrainian is the language and its alphabet is Cyrillic. The dominant religion in the country is Eastern Orthodoxy, which has strongly influenced Ukrainian architecture, literature, there are different hypotheses as to the etymology of the name Ukraine. According to the older and most widespread hypothesis, it means borderland, while more recently some studies claim a different meaning, homeland or region. The Ukraine now implies disregard for the sovereignty, according to U. S. ambassador William Taylor. Neanderthal settlement in Ukraine is seen in the Molodova archaeological sites include a mammoth bone dwelling
5.
Belarus
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Its capital and most populous city is Minsk. Over 40% of its 207,600 square kilometres is forested and its strongest economic sectors are service industries and manufacturing. In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Belarus declared independence as the Belarusian Peoples Republic, the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia became a founding constituent republic of the Soviet Union in 1922 and was renamed as the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Belarus lost almost half of its territory to Poland after the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921, during WWII, military operations devastated Belarus, which lost about a third of its population and more than half of its economic resources. The republic was redeveloped in the post-war years, in 1945 the Byelorussian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations, along with the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR. The parliament of the declared the sovereignty of Belarus on 27 July 1990. Alexander Lukashenko has served as the president since 1994. Belarus has been labeled Europes last dictatorship by some Western journalists, Lukashenko continued a number of Soviet-era policies, such as state ownership of large sections of the economy. Though not directly espousing communism like the five remaining communist countries of China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and North Korea, in 2000 Belarus and Russia signed a treaty for greater cooperation, with some hints of forming a Union State. Over 70% of Belaruss population of 9.49 million resides in urban areas, more than 80% of the population is ethnic Belarusian, with sizable minorities of Russians, Poles and Ukrainians. Since a referendum in 1995, the country has had two official languages, Belarusian and Russian, the Constitution of Belarus does not declare any official religion, although the primary religion in the country is Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Belarus is the only European country to retain capital punishment in both law and practice, the name Belarus is closely related with the term Belaya Rus, i. e. White Rus. There are several claims to the origin of the name White Rus, an alternate explanation for the name comments on the white clothing worn by the local Slavic population. A third theory suggests that the old Rus lands that were not conquered by the Tatars had been referred to as white, other sources claim that, before 1267, the land not conquered by the Mongols was considered White Rus. The name Rus is often conflated with its Latin forms Russia and Ruthenia, in some languages, including German and Dutch, the country is generally called White Russia to this day. The Latin term Alba Russia was used again by Pope Pius VI in 1783 to recognize the Society of Jesus there, exclaiming Approbo Societatem Jesu in Alba Russia degentem, approbo, approbo. The first known use of White Russia to refer to Belarus was in the century by Englishman Sir Jerome Horsey. During the 17th century, the Russian tsars used White Rus to describe the lands added from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
6.
Kazakhstan
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Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in northern Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Kazakhstan is the worlds largest landlocked country, and the ninth largest in the world, Kazakhstan is the dominant nation of Central Asia economically, generating 60% of the regions GDP, primarily through its oil/gas industry. It also has vast mineral resources, Kazakhstan is officially a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic with a diverse cultural heritage. Kazakhstan shares borders with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, the terrain of Kazakhstan includes flatlands, steppe, taiga, rock canyons, hills, deltas, snow-capped mountains, and deserts. Kazakhstan has an estimated 18 million people as of 2014, Given its large area, its population density is among the lowest. The capital is Astana, where it was moved in 1997 from Almaty, the territory of Kazakhstan has historically been inhabited by nomadic tribes. This changed in the 13th century, when Genghis Khan occupied the country as part of the Mongolian Empire, following internal struggles among the conquerors, power eventually reverted to the nomads. By the 16th century, the Kazakh emerged as a distinct group, the Russians began advancing into the Kazakh steppe in the 18th century, and by the mid-19th century, they nominally ruled all of Kazakhstan as part of the Russian Empire. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, and subsequent civil war, the territory of Kazakhstan was reorganised several times, in 1936, it was made the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan has worked to develop its economy, especially its dominant hydrocarbon industry. Kazakhstans 131 ethnicities include Kazakhs, Russians, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, the Kazakh language is the state language, and Russian has equal official status for all levels of administrative and institutional purposes. The name Kazakh comes from the ancient Turkic word qaz, to wander, the name Cossack is of the same origin. The Persian suffix -stan means land or place of, so Kazakhstan can be translated as land of the wanderers. Kazakhstan has been inhabited since the Neolithic Age, the regions climate, archaeologists believe that humans first domesticated the horse in the regions vast steppes. Central Asia was originally inhabited by the Scythians, the Cuman entered the steppes of modern-day Kazakhstan around the early 11th century, where they later joined with the Kipchak and established the vast Cuman-Kipchak confederation. Under the Mongol Empire, the largest in history, administrative districts were established. These eventually came under the rule of the emergent Kazakh Khanate, throughout this period, traditional nomadic life and a livestock-based economy continued to dominate the steppe. Nevertheless, the region was the focus of ever-increasing disputes between the native Kazakh emirs and the neighbouring Persian-speaking peoples to the south, at its height the Khanate would rule parts of Central Asia and control Cumania
7.
Poles
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The Poles are a nation and West Slavic ethnic group native to Poland who share a common ancestry, culture, history and are native speakers of the Polish language. The population of Poles in Poland is estimated at 37,394,000 out of a population of 38,538,000. Polands population inhabits several historic regions, including Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Mazovia, Silesia, Pomerania, Kuyavia, Warmia, Masuria, a wide-ranging Polish diaspora exists throughout Europe, the Americas and in Australasia. Today the largest urban concentration of Poles is the Katowice urban agglomeration of 2.7 million inhabitants, Poland was also for centuries a refuge for many Jews from all over Europe, a large number emigrated in the twentieth century to Israel. Several prominent Israeli statesmen were born in Poland, including Israels founder David Ben-Gurion, former President of Israel Shimon Peres, the Slavic people have been in the territory of modern Poland for over 1500 years. In the 9th and 10th centuries the tribes gave rise to developed regions along the upper Vistula, the last tribal undertaking resulted in the 10th century in a lasting political structure and state, Poland, one of the West Slavic nations. After 1945 the so-called autochthonous or aboriginal school of Polish prehistory received official backing in Poland, Polish people are the sixth largest national group in the European Union. Estimates vary depending on source, though available data suggest a number of around 60 million people worldwide. There are almost 38 million Poles in Poland alone, there are also Polish minorities in the surrounding countries including Germany, and indigenous minorities in the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus. There are some smaller indigenous minorities in nearby countries such as Moldova, the term Polonia is usually used in Poland to refer to people of Polish origin who live outside Polish borders, officially estimated at around 10 to 20 million. There is a notable Polish diaspora in the United States, Brazil, France has a historic relationship with Poland and has a relatively large Polish-descendant population. Poles have lived in France since the 18th century, in the early 20th century, over a million Polish people settled in France, mostly during world wars, among them Polish émigrés fleeing either Nazi occupation or later Soviet rule. In the United States, a significant number of Polish immigrants settled in Chicago, Ohio, Detroit, New York City, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, the highest concentration of Polish Americans in a single New England municipality is in New Britain, Connecticut. The majority of Polish Canadians have arrived in Canada since World War II, the number of Polish immigrants increased between 1945 and 1970, and again after the end of Communism in Poland in 1989. In Brazil the majority of Polish immigrants settled in Paraná State, smaller, but significant numbers settled in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Espírito Santo and São Paulo. The city of Curitiba has the second largest Polish diaspora in the world and Polish music, dishes and it is estimated that over half a million Polish people have come to work in the United Kingdom from Poland. Since 2011, Poles have been able to work throughout the EU and not just in the United Kingdom, Ireland. The Polish community in Norway has increased substantially and has grown to a number of 120,000
8.
NKVD
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The Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was a joint law enforcement agency of the whole Soviet Union that directly executed the will of the All-Union Communist Party. It was closely associated with the Soviet secret police, which at times was part of the agency, the NKVD was headed by Soviet secret police officials. The NKVD contained the regular, public police force of the USSR, including police, firefighting, border guards. It is best known for the activities of the Gulag and the Main Directorate for State Security and it was also tasked with protection of Soviet borders and espionage, influencing foreign governments and enforcing Stalinist policy within communist movements in other countries. After the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government dissolved the Tsars police, realizing that it was left with no capable security force, the Council of Peoples Commissars of the RSFSR created a secret political police, the Cheka, led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. It gained the right to undertake quick non-judicial trials and executions, the Cheka was reorganized in 1922 as the State Political Directorate, or GPU, of the NKVD of the RSFSR. In 1922, the USSR was formed with the RSFSR as its largest member, the GPU became the OGPU, under the Council of Peoples Commissars of the USSR. The NKVD of the RSFSR retained control of the militsiya, as a result, the NKVD also became responsible for all detention facilities as well as for the regular police. Since its creation in 1934, the NKVD of the USSR underwent many organizational changes, on February 3,1941, the Special Sections of the NKVD responsible for military counterintelligence became part of the Army and Navy. The GUGB was separated from the NKVD and renamed the Peoples Commissariat for State Security, after the German invasion, the NKVD and NKGB were reunited on July 20,1941. The CI sections were returned to the NKVD in January 1942, in April 1943, the CI sections were again transferred to the Peoples Commissariats of Defense and the Navy, becoming SMERSH, at the same time, the NKVD was again separated from the NKGB. In 1946, all Soviet Commissariats were renamed ministries, accordingly, the NKVD of the USSR was renamed as the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while the NKGB was renamed as the Ministry of State Security. In 1953, after the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, the MGB was merged back into the MVD, the police and security services were finally split in 1954 to become, The USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, responsible for the criminal militia and correctional facilities. The USSR Committee for State Security, responsible for the police, intelligence, counter-intelligence, personal protection. In implementing Soviet internal policy towards perceived enemies of the Soviet state, untold multitudes of people were sent to GULAG camps, formally, most of these people were convicted by NKVD troikas – special courts martial. Evidential standards were low, a tip-off by an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds for arrest. Use of physical means of persuasion was sanctioned by a decree of the state. Hundreds of mass graves resulting from operations were later discovered throughout the country
9.
Poland
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Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe, situated between the Baltic Sea in the north and two mountain ranges in the south. Bordered by Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, the total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres, making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people, Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world, the 8th most populous country in Europe, Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, and its capital and largest city is Warsaw. Other metropolises include Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk and Szczecin, the establishment of a Polish state can be traced back to 966, when Mieszko I, ruler of a territory roughly coextensive with that of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin. This union formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous countries of 16th and 17th century Europe, Poland regained its independence in 1918 at the end of World War I, reconstituting much of its historical territory as the Second Polish Republic. In September 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, followed thereafter by invasion by the Soviet Union. More than six million Polish citizens died in the war, after the war, Polands borders were shifted westwards under the terms of the Potsdam Conference. With the backing of the Soviet Union, a communist puppet government was formed, and after a referendum in 1946. During the Revolutions of 1989 Polands Communist government was overthrown and Poland adopted a new constitution establishing itself as a democracy, informally called the Third Polish Republic. Since the early 1990s, when the transition to a primarily market-based economy began, Poland has achieved a high ranking on the Human Development Index. Poland is a country, which was categorised by the World Bank as having a high-income economy. Furthermore, it is visited by approximately 16 million tourists every year, Poland is the eighth largest economy in the European Union and was the 6th fastest growing economy on the continent between 2010 and 2015. According to the Global Peace Index for 2014, Poland is ranked 19th in the list of the safest countries in the world to live in. The origin of the name Poland derives from a West Slavic tribe of Polans that inhabited the Warta River basin of the historic Greater Poland region in the 8th century, the origin of the name Polanie itself derives from the western Slavic word pole. In some foreign languages such as Hungarian, Lithuanian, Persian and Turkish the exonym for Poland is Lechites, historians have postulated that throughout Late Antiquity, many distinct ethnic groups populated the regions of what is now Poland. The most famous archaeological find from the prehistory and protohistory of Poland is the Biskupin fortified settlement, dating from the Lusatian culture of the early Iron Age, the Slavic groups who would form Poland migrated to these areas in the second half of the 5th century AD. With the Baptism of Poland the Polish rulers accepted Christianity and the authority of the Roman Church
10.
Great Purge
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The Great Purge or the Great Terror was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov and it has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. In the Western world, Robert Conquests 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase, Conquests title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The term repression was used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party, most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society, intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as too rich for a peasant, a series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being fifth column communities. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas. Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of political crimes, they were quickly executed by shooting. Many died at the labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis, one secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van. The campaigns were carried out according to the line, and often by direct orders. The threat of war heightened Stalins perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical fifth column of wreckers, terrorists. The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people, but from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. Stalins opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption and these tendencies may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalins suspicions and he enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism. In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and this required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious old guard of revolutionaries
11.
NKVD Order No. 00485
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The Soviet NKVD Order №00485 released on August 11,1937 laid the foundation for the systematic elimination of the Polish minority in the Soviet Union between 1937 and 1938. The order was called On liquidation of Polish sabotage and espionage groups, dated August 9,1937 by the Central Committee Politburo and signed by Nikolai Yezhov, the Peoples Commissar for Internal Affairs. The operation was the epicenter of the operations of the NKVD. According to the 00485 Order, the operation was to be completed in three months, the order was supplemented by a secret letter from Ezhov, specifying the various accusations against the Polish minority, which were fabricated by the Moscow NKVD executive. The order aimed at the arrest of absolutely all Poles and confirmed that the Poles should be completely destroyed, the Order created an extrajudicial sentencing body composed of two NKVD soldiers, the so-called Dvoika completing the paperwork. After the approval the convictions were immediately put into action, similar procedure was applied to all other national operations of 1937-1938, German, Latvian, Finnish, Estonian, Romanian, Greek, and others. The procedure was amended in September 1938, to expedite the process, regional NKVD units were instructed to set up so called Special Troikas authorized to try the national operations cases locally
12.
Timothy D. Snyder
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Timothy David Snyder is an American historian, author, and academic specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Holocaust. He is a professor at Yale University and is affiliated with the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Snyder is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Snyder was born in southwestern Ohio, the son of Christine, Snyder graduated from Centerville High School,10 miles south of Dayton, where his father, a veterinarian and his mother reside. He received his BA from Brown University and his doctorate in 1997 from the University of Oxford and he has held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, and as an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. Since 2005, Snyder has been married to Marci Shore, a professor of European cultural and intellectual history at Yale University, Snyder and Shore have two children together. Snyder has written five books and co-edited two, one of them, Thinking the Twentieth Century, with the late historian Tony Judt, was written while the latter was dying of ALS disease. Snyder says that he has a reading and/or speaking knowledge of eleven European languages and this enabled him to use primary and archival sources in Germany and Central Europe in researching his book, Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which was published in 2010. Reviewer Igor Lukes noted, A word about sources, Snyder introduces his Bibliography with an impressive list of seventeen archival collections located in six countries. Yet a closer look at the text and endnotes reveals that evidence drawn from archives represents and this is a project built on secondary sources. Bloodlands takes nuggets from each source, then assembles them into an original mosaic, almost every paragraph of the books eleven chapters is supported by one or several previously underutilized secondary sources. Snyder says that other languages is very important, If you dont know Russian. We can only see as much, and we can go as far as our languages take us. I wrote this book in English, but there are very important conversations that are happening in German, Russian, Polish and so on among those historians, Bloodlands has been translated into 20 languages. For the academic year 2013–2014, he held the Philippe Roman Chair of International History at the London School of Economics, asked about how the agenda of the Trump administration compared with the Machtergreifung, Snyder said that, istory does not repeat. But it does offer us examples and patterns, and thereby enlarges our imaginations and creates more possibilities for anticipation, several writers, including Jacques Sémelin, have criticised Bloodlands, and Black Earth. Snyder teaches a two-part lecture course at Yale covering the history of Eastern Europe pre- and post-1914, in the past he has also taught an undergraduate seminar on communism in Eastern Europe. Wall Around the West, State Power and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America
13.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
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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
14.
Fifth column
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A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group from within, usually in favor of an enemy group or nation. The activities of a column can be overt or clandestine. Forces gathered in secret can mobilize openly to assist an external attack and this term is also extended to organized actions by military personnel. Clandestine fifth column activities can involve acts of sabotage, disinformation, the term was then widely used in Spain. The rapid fall of France in 1940 led many to blame a fifth rather than German military superiority. Political factions in France blamed one another for the defeat and military officials blamed the civilian leadership. In June 1940, Life magazine ran a series of photos under the heading Signs of Nazi Fifth Column Everywhere, in July 1940, Time magazine called fifth column talk a national phenomenon. In August 1940 the New York Times mentioned the first spasm of fear engendered by the success of fifth columns in less fortunate countries, one report identified participants in Nazi fifth columns as partisans of authoritarian government everywhere, citing Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, and the Netherlands. John Langdon-Davies, a British journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War, the New York Times published three editorial cartoons that used the term on August 11,1940. In the US an Australian radio play, The Enemy Within, proved to be very popular, in December 1940 the Australian censors had the series banned. British reviewers of Agatha Christies novel N or M. in 1941 used the term to describe the struggle of two British partisans of the Nazi regime working on its behalf in England during World War II. Connell says to John, Listen, pal, this stuff is pretty rotten. Identifying the businessman with interests in the United States. When Doe agrees, he adds, And youd feel like an awful sucker if you found yourself marching right in the middle of it, the term was soon so widely known that it very quickly appeared in popular U. S. entertainment. Introducing a 1941 newsreel, Meet John Doughboy, the animated character Porky Pig asked any fifth columnists in the audience to leave the theater immediately, in Alfred Hitchcocks Saboteur, Robert Cummings asks for help against fifth columnists who are conspiring to sabotage the American war effort. The next year in Looney Tunes Foney Fables, the narrator of a fairy tale described a wolf in sheeps clothing as a fifth columnist. In 1943, a cartoon in the Merrie Melodies series was called The Fifth-Column Mouse. Both before and after Pearl Harbor, comic books contained references to the Fifth column, an example of this is the June 1942 Green Lantern
15.
Holodomor
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The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed an officially estimated 7 million to 10 million people. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, during the Holodomor millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. Early estimates of the toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. Recent research has since narrowed the estimates to between 2.4 and 7.5 million, the exact number of deaths is hard to determine, due to a lack of records, but the number increases significantly when the deaths in heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban are included. Older estimates are often cited in political commentary. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement, the word Holodomor literally translated from Ukrainian means death by hunger, or to kill by hunger, to starve to death. Sometimes the expression is translated into English as murder by hunger or starvation, Holodomor is a compound of the Ukrainian words holod meaning hunger and mor meaning plague. The expression moryty holodom means to inflict death by hunger, the Ukrainian verb moryty means to poison somebody, drive to exhaustion or to torment somebody. The perfective form of the verb moryty is zamoryty – kill or drive to death by hunger, the word was used in print as early as 1978 by Ukrainian immigrant organisations in the United States and Canada. However, in the Soviet Union – of which Ukraine was a constituent republic – references to the famine were controlled, historians could speak only of food difficulties, and the use of the very word golod/holod was forbidden. Discussion of the Holodomor became more open as part of Glasnost in the late 1980s, the term may have first appeared in print in the Soviet Union on 18 July 1988, in his article on the topic. Holodomor is now an entry in the modern, two-volume dictionary of the Ukrainian language, the term is described as artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a countrys population. The famine had been predicted as far back as 1930 by academics and advisers to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic government, between 1926 and 1939, the Ukrainian population increased by 6. 6%, whereas Russia and Belarus grew by 16. 9% and 11. 7%, respectively. From the 1932 harvest, Soviet authorities were able to procure only 4.3 million tons as compared with 7.2 million tons obtained from the 1931 harvest. Rations in town were cut back, and in the winter of 1932–33. The urban workers were supplied by a system, but rations were gradually cut, and by the spring of 1933. The first reports of malnutrition and deaths from starvation emerged from two urban areas of the city of Uman, reported in January 1933 by Vinnytsia and Kiev oblasts
16.
Vsevolod Balitsky
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Vsevolod Apollonovych Balytsky was a Commissar of State Security 1st Class of the NKVD and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Balytsky was born in Verkhnodniprovsk, Yekaterinoslav Governorate and he directed the NKVS of Ukraine during the Great Famine. On 11 May 1937, he was transferred to the Far East, during the Great Purge he was arrested on 7 July 1937. Later, on 27 November 1937, he was sentenced to death and shot the day in Moscow. The information in this article is based on that in its Ukrainian, Russian and French equivalents
17.
Polish Military Organisation
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Polish Military Organisation, PMO was a secret military organization created by Józef Piłsudski in August 1914, and officially named in November 1914, during World War I. Its tasks were to gather intelligence and sabotage the enemies of the Polish people and it was used by Piłsudski to create a body independent from his cautious Austro-Hungarian supporters, and it was an important, if somewhat lesser known, counterpart to the Polish Legions. Its targets included the Russian Empire in the phase of the war. Its membership rose from a few hundred members in 1914 to over 30,000 in 1918, active in the Russian-held Kingdom of Poland, the PMO served as the intelligence and sabotage arm of Piłsudskis Polish Legions. In fact, many members of the illegal and secret PMO were at the time soldiers of the Austrian-backed Polish Legions. The PMO was commanded militarily by Piłsudski himself, while the command was a secret A Convent headed by Jędrzej Moraczewski. Initially active only in Central Poland, with time the PMO units were formed in all parts of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including modern day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. It was mainly preoccupied with intelligence and sabotage, as well as training of its members. The PMO members were seen as the core of the future Polish Army after Poland regained her independence. In place of Piłsudski, who was sent to a German prison in the fortress in Magdeburg, the commander of the PMO became his friend, Edward Rydz-Śmigły, also future Marshal of Poland. With the collapse of the Central Powers during the stages of the Great War, the PMO command decided to take an active part in the war. In October and November 1918 the revolutions in Germany and Austria-Hungary made the Ober Ost army collapse, the German units were struck by mass desertions of soldiers who simply left their posts and headed for their homes. The main tasks of the PMO during this period was to disarm the withdrawing soldiers, the campaign was successful and gave the new-born Polish state a large quantity of arms and military equipment. By mid-November, most of garrisons in Galicia surrendered to PMO members, the PMO members continued the disarming actions in the former Congress Kingdom as well. Finally, the PMO was the core of Polish defences of the city of Lwów in the Battle of Lwów against the forces of the West Ukrainian Peoples Republic. In December 1918, the members of the PMO were all conscripted into the newly-reborn Polish Army, contrary to the rest of units, the PMO in the Ukraine remained active after the Polish withdrawal from Kiev in July 1920. In February 1918, an organisation was formed in the German-held Greater Poland. It was modelled after the original PMO and maintained contacts with her predecessor and it assumed the name of Polish Military Organisation of the Prussian Partition and its main aim was to liberate the region and attach it to Poland
18.
Partitions of Poland
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The First Partition of Poland was decided on August 5,1772. Two decades later, Russian and Prussian troops entered the Commonwealth again, Austria did not participate in the Second Partition. The Third Partition of Poland took place on October 24,1795, with this partition, the Commonwealth ceased to exist. In Polish, there are two words for the two meanings. In Polish historiography, the term Fourth Partition of Poland has also been used, the term Fourth Partition in a temporal sense can also mean the diaspora communities that played important political role in re-establishing the Polish sovereign state after 1918. A single member of parliaments belief that a measure was injurious to his own constituency, even after the act had been approved and it became increasingly difficult to undertake action. The liberum veto also provided openings for foreign diplomats to get their ways and this applies particularly to the last Commonwealth King Stanisław August Poniatowski, who for some time had been a lover of Russian Empress Catherine the Great. Their alliance later became known in Poland as the Alliance of the Three Black Eagles, the Commonwealth could never be liquidated unless its long-time ally, Austria, allowed it, so Catherine had to use diplomacy to win Austria to her side. Frederick II retaliated by ordering enough Polish currency counterfeited to severely affect the Polish economy and this new constitution undid the reforms made in 1764 under Stanisław II. The liberum veto and all the old abuses of the last one, the irregular and poorly commanded Polish forces had little chance in the face of the regular Russian army and suffered a major defeat. In 1769 Austria annexed a small territory of Spisz and in 1770 – Nowy Sącz and these territories had been a bone of contention between Poland and Hungary, which was a part of the Austrian crown lands. In February 1772, the agreement of partition was signed in Vienna, early in August, Russian, Prussian and Austrian troops simultaneously invaded the Commonwealth and occupied the provinces agreed upon among themselves. The partition treaty was ratified by its signatories on September 22,1772, to Austria fell Zator and Auschwitz, part of Lesser Poland embracing parts of the counties of Kraków and Sandomir and the whole of Galicia, less the city of Kraków. Catherine of Russia was also very satisfied, by this diplomatic document Russia came into possession of that section of Livonia that had remained in Commonwealth control, and of Belarus embracing the counties of Vitebsk, Polotsk and Mstislavl. By this partition, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth lost about 30% of its territory and half of its population, by seizing northwestern Poland, Prussia instantly gained control over 80% of the Commonwealths total foreign trade. Through levying enormous customs duties, Prussia accelerated the collapse of the Commonwealth, after having occupied their respective territories, the three partitioning powers demanded that King Stanisław and the Sejm approve their action. By 1790 the First Polish Republic had been weakened to such a degree that it was forced into an unnatural and terminal alliance with its enemy, the Polish–Prussian Pact of 1790 was signed. The conditions of the Pact contributed to the succeeding and final two partitions of Poland–Lithuania, the May Constitution of 1791 enfranchised the bourgeoisie, established the separation of the three branches of government, and eliminated the abuses of the Repnin Sejm
19.
Poles in the Soviet Union
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Millions of Poles lived within the Russian Empire following the military Partitions of Poland throughout the 19th century. As Germany took over Polish lands during World War I, many Poles were evacuated or ran away with retreating Russian troops, Polish writer and philosopher Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz lived through the Russian Revolution while in St. Petersburg. What he saw, had an effect on his works. There were also people of Polish background associated with the communist movement, however, according to their ideology they did not identify as Poles or with Poland, and members of the communist party viewed themselves as Soviet citizens without any national sentiments. Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee was created in 1920 but failed to control Poland, Polish communities were inherited from Imperial Russia after the creation of the Soviet Union. According to the 1926 Soviet census, there were a total of 782,334 Poles in the USSR, the largest concentration of Poles was in Ukraine, where according to the Soviet census in 1926476,435 Poles lived. Those estimates are considered to have been lowered by Soviet officials, church and independent estimates show estimates of 650,000 to 700,000 Poles living in that area. This suggests that the total Polish population of the USSR was in excess of 1,000,000, initially the Soviets pursued a policy where the local national language was used as a tool for eradication of national identity in favour of communist education of masses. In the case of the Poles this meant a goal of Sovietisation of the Polish population, however this proved extremely difficult as the Soviet communists themselves realised that the Poles were en masse opposed to communist ideology, seeing it as hostile to Polish identity. The policy of discrimination, plunder and terror further strengthened Polish resistance to Soviet rule. As a result, the Soviet authorities started to imprison and forcefully remove all those seen as an obstacle to their policies, in a short time prisons in areas with a Polish minority were overcrowded by 600%. Two Polish Autonomous Districts were created, with one in Belarus, the first one was named Dzierzynszczyzna, after Felix Dzierżyński, the second was named Marchlewszczyzna after Julian Marchlewski. After 1928 Soviet policies turned to outright eradication of Polish national identity, special centers were established where the youth was indoctrinated towards hatred against the Polish state, all contacts with relatives within Poland were dangerous and could result in imprisonment. Newspapers printed out in the Polish language were de facto used to print anti-Polish propaganda, following attacks on the Polish minority, from 18 February 1930 till 19 March 1930 over 100,000 people from Polish areas were expelled by the Soviet authorities. Following the collectivization of agriculture under Joseph Stalin, both autonomies were abolished and their populations were subsequently deported to Kazakhstan in 1934–1938. Many people starved during the deportation and after, since the deported were moved to sparsely populated areas, unprepared for migration, lacking basic facilities, the survivors were under the supervision of the OGPU/NKVD, cruelly punished for any sign of discontent. 21,000 Poles died during the Holodomor, in 1936 the Poles were deported from the territories Belarus and Ukraine adjacent to the state border. Tens of thousands of ethnic Poles became victims of the Great Purge in 1937–1938, the Communist Party of Poland was also decimated in the Great Purge and was disbanded in 1938
20.
Immigration
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As for economic effects, research suggests that migration is beneficial both to the receiving and sending countries. Studies show that the elimination of barriers to migration would have effects on world GDP. Development economists argue that reducing barriers to labor mobility between developing countries and developed countries would be one of the most efficient tools of poverty reduction. Research shows that country of origin matters for speed and depth of immigrant assimilation, many animals have migrated across evolutionary history, including pre-humans. Human migration started with the out of Africa into the Middle East, and then to Asia, Australia, Europe, Russia. This is discussed in the article pre-modern human migration, recent history is discussed in the articles history of human migration and human migration. When people cross national borders during their migration, they are called migrants or immigrants from the perspective of the country which they enter, from the perspective of the country which they leave, they are called emigrant or outmigrant. Sociology designates immigration usually as migration, as of 2015, the number of international migrants has reached 244 million worldwide, which reflects a 41% increase since 2000. One third of the worlds international migrants are living in just 20 countries, the largest number of international migrants live in the United States, with 19% of the worlds total. Germany and Russia host 12 million migrants each, taking the second, Saudi Arabia hosts 10 million migrants, followed by the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. Between 2000 and 2015, Asia added more international migrants than any major area in the world. Europe added the second largest with about 20 million, in most parts of the world, migration occurs between countries that are located within the same major area. In 2015, the number of international migrants below the age of 20 reached 37 million, while 177 million are between the ages of 20 and 64. International migrants living in Africa were the youngest, with an age of 29, followed by Asia, and Latin America/Caribbean, while migrants were older in Northern America, Europe. Nearly half of all international migrants originate in Asia, and Europe was the birthplace of the second largest number of migrants, india has the largest diaspora in the world, followed by Mexico and Russia. The other top desired destination countries were Canada, France, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Germany, one theory of immigration distinguishes between push and pull factors. Push factors refer primarily to the motive for immigration from the country of origin, in the case of economic migration, differentials in wage rates are common. If the value of wages in the new country surpasses the value of wages in ones country, he or she may choose to migrate
21.
Communist Party of Poland
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The Communist Party of Poland was a communist party in Poland. It was a result of the fusion of Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, elections for the Workers Councils which sprang up in 1918 revealed that the new party had a level of support almost equal to that of the Polish Socialist Party. However this support was undermined by both national feeling and due to the party being driven underground by reactionary legislation. The KPRP would be illegal for the rest of its life but took part, in the shape of Józef Unszlicht, in the founding of the Communist International in March 1919. Despite the immense difficulties facing the new party the KPRP promoted the unification of the union movement. Clashes in this region became a full-scale war with Russia in April 1920 as Józef Piłsudski, in alliance with Symon Petliura. This was successfully repulsed and the Red Army advanced to the gates of Warsaw only to be pushed back in its turn, the war ended with the Peace of Riga in March 1921. The period 1921-1926 saw relative political freedom in Poland and the KPRP took full advantage of all legal avenues offered it. Gains were also made from the Bund when a faction led by Aleksander Minc joined, rapid gains were also made in the eastern borderlands at this time, see the entry for the KPZU. The Partys third Conference in 1922 saw the consolidation of the leadership around the Three Ws - Adolf Warski, Maksymilian Horwitz, the party was able to assume a stable organisational form and founded Red Factions within the unions. An electoral list was constructed called the Union of Town and Country Proletariat, yet the party only managed to win 130,000 votes and two seats in the November 1922 elections. In general the idea of the United Front - recently made policy by the Communist International - provided a guide for the partys activities, autonomous sections of the Party were also recognised as being needed in Polands borderlands which were inhabited by non-Polish groups. In accordance with party decisions, Communist Parties were then organised both in the Western Ukraine and in Western Belarus, within the Communist International, the Polish leadership of the Three Ws aligned with Grigory Zinoviev and therefore opposed to the embryonic Left Opposition. The main persecutor in the case against the Polish leadership was Julian Leszczyński Lenski, but the Chair of the Commission would wield the decisive blows, lenskis reward was his appointment to a new party central committee, appointed without reference to a Party Congress. His task - to Bolshevise the KPRP, the Partys Third Congress gathered at Minsk in March 1925 with the slogan Bolshevisation of the Party. Significantly the Partys name was changed, with its contraction to Communist Party of Poland, Warski returned to the leadership and the party again embarked on attempts to build a United Front with the PPS. With rising unemployment and a deteriorating economic situation Pilsudski staged a coup d’etat in May 1926. Confused as to the meaning of this the KPP engaged in battles with troops loyal to the Witos government
22.
Polish Socialist Party
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The Polish Socialist Party was a left-wing Polish political party, it was one of the most important parties in Poland from its inception in 1892 until its dissolution in 1948. A party with the name was established in 1987 but has remained at the margins of Polish politics. Józef Piłsudski, founder of the resurrected Polish state, was a member and later leader of the PPS in the early 20th century, the PPS was founded in Paris in 1892. In November 1892 the leading personalities of the PPS agreed on a political program, however, the Revolutionary Faction became dominant and renamed itself back again to the PPS, while the Left was eclipsed, and in 1918 merged with SDKPiL forming the Communist Party of Poland. In 1917-18 the party participated in the Central Council of Ukraine, many PPS leaders and members were put on trial by Piłsudskis regime and jailed in the infamous Bereza Kartuska prison. The party was a member of the Labour and Socialist International between 1923 and 1940, the party supported the Polish resistance during World War II as the underground Polish Socialist Party – Freedom, Equality, Independence. In 1948 it suffered a split, as the communists applied the salami tactics to dismember any opposition. One faction, which included Edward Osóbka-Morawski wanted to join forces with the Polish Peasant Party, another faction, led by Józef Cyrankiewicz, argued that the Socialists should support the Communists in carrying through a socialist program, while opposing the imposition of one-party rule. Pre-war political hostilities continued to influence events, and Stanisław Mikołajczyk, leader of the Peasant Party, the Communists played on these divisions by dismissing Osóbka-Morawski and making Cyrankiewicz Prime Minister. A new party of the name, which seeks to carry on the tradition of the original PPS, was established by left-wing opposition figures such as Jan Józef Lipski in 1987. However, the new PPS remains a marginal group within the landscape of the Third Republic. Its main propaganda outlet was the Robotnik newspaper
23.
Communism
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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
24.
Prisoner of war
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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
25.
Second Polish Republic
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The Second Polish Republic, also known as the Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland, refers to the country of Poland between the First and Second World Wars. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland and it had access to the Baltic Sea via a short strip of coastline either side of the city of Gdynia. Between March and August 1939, Poland also shared a border with the then-Hungarian governorate of Subcarpathia, the Second Republic was significantly different in territory to the current Polish state. It included substantially more territory in the east and less in the west, the Second Republics land area was 388,634 km2, making it, in October 1938, the sixth largest country in Europe. After the annexation of Zaolzie, this grew to 389,720 km2, according to the 1921 census, the number of inhabitants was 27.2 million. By 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, almost a third of population came from minority groups,13. 9% Ukrainians, 10% Jews,3. 1% Belarusians,2. 3% Germans and 3. 4% Czechs, Lithuanians and Russians. At the same time, a significant number of ethnic Poles lived outside the country borders, Poland maintained a slow but steady level of economic development. By 1939, the Republic had become one of Europes major powers, the victorious Allies of World War I confirmed the rebirth of Poland in the Treaty of Versailles of June 1919. It was one of the stories of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Poland solidified its independence in a series of wars fought by the newly formed Polish Army from 1918 to 1921. The extent of the half of the interwar territory of Poland was settled diplomatically in 1922. In the course of World War I, Germany gradually gained overall dominance on the Eastern Front as the Imperial Russian Army fell back, German and Austro-Hungarian armies seized the Russian-ruled part of what became Poland. In a failed attempt to resolve the Polish question as quickly as possible, Berlin set up a German puppet state on 5 November 1916, with a governing Provisional Council of State, the Council administered the country under German auspices, pending the election of a king. A month before Germany surrendered on 11 November 1918 and the war ended, the Regency Council had dissolved the Council of State, with the notable exception of the Marxist-oriented Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, most Polish political parties supported this move. On 23 October the Regency Council appointed a new government under Józef Świeżyński, in 1918–1919, over 100 workers councils sprang up on Polish territories, on 5 November 1918, in Lublin, the first Soviet of Delegates was established. On 6 November socialists proclaimed the Republic of Tarnobrzeg at Tarnobrzeg in Austrian Galicia, the same day the Socialist, Ignacy Daszyński, set up a Provisional Peoples Government of the Republic of Poland in Lublin. On Sunday,10 November at 7 a. m, Józef Piłsudski, newly freed from 16 months in a German prison in Magdeburg, returned by train to Warsaw. Piłsudski, together with Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was greeted at Warsaws railway station by Regent Zdzisław Lubomirski, next day, due to his popularity and support from most political parties, the Regency Council appointed Piłsudski as Commander in Chief of the Polish Armed Forces
26.
Russian Partition
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The Russian Partition constituted the former territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that were invaded by the Russian Empire in the course of late-18th-century Partitions of Poland. The Russian acquisition encompassed the largest share of Polands population, living on 463,200 km2 of land constituting formerly east-central territory of a sovereign country. The first partitioning led by imperial Russia took place in 1772, the one in 1793. To both Russians and Poles, the term Russian Poland was not acceptable, to the Russians after partition Poland ceased to exist, and their newly acquired territories were considered the long lost parts of Mother Russia. To Poles, Poland was simply Polish, never Russian, while the Russians used varying administrative names for their new territories, another popular term, used in Poland and adopted by most other historiographies, was the Russian Partition. Even before the partitions from the late 18th century, the Russian Empire had already acquired some territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The first Russian partition took place in the late 17th century, under the Third Partition of Poland Russia acquired Courland, all Lithuanian territory east of the Nieman River, and the remaining parts of Volhynian Ukraine. Major historical events of the Russian Partition included the Warsaw Uprising soon after Kościuszkos victory at Racławice. It ended up in the massacre of Praga district of Warsaw, in which the Russian imperial army killed up to 20,000 civilians in reprisal or revenge, regardless of gender and age. The whole of Praga was strewn with bodies, blood was flowing in streams wrote Suvorov himself. In 1807, the victorious Napoleon formed the Duchy of Warsaw after his War of the Fourth Coalition against Prussia and Russia, the new Duchy was held in personal union by King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony. However, the Duchy was dissolved after just a few years following the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the Tsarist Kingdom of Poland was established in the territory returned to Russia with the Tsar taking the title of King of Poland. The protectorate was gradually integrated into Russia over the course of the 19th century, notwithstanding, the relentless Russian exploitation activities led to the 1830–1831 November Uprising which took place in the heartland of partitioned Poland, forming a government. Its subsequent defeat resulted in a new wave of Tsarist mass repressions, in 1863–1864 another insurrection, the January Uprising, broke out. This time, the Carmelite friars who helped the insurgents were sent on death marches to Siberia chained by their necks together, the January Uprising lead to the Kingdoms autonomy being drastically reduced, and its renaming as Vistula Land. There is debate as to whether the Kingdom of Poland, as a state, was replaced by the Vistula Land. Towns were stripped of their charters in reprisal, and turned into villages, the Russian Partition of Poland was made an official province of the Russian Empire in 1867. In early 20th century, a part of the Russian Revolution of 1905 was the Revolution in the Kingdom of Poland
27.
October Revolution
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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
28.
Labor camp
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A labor camp or work camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment under the criminal code. Labor camps have many aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators, some of those camps were dubbed reeducation facilities for political coercion, but most others served as backbone of industry and agriculture for the benefit of the state especially in times of war. Labor camps of forced labor were abolished by Convention no.105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization, albania Allied Forces The Allies of World War II operated a number of work camps after the war. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, it was agreed that German forced labor was to be utilized as reparations, see Forced labor of Germans after World War II. Bulgaria Burma According to the New Statesman, Burmese military government operated, from 1962 to 2011, China The anti-communist Kuomintang operated various camps between 1938 and 1949, including the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp for young activists and students. The Communist Party of China has operated many labor camps for some crimes at least since taking power in 1949, many leaders of China were put into labor camps after purges, including Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. May Seventh Cadre Schools are an example of Cultural Revolution-era labor camps, According to CNN, hundreds — if not thousands — of labor camps and forced-labor prisons still exist in modern-day China, housing political prisoners and dissidents alongside dangerous criminals. Chinese state-run media Xinhua reported in early 2013 that the plans to reform its controversial re-education through labor system this year. Cuba Beginning in November 1965, people classified as against the government were summoned to work camps referred to as Military Units to Aid Production, Czechoslovakia After the communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, many forced labor camps were created. The inmates included political prisoners, clergy, kulaks, Boy Scouts leaders, about half of the prisoners worked in the uranium mines. Also between 1950 and 1954 many men were considered unreliable for compulsory military service, and were conscripted to labour battalions instead. Nazi Germany During World War II the Nazis operated several categories of Arbeitslager for different categories of inmates, the largest number of them held Jewish civilians forcibly abducted in the occupied countries to provide labor in the German war industry, repair bombed railroads and bridges or work on farms. By 1944,19. 9% of all workers were foreigners, the Nazis employed many slave laborers. They also operated concentration camps, some of which provided free forced labor for industrial, a notable example is the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp complex that serviced the production of the V-2 rocket. See List of German concentration camps for more, the Nazi camps played a key role in the extermination of millions. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the overwork, malnutrition, preventable disease. North Korea North Korea is known to six camps with prison-labor colonies in remote mountain valleys
29.
Yezhovshchina
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The Great Purge or the Great Terror was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov and it has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. In the Western world, Robert Conquests 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase, Conquests title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The term repression was used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party, most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society, intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as too rich for a peasant, a series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being fifth column communities. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas. Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of political crimes, they were quickly executed by shooting. Many died at the labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis, one secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van. The campaigns were carried out according to the line, and often by direct orders. The threat of war heightened Stalins perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical fifth column of wreckers, terrorists. The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people, but from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. Stalins opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption and these tendencies may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalins suspicions and he enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism. In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and this required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious old guard of revolutionaries
30.
Saint Petersburg
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Saint Petersburg is Russias second-largest city after Moscow, with five million inhabitants in 2012, and an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea. It is politically incorporated as a federal subject, situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 271703. In 1914, the name was changed from Saint Petersburg to Petrograd, in 1924 to Leningrad, between 1713 and 1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia. In 1918, the government bodies moved to Moscow. Saint Petersburg is one of the cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Saint Petersburg is home to The Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. A large number of consulates, international corporations, banks. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress, at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in a then called Ingermanland. A small town called Nyen grew up around it, Peter the Great was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, and he intended to have Russia gain a seaport in order to be able to trade with other maritime nations. He needed a better seaport than Arkhangelsk, which was on the White Sea to the north, on May 1703121703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans, and soon replaced the fortress. On May 271703, closer to the estuary 5 km inland from the gulf), on Zayachy Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city. The city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia, tens of thousands of serfs died building the city. Later, the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate, Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712,9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war, he referred to Saint Petersburg as the capital as early as 1704. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the bank of the Neva, near the Peter. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan, by 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals. The project was not completed, but is evident in the layout of the streets, in 1716, Peter the Great appointed French Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences, University and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great, in 1725, Peter died at the age of fifty-two. His endeavours to modernize Russia had met opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life
31.
Michael Ellman
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Michael John Ellman has been a professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam since 1978. He has written on the economics of the Soviet Union, transition economics, Russia, foreign member of the Russian Academy of Economic Sciences and Entrepreneurship. Awarded the 1998 Kondratieff prize for his contribution to the development of the sciences by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation. Planning Problems in the USSR, The contribution of mathematical methods to their solution, ISBN9781107427327 Did the agricultural surplus provide the resources for the increase in investment in the USSR during the First Five Year Plan. Transformation, depression and economics, some lessons, Journal of Comparative Economics, reprinted in P. G. Hare & J. R. Davis Transition to the market economy, vol.1. With V. Kontorovich, The destruction of the Soviet economic system, the 1947 Soviet famine and the entitlement approach to famines, Cambridge Journal of Economics. Russia’s oil and natural gas, Bonanza or curse, ISBN9781843312260 Homepage at the University of Amsterdam Michael Ellman, Policy Innovations, a publication of Carnegie Council
32.
Genocide
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Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people in whole or in part. The hybrid word genocide is a combination of the Greek word génos, the United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The term genocide was coined in a 1943 book responding to mass murder of populations in the 20th century, in 1943, Raphael Lemkin created the term genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The book describes the implementation of Nazi policies in occupied Europe, the term described the systematic destruction of a nation or people, and the word was quickly adopted by many in the international community. The word genocide is the combination of the Greek prefix geno-, Lemkin defined genocide as follows, Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. The preamble to the 1948 Genocide Convention notes that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history. Lemkins lifelong interest in the murder of populations in the 20th century was initially in response to the killing of Armenians in 1915. He dedicated his life to mobilizing the international community, to together to prevent the occurrence of such events. In a 1949 interview, Lemkin said I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times and it happened to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action. In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention, the CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into effect on 12 January 1951. The USSR argued that the Conventions definition should follow the etymology of the term, and may have feared greater international scrutiny of its own Great Purge. Other nations feared that including political groups in the definition would invite international intervention in domestic politics. ”The conventions purpose and scope was later described by the United Nations Security Council as follows, In 2007 the European Court of Human Rights, noted in its judgement on Jorgic v. In the same judgement the ECHR reviewed the judgements of several international and municipal courts judgements, in the case of Onesphore Rwabukombe the German Supreme Court adhered to its previous judgement and didnt follow the narrow interpretation of the ICTY and the ICJ. The phrase in whole or in part has been subject to discussion by scholars of international humanitarian law. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic – Trial Chamber I – Judgment – IT-98-33 ICTY8 that Genocide had been committed. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the destruction of entire human groups. The Appeals Chamber goes into details of other cases and the opinions of respected commentators on the Genocide Convention to explain how they came to this conclusion. The judges continue in paragraph 12, The determination of when the part is substantial enough to meet this requirement may involve a number of considerations
33.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
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Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian, television presenter and award-winning author of popular history books and novels. Simon Montefiore was born in London and his father was Stephen Eric Sebag Montefiore and his brother is Hugh Sebag-Montefiore. They are descended from a line of wealthy Sephardi Jews who were diplomats and bankers all over Europe, at the start of the 19th century, his great-great-uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore, was an international financier who worked with the Rothschild family and who became a philanthropist. His mother, Phyllis April Jaffé, comes from a Lithuanian Jewish family of scholars and her parents fled the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. They bought tickets for New York City, but were cheated, being dropped off at Cork. Due to the Limerick boycott in 1904 his grandfather Henry Jaffé left the country and moved to Newcastle, Montefiore was educated at Ludgrove School and Harrow School. He read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where he received his Doctorate of Philosophy and he won an Exhibition to Caius College. Montefiore worked as a banker, a foreign affairs journalist, montefiores book Catherine the Great & Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Marsh Biography Award. Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar won History Book of the Year at the 2004 British Book Awards, jerusalem, The Biography was a number one non-fiction Sunday Times bestseller and a global bestseller and won The Book of the Year Prize from the Jewish Book Council. His latest history is The Romanovs, 1613–1918, montefiores debut novel Kings Parade was published in 1991. The Spectator called the book embarrassing and extremely silly, Montefiore is also the author of the acclaimed novels Sashenka and One Night in Winter. One Night in Winter won the Political Novel of the Year Prize and was longlisted for the Orwell Prize and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Buckingham. Montefiore lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children
34.
Katyn massacre
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The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish nationals carried out by the NKVD in April and May 1940. Though the killings took place at different locations, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest. The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, the victims were executed in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943. When the London-based Polish government-in-exile asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, in November 2010, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for having personally ordered the massacre. At least 111,091 people were executed during the Polish Operation of the NKVD, on 1 September 1939, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany began. Consequently, Britain and France, obligated by the Anglo-Polish military alliance and Franco-Polish alliance to attack Germany in the case of such an invasion, demanded that Germany withdraw. On 3 September 1939, after Germany failed to comply, Britain, France, and most countries of the British Empire declared war on Germany and they took minimal military action during what became known as the Phony War. The Soviet invasion of Poland began on 17 September in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army advanced quickly and met little resistance, as Polish forces facing them were under orders not to engage the Soviets. About 250,000 to 454,700 Polish soldiers and policemen were captured and interned by the Soviet authorities, some were freed or escaped quickly, but 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD. Of these,42,400 soldiers, mostly of Ukrainian and White Russian ethnicity serving in the Polish army, who lived in the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, were released in October. The 43,000 soldiers born in western Poland, then under German control, were transferred to the Germans, in turn, Soviet repressions of Polish citizens occurred as well over this period. Since Polands conscription system required every nonexempt university graduate to become a reserve officer. According to estimates by the Institute of National Remembrance, roughly 320,000 Polish citizens were deported to the Soviet Union, IPN estimates the number of Polish citizens who died under Soviet rule during World War II at 150,000. Of the group of 12,000 Poles sent to Dalstroy camp in 1940-1941, mostly POWs, only 583 men survived, according to Tadeusz Piotrowski, during the war and after 1944,570,387 Polish citizens had been subjected to some form of Soviet political repression. As early as 19 September, the head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, ordered the police to create the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War. The largest camps were located at Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobelsk, other camps were at Jukhnovo, Yuzhe, rail station Tyotkino, Kozelshchyna, Oranki, Vologda, and Gryazovets. Kozelsk and Starobelsk were used mainly for officers, while Ostashkov was used mainly for Polish Scouting, gendarmes, police officers
35.
Deportation of the Crimean Tatars
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The state-organized removal is known as the Sürgünlik in Crimean Tatar. A total of more than 230,000 people were deported and this included the entire ethnic Crimean Tatar population, at the time about a fifth of the total population of the Crimean Peninsula, as well as smaller numbers of ethnic Greeks and Bulgarians. A large number of deportees died from starvation or disease as a result of deportation. It is considered to be a case of ethnic cleansing, for a long time Crimean Tatars and Soviet dissidents called for recognition of the genocide of Crimean Tatars. During Destalinization the deportation was denounced by the Soviet government, nevertheless, in November 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR recognized the deportation as a crime against humanity of the highest degree. On 21 April 2014, President of Russia Vladimir Putin signed a decree that rehabilitated Crimean Tatars and other ethnicities who suffered from Stalinist repressions in Crimea. On November 12,2015 parliament of Ukraine adopted a resolution recognizing the event as a genocide, however, under Joseph Stalin, the official policy of the Soviet government turned to one of repression. However, between 1923 and 1938, the Crimean Tatar population had increased from 150,000 to over 218,000 people. In September 1941 the German 11th Army and troops from the Romanian Third Army and Fourth Army entered the Crimean Peninsula, by November, they controlled the entire peninsula except for the city of Sevastopol. After a siege lasting for months, Sevastopol also fell and the peninsula was occupied by Army Group A with the 17th Army, with the fall of the peninsula to the Germans, the resistance activity of the Soviet partisans, led by A. N. Martynov and organized by the NKVD and activists of the Communist Party began, however, Crimean Tatars were banned from joining this movement. Historian J. Otto Pohl has accused Mokrousov and Martynov of incompetence, some Crimean Tatar communists were forced out of their refuges in woodlands by the partisans, which resulted in their execution by the occupying German forces. The partisans specifically targeted and destroyed Crimean Tatar villages, according to Pohl, Crimean Tatar villages were also pillaged for food by the partisans. Overall, the number of Crimean Tatar men who joined these battalions was around 20,000 The motivations of Crimean Tatar men who joined these battalions varied, some were members of the defeated 51st Army and had been taken as prisoners of war by the German Army. They joined the battalions to avoid the conditions in the POW camps in Simferopol and Mykolaiv. Some aimed to protect their villages from the activities of Soviet partisans, however, 15% of the adult male Crimean Tatar population remained active in the ranks of the Red Army, and some Crimean Tatars were taken to Germany as forced laborers, called Ostarbeiter. According to Pohl, the aim of the Soviet government was the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars and this constituted the continuation of a policy practiced earlier in the Caucasus, whereby an ethnic group was selected to be deported and then charges of treason were fabricated. Another motivation, according to Pohl, was their close historical and cultural ties with Turkey
36.
Rzeczpospolita
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Rzeczpospolita is a traditional and official name of the Polish State – Polish, Rzeczpospolita Polska. It comes from the words, rzecz and pospolita, literally, in terms of etymology and meaning, the closest Latin phrase is res publica and the closest English term is commonwealth, but a more modern translation is republic. The term Rzeczpospolita has been used in Poland since the beginning of the 16th century, originally it was a generic term to denote a state or a commonness. The famous quote by Jan Zamoyski, the Lord Chancellor of the Crown, on the importance of education, is an example of its use, Polish, Takie będą Rzeczypospolite. Such will be the Commonwealths as the upbringing of their youth, the meaning of Rzeczpospolita is well described by the term Commonwealth. As a result, the meaning of Rzeczpospolita Polska is Polish Commonwealth. Rzeczpospolita is also used in a series of names referring to three periods in the History of Poland, I Rzeczpospolita, in reference to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. During this period, commonwealth was ruled de facto by a class called the szlachta. It began with the Union of Lublin in 1569 and ended with the third and final Partition of Poland in 1795, II Rzeczpospolita, the renascent Polish State was initially called the Republic of Poland. This is the title of the current Polish State, dating from the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, was often abbreviated to simply Rzeczpospolita Polska or PRL. Sometimes referenced to the post-war period 1944–1952, Czwarta Rzeczpospolita – Fourth Polish Republic, nowadays, the terms Rzeczpospolita and Rzeczpospolita Polska are used interchangeably, so far as they relate to the Polish State by default. Before 1939, Rzeczpospolita was sometimes abbreviated to Rzplita in written documents, RP is a common abbreviation for Rzeczpospolita Polska. While Lithuanian word Žečpospolita is a borrowing from Polish rzeczpospolita, Belarusian Рэч Паспалітая. All of them refer to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, History of Poland Name of Poland Outline of Poland Poland - History - Third Rzeczpospolita. Central European Superpower, Henryk Litwin, BUM Magazine, October 2016, Commonwealth of Diverse Cultures, Polands Heritage
37.
The Wall Street Journal
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The Wall Street Journal is an American business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper based in New York City. The Journal, along with its Asian and European editions, is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, the newspaper is published in the broadsheet format and online. The Wall Street Journal is the largest newspaper in the United States by circulation, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, the Journal had a circulation of about 2.4 million copies as of March 2013, compared with USA Todays 1.7 million. The newspaper has won 39 Pulitzer Prizes through 2015 and derives its name from Wall Street in the heart of the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The Journal has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8,1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, the Journal also publishes the luxury news and lifestyle magazine WSJ. They were later aggregated in a daily summary called the Customers Afternoon Letter. In 1896, The Dow Jones Industrial Average was officially launched and it was the first of several indices of stock and bond prices on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1899, the Journals Review & Outlook column, which still today, appeared for the first time. Journalist Clarence Barron purchased control of the company for US$130,000 in 1902, circulation was then around 7,000, Barron and his predecessors were credited with creating an atmosphere of fearless, independent financial reporting—a novelty in the early days of business journalism. In 1921, Barrons, Americas premier financial weekly, was founded, Barron died in 1928, a year before Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that greatly affected the Great Depression in the United States. Barrons descendants, the Bancroft family, would continue to control the company until 2007, the Journal took its modern shape and prominence in the 1940s, a time of industrial expansion for the United States and its financial institutions in New York. Bernard Kilgore was named managing editor of the paper in 1941, under Kilgore, in 1947, that the paper won its first Pulitzer Prize, for William Henry Grimess editorials. In 1970, Dow Jones bought the Ottaway newspaper chain, which at the time comprised nine dailies, later, the name was changed to Dow Jones Local Media Group. In 2007 News Corp. acquired Dow Jones, a luxury lifestyle magazine, was launched in 2008. A complement to the print newspaper, The Wall Street Journal Online, was launched in 1996, in 2003, Dow Jones began to integrate reporting of the Journals print and online subscribers together in Audit Bureau of Circulations statements. In 2007, it was believed to be the largest paid-subscription news site on the Web. Since then, online subscribership has fallen, due in part to rising subscription costs, in May 2008, an annual subscription to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal cost $119 for those who do not have subscriptions to the print edition. By June 2013, the monthly cost for a subscription to the edition was $22.99, or $275.88 annually
38.
Cambridge University Press
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Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the worlds oldest publishing house and it also holds letters patent as the Queens Printer. The Presss mission is To further the Universitys mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, Cambridge University Press is a department of the University of Cambridge and is both an academic and educational publisher. With a global presence, publishing hubs, and offices in more than 40 countries. Its publishing includes journals, monographs, reference works, textbooks. Cambridge University Press is an enterprise that transfers part of its annual surplus back to the university. Cambridge University Press is both the oldest publishing house in the world and the oldest university press and it originated from Letters Patent granted to the University of Cambridge by Henry VIII in 1534, and has been producing books continuously since the first University Press book was printed. Cambridge is one of the two privileged presses, authors published by Cambridge have included John Milton, William Harvey, Isaac Newton, Bertrand Russell, and Stephen Hawking. In 1591, Thomass successor, John Legate, printed the first Cambridge Bible, the London Stationers objected strenuously, claiming that they had the monopoly on Bible printing. The universitys response was to point out the provision in its charter to print all manner of books. In July 1697 the Duke of Somerset made a loan of £200 to the university towards the house and presse and James Halman, Registrary of the University. It was in Bentleys time, in 1698, that a body of scholars was appointed to be responsible to the university for the Presss affairs. The Press Syndicates publishing committee still meets regularly, and its role still includes the review, John Baskerville became University Printer in the mid-eighteenth century. Baskervilles concern was the production of the finest possible books using his own type-design, a technological breakthrough was badly needed, and it came when Lord Stanhope perfected the making of stereotype plates. This involved making a mould of the surface of a page of type. The Press was the first to use this technique, and in 1805 produced the technically successful, under the stewardship of C. J. Clay, who was University Printer from 1854 to 1882, the Press increased the size and scale of its academic and educational publishing operation. An important factor in this increase was the inauguration of its list of schoolbooks, during Clays administration, the Press also undertook a sizable co-publishing venture with Oxford, the Revised Version of the Bible, which was begun in 1870 and completed in 1885. It was Wright who devised the plan for one of the most distinctive Cambridge contributions to publishing—the Cambridge Histories, the Cambridge Modern History was published between 1902 and 1912
39.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
Soviet Union, modern-day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and others.jpg)
