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Polish Operation Of The NKVD (1937–38)
The ''Polish Operation'' of the NKVD (Soviet security service) in 1937–1938 was an anti-Polish mass-ethnic cleansing operation of the NKVD carried out in the Soviet Union against Poles (labeled by the Soviets as "agents") during the period of the Great Purge. It was ordered by the Politburo of the Communist Party against the so-called "Polish spies" and customarily interpreted by the NKVD officials as relating to 'absolutely all Poles'. It resulted in the sentencing of 139,835 people, and summary executions of 111,091 Poles living in or near the Soviet Union. The operation was implemented according to NKVD Order No. 00485 signed by Nikolai Yezhov. The majority of the shooting victims were ethnically Polish, but not all, with some belonging to various minority groups from the Kresy macro-region, for instance, Ruthenians; these groups in the Soviet worldview had some element of Polish culture or heritage, and were therefore also "Polish". The remainder were 'suspected' of bei ...
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Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the party and the state; the purges were also designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky as well as other prominent political rivals within the party. It occurred from August 1936 to March 1938. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party. Various established figures in Lenin's government attempted to succeed him. Joseph Stalin, the party's General Secretary, outmaneuvered political opponents and ultimately gained control of the Communist Party by 1928. Initially, Stalin's leadership was widely accepted; his main political adversary Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929, and the doctrine of "socialism in one country" ...
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Politburo Of The Communist Party Of The Soviet Union
The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (, abbreviated: ), or Politburo ( rus, Политбюро, p=pəlʲɪtbʲʊˈro) was the highest policy-making authority within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was founded in October 1917, and refounded in March 1919, at the 8th Congress of the Bolshevik Party. It was known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966. The existence of the Politburo ended in 1991 upon the breakup of the Soviet Union. History Background On August 18, 1917, the top Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, set up a political bureau—known first as Narrow composition, and after October 23, 1917, as Political bureau—specifically to direct the October Revolution, with only seven members (Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin, Grigori Sokolnikov, and Andrei Bubnov), but this precursor did not outlast the event; the Central Committee continued with the political functions. However, d ...
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Album Procedure
The album procedure (russian: в альбомном порядке, v albomnom poryadke) was a simplified procedure of extrajudicial conviction by NKVD, introduced in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge. The level of punishment (execution or imprisonment) of the arrested persons was decided by local organs during the investigation, the lists of the convicted were sent to NKVD headquarters, where they were approved ''en masse'' and returned for immediate application of the punishment. The name of the procedure came about because the lists collected by mid-range NKVD organs were bound into albums. Procedure The procedure was introduced in the August 11, 1937 NKVD Order No. 00485 "On liquidation of Polish sabotage and espionage groups and units of P.O.W." (P.O.W. stands for the Polish Military Organization, Polska Organizacja Wojskowa.) The order specifies the process as follows: *During investigations all arrested are to be classified into two categories: First Category, su ...
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Nikita Petrov
Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov (russian: Ники́та Васи́льевич Петро́в, born 31 January 1957, Kiev) is a Russian historian. He works at ''Memorial,'' a Russian organization dedicated to studying Soviet political repression. Petrov specializes in Soviet security services. The book about Nikolai Ezhov written by Nikita Petrov and Marc Jansen is based on the archives made accessible after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Petrov's part was tracking original archival documents, while Jansen worked with published sources. On March 24, 2005 Nikita Petrov was awarded Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for his efforts in uncovering truth about repressions against Polish people during the war. In 2008 Petrov earned Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam (Instituut voor Cultuur en Geschiedenis, Faculty of Humanities) with the thesis "Сталин и органы НКВД-МГБ в советизации стран Центральной ...
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Politburo Of The CPSU Central Committee
The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (, abbreviated: ), or Politburo ( rus, Политбюро, p=pəlʲɪtbʲʊˈro) was the highest policy-making authority within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was founded in October 1917, and refounded in March 1919, at the 8th Congress of the Bolshevik Party. It was known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966. The existence of the Politburo ended in 1991 upon the breakup of the Soviet Union. History Background On August 18, 1917, the top Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, set up a political bureau—known first as Narrow composition, and after October 23, 1917, as Political bureau—specifically to direct the October Revolution, with only seven members (Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin, Grigori Sokolnikov, and Andrei Bubnov), but this precursor did not outlast the event; the Central Committee continued with the political functions. However, due t ...
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Central Committee
Central committee is the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, of both ruling and nonruling parties of former and existing socialist states. In such party organizations, the committee would typically be made up of delegates elected at a party congress. In those states where it constituted the state power, the central committee made decisions for the party between congresses and usually was (at least nominally) responsible for electing the politburo. In non-ruling communist parties, the central committee is usually understood by the party membership to be the ultimate decision-making authority between congresses once the process of democratic centralism has led to an agreed-upon position. Non-communist organizations are also governed by central committees, such as the right-wing Likud party in Israel, the North American Mennonite Church and Alcoholics Anonymous, the Chinese Kuomintang as well as the form ...
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Communist Party Of The Soviet Union
" Hymn of the Bolshevik Party" , headquarters = 4 Staraya Square, Moscow , general_secretary = Vladimir Lenin (first) Mikhail Gorbachev (last) , founded = , banned = , founder = Vladimir Lenin , newspaper = ''Pravda'' , position = Far-left , international = , religion = State Atheism , predecessor = Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP , successor = UCP–CPSU , youth_wing = Little Octobrists Komsomol , wing1 = Young Pioneers , wing1_title = Pioneer wing , affiliation1_title = , affiliation1 = Bloc of Communists and Non-Partisans (1936–1991) , membership = 19,487,822 (early 1989 ) , ideology = , colours = Red , country = the Soviet Union The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),; abbreviated in Russian as or also known by various other names during its history, was the founding and ruling party of the Sovie ...
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Joshua Rubenstein
Joshua Rubenstein is an American activist, writer and scholar of literature, dissent, and politics in the former Soviet Union. He won a National Jewish Book Award in Eastern European studies in 2002 for his book ''Stalin’s Secret Pogrom''. Biography Rubenstein is a native of New Britain, Connecticut. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1971, graduating ''Phi Beta Kappa''. At Columbia, he was a student of Lionel Trilling. He also took part in the Columbia University protests of 1968 as a freshman. During college, Rubenstein took a six-week language tour of the Soviet Union and met William Brui, an artist in Leningrad whom he would eventually profile in '' ARTnews'', resulting in his hiring by the ''Boston Phoenix''. He joined Amnesty International in 1975 and served as its Northeast Regional Director for 37 years. He worked with Soviet dissidents and on behalf of prisoners of conscience, and organized campaigns to free activists in Pakistan, the former Rhodesia, ...
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The New York Review Of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of important books is an indispensable literary activity. ''Esquire'' called it "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language." In 1970, writer Tom Wolfe described it as "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic". The ''Review'' publishes long-form reviews and essays, often by well-known writers, original poetry, and has letters and personals advertising sections that had attracted critical comment. In 1979 the magazine founded the '' London Review of Books'', which soon became independent. In 1990 it founded an Italian edition, ''la Rivista dei Libri'', published until 2010. The ''Review'' has a book publishing division, established in 1999, called New York Review Books, which publishes reprints of classics, as wel ...
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Basic Books
Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1950 and located in New York, now an imprint of Hachette Book Group. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and history. History Basic Books originated as a small Greenwich Village-based book club marketed to psychoanalysts. Arthur Rosenthal took over the book club in 1950, and under his ownership it soon began producing original books, mostly in the behavioral sciences. Early successes included Ernest Jones's ''The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud'', as well as works by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. Irving Kristol joined Basic Books in 1960, and helped Basic to expand into the social sciences. Harper & Row purchased the company in 1969. In 1997, HarperCollins announced that it would merge Basic Books into its trade publishing program, effectively closing the imprint and ending its publishing of serious academic books. That same year, B ...
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Ruthenians
Ruthenian and Ruthene are exonyms of Latin language, Latin origin, formerly used in Eastern and Central Europe as common ethnonyms for East Slavs, particularly during the late medieval and early modern periods. The Latin term Rutheni was used in medieval sources to describe all Eastern Slavs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as an exonym for people of the former Kievan Rus', thus including ancestors of the modern Belarusians, Rusyns and Ukrainians. The use of ''Ruthenian'' and related exonyms continued through the early modern period, developing several distinctive meanings, both in terms of their regional scopes and additional religious connotations (such as affiliation with the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church). In medieval sources, the Latin term ''Rutheni'' was commonly applied to East Slavs in general, thus encompassing all endonyms and their various forms (Ukrainian language, Ukrainian: ''русини'', Belarusian language, Belarusian: ''русіны''). By opting for the us ...
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Kresy
Eastern Borderlands ( pl, Kresy Wschodnie) or simply Borderlands ( pl, Kresy, ) was a term coined for the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic during the History of Poland (1918–1939), interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural and extensively multi-ethnic, it amounted to nearly half of the territory of Second Polish Republic, pre-war Poland. Historically situated in the eastern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the Partitions of Poland, 18th-century foreign partitions it was annexed by Russia and partly by the Habsburg monarchy (Galicia (Eastern Europe), Galicia), and Polish–Soviet War, ceded to Poland in 1921 after the Peace of Riga. As a result of the Territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II, post-World War II border changes, none of the lands remain in Poland today. The Polish plural term ''Kresy'' corresponds to the Russian ''okrainy'' (), meaning "the border regions". It is also largely co-terminous with the northern areas of ...
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