Katyn (rural Locality)
Katyn ( ; ) is a rural locality (a '' selo'') in Smolensky District of Smolensk Oblast, Russia, located approximately to the west of Smolensk, the administrative center of the oblast. The village had a population of 1,737 in 2007. Geography It is situated to the west of the city of Smolensk (about 18 km from its center) and circa 60 km from the Russian borders with Belarus. It has a station on the Berlin-Warsaw-Minsk-Moscow international railway line. History Before World War I, Gnyozdovo with the Katyn Forest belonged to the Koźliński family. In the 19th century, Piotr Koźliński married Leokadia Lefftreu, the daughter of the director of the English railway construction company in Russia. Under the marriage articles Gniezdovo and Katyn became co-owned by the British. Katyn massacre The Katyn Forest, in the vicinity of the village, was the site of the Katyn massacre during World War II, in which thousands of captured Polish officers and other citizens were ki ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Katyn Polish War Cemetery
Katyn war cemetery (, ) is a Polish military cemetery located in Katyn, a small village 22 kilometres away from Smolensk, Russia, on the road to Vitebsk. It contains the remnants of 4,412 Polish officers of the Kozelsk prisoner of war camp, who were murdered in 1940 in what is called the Katyn massacre. Except for bodies of two Polish generals exhumed by German authorities in 1943 and then buried separately, all Polish officers murdered in Katyn were buried in six large mass graves. There is also a Russian part of the cemetery, where some 6,500 victims of the Soviet Great Purges of the 1930s were buried by the NKVD. The cemetery was officially opened in 2000. The cemetery is a large, irregular area covering roughly 22 hectares of forest. All mass graves are located on both sides of the main alley. There is also a circular alley with thousands of names of the officers who perished in the massacre. At the end of the main alley there is a war memorial and an altar with a memor ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Katyn Massacre
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass killings under Communist regimes, mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish people, Polish military officer, military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin's order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Tver#20th century, Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by Nazi German forces in 1943. The massacre is qualified as a Crimes against humanity, crime against humanity, Crime of aggression, crime against peace, war crime and (within the Polish Penal Code) a Communist crimes (Polish legal concept), Communist crime. According to a 2009 resolution of the Polish parliament's Sejm, it bears the hallmarks of a genocide. The order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps wa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Smolensky Uyezd
Smolensky Uyezd (''Смоленский уезд'') was one of the subdivisions of the Smolensk Governorate of the Russian Empire. It was situated in the central part of the governorate. Its administrative centre was Smolensk. Demographics At the time of the Russian Empire Census of 1897, Smolensky Uyezd had a population of 145,155. Of these, 91.1% spoke Russian, 3.1% Yiddish, 2.6% Polish, 1.2% Belarusian, 0.7% Ukrainian, 0.5% Latvian, 0.4% German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ..., 0.1% Tatar, 0.1% Lithuanian and 0.1% Romani as their native language. Демоскоп Weekly - Приложение. Справочник стат� ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rural Localities In Smolensk Oblast
In general, a rural area or a countryside is a geographic area that is located outside towns and cities. Typical rural areas have a low population density and small settlements. Agricultural areas and areas with forestry are typically described as rural, as well as other areas lacking substantial development. Different countries have varying definitions of ''rural'' for statistical and administrative purposes. Rural areas have unique economic and social dynamics due to their relationship with land-based industry such as agriculture, forestry, and resource extraction. Rural economics can be subject to boom and bust cycles and vulnerable to extreme weather or natural disasters, such as droughts. These dynamics alongside larger economic forces encouraging urbanization have led to significant demographic declines, called rural flight, where economic incentives encourage younger populations to go to cities for education and access to jobs, leaving older, less educated and less w ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bronisław Bohaterewicz
Bronisław Bohaterewicz (Bohatyrewicz) of the Ostoja coat of arms (24 February 1870 – 9 April 1940) was a Polish military commander and a general of the Polish Army. Murdered during the Katyn massacre, Bohaterewicz was one of the Generals whose bodies were identified by forensic scientists of the Katyn Commission during the 1943 exhumation. Life Born 24 February or 24 April 1870 (sources differ) Anna Cienciala (ed.), ''Katyn A Crime Without Punishment'' Yale, 2007 . in Grodno, in a noble family being part of the Clan of Ostoja, Bohaterewicz joined the Imperial Russian Army, where he received officers training. In September 1918 he joined the Polish Army. He started as the commanding officer of Belarusian self-defence units in Grodno during the opening stages of the Russian Civil War and then the Polish-Bolshevik War. [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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War Crimes In Occupied Poland During World War II
Around six million Polish citizensProject in PosterumRetrieved 20 September 2013.Holocaust: Five Million Forgotten: Non-Jewish Victims of the Shoah. Remember.org.AFP/Expatica, '', Expatica.com, 30 August 2009 Tomasz Szarota & Wojciech Materski, ''Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami'' (Poland, 1939–1945: Human Losses and Victims of Repression under Two Occupations), [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Köppen Climate Classification
The Köppen climate classification divides Earth climates into five main climate groups, with each group being divided based on patterns of seasonal precipitation and temperature. The five main groups are ''A'' (tropical), ''B'' (arid), ''C'' (temperate), ''D'' (continental), and ''E'' (polar). Each group and subgroup is represented by a letter. All climates are assigned a main group (the first letter). All climates except for those in the ''E'' group are assigned a seasonal precipitation subgroup (the second letter). For example, ''Af'' indicates a tropical rainforest climate. The system assigns a temperature subgroup for all groups other than those in the ''A'' group, indicated by the third letter for climates in ''B'', ''C'', ''D'', and the second letter for climates in ''E''. Other examples include: ''Cfb'' indicating an oceanic climate with warm summers as indicated by the ending ''b.'', while ''Dwb'' indicates a semi-Monsoon continental climate, monsoonal continental climate ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Andrzej Wajda
Andrzej Witold Wajda (; 6 March 1926 – 9 October 2016) was a Polish film and theatre director. Recipient of an Honorary Oscar, the Palme d'Or, as well as Honorary Golden Lion and Honorary Golden Bear Awards, he was a prominent member of the "Polish Film School". He was known especially for his trilogy of war films consisting of ''A Generation'' (1955), ''Kanał'' (1957) and ''Ashes and Diamonds (film), Ashes and Diamonds'' (1958). He is considered one of the world's most renowned filmmakers, whose works chronicled his native country's political and social evolution and dealt with the myths of Polish national identity offering insightful analyses of the universal element of the Polish experience – the struggle to maintain dignity under the most trying circumstances. Four of his films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: ''The Promised Land (1975 film), The Promised Land'' (1975), ''The Maids of Wilko'' (1979), ''Man of Iron'' (1981) and '' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Katyń (film)
''Katyń'' () is a 2007 Polish historical drama film about the 1940 Katyn massacre, directed by Academy Honorary Award winner Andrzej Wajda. It is based on the book ''Post Mortem: The Story of Katyn'' by Andrzej Mularczyk. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film for the 80th Academy Awards. Wajda’s Katyń is the first screen portrayal of the long-suppressed and “highly controversial historical event.” Historical background Six months before the massacres at Katyn, on August 23, 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin authorized the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany with a secret protocol to partition and annex Eastern Europe. Within days, German troops invaded western Poland, the first action aimed at fulfilling Hitler’s ultimate goal of "Lebensraum". Within days, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland, a region historically at odds with its former rival, Tsarist Russia. Hundreds of thousands ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Piatykhatky, Kharkiv Oblast
Piatykhatky (; ) is a former khutir, now a neighborhood within the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine. The neighborhood is part of the city Kyivskyi District, Kharkiv, Kyivskyi District of Kharkiv. Located near the mass burial site of KGB massacres of then Soviet citizens in the late 1930s, and Polish military officers who were Soviet prisoners of war in 1940. In the 1950s, it became part of the city of Kharkiv, when construction of the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, "New Matter", and Piatyhatky became incorporated into the city. Burials and memorial complex in Lisopark The Burial site was located in a forest reserve about 5 km from the outskirts of Kharkiv (currently within the city limits and known as Lisopark neighborhood). In the late 1930s it was a remote and sparsely populated area. According to local residents, the site was secured and surrounded by a fence at that time. After World War II the site was abandoned. In the late 1950s – early 1960s, a nuclea ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) secret police organization, and thus had a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. The NKVD is known for carrying out political repression and the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin, as well as counterintelligence and other operations on the Eastern Front of World War II. The head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Yezhov from 1936 to 1938, Lavrentiy Beria from 1938 to 1946, and Sergei Kruglov in 1946. First established in 1917 as the NKVD of the Russian SFSR, the ministry was tasked with regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, and its functions dispersed among other agencies before being reinstated as a commissariat of the Soviet Union ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 and additionally as head of state beginning in 1988, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990 and the president of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, Gorbachev initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism but moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s. Gorbachev was born in Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, Privolnoye, North Caucasus Krai, to a poor peasant family of Russian and Ukrainian heritage. Growing up under the rule of Joseph Stalin, in his youth he operated combine harvesters on a Collective farming, collective farm before joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |