Patarei Prison
Patarei Prison (Estonian: ''Patarei vangla''), also known as Patarei Sea Fortress and Tallinn Central Prison (''Tallinna Keskvangla''), commonly known as The Battery (''Patarei''), is a building complex in Kalamaja district of Tallinn, Estonia. The premises cover approximately four hectares of a former sea fortress and prison, located on the shore of Tallinn Bay. The fort was built from 1830–1837 as part of the fortifications for the tsarist Russian state. The building order was given by emperor Nicholas I. In 1864, Tallinn was removed from Russian Empire’s list of fortresses due to Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, and the fort was converted into barracks. The Republic of Estonia, which declared independence in 1918, reconstructed it as a prison after World War I. In 1919, the fort's main function became a prison, lasting until 2005. For Estonians, Patarei is one of the most prominent symbols of Soviet and Nazi political terror. In 2018, the Estonian Institute of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Estonian Language
Estonian ( ) is a Finnic language and the official language of Estonia. It is written in the Latin script and is the first language of the majority of the country's population; it is also an official language of the European Union. Estonian is spoken natively by about 1.1 million people: 922,000 people in Estonia and 160,000 elsewhere. Classification By Convention (norm), conventions of historical linguistics, Estonian is classified as a part of the Finnic languages, Finnic (a.k.a. Baltic Finnic) branch of the Uralic languages, Uralic (a.k.a. Uralian, or Finno-Ugric languages, Finno-Ugric) language family. Other Finnic languages include Finnish language, Finnish and several endangered languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in northwestern Russia. Estonian is typically subclassified as a Southern Finnic language, and it is the second-most-spoken language among all the Finnic languages. Alongside Finnish, Hungarian language, Hungarian and Maltese language, Maltese, Estonian is ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
The Patarei Prison In Tallinn
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun ''thee'') ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
History Of Estonia
The history of Estonia forms a part of the history of Europe. Human settlement in what is now Estonia became possible 13,000–11,000 years ago, after the ice from the last Ice age, glacial era had melted, and signs of the first permanent population in the region date from around 9000 BC. The Ancient Estonia#Early Middle Ages, medieval indigenous population of Estonia was one of the last pagan civilisations in Europe to adopt Christianity following the Northern Crusades in the 13th century. After the crusaders had conquered the area by 1227, Estonia was first ruled by the King of Denmark in the north (until 1345), and then until 1559 by the State of the Teutonic Order, Teutonic Order, and by the ecclesiastical states of the List of states in the Holy Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, which from 1418 to 1562 covered the whole of Estonia, forming a part of the Livonian Confederation. After 1559, Estonia became part of the Sweden, Kingdom of Sweden until 1710, when the Tsardom of Rus ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
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]   |
|
1940 Estonian Parliamentary Election
Parliamentary elections were held in Estonia on 14 and 15 July 1940 alongside simultaneous elections in Latvia and Lithuania. The elections followed the Soviet occupation of the three countries. As was the case in Latvia and Lithuania, the elections in Estonia were blatantly rigged. They were also unconstitutional, since only seats for the lower chamber of the Riigikogu, the Chamber of Deputies (), were contested; the upper chamber, the National Council, had been dissolved and was never reconvened. According to August Rei, one of independent Estonia's last envoys to Moscow, under the Estonian constitution, the Chamber of Deputies had "no legislative power" apart from the National Council. The Estonian Working People's Union, a Communist front group, was the only party allowed to run and won all 80 seats, allegedly with 93% of the votes cast and the remaining 7% having been declared invalid. The newly elected declared the Estonian SSR on 21 July and requested admission to the So ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Armoured Fighting Vehicle
An armoured fighting vehicle (British English) or armored fighting vehicle (American English) (AFV) is an armed combat vehicle protected by vehicle armour, armour, generally combining operational mobility with Offensive (military), offensive and defense (military), defensive capabilities. AFVs can be wheeled or Continuous track, tracked. Examples of AFVs are tanks, armored car (military), armoured cars, assault guns, Self-propelled artillery, self-propelled artilleries, infantry fighting vehicles (IFV), and armoured personnel carriers (APC). Armoured fighting vehicles are classified according to their characteristics and intended role on the battlefield. The classifications are not absolute; two countries may classify the same vehicle differently, and the criteria change over time. For example, relatively lightly armed armoured personnel carriers were largely superseded by infantry fighting vehicles with much heavier armament in a similar role. Successful designs are often ada ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars to oppose the military forces of the new nation's adversaries during the Russian Civil War, especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army. In February 1946, the Red Army (which embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces alongside the Soviet Navy) was renamed the "Soviet Army". Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union it was split between the post-Soviet states, with its bulk becoming the Russian Ground Forces, commonly considered to be the successor of the Soviet Army. The Red Army provided the largest land warfare, ground force in the Allies of World War II, Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II, and its Soviet invasion of Manchuria, invasion of Manchuria assisted the un ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Vaps Movement
The Vaps Movement (, later ''Eesti Vabadussõjalaste Liit'', ''vabadussõjalased'', or colloquially ''vapsid'', a single member of this movement was called ''vaps'') was an Estonian political organization. Founded in 1929, it emerged as a right wing radical popular movement from the Union of Participants in the Estonian War of Independence, an association of veterans of the Estonian War of Independence (1918–1920). The leaders of this association were Andres Larka (formal figurehead and presidential candidate) and Artur Sirk. History The Vaps Movement was an anti-communist organisation led by former military officers, and most of its base were veterans of the 1918–1920 Estonian War of Independence. Early support for the movement came from campaigns to financially uplift Estonian veterans, and redistribute land previously held by the Baltic German nobility. The organisation advocated a more authoritarian and nationalist government in Estonia. [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Estonian War Of Independence
The Estonian War of Independence, also known as the War of Freedom in Estonia, was a defensive campaign of the Estonian Army and its allies, most notably the United Kingdom, against the Soviet Russian westward offensive of 1918–1919 and the 1919 aggression of the pro–German '' Baltische Landeswehr''. The campaign was the struggle of the newly established democratic state of Estonia for independence in the aftermath of World War I. It resulted in a victory for Estonia and was concluded in the 1920 Treaty of Tartu. Preface During the 1917 Russian Revolution, the newly elected provincial legislature ( State Diet or '' Maapäev'') of the Autonomous Governorate of Estonia proclaimed itself the highest sovereign authority in Estonia, instead of the new Bolshevik government of Russia. As a result, the local Bolsheviks soon dissolved the ''Maapäev'' and temporarily forced the democratically elected Estonian leadership underground in the capital Tallinn. A few months later, in F ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Amnesty
Amnesty () is defined as "A pardon extended by the government to a group or class of people, usually for a political offense; the act of a sovereign power officially forgiving certain classes of people who are subject to trial but have not yet been convicted." Though the term general pardon has a similar definition, an amnesty constitutes more than a pardon, in so much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the offense. Amnesty is increasingly used to express the idea of "freedom" and to refer to when prisoners can go free. Amnesties, which in the United Kingdom may be granted by the crown or by an act of Parliament, were formerly usual on coronations and similar occasions, but are chiefly exercised towards associations of political criminals, and are sometimes granted absolutely, though more frequently there are certain specified exceptions. Thus, in the case of the earliest recorded amnesty, that of Thrasybulus at Athens, the thirty tyrants and a few others were expressly e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Konstantin Päts
Konstantin Päts ( – 18 January 1956) was an Estonian statesman and the country's president from 1938 to 1940. Päts was one of the most influential politicians of the independent democratic Republic of Estonia, and during the two decades prior to World War II he also served five times as the country's prime minister. After the 16–17 June 1940 Soviet invasion and occupation of Estonia, Päts remained formally in office for over a month, until he was forced to resign, imprisoned by the new Stalinist regime, and deported to the USSR, where he died in 1956. Päts was one of the first Estonians to become active in politics, and he then started a famous, nearly four-decade long, political rivalry with Jaan Tõnisson — first through journalism with his newspaper '' Teataja'', later through politics. Although Päts was sentenced to death (in absentia) during the Russian Revolution of 1905, he was able to flee abroad, first to Switzerland, then to Finland, where he continued ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
1924 Estonian Coup D'état Attempt
The 1924 Estonian coup d'état attempt was a failed coup d'état, coup attempt in Estonia on 1 December 1924, conducted by the Comintern,Estonia and the Estonians, Hoover Institution Press, p.15 and staged by the Communist Party of Estonia and Bolsheviks who in most part had been infiltrated from the Soviet Union. Of the 279 actively participating pro-communist rebels, 125 were killed in action, later more than 500 people were arrested. The Estonian government forces lost 26 men. Background The Communist Party of Estonia had affiliated with the Comintern in 1920, and it continued underground activities in Estonia with strong Soviet Russian backing. The incapacity and death of Vladimir Lenin (January 21, 1924) triggered a struggle for power between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. The Soviet Union's foreign policy drifted during this period in relation to Estonia. On 1 December 1924 the Comintern attempted the communist coup in Estonia. Planning Sixty Razvedupr officers were ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |