Vsevolod Balitsky
Vsevolod Apollonovich Balitsky (, ; – November 27, 1937) was a Soviet official, Commissar of State Security 1st Class (equivalent to Four-star General) of the NKVD and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Early career Balitsky was a Russian-speaking ethnic Ukrainian, born in Verkhnodniprovsk, Yekaterinoslav Governorate and raised in Luhansk, where his father worked in a factory as an accountant. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a student at law school in Moscow. Initially a Menshevik, 1913–15, he joined the Bolshevik Party in 1915, and joined Cheka in 1918. During the Russian Civil War, he was in Ukraine, where he took part in the mass killing of hostages. In 1926, he was Ukraine People's Commissar for Internal Affairs. In 1928–30, he was in charge of putting down revolts by Ukrainian peasants who objected to being forced to give up their land and join collective farms, telling his subordinates: "If t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Izrail Leplevsky
Izrail Moiseyevich Leplevsky (Russian: Израиль Моисеевич Леплевский; 1894 – July 28, 1938) was a Soviet security officer. He was part of the Intelligence Service and Secret police apparatus in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, then People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR from June 14, 1937 to January 25, 1938. His brother Gregory Leplevsky also worked in senior positions in the Soviet Union, including as Prosecutor of the USSR. Early years Born into a Jewish family in Brest-Litovsk, Grodno Governorate, Leplevsky received a home education and worked afterwards in a hat shop, and in a pharmacy warehouse. In 1914 he was enrolled as a conscript in the Russian army and served on the Turkish front from October 1914 till June 1917. Political career In March 1917, Leplevsky became active in the Bolshevik party in Tbilisi. From June 1917 he was a member of the military organization of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) in Yekaterinoslav. Afterward ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Luhansk
Luhansk (, ; , ), also known as Lugansk (, ; , ), is a city in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. As of 2022, the population was estimated to be making Luhansk the Cities in Ukraine, 12th-largest city in Ukraine. Luhansk served as the administrative center of Luhansk Oblast, before pro-Russian separatists seized control of the city in 2014 and made it the capital of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic. The Ukrainian administration was located in Sievierodonetsk from 2014 to 2022 during the War in Donbas (2014–2022), war in Donbas, due to Ukraine not being in control of Luhansk. Sievierodonetsk was Battle of Sievierodonetsk (2022), captured by Russia in 2022 and Luhansk Oblast was later Russian annexation of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, annexed by Russia in late 2022. Etimology The city was founded as a foundry in 1795-1796, following the decree of Empress Catherine II titled ''On the establishment of a foundry in the Donetsk uyezd by the Lugan ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vinnytsia Oblast
Vinnytsia Oblast (, ), also referred to as Vinnychchyna (), is an oblasts of Ukraine, oblast in central Ukraine. Its capital city, administrative center is Vinnytsia. The oblast has a population of History Vinnytsia Oblast, first established on February 27, 1932, originally comprised Raions of Ukraine, raions (regions) of the following former okruhas of Ukraine (districts of Soviet Ukraine): * Uman Okruha * Berdychiv Okruha * Vinnytsia Okruha * Mohyliv Okruha * Tulchyn Okruha * Shepetivka Okruha * Proskuriv Okruha * Kamianets Okruha In 1935 bordering territories of the oblast were transformed into Soviet border districts: Shepetivka Okrug, Proskuriv Okrug, and Kamianets Okrug. In 1937 the Kamianets Oblast, based on the border districts, was formed (it later became Khmelnytsky Oblast). During World War II the occupying Axis powers split the territory of Vinnytsia Oblast between the General District Shitomir (Zhytomyr in Reichskommissariat Ukraine) and the Transnistria Governorate ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Holodomor
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a mass famine in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major Agriculture, grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union. While most scholars are in consensus that the main Causes of the Holodomor, cause of the famine was largely man-made, Holodomor genocide question, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid History of the Soviet Union (1927–53)#Indu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Stanislav Redens
Stanislav Frantsevich Redens (, ; 17 May 1892 – 12 February 1940) was a Soviet NKVD official, one of those responsible for conducting mass repressions under Joseph Stalin. Redens was executed in 1940 after his arrest at the conclusion of the Great Purge in 1938. Early life Born to a Polish worker's family in Tykocin in the Łomża Governorate of the Russian Empire, Redens received a limited education and began working in metallurgy in 1907. A Bolshevik since 1914, he was briefly mobilized into the army during World War I but was soon demobilized and returned to political activity in time for the 1917 Russian Revolution. Career Redens began to work for the newly established Cheka in 1918, amid the Russian Civil War. He was energetically involved in dekulakization in Ukraine, serving as the head of the Odessa Cheka. Redens held important positions in the Crimean GPU in 1922–1923. Though made a chief of the Transcaucasian GPU in 1928, Redens was gradually sidelined by hi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Collectivization In The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union introduced collectivization () of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: ''Kolkhozes'' and '' Sovkhozes'' accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed from 1927. This problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952 and as the fourth Premier of the Soviet Union, premier from 1941 until his death. He initially governed as part of a Collective leadership in the Soviet Union, collective leadership, but Joseph Stalin's rise to power, consolidated power to become an absolute dictator by the 1930s. Stalin codified the party's official interpretation of Marxism as Marxism–Leninism, while the totalitarian political system he created is known as Stalinism. Born into a poor Georgian family in Gori, Georgia, Gori, Russian Empire, Stalin attended the Tiflis Theological Seminary before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He raised f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Martemyan Ryutin
Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin (; 13 February 1890 – 10 January 1937) was a Russian Marxist activist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and a political functionary of the Russian Communist Party. Ryutin is best remembered as the leader of a pro-peasant political faction organized against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s and as the primary author of a 200-page oppositional platform. Ryutin was arrested by the Soviet secret police, along with his co-thinkers, in what has come to be known as the Ryutin Affair. He was executed in January 1937 as part of the "Yezhovshchina" (Great Purge) conducted against political oppositionists and suspected economic " wreckers" and spies. During the final years of the Soviet Union, Ryutin was politically rehabilitated, and his lengthy critique of Stalin and his policies was published for the first time. The document saw its first edition in English translation in 2010. Biography Early years Martemyan Nikitich Ryutin was born on to a peasant f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda (, born Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda; 7 November 1891 – 15 March 1938) was a Soviet secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised arrests, show trials, and executions of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, climactic events of the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using penal labor from the gulag system, during which 12,000–25,000''Александр Кокурин, Юрий Моруков''. Сталинские стройки ГУЛАГа.1930–53, Москва, Материк 2005, — 568 с. — С. 34.Anne Applebaum ''Gulag: A History'' (London: Penguin, 2003), p79 laborers died. Like many Soviet NKVD officers who conducted political repression, Yagoda himself ultimately became a victim of the Purge. He was demoted from the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vyacheslav Menzhinsky
Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky (, ; – 10 May 1934) was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who served as chairman of the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union, from 1926 to 1934. Born to Polish parents in Saint Petersburg, Menzhinsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1902. He emigrated from Russia in 1907, and spent the next decade in Europe and the United States. After the 1917 February Revolution, he joined the Cheka in 1919, and in 1923 was promoted to its deputy under Felix Dzerzhinsky. After his death in 1926, Menzhinsky became head of the Cheka's successor, the OGPU. He worked to crush resistance in the countryside during Joseph Stalin's forced agricultural collectivization. Early life Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, a member of the Polish nobility, was born into an Orthodox Christian Polish-Russian family of teachers. His father was a Russified Pole and a history lecturer. His mother was a woman of letters who sympathised with the revolutionarie ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Joint State Political Directorate
The Joint State Political Directorate ( rus, Объединённое государственное политическое управление, p=ɐbjɪdʲɪˈnʲɵn(ː)əjə ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əjə pəlʲɪˈtʲitɕɪskəjə ʊprɐˈvlʲenʲɪje), abbreviated as OGPU (), was the secret police of the Soviet Union from November 1923 to July 1934, succeeding the State Political Directorate (GPU). Responsible to the Council of People's Commissars, the OGPU was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky until 1926, then by Vyacheslav Menzhinsky until replaced by the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) within the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). The OGPU played an important role in the Soviet Union's forced collectivization of agriculture under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, crushing resistance and deporting millions of peasants to the growing network of Gulag forced labor camps. The OGPU operated both inside and outside the country, persecuting political ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War () was a multi-party civil war in the former Russian Empire sparked by the 1917 overthrowing of the Russian Provisional Government in the October Revolution, as many factions vied to determine Russia's political future. It resulted in the formation of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and later the Soviet Union in most of its territory. Its finale marked the end of the Russian Revolution, which was one of the key events of the 20th century. The List of Russian monarchs, Russian monarchy ended with the abdication of Nicholas II, Tsar Nicholas II during the February Revolution, and Russia was in a state of political flux. A tense summer culminated in the October Revolution, where the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Provisional Government, provisional government of the new Russian Republic. Bolshevik seizure of power was not universally accepted, and the country descended into a conflict which beca ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |