Saint PetersburgSaint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991; see below), is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of roughly 5.6 million residents as of 2021. Saint Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents.
Leon Trotsky'Lev Davidovich Bronstein' ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky (ˈtrɒtski), was a Russian-born revolutionary, Soviet politician, and naturalized Mexican political theorist. Along with Vladimir Lenin, he was a central figure in the October Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Ideologically a Marxist, Trotsky's writings and thought inspired a school of the ideology known as Trotskyism. Born to a wealthy Russian Jewish family in Yanovka (now Bereslavka, Ukraine), Trotsky embraced Marxism after moving to Nikolayev in 1896.
Prisoner of warA prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of war in custody for a range of legitimate and illegitimate reasons, such as isolating them from the enemy combatants still in the field (releasing and repatriating them in an orderly manner after hostilities), demonstrating military victory, punishing them, prosecuting them for war crimes, exploiting them for their labour, recruiting or even conscripting them as their own combatants, collecting military and political intelligence from them, or indoctrinating them in new political or religious beliefs.
Operation BarbarossaOperation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa; Operatsiya Barbarossa) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. It was the largest land offensive in human history, with around 10 million combatants taking part. The operation, code-named after Frederick Barbarossa ("red beard"), a 12th-century Holy Roman emperor, Crusader, and German king, put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union to repopulate it with Germans.
ConscriptionConscription (also called the draft in the United States) is the state-mandated enlistment of people in a national service, mainly a military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and it continues in some countries to the present day under various names. The modern system of near-universal national conscription for young men dates to the French Revolution in the 1790s, where it became the basis of a very large and powerful military.
Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler (ˈaːdɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ; 20 April 1889 - 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
StavkaThe Stavka (Russian and Ukrainian: Ставка) is a name of the high command of the armed forces formerly in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and currently in Ukraine. In Imperial Russia Stavka referred to the administrative staff, and to the General Headquarters in the late 19th-century Imperial Russian armed forces and subsequently in the Soviet Union. In Western literature it is sometimes written in uppercase (STAVKA), although it is not an acronym.
Cinema of the Soviet UnionThe cinema of the Soviet Union includes films produced by the constituent republics of the Soviet Union reflecting elements of their pre-Soviet culture, language and history, albeit they were all regulated by the central government in Moscow. Most prolific in their republican films, after the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuania, Belarus and Moldavia.
