Katyn massacreThe Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German Nazi forces.
SimferopolSimferopol (ˌsɪmfəˈroʊpəl) is the second-largest city in the Crimean Peninsula. The city, along with the rest of Crimea, is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine, and is considered the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. However, it is under the de facto control of Russia, which annexed Crimea in 2014 and regards Simferopol as the capital of the Republic of Crimea. Simferopol is an important political, economic and transport hub of the peninsula, and serves as the administrative centre of both Simferopol Municipality and the surrounding Simferopol District.
Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet UnionThe Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Президиум Центра́льного комите́та Коммунисти́ческой па́ртии Сове́тского Сою́за, abbreviated: Президиум ЦК КПСС) was the highest policy-making authority within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was founded in October 1917, and refounded as a permanent organization in March 1919, at the 8th Congress of the Bolshevik Party. It was known as the Political Bureau until 1952.
AssassinationAssassination is the willful killing, by a sudden or secret attack, of a personespecially if prominent or important. It may be prompted by grievances, notoriety, financial, military, political or other motives. Many times governments, corporations, organized crime or their agents order assassinations. Acts of assassination have been performed since ancient times. A person who carries out an assassination is called an assassin or hitman.
Population transfer in the Soviet UnionFrom 1930 to 1952, the government of the Soviet Union, on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin under the direction of the NKVD official Lavrentiy Beria, forcibly transferred populations of various groups. These actions may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population (often classified as "enemies of the people"), deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite directions to fill ethnically cleansed territories.
Doctors' plotThe "doctors' plot" affair was a Soviet state-sponsored antisemitic campaign and conspiracy theory that alleged a cabal of prominent medical specialists (predominately of Jewish ethnicity) intended to murder leading government and party officials. It was also known as the case of saboteur doctors or killer doctors. In 1951–1953, a group of predominantly Jewish doctors from Moscow were accused of a conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders.
GendarmerieA gendarmerie (ʒɒnˈdɑːrməri,_ʒɒ̃-) is a military force with law enforcement duties among the civilian population. The term gendarme (ˈʒɒndɑːrm) is derived from the medieval French expression gens d'armes, which translates to "men-at-arms" (armed people), or "rural police". In France and some Francophone nations, the gendarmerie is a branch of the armed forces that is responsible for internal security in parts of the territory (primarily in rural areas and small towns in the case of France), with additional duties as military police for the armed forces.
On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" («О культе личности и его последствиях», «O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh»), popularly known as Khrushchev's Secret Speech (секретный доклад Хрущёва, ), was a report by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956.
Special settlements in the Soviet UnionSpecial settlements in the Soviet Union were the result of population transfers and were performed in a series of operations organized according to social class or nationality of the deported. Resettling of "enemy classes" such as prosperous peasants and entire populations by ethnicity was a method of political repression in the Soviet Union, although separate from the Gulag system of penal labor. Involuntary settlement played a role in the colonization of virgin lands of the Soviet Union.
ChekaThe All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (AREOC; Всероссийская чрезвычайная комиссия), abbreviated as VČK (ВЧК), and commonly known as Cheka (Чека; from the initialism ChK), was the first of a succession of Soviet secret-police organizations. Established on December 5 (Old Style) 1917 by the Sovnarkom, it came under the leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat-turned-Bolshevik. By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had sprung up in the Russian SFSR at all levels.
