NKVDThe People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (PCIA) (Narodný komissariat vnutrennih del (NKVD), nɐˈrod.nɨj kə.mjɪ.sə.rjɪˈat ˈvnut.rjɪ.njɪx̬ djel), abbreviated NKVD (НКВД ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union. Established in 1917 as NKVD of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the agency was originally tasked with conducting regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, with its functions being dispersed among other agencies, only to be reinstated as an all-union commissariat in 1934.
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.
Collectivization in the Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union introduced the collectivization (Коллективизация) of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascension of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into collectively-controlled and state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly.
Vladimir Lenin'Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin', was a Russian lawyer, revolutionary, politician and political theorist who served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party over the course of the Russian Civil War. Ideologically a Marxist, his development of the ideology is known as Leninism.
Great PurgeThe Great Purge or the Great Terror (Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (37-й год) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state; the purges were also designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky as well as other prominent political rivals within the party. It occurred from August 1936 to March 1938.
Russian nationalismRussian nationalism (Русский национализм) is a form of nationalism that promotes Russian cultural identity and unity. Russian nationalism first rose to prominence as a Pan-Slavic enterprise during the 19th century Russian Empire, and was repressed during the early Bolshevik rule. Russian nationalism was briefly revived through the policies of Joseph Stalin during and after the Second World War, which shared many resemblances with the worldview of early Eurasianist ideologues.
MensheviksThe Mensheviks (mensheviki, from меньшинство, menshynstvo, 'minority') were a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which emerged at the Second Party Congress in 1903, among those who opposed Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction. The Mensheviks were led by Julius Martov and Pavel Axelrod. The initial point of disagreement was the Mensheviks' support for a broad party membership, as opposed to the Bolsheviks' support for a smaller party of professional revolutionaries.
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.
StalinismStalinism is the means of governing and Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country (until 1939), collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time.
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.
