Eremin Letter
The Eremin letter was a letter supposedly written by Colonel A. Eremin, a high-ranking member of the Okhrana, the secret police of the Russian Empire. It said that Joseph Stalin was an Okhrana agent that infiltrated the RSDLP and was providing information to the Tsar's police. It also said that when Stalin was elected to the Central committee of the Bolshevik party in 1910, he completely ceased to cooperate with the Okhrana. The claim that Stalin worked for the Okhrana has been made multiple times, but the Eremin letter is the only document that corroborates it. Orlov's Life Magazine article In 1956, Soviet defector Alexander Orlov wrote an article for ''Life Magazine'', "The Sensational Secret Behind the Damnation of Stalin", and according to him, the reason Stalin had purged Marshal Tukhachevsky and other members of the soviet military was because they discovered some documents which showed that Stalin had been a member of the Okhrana that infiltrated the bolshevik movement. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Okhrana
The Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order (russian: Отделение по охранению общественной безопасности и порядка), usually called Guard Department ( rus, Охранное отделение, tr= okhrannoye otdelenie) and commonly abbreviated in modern English sources as Okhrana ( rus , Охрана, p=ɐˈxranə, a=Ru-охрана.ogg, t= the guard) was a secret-police force of the Russian Empire and part of the police department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the late 19th century and early 20th century, aided by the Special Corps of Gendarmes. Overview Formed to combat political terrorism and left-wing revolutionary activity, the Okhrana operated offices throughout the Russian Empire, as well as satellite agencies in a number of foreign countries. It concentrated on monitoring the activities of Russian revolutionaries abroad, including in Paris, where the Okhrana agent Pyotr Rachkovsky ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. The rise of the Russian Empire coincided with the decline of neighbouring rival powers: the Swedish Empire, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Qajar Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Qing China. It also held colonies in North America between 1799 and 1867. Covering an area of approximately , it remains the third-largest empire in history, surpassed only by the British Empire and the Mongol Empire; it ruled over a population of 125.6 million people per the 1897 Russian census, which was the only census carried out during the entire imperial period. Owing to its geographic extent across three continents at its peak, it featured great ethnic, linguistic, religious, and economic diversity. From the 10th–17th centuries, the land ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP; in , ''Rossiyskaya sotsial-demokraticheskaya rabochaya partiya (RSDRP)''), also known as the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party or the Russian Social Democratic Party, was a socialist political party founded in 1898 in Minsk (then in Northwestern Krai of the Russian Empire, present-day Belarus). Formed to unite the various revolutionary organizations of the Russian Empire into one party, the RSDLP split in 1903 into Bolsheviks ("majority") and Mensheviks ("minority") factions, with the Bolshevik faction eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. History Origins and early activities The RSDLP was not the first Russian Marxist group; the Emancipation of Labour group had been formed in 1883. The RSDLP was created to oppose the revolutionary populism of the Narodniks, which was later represented by the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). The RSLDP was formed at an underground conference in Minsk in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Alexander Orlov (Soviet Defector)
Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov ( be, Аляксандар Мікалаевіч Арлоў, born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin, later Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, and in the US assuming the name of Igor Konstantinovich Berg; 21 August 1895 – 25 March 1973), was a colonel in the Soviet secret police and NKVD ''Rezident'' in the Second Spanish Republic. In 1938, Orlov refused to return to the Soviet Union due to fears of execution, and instead fled with his family to the United States. He is mostly known for secretly transporting the entire Spanish gold reserves to the USSR in exchange for military aid for Spanish Republic and for his book, ''The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes''. Throughout his career, Orlov was also known under the names of Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, Lev Leonidovich Nikolaev, SCHWED (his OGPU/NKVD code name), Leo Feldbiene (as in his Austrian passport), William Goldin (as in his US passport), Koornick (the name of his Jewish relatives living in the US). Travelling in th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Life Magazine
''Life'' was an American magazine published weekly from 1883 to 1972, as an intermittent "special" until 1978, and as a monthly from 1978 until 2000. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, ''Life'' was a wide-ranging weekly general-interest magazine known for the quality of its photography, and was one of the most popular magazines in the nation, regularly reaching one-quarter of the population. ''Life'' was independently published for its first 53 years until 1936 as a general-interest and light entertainment magazine, heavy on illustrations, jokes, and social commentary. It featured some of the most notable writers, editors, illustrators and cartoonists of its time: Charles Dana Gibson, Norman Rockwell and Jacob Hartman Jr. Gibson became the editor and owner of the magazine after John Ames Mitchell died in 1918. During its later years, the magazine offered brief capsule reviews (similar to those in ''The New Yorker'') of plays and movies currently running in New York City, b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky ( rus, Михаил Николаевич Тухачевский, Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevskiy, p=tʊxɐˈtɕefskʲɪj; – 12 June 1937) nicknamed the Red Napoleon by foreign newspapers, was a Soviet general who was prominent between 1918 and 1937 as a military officer and theoretician. After service in World War I of 1914-1917 and in the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923, from 1920 to 1921 he commanded the Soviet Western Front in the Polish–Soviet War. Soviet forces under his command successfully repelled the Polish forces from Western Ukraine, driving them back into Poland, but the Red Army suffered defeat outside of Warsaw, and the war ended in a Soviet defeat. He later served as chief of staff of the Red Army from 1925 through 1928, as assistant in the People's Commissariat of Defense after 1934 and as commander of the Volga Military District in 1937. He achieved the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935. As a ma ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Isaac Don Levine
Isaac Don Levine (January 19, 1892 – February 15, 1981) was a 20th-century Russian-born American journalist and anticommunist writer, who is known as a specialist on the Soviet Union. He worked with Soviet ex-spy Walter Krivitsky in a 1939 expose of Stalin's purges and other terrorism in the Soviet Union. Later he worked with Whittaker Chambers, a defector from the American Communist Party, to reveal agents in the United States government. Background Levine was born in 1892 in Mazyr (then "Mozyr"), Belarus, into a Zionist Jewish family. He immigrated to the United States in 1911, where he learned English. He finished high school in Missouri. Career Levine found work with ''The Kansas City Star'' and later ''The New York Tribune'', for which he covered the revolution of 1917. He would return to Russia in the early 1920s to cover the Civil War for ''The Chicago Daily News''. He was in Boston to cover the Sacco and Vanzetti trials in the early 1920s, during which he formed t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Stephen Kotkin
Stephen Mark Kotkin (born February 17, 1959) is an American historian, academic, and author. He is currently the John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he is also co-director of the program in history and the practice of diplomacy and the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has won a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Kotkin's most prominent book project is his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, of which the first two volumes have been published as ''Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928'' (2014) and ''Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941'' (2017), while the third volume remains to be published. Academic career Kotkin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Leon Trotsky
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Trotskyism. Born to a wealthy Jewish family in Yanovka (now Bereslavka, Ukraine), Trotsky embraced Marxism after moving to Mykolaiv in 1896. In 1898, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and subsequently exiled to Siberia. He escaped from Siberia in 1902 and moved to London, where he befriended Vladimir Lenin. In 1903, he sided with Julius Martov's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks during the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party's initial organisational split. Trotsky helped organize the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, after which he was again arrested and exiled to Siberia. He once again escape ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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History Of Russia
The history of Russia begins with the histories of the East Slavs. The traditional start-date of specifically Russian history is the establishment of the Rus' people, Rus' state in the north in 862, ruled by Varangians. Staraya Ladoga and Veliky Novgorod, Novgorod became the first major cities of the new union of immigrants from Scandinavia with the Slavs and Finnic peoples, Finns. In 882, Prince Oleg of Novgorod seized Kiev, thereby uniting the northern and southern lands of the Eastern Slavs under one authority, moving the governance center to Kiev by the end of the 10th century, and maintaining northern and southern parts with significant autonomy from each other. The state Christianization of Kievan Rus', adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire in 988, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine Empire, Byzantine and Slavs, Slavic cultures that defined Russia, Russian culture for the next millennium. Kievan Rus' ultimately disintegrated as a state due to the Mongol invasion ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |