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Sergei Kirov's Assassination
The assassination of Sergei Mironovich Kirov, head of the Leningrad party organization, member of the Politburo, the Orgburo, and secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, took place on December 1, 1934, in Smolny. The murder was committed by Leonid Nikolaev. Course of events Murder Nikolaev planned to make the first attempt to assassinate Kirov on October 15, 1934. On that day, he was detained by guards near Kirov's house on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt, but, upon presentation of a party card and a weapon permit, he was released. On December 1, 1934, at about 4:30 p.m., Nikolaev ambushed Kirov near his office in the corridor on the third floor of the Smolny and fired a revolver into his head. The killer tried to commit suicide by shooting himself, but missed and lost consciousness. He was detained at the scene of the crime in a state of shock and taken to the psychiatric hospital No. 2, where, after the necessary procedures, he came ...
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Sergei Kirov
Sergei Mironovich Kirov (né Kostrikov; 27 March 1886 – 1 December 1934) was a Soviet politician and Bolshevik revolutionary whose assassination led to the first Great Purge. Kirov was an early revolutionary in the Russian Empire and member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Kirov became an Old Bolshevik and personal friend to Joseph Stalin, rising through the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ranks to become head of the party in Leningrad and a member of the Politburo. On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by Leonid Nikolaev at his offices in the Smolny Institute for unknown reasons; Nikolaev and several suspected accomplices were convicted in a show trial and executed less than 30 days later. Kirov's death was later used as a pretext for Stalin's escalation of political repression in the Soviet Union and the events of the Great Purge, with complicity as a common charge for the condemned in the Moscow Trials. Kirov's assassina ...
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Grigori Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev, . Transliterated ''Grigorii Evseevich Zinov'ev'' according to the Library of Congress system. (born Hirsch Apfelbaum, – 25 August 1936), known also under the name Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky (russian: Овсей-Гершен Аронович Радомысльски, links=no), was a Soviet revolutionary and politician. He was an Old Bolshevik and a close associate of Vladimir Lenin. During the 1920s, Zinoviev was one of the most influential figures in the Soviet leadership and the chairman of the Communist International. Born in Ukraine to a Jewish family, Zinoviev began revolutionary activities by joining the underground Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1901. In 1903 the RSDLP split between the Menshevik faction led by Julius Martov and the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Zinoviev joined Lenin's faction and in doing so he became one of the original Bolsheviks. As a Bolshevik, Zinoviev engaged in revolutionary activities ...
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Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev stunned the communist world with his denunciation of his predecessor Joseph Stalin's crimes, and embarked on a policy of de-Stalinization with his key ally Anastas Mikoyan. He sponsored the early Soviet space program, and enactment of moderate reforms in domestic policy. After some false starts, and a narrowly avoided nuclear war over Cuba, he conducted successful negotiations with the United States to reduce Cold War tensions. In 1964, the Kremlin leadership stripped him of power, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. Khrushchev was born in 1894 in a village in western Russia. He was employed as a metal worker during his youth, and he was a political commissar during the Russian Civil Wa ...
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Vasiliy Ulrikh
Vasiliy Vasilievich Ulrikh (russian: Василий Васильевич Ульрих, 13 July 1889 – 7 May 1951) was a senior judge of the Soviet Union during most of the regime of Joseph Stalin. Ulrikh served as the presiding judge at many of the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union. Early life Vasili Ulrikh was born in Riga, Latvia, then a part of the Russian Empire. His father was a Latvian revolutionary of German descent, and his mother was a Russian noblewoman. Because of their open involvement in revolutionary activity, the entire family was sentenced to a five-year period of internal exile in Irkutsk, Siberia. In 1910, young Ulrikh returned to his native Riga and began to study at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. He joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in the same year. He graduated in 1914, and with the beginning of World War I he was sent to the front as an officer. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon ...
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Military Collegium Of The Supreme Court Of The Soviet Union
The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union ( Russian: Военная коллегия Верховного суда СССР, ''Voennaya kollegiya Verkhovnogo suda SSSR'') was created in 1924 by the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union as a court for the higher military and political personnel of the Red Army and Fleet. In addition it was an immediate supervisor of military tribunals and the supreme authority of military appeals. During 1926–1948 the Chairman of the Collegium was Vasiliy Ulrikh. The role of the Military Collegium drastically changed after June 1934, when it was assigned the duty to consider cases that fell under Article 58, counter-revolutionary activity. During the Great Purge of 1937–1938 the Military Collegium tried relatively prominent figures, usually based on the lists approved personally by Joseph Stalin, the majority of Article 58 cases having been processed extrajudicially by NKVD troikas. In particular, the Military Colle ...
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Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov ( rus, Никола́й Ива́нович Ежо́в, p=nʲɪkɐˈɫaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪt͡ɕ (j)ɪˈʐof; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940) was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge, but he fell from Stalin's favour and was arrested, subsequently admitting in a confession (that he later claimed was taken under torture) to a range of anti-Soviet activity including "unfounded arrests" during the Purge. He was executed in 1940 along with others who were blamed for the Purge. Early life and career Yezhov was born either in Saint Petersburg, according to his official Soviet biography, or in southwest Lithuania (probably Veiveriai, Marijampolė or Kaunas). Although Yezhov claimed to be born in Saint Petersburg, hoping to "portray (himself) in the guise of a deeply-rooted proletarian" ...
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Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev. (''né'' Rozenfeld; – 25 August 1936) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. Born in Moscow to parents who were both involved in revolutionary politics, Kamenev attended Imperial Moscow University before becoming a revolutionary himself, joining the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1901 and was active in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Tiflis (now Tbilisi). He took part in the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. Relocating abroad in 1908, Kamenev became an early member of the Bolsheviks and a close associate of the exiled Vladimir Lenin. In 1914, he was arrested on his return to Saint Petersburg and exiled in Siberia, but was able to return following the February Revolution of 1917 which overthrew the Tsarist monarchy. In 1917, he served briefly as the equivalent of the first head of state of Soviet Russia. Kamenev disagreed with Lenin's strategy of armed uprising during the October Revolution, but nevertheles ...
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Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda ( rus, Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да, Genrikh Grigor'yevich 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 construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using penal labor from the GULAG system, during which 12,000–25,000 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 directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937. Charged with crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism and conspiracy, Yagoda ...
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Politburo
A politburo () or political bureau is the executive committee for communist parties. It is present in most former and existing communist states. Names The term "politburo" in English comes from the Russian ''Politbyuro'' (), itself a contraction of ''Politicheskoye byuro'' (, "Political Bureau"). The Spanish term ''Politburó'' is directly loaned from Russian, as is the German ''Politbüro''. Chinese uses a calque (), from which the Vietnamese (), and Korean ( ''Jeongchiguk'') terms derive. History The first politburo was created in Russia by the Bolshevik Party in 1917 during the Russian Revolution that occurred during that year. The first Politburo had seven members: Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. During the 20th century, politburos were established in most Communist states. They included the politburos of the USSR, East Germany, Afghanistan, and Czechoslovakia. Several countries still have a politburo system in operation: China, ...
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NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), 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. The functions of the OGPU (the secret police organization) were transferred to the NKVD around the year 1930, giving it a monopoly over law enforcement activities that lasted until the end of World War II. During this period, the NKVD included both ordinary public order activities, and secret police activities. The NKVD is known for its role in political repression and for carrying out the Great ...
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