HOME
*





Alexander Barmine
Alexander Grigoryevich Barmin (russian: Александр Григорьевич Бармин, ''Aleksandr Grigoryevich Barmin''; August 16, 1899 – December 25, 1987), most commonly Alexander Barmine, was an officer in the Soviet Army and diplomat who fled the purges of the Joseph Stalin era for France and then United States, where he served the US government (including the OSS, VOA, and USIA) and also testified before congressional committees (including the SISS). Background Alexander Grigoryevich Barmin was born on August 16, 1899, in Mogilev, Mogilev Government, Russian Empire (now Belarus). His father, whose surname was originally Graff, was a teacher and came from an ethnic German colonist family, while Alexander's mother was Ukrainian. Alexander attended a state gymnasium in Kiev, followed by St. Vladmir University also in Kiev, Infantry Officer's School in Minsk, M. V. Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, and the Oriental Languages Institute in Moscow. Career USS ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mogilev
Mogilev (russian: Могилёв, Mogilyov, ; yi, מאָלעוו, Molev, ) or Mahilyow ( be, Магілёў, Mahilioŭ, ) is a city in eastern Belarus, on the Dnieper River, about from the border with Russia's Smolensk Oblast and from the border with Russia's Bryansk Oblast. , its population was 360,918, up from an estimated 106,000 in 1956. It is the administrative centre of Mogilev Region and the third-largest city in Belarus. History The city was first mentioned in historical records in 1267. From the 14th century, it was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and since the Union of Lublin (1569), part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where it became known as ''Mohylew''. In the 16th-17th centuries, the city flourished as one of the main nodes of the east–west and north–south trading routes. In 1577, Polish King Stefan Batory granted it city rights under Magdeburg law. In 1654, the townsmen negotiated a treaty of surrender to the Russians peacefully, if ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Russian Civil War
{{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Russian Civil War , partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I , image = , caption = Clockwise from top left: {{flatlist, *Soldiers of the Don Army *Soldiers of the Siberian Army *Suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion *American troop in Vladivostok during the intervention *Victims of the Red Terror in Crimea *Hanging of workers in Yekaterinoslav by the Austrians *A review of Red Army troops in Moscow. , date = 7 November 1917 – 16 June 1923{{Efn, The main phase ended on 25 October 1922. Revolt against the Bolsheviks continued in Central Asia and the Far East through the 1920s and 1930s.{{cite book, last=Mawdsley, first=Evan, title=The Russian Civil War, location=New York, publisher=Pegasus Books, year=2007, isbn=9781681770093, url=https://archive.org/details/russiancivilwar00evan, url-access=registration{{rp, 3,230(5 years, 7 months and 9 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Boris Feldman
Boris Mironovich Feldman (russian: Борис Миронович Фельдман) (1890 – June 12, 1937) was a Soviet military commander and politician. He was executed during the Great Purge and rehabilitated during the Khrushchev Thaw. Early years Feldman was born in Pinsk, Minsk Governorate into a Jewish family. As a young man he sympathized with the revolutionary movement and was repeatedly arrested. In 1913 he was mobilized into the Imperial Russian Army. As an ordinary soldier he participated in the First World War (1914-1917). Red Army career In May 1918 he joined the Red Army. In 1918 he was the secretary of the headquarters of the Army's Bryansk region, from February 1919 he was a student at the Academy of the General Staff of the Red Army, and, in the same year, he rose to being assistant chief of the operational department of the 13th army, while in June-September he was chief of staff of the 1st brigade of the 9th rifle division. In 1920 he became a member ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Ieronim Uborevich
Ieronim Petrovich Uborevich ( lt, Jeronimas Uborevičius; russian: Иерони́м Петро́вич Уборе́вич; – 12 June 1937) was a Soviet military commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, reaching the rank of komandarm in 1935. He was executed during the Great Purge in June 1937 and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1957. Biography Uborevich was born into a Lithuanian peasant family in the village of Antandraja in the Novoalexandrovsky Uyezd of the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Utena District Municipality, Lithuania). After graduating from the Dvinsk (now Daugavpils) realschule, he attended the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute before transferring in 1915 to the , from which he graduated in 1916, receiving command of a battery and later a company. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (b) in 1917 and, after the October Revolution, began recruiting Red Guards in Bessarabia. During Operation Faust ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


August Kork
August Ivanovich Kork (, also Аугуст Яанович Корк; 11 June 1937) was an Estonian Red Army commander (Komandarm 2nd rank) who was tried and executed during the Great Purge in 1937. Kork became an officer of the Imperial Russian Army and graduated from the General Staff Academy. He served as a staff officer during World War I and in February 1917 was at the Western Front headquarters. Kork became a Bolshevik and joined the Red Army. He fought in the Russian Civil War, initially as chief of staff of the Bolshevik-sponsored Estonian Red Army and then as assistant commander of the 7th Army. In July 1919 Kork became commander of the 15th Army, defeating Nikolai Yudenich's Northwestern Army and defending Petrograd. He led the army in the Polish–Soviet War and in October 1920 became commander of the 6th Army, which defeated the last White Army in Crimea, led by Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel. After the end of the campaign, Kork took command of the Kharkov Milit ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Iona Yakir
Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir (russian: Ио́на Эммануи́лович Яки́р; 3 August 1896 – 12 June 1937) was a Red Army commander and one of the world's major military reformers between World War I and World War II. He was an early and major military victim of the Great Purge, alongside Mikhail Tukhachevsky. Early years Yakir was born in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russian Empire, into the prosperous family of a Jewish pharmacist. He graduated from the local secondary school in 1914. Because of governmental restrictions on Jewish access to higher education, Yakir studied abroad at the University of Basel in Switzerland, in the field of chemistry. During World War I, he returned to the Russian Empire and worked as a turner in a military factory in Odessa, Ukraine (he was a reservist). From 1915 to 1917, he attended the Kharkiv Technological Institute. He was affected by the war and became a follower of Vladimir Lenin. In 1917, he returned to Kishinev, and in April bec ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Smolny Institute
The Smolny Institute (russian: Смольный институт, ''Smol'niy institut'') is a Palladian edifice in Saint Petersburg that has played a major part in the history of Russia. History The building was commissioned from Giacomo Quarenghi by the Society for Education of Noble Maidens and constructed in 1806–08 to house the Smolny Institute of Noble Maidens, established at the urging of Ivan Betskoy and in accordance with a decree of Catherine II (the Great) in 1764, borrowing its name from the nearby Smolny Convent. The establishment of the institute was a significant step in making education available for females in Russia: "The provision of formal education for women began only in 1764 and 1765, when Catherine II established first the Smolny Institute for girls of the nobility in Saint Petersburg and then the Novodevichii Institute for the daughters of commoners." The Smolny was Russia's first educational establishment for women and continued to function und ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Leonid Nikolaev
Leonid Vasilevich Nikolaev (10 May 1904 – 29 December 1934) was the assassin of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Party. Early life Nikolaev was a troubled young Soviet Communist Party member in Leningrad. He was a small, thin man, about tall; even as an adult he showed the effects of childhood malnutrition. He had difficulty holding a job, and had been reprimanded by the Party for having refused a posting that was not to his liking. Eventually, the Party expelled him as a member. Unemployed, he soon ran short of money, and blamed the Party for his troubles. His wife Milda Draule was a member of a regional party committee and he had a strong suspicion that she had a love affair with Sergei Kirov, the Party administrator of the Leningrad district. The Kirov Assassination It is unknown whether Nikolaev had had prior dealings with the Leningrad branch of the Soviet government, headed by Kirov. As Nikolaev's troubles grew, he bec ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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 ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Great Purge
The Great Purge or the Great Terror (russian: Большой террор), also known as the Year of '37 (russian: 37-й год, translit=Tridtsat sedmoi god, label=none) and the Yezhovshchina ('period of Yezhov'), was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the party 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. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924 a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party. Various established figures in Lenin's government attempted to succeed him. Joseph Stalin, the party's General Secretary, outmaneuvered political opponents and ultimately gained control of the Communist Party by 1928. Initially, Stalin's leadership was widely accepted; his main political adversary Trotsky was forced into exile in 1929, and the doctrine of "socialism in one country" ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]