NKVD

weather through, Sepetys illustrates that a sense of community gets stronger as their lives become harder. In 1940 Soviet Union, educated people are being separated from the uneducated citizens, to prevent the questioning of autocratic authority. The NKVD take Lina and her Family. They put them onto trucks to be transported. Heading to the truck is a women named Ona, she just had a baby and is bleeding immensely. The crowd comes to help the bleeding woman, “I carried the…

animals feared him, but at the same time uncomfortably trusted him. He did not have the same way with words that Snowball had, (though he had a speaker named Squealer), but he preferred to use forceful demonstrations. His dogs, representing Stalin’s NKVD, the morbidly powerful police force, did his dirty work, chasing Snowball off the farm, slaughtering disobedient animals, and protecting him through all of his tyrannical speeches. Representing Joseph Stalin, Napoleon ruthlessly smothers all…

Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin written by Wendy Z. Goldman is a powerhouse writing on the Great Purge in Stalin’s Russia. Her work focuses on the role of the masses during the campaign of political terrorism rather turning the reader’s attention solely on the role of the functionaries. Arguing that the acts of “repression” were committed by both poor workers and political party leaders wanting to prove their dissociation with the opposition. Goldman’s work becomes a pivotal addition…

Animal Farm: A Satire on The Soviet Union Animal Farm is a classic novel written by George Orwell in 1944. Orwell Served with the Indian Imperial Police Force for six years in Burma, but resigned in 1927 when he discovered he felt like an oppressor. He came up with a theory that states “the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong.” He seems to demonstrate this theory throughout Animal Farm as the oppressors always do wrong by the oppressed. In many of Orwell's writings,…

the director of a factory that processed lumber. According to the prosecution, he deliberately broke all sort of laws, stole from the state, embezzled funds, and made shady deals in order to meet his production quota. In 1937 he was arrested by the NKVD on these actions, which he was accused of undertaking on behalf of foreign agents who were planning to overthrow the state. Mochulsky was a guard at the Pechorlag gulag, a railroad building prison labor camp north of the Arctic Circle.…

Ruta Sepetys’s novel Between Shades of Gray is set across Eurasia during World War II, from the Baltic Sea to Laptev Sea, from Lithuania to Siberia. Initially, the reader is introduced to a cozy, sleeping home with an “evening breeze float[ing] through the open window” (Sepetys 3). However, the peace in interrupted by “an urgent booming” (Sepetys 4), the NKVD’s fists pummeling the wooden door, intending to capture the Vilkas family and toss them in a train to a work camp. “The wet smell of feces…

On the morning of December 1st, 1934, Leonid Nikolaev walked inside the Party Headquarters in Leningrad, where he shot and killed Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad Party organization. Owing to Joseph Stalin’s growing suspicion of party members, the death of Kirov opened the door for what became known as The Great Terror. By the end of 1939 over two million people were directly impacted by the purges, estimates put the death toll close to 800,000 people killed outright, and hundreds of…

The Delusive Dramatist from Myslenice The girl sat in the corner of the train car, she rotated from rocking herself back and forth in a fetal position and singing to herself softly. Every once in awhile she would pull out her notebook and scribble in it, only when she was sure that no one else was looking, or so she thought. All hours of the day she spoke to herself, setting a tense scene, I could feel the lies as she spoke them, nothing she told herself was true. She knew it, I knew it, but it…

promised to relinquish his position. (Marx 23). Not only did Stalin remain in charge, he limited the freedom of the people. He instituted acts of terror to prevent any rebellions against his rule, including purges and the gulags. Stalin created the NKVD, which was a secret police force. This force was established to catch and punish anyone who spoke against Stalin or his rule. People who spoke against him, were Christians, or posed a threat to anyone in Stalin’s government were eliminated…

to determine the direction of the Soviet Union following the death of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in 1953. Under dictatorial rule for more than three decades, a power pull breaks out among Nikita Khrushchev of Moscow, Lavrentiy Baria, the head of NKVD - Russian Internal Affairs, and Stalin's General Secretary, Georgy Malenkov, as well as with other members of a hastily assembled Central Committee. That may sound simple enough, but through the filter of Iannucci, this quickly degenerates into a…