NKVD

it enables repression-fed by fear- from within, leaving no place of refuge for dissidence. In his article “Red Mortar,” concerning the Soviet Union’s exploitation of the youth, Filipp Velgach states that “…the Pioneers acted as an extension of the NKVD… and children viewed these Pioneers as the embodiment of good” (Velgach 27). A government conquers a nation not when they…

Both George Orwell’s allegorical tale, Animal Farm and Jimmy Fallon’s comedic clip of Donald Trump employ satire to demonstrate that some people are unfit to lead because they use fear and terror to maintain power. Orwell believes that any society where leaders have absolute power would fail because inevitably leaders use power for their own benefit. He criticises the failures of the Russian revolution and the subsequent totalitarian regime to provide strong and fair leadership and to establish…

In the Garden of Beasts, follows love, terror, politics, and gives an inside look at what people lived through and witnessed during Hitler’s reign. When the book first starts, you 're introduced to the Dodds, a small family from Chicago. The book follows William Dodd, the father, and Martha Dodd, his daughter, and their life throughout Hitler’s regime. Beginning in Chicago, FDR was looking for someone to be the American Ambassador in Berlin, but no one was willing to go, except William Dodd.…

From June 22 to August 22, 1941 a shift occurred in the newly occupied territories of the Soviet Union, a change that fundamentally changed the tone of the war and the approach to the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in the occupied territories of Europe. On August 22, 1941 a massacre took place in the Ukraine that might seem unimportant, almost insignificant in the face of the other killings that had already taken place in the war except for one detail; the killing order came from…

Born on 1 January 1912, Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby grew up to become one of the Soviet Union’s most valuable intelligence assets inside the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His childhood began in India, where his father, Harry St. John Philby worked as an intelligence officer and diplomat for the British government. St. John Philby was also a well-known author, orientalist (an individual who specialized in Middle East and Asian policy), as well as a convert to Islam after his…

Why Communism doesn’t work Communism was an idea that spread rapidly throughout the twentieth century, most do not have a full understanding of what happened or how it happened. It was invented in the year 1848, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto . Many have claimed throughout the years that it would lead to a utopia, no poor and no oppressed, no rich and no oppressors. In reality, Communism was not a good idea gone wrong, It was a bad Idea from the start.…

When the Soviet Union officially dissolved in December, 1991, many Westerners, Soviet dissidents, and Russian citizens believed that the feared Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti (KGB) would be dismantled forever. Russian and Western observers viewed the toppling of the “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky statue in August 1991 as the symbolic end of the era of Soviet political police repression. Subsequently, Gorbachev appointed Vadim Bakatin to reform the KGB. But what constituted reform? In December…

traveled to the Soviet Union, working in the Balkan section of the Communist International from February 1935 to October 1936. According to the New World Encyclopedia, Tito became a member of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet secret police (NKVD); in 1936, he returned to Yugoslavia to purge the CPY’s leadership (Josip Broz Tito, 2016). From 1937 to 1938, Gorkić and many other leaders of the CPY were purged by Stalin and then replaced with Tito’s hand-picked lieutenants; in 1939, he…

In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and Britain together with France declared war on him. This was the start of a war that would span over six years. There was a destruction of property gained during the rise after the First World War. “The products of industry-tanks, submarines, strategic bombing-had destroyed the structures of industry society-factories, ports, and railroads (Joshua Cole 643).” The Second World War is estimated to have claimed 45 -60 million lives. This war is said to the most…

Horror by Paranoia In late 1934, Stalin launched a campaign of political terror, otherwise know as the Great Purge. After Lenin’s death in 1924 Stalin maneuvered his way up the political ranks until he became the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (History.com Staff). Under his leadership came a period of terror across Russia. The Great purge, 1934 to 1939, was an unjust era of false persecution, high police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs…