A report to the Commissar General of State Security (NKVD chief) Lavrentiy Beria on October 10, 1941, noted that since the beginning of the war, NKVD anti-retreat troops had detained a total of 657,364 retreating, spies, traitors, instigators and deserting personnel, of which 25,878 were arrested (of which 10,201 were sentenced to death by ...

The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the …

The NKVD is known for its role in political repression and for carrying out the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin. It was led by Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria. The NKVD undertook mass extrajudicial executions of citizens, and conceived, populated and administered the Gulag system of forced labour camps. Their agents were ...

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Dec 21, 2006 · Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. ... Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization ...

May 25, 2015 · The NKVD was handed a list of those who were now labelled ‘enemies of the state’ – effectively the Bolshevik Party’s Old Guard – for example, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin. Anyone associated with these men was also under suspicion. ... Joseph Stalin lead Russia throughout World War Two and up to his death in 1953. Joseph Stalin was ...

The KGB (Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), romanized: Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, lit. 'Committee for State Security') was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached …

The war crimes and crimes against humanity which were perpetrated by the Soviet Union and its armed forces from 1919 to 1991 include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the NKVD, including acts which were committed by the NKVD's Internal Troops.In some cases, these acts were committed upon the …

Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones (13 August 1905 – 12 August 1935) was a Welsh journalist who in March 1933 first reported in the Western world, without equivocation and under his own name, the existence of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933, including the Holodomor.. Jones had reported anonymously in The Times in 1931 on starvation in Soviet Ukraine and Southern Russia, and, …

The Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Union Republics (Russian: Сою́зные Респу́блики, tr. Soyúznye Respúbliki) were national-based administrative units of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The Soviet Union was formed in 1922 by a treaty between the Soviet republics of Byelorussia, Russia, Transcaucasia, and Ukraine, by which …