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By 1929, Stalin had defeated his political opponents and gained full control over the party. He organized a committee to begin the process of industrialization of the Soviet Union. Backlash against industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture escalated, which prompted Stalin to increase police presence in rural areas.
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940), also spelt Ezhov, 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.
Stalin's government feared attack from capitalist countries, [230] and many communists, including in Komsomol, OGPU, and the Red Army, were eager to be rid of the NEP and its market-oriented approach. [231] They had concerns about those who profited from the policy: affluent peasants known as "kulaks" and small business owners, or "NEPmen". [232]
[92] Stalin's Politburo also issued directives on quotas for mass arrests and executions. [93] Under Stalin, the death penalty was extended to adolescents as young as 12 years old in 1935. [94] [95] [96] After that, several trials, known as the Moscow Trials, were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country.
After the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government dissolved the Tsarist police and set up the People's Militias. The subsequent Russian October Revolution of 1917 saw a seizure of state power led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks , who established a new Bolshevik regime, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).
The Gulag was an administrative body that watched over the camps; eventually, its name would retrospectively be used as a name for these camps. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin was able to take control of the government, and he began to form the gulag system
Map of the sites related to the Katyn massacre. The Katyn massacre [a] was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin's order in April and May 1940.
Stalin, Orlov continued, uncovered the plot and this was his motive behind the secret trial and execution of Soviet Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the purge of the Red Army. [16] The Life article cites the Eremin letter as evidence that Stalin was a member of the Okhrana, but most historians today agree it is a forgery. [17]