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According to Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, with respect to the trials of former leaders, some Western observers were unintentionally or intentionally ignorant of the fraudulent nature of the charges and evidence, notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Russian speaker; the American ...
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).
Stalin passed a new law on "terrorist organizations and terrorist acts" that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys, or appeals, followed by a sentence to be imposed "quickly." [92] Stalin's Politburo also issued directives on quotas for mass arrests and executions. [93]
The government officially admitted that there had been some injustice and "excesses" during the purges, which were blamed entirely on Yezhov. But the liberalization was only relative: arrests, torture, and executions continued. On 16 January 1940, Beria sent Stalin a list of 457 "enemies of the people" of whom 346 were marked to be shot.
The People's Commissariat for State Security (Russian: Народный комиссариат государственной безопасности, romanized: Narodnyy komissariat gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) or NKGB, was the name of the Soviet secret police, intelligence and counter-intelligence force that existed from 3 February 1941 to 20 July 1941, and again from 1943 to 1946, before ...
To say the NKVD is the state secret police conveys very little ... To say that the NKVD is a "state within a state" belittles the NKVD, for the mere formulation allows for the presence of two forces: the normal government and that of the supernormal NKVD; while there is only one actual force — universal Chekism. Chekism of the State, Chekism ...
The term would also become associated with anyone who opposed or even seemed disssatisfied with the Soviet government. By late 1929, Stalin launched a program which was known as dekulakization. Stalin demanded the complete elimination of the kulak class, resulting in the imprisonment and execution of Soviet peasants.
In total 73 people addressed the Plenum. 56 of them were executed in 1937–1940; two committed suicide; 15 including Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich themselves survived beyond 1940. February 27 Yezhov presented to the Politburo the List of persons to be judged by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. 475 people were recommended for ...