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Political repression was enacted by the Soviet Union, especially during the rule of Stalin, in which he and the state sought to deter any and all political opponents and "undesirables". The latter term was limited not just to undesirable thought, but undesirable ethnic groups and minorities residing, often unwillingly, [ citation needed ] in ...
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution.It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the "Khrushchev Thaw", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev era, and it did not cease to exist until late ...
The Khrushchev Thaw (Russian: хрущёвская о́ттепель, romanized: khrushchovskaya ottepel, IPA: [xrʊˈɕːɵfskəjə ˈotʲːɪpʲɪlʲ] or simply ottepel) [1] is the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization [2] and peaceful coexistence with other nations.
In the 1950s, Soviet dissidents started leaking criticism to the West by sending documents and statements to foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow. [13] In the 1960s, Soviet dissidents frequently declared that the rights the government of the Soviet Union denied them were universal rights, possessed by everyone regardless of race, religion and nationality. [14]
Samizdat (Russian: самиздат, pronounced [səmɨzˈdat], lit. ' self-publishing ') was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader.
Criticism of the Soviet Union and Third World communist regimes have been strongly anchored in scholarship on totalitarianism which asserts that communist parties maintain themselves in power without the consent of the governed and rule by means of political repression, secret police, propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass ...
Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.
For example, in the 1976 Russian translation of Basil Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War content, such as the Soviet treatment of its satellite states, many other Western Allies' efforts (e.g. Lend-Lease), the Soviet leadership's mistakes and failures, criticism of the Soviet Union, and other content, were censored out. [18]