The beginning of the Cold War saw the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union confront the Western Bloc of the United States, with the latter grouping becoming largely united in 1949 under NATO and the former grouping becoming largely united in 1955 under the Warsaw Pact. There was no direct military confrontation between the two organizations; instead, the conflict was fought on an ideological basis and through proxy wars. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact led to the expansion of military forces and their integration into the respective blocs. The Warsaw Pact's largest military engagement was the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, its own member state, in August 1968 (with the participation of all pact nations except Albania and Romania), which, in part, resulted in Albania withdrawing from the pact less than one month later. Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period known as de-Stalinization occurred under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviets took an early lead in the Space Race with the first artificial satellite, the first human spaceflight, and the first probe to land on another planet (Venus).
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Bezhin Meadow (Бежин луг, Bezhin lug) is a 1937 Soviet propaganda film, famous for having been suppressed and believed destroyed before its completion. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein, it tells the story of a young farm boy whose father attempts to betray the government for political reasons by sabotaging the year's harvest and the son's efforts to stop his own father to protect the Soviet state, culminating in the boy's murder and a social uprising. The film draws its title from a story by Ivan Turgenev, but is based on the life of Pavlik Morozov, a young Russian boy who became a political martyr following his death in 1932, after he denounced his father to Soviet government authorities and subsequently died at the hands of his family. Pavlik Morozov was immortalized in school programs, poetry, music, and film.
Commissioned by a communist youth group, the film's production ran from 1935 to 1937, until it was halted by the central Soviet government, which said it contained artistic, social, and political failures. Some, however, blamed the failure of Bezhin Meadow on government interference and policies, extending all the way to Joseph Stalin himself. In the wake of the film's failure, Eisenstein publicly recanted his work as an error. Individuals were arrested during and after the ensuing debacle. (Full article...)
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (/ˈbɛriə/BERR-ee-ə; Russian:Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия, IPA:[lɐˈvrʲenʲtʲɪjˈpavləvʲɪdʑˈbʲerʲɪjə]; Georgian:ლავრენტი ბერია, romanized:lavrent'i beria, IPA:[ˈɫavɾentʼiˈbeɾia]; 29 March[O.S. 17 March]1899– 23 December 1953) was a Georgian Bolshevik and Soviet politician, Marshal of the Soviet Union and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security, and chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during the Second World War, and promoted to deputy premier under Stalin in 1941. He officially joined the Politburo in 1946. Beria was the longest-serving and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after the war. Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, he was responsible for organising purges such as the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials.
He would later also orchestrate the forced upheaval of minorities from the Caucasus as head of the NKVD, an act that was declared genocidal by various scholars and, as concerning Chechens, in 2004 by the European Parliament. He simultaneously administered vast sections of the Soviet state, and acted as the de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of NKVD field units responsible for barrier troops and Soviet partisan intelligence and sabotage operations on the Eastern Front. Beria administered the expansion of the Gulag labour camps, and was primarily responsible for overseeing the secret detention facilities for scientists and engineers known as sharashkas. After the war, Beria organised the communist takeover of the state institutions in central and eastern Europe. He oversaw the Soviet atomic bomb project, which Stalin gave absolute priority, and the project was completed in under five years. (Full article...)
Image 12Map showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km2) (from Soviet Union)
Image 30American, British, and Japanese Troops parade through Vladivostok in armed support to the White Army. (from Russian Revolution)
Image 31A revolutionary meeting of Russian soldiers in March 1917 in Dalkarby of Jomala, Åland (from Russian Revolution)
Image 32Country emblems of the Soviet Republics before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (fifth in the second row) no longer exists as a political entity of any kind and the emblem is unofficial.) (from Soviet Union)
Image 33The 2nd Moscow Women Death Battalion protecting the Winter Palace as the last guards of the stronghold (from Russian Revolution)
Image 41Residents of Leningrad leave their homes destroyed by German bombing. About 1 million civilians died during the 871-day Siege of Leningrad, mostly from starvation. (from Soviet Union)
Image 47U.S. Lend Lease shipments to the USSR. During the war the USSR provided an unknown number of shipments of rare minerals to the US Treasury as a form of cashless repayment of Lend-Lease. (from Soviet Union)
Image 48Forward gun of Aurora that fired the signal shot (from October Revolution)
... that Mary V.R. Thayer was briefly arrested on suspicion of spying after abandoning a 1929 business trip in the Soviet Union to explore the Caucasus?
... that economist and anti-apartheid activist Vella Pillay arranged for South African revolutionaries to receive military training in the Soviet Union and China?
... that development of the British UB.109Tcruise missile was given "super-priority" in 1951 to ward off an expected attack by the Soviet Union, only to be cancelled after the attack never came?
... that Estonian minister of war Paul Lill resigned in 1939, citing the unacceptable conditions of the Bases Treaty with the Soviet Union?
... that a 1955 satirical comedy play by Kasymaly Jantöshev was one of the first signs of the relaxation of Soviet literary restrictions after the death of Joseph Stalin?
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