The NKVD was chartered around the same time Stalin orchestrated the murder of Sergei Kirov, an event he used as an excuse to purge the upper ranks of the Communist Party and strike terror into the populace.
In the 12 years of its existence, from to , the NKVD arrested and executed literally millions of people, stocked the gulags with millions more miserable souls, and "relocated" entire ethnic populations within the vast expanse of the U. Being an NKVD head was a dangerous occupation: Genrikh Yagoda was arrested and executed in , Nikolai Yezhov in , and Lavrenty Beria in during the power struggle that followed the death of Stalin. After the end of World War II and before his execution, Lavrenty Beria presided over the Soviet security apparatus, which remained in a somewhat fluid state of multiple acronyms and organizational structures.
Despite its fearsome reputation in the west, the KGB was actually more effective in policing the U. The major foreign accomplishments of the KGB included suppressing the Hungarian Revolution in and the "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia in , as well as installing a Communist government in Afghanistan in the late s; however, the agency's luck ran out in early s Poland, where the anti-Communist Solidarity movement emerged victoriously.
All during this time, of course, the CIA and the KGB engaged in an elaborate international dance often in third-world countries like Angola and Nicaragua , involving agents, double agents, propaganda, disinformation, under-the-table arms sales, interference with elections, and nighttime exchanges of suitcases filled with rubles or hundred-dollar bills.
The exact details of what transpired, and where, may never come to light; many of the agents and "controllers" from both sides are dead, and the current Russian government has not been forthcoming in declassifying the KGB archives.
Inside the U. During the reign of Nikita Khrushchev, from to , a certain amount of openness was tolerated, as witnessed in the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag-era memoir "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich " an event that would have been unthinkable under the Stalin regime.
The pendulum swung the other way with the ascension of Leonid Brezhnev in , and, especially, the appointment of Yuri Andropov as the head of the KGB in In the late s, the U. Premier Mikhail Gorbachev had already implemented "perestroika" a restructuring of the economy and political structure of the Soviet Union and "glasnost" a policy of openness toward dissidents , but while this placated some of the population, it enraged hard-line Soviet bureaucrats who had grown accustomed to their privileges.
As might have been predicted, the KGB was at the forefront of the counter-revolution. In late , then-KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov recruited high-ranking members of the Soviet elite into a tight-knit conspiratorial cell, which sprang into action the following August after failing to convince Gorbachev to either resign in favor of its preferred candidate or declare a state of emergency. Armed combatants, some of them in tanks, stormed the Russian parliament building in Moscow, but Soviet President Boris Yeltsin held firm and the coup quickly fizzled out.
Four months later, the U. However, institutions like the KGB never really go away; they just assume different guises. They are not building the enterprises and palaces in order to destroy them. Maybe I am wrong. Reagan obtained approval for billion dollars in military expenditures. Therefore, we must do everything possible in order to provide the corresponding funds for the defense industry.
We cannot permit them to overtake us. If we did not have to make these expenditures, we could solve all the other problems in two or three years. We are currently conducting negotiations with the FRG and France over the natural-gas pipeline. This is useful for us and also for them.
But the USA is putting pressure on other countries, saying that they are allegedly making themselves dependent upon us. Poland must remain a member of the Warsaw Pact. It is clear that in determining economic measures we will keep in mind the transit routes into the GDR.
We will take care of that. Protection of the lines of communication might have been possible without military force — e. These will be practical steps of the party and the organs of state security. Basket III gives no one the possibility of intervening in the internal affairs of another state.
There are many references there to domestic legislation. Not with regard to the overall assessment, to the issues of disarmament and peace. But with regard to Basket III. Moscow lies 1, km away from Berlin. We will speak again over Madrid, after Cde. Kryuchkov has rested. Today, I spoke about it with unusual severity before the party aktiv [of the Stasi]. Cold War Museum.
Allen W. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society into an industrial and military superpower.
However, he ruled by terror, and millions of his own Much of the fighting took place in what is now northeastern China. The Russo-Japanese War was also a naval conflict, with ships exchanging fire in the Russian leader Vladimir Putin was born in in St.
Petersburg then known as Leningrad. Putin rose to the top ranks of the Russian government after joining Boris Yeltsin served as the president of Russia from until Though a Communist Party member for much of his life, he eventually came to believe in both democratic and free market reforms, and played an instrumental role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Vladimir Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary and head of the Bolshevik Party who rose to prominence during the Russian Revolution of , one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The bloody upheaval marked the end of the From early Mongol invasions to tsarist regimes to ages of enlightenment and industrialization to revolutions and wars, Russia is known not just for its political rises of world power and upheaval, but for its cultural contributions think ballet, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, caviar and After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in as the newly formed Soviet Union.
The notorious prisons, which incarcerated about 18 million Live TV.
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