What Is The NKVD?

Genocide is always organized and the killings planned out. Soon after the organization stage, polarization begins, driving the groups apart and beginning an extremist regime. The “Final Solution” was approved and planned under the rule of Adolf Hitler and implemented by the German SS. Overall, the German SS murdered more than one million Jews (Source 3). Under the rule of Joseph Stalin, the killing of kulaks and other peasants was organized. Starting in 1929, ten million peasants were moved to Arctic work camps. The remaining peasants were forced into collective farming where they were forced to meet the government’s demanding grain quota (Source 1). Like the Holocaust, government agents were trained to carry out the plans to eliminate their targeted people group and preventing them from escaping the oppression. As the beginnings of these genocides continued, the Jews and the Ukrainians were alienated more and more. In both genocides, people with opposing views were deported because they were seen as a threat. In Russia, Soviet propaganda promoted “The new Soviet man”, one who idealises the Soviet’s past and overlooks Stalin’s heinous crimes (source

When extremists attempt to intensify divisions between groups, the government usually begins attacks, violent actions, and takes drastic measures. In the situation of Holodomor, a large amount of Ukraine’s religious, political, and intellectual leaders were arrested, tortured, and often murdered in order to remove any dangerous opposition. By taking these actions, Stalin polarized the Ukrainian population, separating the Ukrainian working class from the peasants. Stalin also began removing a large amount of the population out of Ukraine, and into harsh survivable lands such as Siberia and labor camps, these settings were referred to as a “Dump site” where the main purpose was to eliminate the farmers and keep rotting bodies out of

The red terror started, as a result form an assassination attempt on Lenin from Fanni Kaplin in August 1918. From Lenin’s hospital bed he told the Cheka ‘prepare for terror’. There was no government that could argue against the work of the Cheka, they arrested and executed 800 people in St. Petersburg in 1918, the Cheka explained that they were ‘enemies of the state’ ‘enemies of the revolution’. The red terror lasted from September 1918 to October 1918. Lenin supported the Cheka and argued on their behalf. They were also supported by Gregory Zinoviev. War communism is were the Bolsheviks took control over the factories, mines, workshops and railways.The Bolsheviks took over the banks, private trade was not allowed, workers were forced to work in factories. The red army needed supplies to fight against the White army. The Bolsheviks were communists and they wanted to take control of industry and food production in Russia.

By imprisoning and executing members that opposed his views and were potential threats to his position, Stalin was able to keep control over the USSR by using fear. Hence, this raised up a new ruling elite that he found to be more dependable, as no one dared challenge him for fear of their life.

During the second half of the 1920s, Joseph Stalin set the stage for gaining absolute power by employing police repression against opposition elements within the Communist Party. The machinery of coercion had previously been used only against opponents of Bolshevism, not against party members themselves. The first victims were Politburo members Leon Trotskii, Grigorii Zinov'ev, and Lev Kamenev, who were defeated and expelled from the party in late 1927. Stalin then turned against Nikolai Bukharin, who was denounced as a "right opposition," for opposing his policy of forced collectivization and rapid

Gestapo,was a German secret police force, which was created in 1933 after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

Under the rule of Stalin, people were sent to be housed at the Gulag camps, by then they were using them as a slave labor. These camps housed a wide range of convicts from minor criminals to political prisoners. The Soviet Union’s main offences were robbers, rapists, murders, and thieves, so instead of spending their sentences in prison they got taken to the Gulag.

gestapo was a vital protection to Hitler's power, they helped maintain order and keep any opposers out of Germany that are trying to stop the natzi and their ultimate goal of exterminating the jews. The Gestapo was dissolved with the fall of the 3 Reich in 1945. Many of the personal bodyguards consisted of agents of former Gestapo prison officials they were highly respected authority and served good protection to Hitler's safety at public speeches. Gestapo also served as a natzi spi base and was used to find potential threats to the

The NKVD was relentless on seeking and punishing those who threatened the stability of the Soviet Union, per the direction and management of Stalin. While the majority of the NKVD activity included ordinary police work and public safety, there were also secret assassinations and political cover ups done by the secret police department. In a book written by Richard Pipes in 2001, he gave the statistics that, “...during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot”. These shocking numbers were only addressing the arrests and deaths by the NKVD, which in the grand amount of total atrocities of the USSR during the Cold War. All of these deaths and arrests separated families and loved ones and created a country divided in fear and

Using the AVO, the brutal Hungarian secret police, the Soviets promoted terror and instilled fear in the Hungarians. Paid more than workers in the factories and given power over the people, the AVO routinely terrorized the Hungarian citizens. Strictly enforcing rules and regulations, the feared AVO police unleashed a reign of terror across Hungary. People were afraid of speaking out against the Soviets and many families went behind closed doors to educate their children about the harsh reality of communism.

For example, the thought police is one of them. ”There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the thought police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork”. This quote taken from the book describes how the thought police could watch individuals at any chosen time, and also had the power to listen to people’s thoughts. This was a way of controlling the people, by having their mind in control and to expose those who were in the opposition. In contrary to popular beliefs at the time, NKVD did not have the power to listen to the citizens of the soviet union’s thoughts. However, they did have spies working for Stalin, in order to listen to, and follow people who they suspected had political differences to their

The Gulags of the Soviet Union have been compared to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, but in reality they were worse. The Gulags were isolated prison camps peppered across Siberia. Death, torture, and disease raged within their walls, while endless work went on outside. Gulag personnel were cruel and unfeeling, using terrible punishment methods and playing senseless games that cost prisoners their lives. Political enemies of the Bolshevik party made up a significant portion of the prisoner population, with most sent to the infamous camp system Kolyma. Liberation was painfully slow, but by 1960, all of the Gulags were gone.

What is the KGB? The KGB was the Soviet Union’s main security agency from 1954-1991. It was founded March 13, 1954, 6 weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, along with the establishment of Cheka founded by Felix Dzerzhinsky(“KGB”). KGB stands for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. However the KGB has been around since 1917 under names such as: Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, and the MGB (Wikipedia).

A purge was the systematic elimination of opponents by Stalin, The assassination of Kirov allowed Stalin to use it as an excuse to begin the purges. In 1932, Kirov had helped to defeat Stalin on an important issue concerning Mikhail Riutin, who had circulated a document that was

The NKVD presented a more polite scaled back view to the secret service with less public purges and more just spying upon the Soviet people. While this may have looked like a nicer more people oriented service, in actuality it was merely more propaganda. The service was actually murdering only a small fraction less of people and it was spying on the people more. The West was not aware of these facts and looked upon it as an improvement to the USSR. It was during these times that the NKVD recruited the most western spies such as the “Cambridge Five spy ring”, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen in the CIA, and Klaus Fuchs, the spy in the