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Politics : World Affairs Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (1056)	7/25/2002 4:58:09 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3959

Good article...My dad would strangle Beria, Kaganovich and the rest of monsters with his bare hands if he could PS Same Ukrainians were killing Jews prior to 1917 for what reason?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (1056)	7/25/2002 5:07:12 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3959

The Russian Revolution of 1917 shook separatism to its core. Bolsheviks abolished the Pale of Settlement, along with all anti-Jewish laws, and many Jews had high government and Communist Party positions. Soviet Communists embraced Jews initially but condemned Judaism, and it did not take long for all expressions of Jewish culture not considered revolutionary to be made illegal. In the United States, assimilation without atheism could work; the first movie with sound, The Jazz Singer in 1927, showed the process. But Soviet leaders of Jewish ancestry such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev attacked Jews and Christians, and then each other, until Josef Stalin killed all of them. (A rabbi once told the atheistic Trotsky, whose original name was Bronstein, that the Trotskys are making the revolution and the Bronsteins are paying the price.) worldmag.com

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (1056)	7/25/2002 5:26:12 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 3959

Russia and the Soviet Union After the abortive Decembrist coup of 1825, a powerful secret police was organized in Russia at the order of the repressive Nicholas I. This notorious Third Section (thus named because it was the third department of the czar's chancery), established a rigid and complicated system of censorship and sought to suppress not only subversive activity but even subversive thought. (The culmination of this trend, typical of police states, was symbolized by the name of the Japanese secret police before 1945—Thought Police.) The use of agents provocateurs by the czarist police led to such extremes that secret police, posing as revolutionists, actually helped to assassinate government officials. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Soviet government instituted its own secret police, the Cheka (the Russian acronym for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution and Sabotage), under Felix Dzerzhinsky. This was reorganized (1922) as the GPU, later the OGPU (United State Political Administration). In 1934 the functions of the OGPU were transferred to the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which was also responsible for all places of detention (e.g., forced labor camps) and for the regular police. In 1936, Stalin named Nikolai Yezhov as its head, and under Yezhov's direction Stalinist purges culminated in the wave of terror (1936–38) known as the Yezhovshchina. When Yezhov himself was convicted of conspiracy in the 1938 Moscow treason trials, he was succeeded by Lavrenti Beria. Under Beria's long tenure the vast apparatus of the Soviet security organs became the most powerful and the most feared section of society. The NKVD was split (1943) into the NKVD and the NKGB (People's Commissariat for State Security), the former retaining responsibility for internal security; in 1946 the NKVD became the MVD (Ministry of Interior), and the NKGB became the MGB (Ministry of State Security). After Stalin's death in 1953 the two ministries were fused into a new MVD under Beria. Later in the year Beria was arrested on charges of conspiracy and was killed; the charges illustrated the inherent danger of a strong secret police and its potential for overthrowing the very state that it is supposed to protect. totse.com

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (1056)	7/25/2002 5:31:18 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3959

The year 1953 was the last in the life of the all-powerful Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. In January he had a medical checkup done by a team of prominent doctors led by the famous professor Vinogradov, who detected a sharp deterioration of the patient's health and recommended strict bed confinement and complete inactivity. The diagnosis angered the dictator and, soon after, Vinogradov and a number of other leading Soviet doctors were arrested and renounced as "agents of international Zionism". The arrests triggered the so-called Doctors' Case and a new spiral of the Great Terror of the Thirties was only prevented by Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. Stalin had a stroke when he was staying behind armored doors at his country dacha just outside Moscow. The bodyguards found his prostrate on the floor of his dining room. Stalin was still breathing but unconscious. Fully aware of the strongman's profound distrust of the doctors, the security officers never called an ambulance. They only notified members of Stalin's inner circle who finally allowed the doctors to examine the dying leader. There was nothing much they could possibly do, though and, on March 5, Joseph Stalin died. Some people in the West still believe that Stalin could have been poisoned by his associates, including the head of his much feared secret police, Lavrenti Beria. Stalin's death wrote an end to a whole era of a political system based on the oppression of anyone who dared not to toe the party line. The system had penetrated every imaginable aspect of the social life, from politics and economics to culture and ideology, and the deification of Stalin had etched itself indelibly on the hearts and minds of millions of people. Thousands of grief-stricken mourners flocked to Moscow from all across the nation to pay their last respects to the Father of All Nations and hundreds were trampled to death in a stampede caused by poor organization during the funeral day. Stalin's embalmed body was placed inside the Lenin mausoleum next to that of the founder of the Soviet state. The country needed a new leader and the blood-stained monster, Lavrenti Beria, came in from behind to fill the void. His main rival, Nikita Khrushchev, was busily canvassing the support of fellow Politburo members to get rid of the man notorious for the endless purges and tortures he had masterminded during his long tenure as the country's secret service supreme. During a meeting of the ruling Politburo held in June, Khrushchev accused Beria of careerism, nationalism and links with British intelligence. Immediately after, a team of top Army Generals, led by the legendary Marshal Georgy Zhukov, arrested Beria who was later tried and executed vor.ru

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (1056)	7/25/2002 5:36:25 PM
From: goldsnow	Respond to of 3959

Consolidating his control of the Party apparatus, Stalin next defeated Zinoviev and Kamenev, who joined Trotsky in what became known as the "Left Opposition." Stalin was aided in this by Nikolai Bukharin, theoretician and editor of Pravda, Alexei Rykov, Lenin's successor as Soviet Premier, and Mikhail Tomsky, head of the Soviet trade unions; these men. who favored a cooperative approach to the peasantry and a parallel growth of light and heavy industry, became known as the "Right Opposition" when Stalin turned on them in 1928-29 and introduced Trotsky's old program as official Soviet policy. In the collectivization, industrialization and famines of 1929-33, it is estimated that 5 to 10 million Russians died and another 10 million were sent to forced labor under Stalin's slogan of "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class." In addition, Russian livestock, destroyed by starving peasants, suffered a setback from which, according to Khrushchev, the nation has not yet recovered. The violence and brutality of what Stalin (and Khrushchev) called "the era of socialist construction" soon repelled many Communist party members previously loyal to Stalin, and by 1934 the dictator no longer had a majority in his own party. Stalin, however, succeeded in having the opposition leader, Sergei Kirov, murdered and thereupon crushed resistance in the Party by mass terror. The Great Purges of 1936-38, known popularly as the Yezhovshchina (after NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov who conducted them), wiped out an entire generation of Communist leaders. Public trials of such Old Bolsheviks as Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Rykov were marked by astounding "confessions" of dastardly crimes; behind the scenes, thousands refused to yield to torture and met their deaths in silence. trussel.com