Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Soviet politician and one of the longest-serving and most influential of Joseph Stalin's secret police chiefs, serving as head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1938 to 1946, during the country's involvement in the Second World War. Beria was also a prolific sexual predator, who serially raped scores of girls and young women, and murdered some of his victims.
Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a Russian, later Soviet writer, medical doctor, and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, which has been called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
A graphic novel is a long-form work of sequential art. The term graphic novel is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comics scholars and industry professionals. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term comic book, which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks.
Grigori Rasputin (1869–1916) was a Siberian peasant and mystic, who became a healer and adviser for the Romanovs at the end of the Russian Empire.
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. In 1967, she became an international sensation when she defected to the United States and, in 1978, became a naturalized citizen. From 1984 to 1986, she briefly returned to the Soviet Union and had her Soviet citizenship reinstated. She was Stalin's last surviving child.
Death and the Maiden, a concept ultimately derived from the Medieval "Dance of Death", may refer to:
The "doctors' plot" was a Soviet state-sponsored antisemitic campaign and conspiracy that alleged a cabal of prominent medical specialists, predominantly of Jewish ethnicity, intended to murder leading government and communist party officials. It was also known as the case of saboteur doctors or killer doctors. In 1951–1953, a group of mostly Jewish doctors from Moscow were accused of a conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders. This was later accompanied by publications of antisemitic character in the media which talked about the threats of Zionism and condemned people with Jewish surnames. Following this, many doctors, both Jews and non-Jews, were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, and tortured to produce admissions. A few weeks after Stalin's death in 1953, the new Soviet leadership said there was a lack of evidence regarding the doctors' plot and the case was dropped. Soon after, the case was declared to have been a fabrication.
Maria Veniaminovna Yudina was a Soviet pianist.
The Killing Joke may refer to:
The Black Dahlia is a nickname given to 1940s murder victim Elizabeth Short.
Heroic realism is art used as political propaganda. Examples include the socialist realism style associated with socialist states, and sometimes the similar art style associated with fascism. Its characteristics are realism and the depiction of figures as ideal types or symbols, often with explicit rejection of modernism in art.
Cancer Ward is a semi-autobiographical novel by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Completed in 1966, the novel was distributed in Russia that year in samizdat, and banned there the following year. In 1968, several European publishers published it in Russian, and in April 1968, excerpts in English appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in the UK without Solzhenitsyn's permission. An unauthorized English translation was published that year, first by The Bodley Head in the UK, then by Dial Press in the US.
A ghosthunter is a person who engages in ghost hunting, the process of investigating locations that are allegedly haunted.
Marvel Graphic Novel (MGN) is a line of graphic novel trade paperbacks published from 1982 to 1993 by Marvel Comics. The books were published in an oversized format, 8.5" x 11", similar to French albums. In response, DC Comics established a competitor line known as DC Graphic Novel.
Richard Appignanesi is a Canadian writer and editor. He was the originating editor of the internationally successful illustrated For Beginners book series, as well as the author of several of the series' texts. He is a founding publisher and editor of Icon Books. He was founding editor of the Manga Shakespeare series. He is a former executive editor of the journal Third Text, and reviews editor of the policy studies journal Futures.
The Death of Stalin is a 2017 political satire black comedy film written and directed by Armando Iannucci and co-written by David Schneider and Ian Martin with Peter Fellows. Based on the French graphic novel La Mort de Staline (2010–2012), the film depicts the internal social and political power struggle among the members of the Soviet Politburo following the death of leader Joseph Stalin in 1953. The French-British-Belgian co-production stars an ensemble cast that includes Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs, Olga Kurylenko, Michael Palin, Andrea Riseborough, Dermot Crowley, Paul Chahidi, Adrian McLoughlin, Paul Whitehouse, and Jeffrey Tambor.
La Mort de Staline is a series of French satirical-biographical graphic novels. The two volumes were created by artist Thierry Robin and writer Fabien Nury, and published in October 2010 and May 2012 by Dargaud.
