Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria 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 and brutal 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.
The State Flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or simply the Soviet flag, was a red banner with two communist symbols displayed in the canton: a gold hammer and sickle topped off by a red five-point star bordered in gold. The flag's design and symbolism are derived from several sources, but emerged during the Russian Revolution. It has also come to serve as the standard symbol representing communism as a whole, recognized as such in international circles, even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The title Hero of the Soviet Union was the highest distinction in the Soviet Union, awarded together with the Order of Lenin personally or collectively for heroic feats in service to the Soviet state and society.
The history of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 covers the period in Soviet history from the establishment of Stalinism through victory in the Second World War and down to the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Stalin sought to destroy his enemies while transforming Soviet society with central planning, in particular through the forced collectivization of agriculture and rapid development of heavy industry. Stalin consolidated his power within the party and the state and fostered an extensive cult of personality. Soviet secret-police and the mass-mobilization of the Communist Party served as Stalin's major tools in molding Soviet society. Stalin's methods in achieving his goals, which included party purges, ethnic cleansings, political repression of the general population, and forced collectivization, led to millions of deaths: in Gulag labor camps and during famine.
Rootless cosmopolitan was a pejorative Soviet epithet which referred mostly to Jewish intellectuals as an accusation of their lack of allegiance to the Soviet Union, especially during the antisemitic campaign of 1948–1953. This campaign had its roots in Joseph Stalin's 1946 attack on writers who were connected with "bourgeois Western influences", culminating in the "exposure" of the non-existent Doctors' Plot in 1953.
Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced.
These are lists of films produced in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1991. Films are listed by year of release in alphabetical order on separate pages.
The June deportation was a mass deportation of tens of thousands of people from the territories which were occupied in 1940–1941: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, occupied Ukraine and occupied Poland, and Moldavia by the Soviet Union.
Cinema of Latvia dates back to 1910 when the first short films were made. The first cinematic screening in Riga took place on May 28, 1896. By 1914 all major cities in Latvia had cinemas where newsreels, documentaries and mostly foreign-made short films were screened.
Lithuanian partisans were partisans who waged guerrilla warfare in Lithuania against the Soviet Union in 1944–1953. Similar anti-Soviet resistance groups, also known as Forest Brothers and cursed soldiers, fought against Soviet rule in Estonia, Latvia and Poland. An estimated total of 30,000 Lithuanian partisans and their supporters were killed. The Lithuanian partisan war lasted almost for a decade, thus becoming one of the longest partisan wars in Europe.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1991.
The following lists events that happened during 1936 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The history of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union (USSR) reflects a period of change for both Russia and the world. Though the terms "Soviet Russia" and "Soviet Union" often are synonymous in everyday speech, when referring to the foundations of the Soviet Union, "Soviet Russia" often specifically refers to brief period between the October Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922.
Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was a Soviet politician who briefly succeeded Joseph Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union. However, at the insistence of the rest of the Presidium, he relinquished control over the party apparatus in exchange for remaining Premier and first among equals within the Soviet collective leadership. He then became embroiled in a power struggle with Nikita Khrushchev that culminated in his removal from the premiership in 1955 as well as the Presidium in 1957.
De-Stalinization comprised a series of political reforms in the Soviet Union after the death of long-time leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the thaw brought about by ascension of Nikita Khrushchev to power, and his 1956 secret speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", which denounced Stalin's cult of personality and the Stalinist political system.
The following lists events that happened during 1953 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Joseph Stalin, second leader of the Soviet Union, died on 5 March 1953 at his Kuntsevo Dacha after suffering a stroke, at age 74. He was given a state funeral in Moscow on 9 March, with four days of national mourning declared. On the day of the funeral, hundreds or thousands of Soviet citizens visiting the capital to pay their respects died in a human crush.
The State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting of the Soviet Union commonly known as Gosteleradioof the USSR was the main state body of that supervised over all television and radio broadcasting of the Soviet Union from September 10, 1931 to December 27, 1991.
The following lists events that happened during 1980 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
