Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, journalist and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution, October Revolution, Russian Civil War, and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Alongside Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky was widely considered the most prominent Soviet figure and was de facto second-in-command during the early years of the Russian Soviet Republic. Ideologically a Marxist and a Leninist, his thought and writings inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism.
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume series written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident. It was first published in 1973 by the Parisian publisher YMCA-Press, and it was translated into English and French the following year. It explores a vision of life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp system. Solzhenitsyn constructed his highly detailed narrative from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and his own experience as a Gulag prisoner.
The Great Purge or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshina, was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin's campaign to solidify his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the state by eliminating his rivals by drastic use of imprisonment and execution. In particular, the purges were designed to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky.
Edgar Miles Bronfman was a Canadian-American businessman. He worked for his family's distilled beverage firm, Seagram, eventually becoming president, treasurer and CEO. As president of the World Jewish Congress, Bronfman is especially remembered for initiating diplomacy with the Soviet Union, which resulted in legitimizing the Hebrew language in the USSR, and contributed to Soviet Jews being legally able to practice their religion, as well as immigrate to Israel.
Isidor Feinstein Stone was an American investigative journalist, writer, and author.
Active measures is a term used to describe political warfare conducted by the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. The term, which dates back to the 1920s, includes operations such as espionage, propaganda, sabotage and assassination, based on foreign policy objectives of the Soviet and Russian governments. Active measures have continued to be used by the administration of Vladimir Putin.
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven books. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.
Yitzhak Arad was an Israeli historian, author, IDF brigadier general and Soviet partisan. He also served as Yad Vashem's director from 1972 to 1993, and specialised in the history of the Holocaust.
A stay-behind operation is one where a country emplaces secret operatives or organizations in its own territory, for use in case of a later enemy occupation. The stay-behind operatives would then form the basis of a resistance movement, and act as spies from behind enemy lines. Small-scale operations may cover discrete areas, but larger stay-behind operations envisage reacting to the conquest of whole countries.
The Bielski partisans were a unit of Jewish partisans who rescued Jews from extermination and fought the German occupiers and their collaborators around Novogrudok and Lida in German-occupied Poland. The partisan unit was named after the Bielskis, a family of Polish Jews who organized and led the community.
The Ministry of Public Security, was the secret police, intelligence and counter-espionage agency operating in the Polish People's Republic. From 1945 to 1954 it was known as the Security Office, and from 1956 to 1990 as the Security Service.
Isaac Don Levine was a 20th-century Russian-born American journalist and anticommunist writer, who is known as a specialist on the Soviet Union.
Hungary–Russia relations are the bilateral foreign relations between the two countries, Hungary and Russia. During the Second World War, the Soviet army occupied Hungary, and in 1948 the Soviet Union took full control of the country. It became part of the Warsaw Pact military alliance and the Comecon economic union. Relations between the two countries were damaged in 1956 due to the Soviet military intervention in the revolution occurring in Hungary. Hungary expelled its communist government in 1989, and diplomatic relations with Russia were restored after the breakup of the USSR in 1991.
George Trofimoff was a United States military intelligence officer of Russian descent. He was convicted in a U.S. federal court of having spied for the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on September 27, 2001. George Trofimoff is the most senior officer in U.S. military history to have been charged with or convicted of espionage.
Stephen South Wolff is one of the many fathers of the Internet. He is mainly credited with turning the Internet from a government project into something that proved to have scholarly and commercial interest for the rest of the world. Dr. Wolff realized before most the potential in the Internet and began selling the idea that the Internet could have a profound effect on both the commercial and academic world.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian state in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism, and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated NKVD, was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
Geoffrey P. Megargee was an American historian and author who specialized in World War II military history and the history of the Holocaust. He served as the project director and editor-in-chief for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Megargee's work on the German High Command won the 2001 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History.
Sylva Zalmanson is a Soviet-born Jewish Prisoner of Zion, human rights activist, artist and engineer who settled in Israel in 1974.
Sylva Zalmanson was most memorable with the stringing and hunting effect, not heard since the publication of Anne Frank's diary of a young girl
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know is a nonfiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on September 10, 2019. The audiobook version of the book follows Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast-style structure, using Gladwell's narration, interviews, sound bites, and the theme song "Hell You Talmbout".
