Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer. A prominent Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system.
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was a Soviet politician who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982 and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet between 1960 and 1964 and again between 1977 and 1982. His 18-year term as General Secretary was second only to Joseph Stalin's in duration. To this day, the quality of Brezhnev's tenure as General Secretary remains debated by historians. While his rule was characterized by political stability and significant foreign policy successes, it was also marked by corruption, inefficiency, economic stagnation, and rapidly growing technological gaps with the West.
Red Storm Rising is a war novel, written by Tom Clancy and co-written with Larry Bond, and released on August 7, 1986. Set in the mid-1980s, it features a Third World War between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Pact forces, and is unique for depicting the conflict as being fought exclusively with conventional weapons, rather than escalating to the use of weapons of mass destruction or nuclear warfare. It is one of two Clancy novels, along with SSN (1996), that are not set in the Ryanverse.
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth is an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Kill List. Forsyth's works frequently appear on best-sellers lists and more than a dozen of his titles have been adapted to film. By 2006, he had sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages.
Red Rabbit is a spy thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 5, 2002. The plot occurs a few months after the events of Patriot Games (1987), and incorporates the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Main character Jack Ryan, now an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, takes part in the extraction of a Soviet defector who knows of a KGB plot to kill the pontiff. The book debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was a Soviet politician and Russian Old Bolshevik revolutionary. He served as head of state of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946. From 1926, he was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian far-right leader of the radical, militant wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN-B.
Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin was a Soviet politician and intelligence officer. A long-time member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he served as First Deputy Prime Minister, as a full member of the Politburo and as the chairman of the KGB from December 1958 to November 1961. He continued to maintain decisive influence in the KGB until 1967; his successor as chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, was his client and protégé.
Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny was a Soviet politician, who served as Chairman of the KGB from November 1961 to May 1967. A protégé of Alexander Shelepin, he rose through the ranks of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol).
Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn CBE was a Soviet KGB defector and author of two books about the long-term deception strategy of the KGB leadership. He was born in Pyriatyn, USSR. He provided "a wide range of intelligence to the CIA on the operations of most of the 'Lines' (departments) at the Helsinki and other residencies, as well as KGB methods of recruiting and running agents." He became an American citizen by 1984.
Andriy Atanasovich Melnyk was a Ukrainian military and political leader.
The Third World War: The Untold Story (1982) is a war novel by Sir John Hackett portraying a fictional Third World War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact forces, which breaks out in 1985. It is written in the style of a non-fiction post-event historical account. It was published in 1982 by Macmillan in New York and Sidgwick & Jackson in London. The book is an update to Hackett's 1978 novel, The Third World War: August 1985.
Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov was a Soviet public official and security administrator and head of the KGB from December 1982 to October 1988.
Crisis in the Kremlin is a 1991 strategy video game with managerial aspects in which the player acts as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 2017. The player assumes the role of the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, the nationalist Boris Yeltsin, or the hardliner Yegor Ligachyov. Actual jokes recorded by the KGB can be found in the gameplay, depicting the concerns of the Soviet people in a humorous light. The game was developed and released at a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing and breaking apart with the game's events making reference to that. Indeed, the Soviet Union dissolved in the same year as the game's release. A remake and spiritual successor of the game was published in 2017 on the game platform Steam.
Boris Georgiyevich Bazhanov was a Soviet secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who defected from the Soviet Union on 1 January 1928.
The Committee for State Security (CSS) (KGB; Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности (КГБ), romanized: Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, IPA: [kəmʲɪˈtʲet ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)əj bʲɪzɐˈpasnəsʲtʲɪ](listen)) was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 13 March 1954 until 3 December 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, it was attached to the Council of Ministers. It was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", carrying out internal security, foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence and secret police functions. Similar agencies operated in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from the Russian SFSR, where the KGB was headquartered, with many associated ministries, state committees and state commissions.
The South Yemen Civil War, colloquially referred to as The Events of '86 or The Events of January 13, or more simply as The Events, was a failed coup d'etat and armed conflict which took place on January 13, 1986, in South Yemen. The civil war developed as a result of ideological differences, and later tribal tensions, between two factions of the ruling Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), centred on Abdul Fattah Ismail's faction, al-Toghmah, and Ali Nasir Muhammad's faction, al-Zomrah, for the leadership of the YSP and the PDRY. The conflict quickly escalated into a costly civil war that lasted eleven days and resulted in thousands of casualties. Additionally, the conflict resulted in the demise of much of the Yemeni Socialist Party's most experienced socialist leadership cadre, contributing to a much weaker government and the country's eventual unification with North Yemen in 1990.
Vasyl Omelianovych Makukh was a Soviet veteran of World War II, political prisoner and Ukrainian activist, and member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Having been conscripted into the Red Army, in November 1944 Makukh defected and joined the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In February 1946 he was wounded and captured after a shootout with Soviet and Polish border guards at the Soviet-Polish border. On 15 February 1946, Makukh was taken to the district precinct of the KGB in Velyki Mosty and later to Lviv Prison No. 4. On 11 July 1946, the Military Tribunal of Lviv garrison sentenced him to 10 years of hard labour (katorga) with five years of detention plus the confiscation of all his property. Makukh served his sentence in Dubravlag (Mordovia) and other GULAG camps in Siberia. On 18 July 1955, he was freed and exiled to a local settlement, where he met a woman who had also served 10 years imprisonment. In 1956, both managed to return to Ukraine, and being forbidden to return to their own region, they settled in Dnipropetrovsk, where they married and Makukh worked as a schoolteacher.
The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or Politburo was the highest policy-making authority within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was founded in October 1917, and refounded in March 1919, at the 8th Congress of the Bolshevik Party. It was known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966. The existence of the Politburo ended in 1991 upon the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Mark I. Kaminsky and Harvey C. Bennett were American tourists who were detained in the Soviet Union in 1960. Kaminsky was put on trial, sentenced to seven years' jail, then expelled from the Soviet Union as a spy.
