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WELCOME!You have arrived at the CCCP MySpace, a site devoted to the history of Soviet Russia. A site which we hope will be your first port of call if in need of information concerning Soviet Russia and related topics.
We, the CCCP Administrators, are specialists in the field of Soviet History and have committed to run this site for the benefit of those seeking information; we offer both a display of information and a service whereby questions can be asked and topics raised.
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NEW FOR 2008:In the year ahead, the CCCP MySpace will be featuring special themed weeks to celebrate the revolutionary victories of Communist countries around the world. On the revolutionary anniversaries of the major Proletarian States, the CCCP MySpace will feature a bonus biography of its revolutionary leader, as well as other information and resources relating to the country. So keep a lookout for updates, and join us as we celebrate the worker revolutions of the 20th century!
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924)(Bладѝмир Ильѝч Дѐнии) Born on April 10th 1870, this son of a Russian nobleman was to have a profound effect on the future of Russia and, indeed, the world. His father had been the son of a serf who had risen to post of inspector of schools in Simbirsk. While his mother was the daughter of land owning physician. In school he proved himself to be very bright though he suffered alienation because of it. However, he excelled in his studies. He also enjoyed reading and writings, Goethe and Turgenev would affect him for the rest of his life.
Two major tragedies occurred which had an acute effect on the young Lenin (then Ulyanov). In 1886 his father died from a cerebral haemorrhage; the following year his brother, Alexander, was hung for plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. Lenin renounced religion and the political system. Added to this he was the brother of dead revolutionary and found many doors closed to him. He finally managed to be accepted in a Kazan University where he studied law. This was to be short-lived as he was expelled for attending a peaceful protest some three months later. He was ostracised from the academic world. He studied the law on his own and passed the exam, coming first in a class of 124 in 1891.
Lenin moved to St. Petersburg in 1893 where he practised law. While there he began developing a Marxist underground movement. He grouped members into six member cells. By this means, industrial conditions were investigated, statistics compiled and pamphlets written. It was also through these groups that he met his future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who he married in 1898. In 1895 he travelled to Switzerland to meet like-minded Social Democrats. While there he talked with Georgi Plekhanov. They argued over the means of bringing about change in Russia; Plekhanov wanted to include the liberal middle class; Lenin favoured the rise of the proletariat. This disagreement led to the eventual split of the Social Democratic Party into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.
When Lenin returned to Russia, he carried with him illegal pamphlets; he wanted to start up a revolutionary paper. On the eve of its publication he and other leaders were arrested. He served fifteen months in prison and, after this term, was exiled to Siberia. Having finished his period of exile in 1900, he left for Switzerland where he finally managed to establish the Bolshevik paper, Iskra (Spark). During his years in Switzerland Lenin rose to a position of power in the Social Democratic Party. His uncompromising views were a core cause for the split in the party.
The 1905 St. Petersburg Massacre spurred Lenin to advocate violent action. The massacre itself occurred when Cossacks fired on peaceful protesters led by Father Gapon. This event led to several uprisings in Russia. Lenin returned to Russia for two years but the promised revolution never happened due to a combination of concession and repression by the Tsar’s government. Lenin fled abroad again.
1917 was to finally see the revolution in Russia. In March, steelworkers in St. Petersburg went on strike. It grew until thousands of people lined the streets. The Tsar’s power collapsed and the Duma took power. Lenin made a deal with the Germans; if they could get him safely back to Russia, he would take power and pull Russia out of the war. The Duma’s Prime Minister Kerensky was to fall over this same issue. He refused to take Russia out a war in which they were suffering severe losses and causing brutal hardship at home. Lenin came to power in October after a nearly bloodless coup.
At age forty-seven Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was named president of the Society of People’s Commissars (Communist Party). The problems of the new government were enormous. The war with Germany was ended immediately; though Russia had lost the bread basket of the Ukraine to Germany, this was soon regained when Germany was ultimately defeated in the war. Land was redistributed, some as collective farms. Factories, mines, banks and utilities were all taken over by the state and the Russian Orthodox Church was disestablished. There was opposition and this led to a civil war in 1918 between the deposed factions of the Provisional Government – Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and Tsarists, commonly known as the Whites – and the Bolsheviks, or Reds. Despite being supported by Britain, the U.S.A, Japan and France, the Whites were defeated after a bitter struggle. From 1919 to 1921 famine and typhus ravaged Russia and left over 27 million people dead, due fundamentally to the aggressive War Communism of the Reds. To counter this, Lenin put into effect the New Economic Plan (NEP). This plan embraced some capital ideas in order to revitalise the flagging economy; it was to be a controlled retreat from strict Marxist policy. However, Lenin was never to see the full effect of his measures.
In May 1922, Lenin suffered the first of a series of strokes; less than a year later he suffered a second one. In his two remaining years he tried correct some of the excesses of the regime. He saw that it would be necessary to learn coexistence with capitalist countries and eliminate the inefficiency of the party bureaucracy. He also tried to ensure that Trotsky and not Stalin succeeded him. In this endeavour, he failed. 1923 saw Lenin decline further as he had another stroke which left him paralysed and speechless. He never fully recovered and died of a cerebral haemorrhage on January 21st, 1924.
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)(Лев Давидович Трóцкий) Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky) was born on October 26th, 1879 son of a hard-working, thrifty, and well-to-do Jewish farmer, in southern Ukraine. The family valued education highly, and when Lev was nine years old they let him move to the city of Odessa, to stay with his ‘uncle’ and to go to school. Lev was an exceptionally bright and capable student, and in 1896 he moved to Nicolayev to complete his secondary education and study mathematics. This is where Lev turned revolutionary. In 1897 he was instrumental in founding the South Russia Workers Union and in 1898, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). However, Lev was arrested for his political activities, put in prison, and in 1900 deported to Siberia. In 1902 he adopted the name Trotsky as he escaped, and met Lenin in London.
Trotsky then joined Lenin on the staff of Iskra, the Communist newspaper. Trotsky and Lenin, as intellectuals, had much respect for each other. However, in 1903, at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, the Bolsheviks were led by Lenin, while Trotsky was among the Menshevik leaders. In 1905 Trotsky returned to Russia, where he participated actively in the first Russian Revolution, and in December that year he was elected President of the St. Petersburg Soviet. However, Trotsky and several other members of the St. Petersburg Soviet were soon arrested, and after a trial they were deported to Western Siberia in January 1907. That year, Trotsky escaped Siberia and at the Fifth Party Congress in London he met Stalin for the first time. For the next several years Trotsky was busy publishing several papers, among them Pravda (Truth).
In 1917, as the Tsar abdicated, Leon Trotsky went to Russia, and in August that year became a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which had Lenin as its leader and visionary. In this capacity, Trotsky became second in command after Lenin. In 1918, Trotsky was appointed People’s Commissar for Military Affairs, and as such he managed the founding of the Red Army. As Lenin became ill in 1922, and died two years later, Stalin gained the control of the party through a brutal leadership battle. Stalin disliked and opposed Trotsky, and in 1927 he was expelled from the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In 1928, Trotsky was banished to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, and from there deported to Turkey in 1929.
Trotsky used his writings to oppose Stalin and to establish an alternative direction for communism; his followers became known as Trotskyists. While Stalin was struggling with practical problems in the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists were fighting for class equality between intellectuals and capitalists. One of Trotsky’s loyal sympathisers was Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, and Trotsky appears, together with Lenin, in two of Diego’s murals. As a communist leader expelled from his homeland, Leon Trotsky had a hard time finding a country where he would be allowed to reside. He stayed temporarily in several countries, until he was allowed to come to Mexico in 1937, after Diego Rivera had used his influence to make this possible.
On August 20th 1940, Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe in his office in Mexico City by and NKVD agent. He died the following day.
Grigory Zinoviev (1883-1936)(Григóрий Eвćеевич Зиѝовьев) Grigory Zinoviev was born in Yelizavetgrad, Ukraine on 23rd September 1883. The son of a Jewish dairy farmer, Zinoviev was educated at home until the age of fourteen when he found work as a clerk. Zinoviev joined the Social Democratic Party in 1901 and became involved in trade union activities. Fleeing from the police, he moved to Berlin and then Paris. In 1903 Zinoviev met Vladimir Lenin and Georgy Plekhanov in Switzerland. After the split of the Social Democratic Party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Zinoviev joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks. With the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, Zinoviev returned to Russia and helped organise the general strike in St. Petersburg, but after falling seriously ill, Zinoviev was forced to abandon the struggle and receive treatment abroad. He returned to Russia in March 1906 and over the next three years agitated amongst metalworkers in St. Petersburg. In 1907 Zinoviev attended the London Party Congress and was elected to the six man Bolshevik Central Committee. The following year, Zinoviev was arrested by the Okhrana but was later released without charge. After the arrest, Zinoviev moved to Geneva where he worked with Vladimir Lenin and Lev Kamenev in the publication of Proletary. Although living in exile, he helped to organise the publication of Zvezda and Pravda in St. Petersburg.
After the war and the overthrow of Nicholas II in 1917, Zinoviev, Lenin and Kamenev returned to Russia and joined with Trotsky and others in plotting against the Provisional Government. At a meeting of the Central Committee in October, Zinoviev and Kamenev were the only members opposed to Lenin’s call for revolution. He later changed his mind and took part in the October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. In February 1917, Zinoviev was elected Chairman of the Council of Commissars of the Petrograd Workers’ Commune. At the First World Congress of the Comintern in 1919, he was elected chairman of the Executive Committee. Zinoviev reached the peak of his power after Lenin’s death in 1923 when, along with Stalin and Kamenev, he formed the Troika in a bid for control of the Soviet Union against Trotsky. In 1925 Stalin was able to arrange Trotsky’s dismissal as commissar of war and the following year from the Politburo. When Zinoviev and Kamenev began attacking Stalin and his policies, Stalin argued that they were attempting to promote factional divides in the party and managed to have them expelled from the Central Committee. Under pressure from the Central Committee, Zinoviev and Kamenev agreed to sign statements promising not to create conflict in the movement by making speeches attacking official policies. Trotsky refused to sign this and was banished to Kazhakstan.
In 1935 Zinoviev was arrested and charged with being involved in the assassination of Sergei Kirov. Found guilty he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. The following year he was charged with forming a terrorist organisation to kill Stalin and other leaders of the government. Zinoviev was found guilty and executed in Moscow on 25th August 1936.
Lev Kamenev (1883-1936)(Лев Борисович Каменев) Born Lev Rosenfeld to a Jewish engine driver in 1883, Kamenev was introduced to revolutionary influences from a very young age; his parents were partially associated with the assassination of Alexander III. He soon became involved with members of the Social Democratic Party while studying in the Georgian town of Tiflis. His attempts to continue his education at Moscow University, frequently broken by his political viewpoints and demonstrations, led to his arrest in 1902. Following this arrest, he emigrated to Europe where he met Vladimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks. Like most of his Bolshevik colleagues, Kamenev was imprisoned on the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917, but quickly made his way into the local Soviets following his release. A period of minor conflict followed; his pessimistic view on the outcome of the revolution put him briefly in total opposition to Lenin, who encouraged swift action at the time. In spite of this, he remained a leading Bolshevik and in 1917, after the Bolshevik victory in Russian, he was made First Chairman of the Revolutionary Central Executive of Soviets. This was added to later, with his appointment to the post of Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. He was also a founding member, and later chairman of the Politburo.
In 1918, Kamenev was made Chairman of the Moscow Soviet, leaving him practically in control of one of Russia’s two capitals. On the outbreak of Civil War in 1920, good relations with Commissar for War, Leon Trotsky were lost and he became more allied with the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Grigory Zinoviev. In 1924, Lenin suffered a series of strokes, casting doubts on the future of the party leadership. Following the soured relations with his brother-in-law Trotsky, Kamenev allied closer with Zinoviev and Stalin, forming the Centralist Troika. The Troika denounced Trotsky and his policies, all but eliminating him from any chance of leadership, and while relations began to crumble within the Troika, Kamenev and Zinoviev still played a key part in retaining Stalin’s position of power.
The all but gone alliance between Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin came to a head in 1925, when Zinoviev and Kamenev fell under criticism from Stalin. Branded ‘The New Opposition’, Kamenev demanded at the Fourteenth Party Congress that Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary and from the party. However, Kamenev found himself in a minority; Stalin’s supporters denounced this idea and Kamenev was demoted to a non-voting member of the party. After the realisation of Stalin’s intentions, Kamenev sided with Zinoviev once again and then allied with ex-opponent Trotsky and his supporters to form the ‘United Opposition’. Defeated in 1926 and throughout the following years, Kamenev was removed from all his posts before being expelled from the party. Between 1933 and 1934, Kamenev and Zinoviev were re-elected into the party and forced to publicly denounce their former lawlessness.
After the murder of Sergei Kirov, Kamenev and Zinoviev were again arrested and forced to admit ‘moral complicity’ in connection with the murder. Kamenev was sentenced to five years in prison. In August 1936, Kamenev and others were roped into the cleverly rehearsed ‘trial of the sixteen’, in which he, Zinoviev and other Bolshevik leaders were accused of acts of sabotage, espionage and attempted murder. Having been found guilty, Kamenev was shot on August 25th 1936.
Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938)(Hиколáй Ивáиович Буxáрин) Nikolai Bukharin was born on September 27th 1888 to cultured and educated parents. Bukharin became one of the most intelligent students throughout his academic years, as well as one of the most intellectual men of the Bolshevik Party. Bukharin was introduced to left wing radicalism while still at college and by age 16, had already become a leading member of students devoted to the revolutionary Social Democratic Party.
While moving in and out of exile in numerous countries, Bukharin busied himself with learning the customs and languages of the West – by 1917 he could speak and write English, French and German. He also devoted time to becoming politically minded and perfecting his skills as a theoretician. Such was the case, that upon his return to Moscow following the February Revolution, his political astuteness and theoretical skills were seen as second only to Lenin. Lenin himself said of Bukharin “he is the greatest and most valuable theoretician in the party” and “deservedly the favourite of the party”.
Bukharin quickly established himself as the head of Pravda, and was a member of the Politburo for 10 years. His most famous political stance was as a defender of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. It was not until Lenin’s death in 1924 however, that Bukharin could truly begin to show his potential. As the party’s leading political thinker, Bukharin found himself – along with Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky – as a candidate for leadership of the party. As tensions began to rise, Bukharin sided with Stalin, with his theory of ‘Socialism in one Country’, to counteract Trotsky’s theory of ‘Permanent Revolution’. Bukharin was also responsible for the introduction of a new agricultural theory – small farmers only produced enough food to feed themselves, while the large farmers were to provide a surplus that could be used to feed the factory workers in the towns. When these agricultural theories were attacked by Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin succeeded in removing the pair from the party. When Stalin began to attack the Kulaks, Bukharin bravely continued to defend them in private, for fear that openly negative speeches would divide the party.
In 1928, after realising the truth, Bukharin contacted Kamenev and said of Stalin “at any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone” – Stalin had played each faction off against the other to gain power for himself. However, the situation was too desperate. Despite the combined forces of all the senior Bolshevik leaders, Stalin had spread his influence to such a great extent that he could not be stopped. In 1929, Bukharin was stripped of his duties and positions and switched to loyally supporting Stalin’s new theories. However, most likely due to fear of an overthrow of power, Stalin found reasons to accuse Bukharin of treason. On March 15th 1938, Bukharin was charged with deception and disloyalty, and shot.
Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952)(Aлексáндра Mиxáйловна Коллонтáй) Born into a wealthy family of Ukrainian, Russian and Finnish background, Alexandra Kollontai was raised in both Russia and Finland, and acquired an early fluency in languages. Kollontai began political work in 1894, when she was a new mother, by teaching evening classes for workers in St. Petersburg. Through that activity, she was drawn into both public and clandestine work with the Political Red Cross, an organisation set up to help political prisoners. In 1895, she read August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, which had a major influence on her future ideas and activity. By 1898, Kollontai was fully committed to Marxism, and had left her husband and child to study in Zurich under the Marxist economist Heinrich Herkner. In 1899, she began her underground work for the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).
From 1905 through 1908, Kollontai led the campaign which has most clearly established her place in history – to organise the women workers of Russia to fight for their own interests, against employers, against bourgeois feminism, and, where necessary, against the conservatism and male chauvinism of the socialist organisations. Through interventions at meetings of the liberal Women’s Union, strikes and protests, the foundations were laid for a mass movement. At the end of 1908, after three months spent evading arrest, Kollontai was finally forced to flee into exile. From then until 1917, she remained outside Russia, although many of her works were published there. She worked as a fulltime agitator for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and travelled in England, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and Switzerland in the period before the War. In 1914, she organised opposition in Germany and Austria against the coming war, and was arrested and imprisoned after it broke out. Released, she moved to Scandinavia and established contact with Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland.
When the February revolution of 1917 broke out, Kollontai was in Norway. From the moment of her arrival in Russia, she joined Shlyapnikov and Molotov in the fight for a clear policy of no support to the provisional government, against the opposition of Kamenev and Stalin. She was elected a member of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and at a tumultuous meeting of Social Democrats on April 4th, she was the only speaker other than Lenin to support the demand for “All Power to the Soviets.” In October 1917, Kollontai participated in the decision to launch an armed uprising against the government. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, she was elected Commissar of Social Welfare in the new Soviet government. In 1918 she led a delegation to Sweden, England and France to raise support for the new government. Upon her return, she argued against ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and resigned from the government, feeling that the unity of the Commissariat would be jeopardised by having a member in opposition on such a crucial question. For the rest of 1918, she was active as an agitator and organiser, and played a key role in organising the First All-Russian Congress of Working and Peasant Women in 1918.
At the Eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Kollontai was elected a member of the Executive Committee. At that congress, she joined the ‘Worker’s Opposition,’ an opposition tendency in the Bolshevik Party opposed to what they saw as the increasing bureaucratisation of the Soviet state. The Worker’s Opposition, which had majority support in the Metalworker’s Union and the Ukrainian Communist Party, was banned along with all other factions at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, but its members continued to be active as leaders of both the Bolshevik Party and the Soviets. Kollontai was re-elected to the Executive Committee of the Soviet in December. In 1922, she was one of the signers of the Letter of the 22 to the Communist International, protesting the banning of factions in Russia. In 1922, Kollontai was appointed as advisor to the Soviet legation in Norway. From then until her retirement for health reasons in 1945, Kollontai was effectively in exile as a diplomat, and her views on the status of women were marginalised and trivialised in the USSR itself. As ambassador to Norway and Sweden, as a trade delegate to Mexico, as a delegate to the League of Nations, and as negotiator of the Finno-Soviet peace treaty of 1940, she served the USSR with what was generally regarded as great finesse. From 1946 until her death in 1952, she was an advisor to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926)(Фeликc Эдмyндoвич Дзepжинcкиѝ, Feliks Dzierżyński) Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky was born into a Noble Polish Szlachta family in Dziarzhynava estate, Western Belarus. While still a student, he became involved in antigovernment politics, and on completion of his secondary education he embarked upon a career as a revolutionary political leader. Between 1897 and 1905, in which he only returned briefly from exile in Berlin to participate in the failed Revolution, he was arrested, imprisoned and exiled numerous times. Although most of his actual political work was in Poland, he became more deeply involved with the Russian Social Democratic party than with the Social Democratic party of Poland and Lithuania; he was ultimately identified with the Bolshevik faction of the Russian revolutionary movement, led by Lenin. It was only after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 that Dzerzhinsky’s talents began to be fully harnessed by the party. In December 1917 he accepted appointment as chairman of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, more commonly known as the Cheka – based on the Russian abbreviation BКЧ. Dzerzhinsky’s new organisation was vital for the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, acting as internal troops to combat reactionary forces, such as the Libertarian Socialists of Petrograd, and ‘class enemies’ such as bourgeois citizens and clergymen of the Orthodox Church. The Cheka also became infamous for its punishment of army deserters and their relatives, as well as countless atrocities committed against the White forces, displaying often inhuman brutality.
In 1922, after the Civil War had died down, the Cheka was rearranged to form the GPU – ГПЮ: State Political Directorate – and the NKVD – HКBД: People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs – the leadership of which Dzerzhinsky retained to some degree as Commissar for Internal Affairs. After the death of Lenin in 1924, the struggle for power between Stalin and his opponents sharpened, and Dzerzhinsky increasingly played the role of an apologist of party unity and Stalin’s claim to power. During a particularly acute Central Committee confrontation in 1926, Dzerzhinsky, vigorously defending Stalin, suffered a fatal heart attack. Dzerzhinsky would be made an icon by Stalin’s government and those after it as the founder of the Cheka, then the KGB, and as a true militant revolutionary.
Sergei Kirov (1886-1934)(Cepгéй Mирóнович Кѝров) Sergei Kirov was born in Urzhum, Russia, on March 15th 1886. His parents died when he was young and he was brought up by his grandmother until he was seven when he was sent to an orphanage. Kirov became a Marxist at the Kazan Technical School and joined the Social Democratic Party in 1904. He is noted to have taken part in the 1905 Revolution in St. Petersburg, after which he was arrested and later released.
Kirov now joined the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party. He lived in Tomsk where he was involved in the printing of revolutionary literature. He also helped to organise a successful strike of railway workers. In 1906 Kirov moved to Moscow but was soon arrested for printing illegal literature. Several of his comrades were executed but he was sentenced to three years in prison. The prison had a good library and during his stay he took the opportunity to improve his education. Kirov returned to revolutionary activity after his release and in 1915 he was once again arrested for printing illegal literature. After a year in custody he moved to the Caucasus where he stayed until the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917.
After the October Revolution, Kirov was sent to fight the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Caucasus. He fought in the Red Army until the defeat of General Denikin in 1920. In 1921 Kirov was put in charge of the Azerbaijan Party organisation and the following year helped organise the Transcaucasian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. Kirov loyally supported Joseph Stalin and in 1926 he was rewarded by being appointed head of the Leningrad Party organisation. He joined the Politburo in 1930, and was quickly established as one of the leading figures in the party. Many felt that he was being groomed for the future leadership of the party by Stalin.
In the summer of 1932, Joseph Stalin became aware that opposition to his policies were growing. Some party members were publicly criticising Stalin and calling for the readmission of Trotsky to the party. When the issue was discussed at the Politburo, Stalin demanded that the critics should be arrested and executed. Kirov, who up to this time had been a staunch Stalinist, adviced against this reaction. When the vote was taken, the majority of the Politburo supported Kirov against Stalin. In the spring of 1934, Kirov put forward a policy of reconciliation and rehabilitation. He argued that people should be released from prison who had opposed the government’s policy of collectivisation and industrialisation. Once again, Stalin found himself in a minority in the Politburo. After years of arranging for the removal of his opponents from the party, Stalin found himself facing the greatest threat yet to his personal hegemony.
Sergei Kirov was assassinated by a young party member, Leonid Nikolayev, on December 1st 1934. Stalin proclaimed that an extensive plot had been uncovered; Nikolayev was one of countless Trotskyite-Zinovievite conspirators that had attempted to assassinate the Soviet leadership before re-establishing capitalism in Russia. Kirov’s fate was to become the trigger for the greatest political massacre of the 20th century, the Great Purge.
Joseph Stalin (1878-1953)(Иосиф Cтaлин, იოსებ სტალინი) Stalin, an adopted name meaning ‘Man of Steel,’ was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in Gori, Georgia. His father was a cobbler, a drunkard who beat him badly and frequently left the family when Joseph was young. His mother supported herself and her son – her other three children died young and Joseph was effectively an only child – by taking in washing. She managed, despite great hardship, to send Joseph to school and then on to Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tbilisi, hoping he would become a priest. However, after three years of studies he was expelled in 1899, for not attending an exam and for propagating books by Karl Marx.
Joining a Georgian Social Democratic organisation in 1898, he became active in the revolutionary underground as organiser of armed robberies, and was seven times arrested, repeatedly imprisoned, and twice exiled to Siberia between 1902 and 1913. During those years he changed his name and became more closely identified with revolutionary Marxism. At this time his intimacy with Vladimir Lenin and Bukharin grew. In 1912, he was co-opted on to the Communist Central Committee. Later he also edited the new Communist paper, Pravda. As a leading Bolshevik, he played an active role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Stalin became People’s Commissar for Nationalities in the first Soviet government, and a member of the Communist Party Politburo, although his activities throughout the counter-revolution and the war with Poland were confined to organising a ‘Red Terror’ in Tsaritsin. With his appointment as General Secretary to the party Central Committee in 1922, a post he held until his death, he began to build up the power that would ensure his control of the situation after Lenin’s death in 1924. He also occupied other key positions that enabled him to build up total personal power in the party and Soviet government. Stalin was known for his piercing eyes and intimidating manners that he used to defeat opponents into submissive retreat during private discussions. In 1927 Stalin was diagnosed with ‘Typical clinical paranoia’ by the leading psychiatrist I. Sechenov and his assistant doctors.
Stalin pursued a policy of building ‘socialism in one country’, and gradually isolated and disgraced his political rivals, notably Trotsky. He stopped any economic freedoms and nationalised all of the Soviet Union’s economic resources. The measures he took to eliminate those who opposed his will involved the death by execution or famine of up to 10 million peasants. Between 1934 and 1938 he inaugurated a massive purge of the party, government, armed forces and intelligentsia, in which millions of ‘enemies of the people’ were imprisoned, exiled or executed. In 1936, Red Army forces and material went to the support of the Spanish Socialist government. After the Munich Agreement, Stalin signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Adolf Hitler which bought the Soviet Union two years respite from involvement in the impending war. After the German invasion of 1941, the USSR became a member of the Grand Alliance and Stalin, as war leader, assumed the title of Generalissimo. Later, Stalin took part in the conferences of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, where his talks with Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Harry S. Truman resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries of post-war eastern and central Europe. From 1945 until his death, Stalin resumed his repressive measures at home and conducted foreign policies that contributed to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Stalin had little interest in family life, although he was married twice. His first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died three years after their marriage and left a son, Jacob who died in a Nazi concentration camp. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, attempted to moderate his politics, but she died by suicide leaving a daughter, Svetlana, and an alcoholic son, Vasili Stalin, who died in exile in 1962.
Stalin died suddenly on March 5th 1953, in somewhat mysterious circumstances, after announcing his intention of arresting Jewish doctors in the Kremlin, whom he believed were plotting to kill him. The cause of death announced was brain haemorrhage. Stalin was posthumously denounced by Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 for crimes against the party and for building a ‘cult of personality’. In 1961, Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s Mausoleum, where it had been displayed since his death, and buried in the Kremlin wall.
Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986)(Bячecлáв Mиxáйлoвич Móлoтoв) Vyacheslav Molotov, the son of middle-class parents, was born in Kukarka, Russia, on 25th February 1890. He was sent to Kazan to be educated and while there met a group of students who introduced him to the ideas of Karl Marx. In 1905 he joined the Social Democratic Labour Party and after the 1905 Revolution began to associate with the Bolshevik faction of the party. Molotov was soon arrested and sent to Vologda province by authorities. After his release, Molotov left Russia to join other Bolsheviks living in exile. He met Vladimir Lenin and it was agreed that he should return to St. Petersburg to organise the distribution of Zvezda, the party newspaper. Later, Molotov was to become editorial secretary of Pravda. The Okhrana attempted to arrest Molotov in 1913 but he managed to escape and went into hiding. Several times he came close to being captured and so he moved to Moscow. However, several police spies had joined the Bolsheviks in Moscow and Molotov was soon arrested and deported to Irkutsk in Siberia. In 1915 Molotov escaped from Siberia and managed to get to Petrograd where he soon established himself as one of the leaders of the Bolsheviks in the city. He worked closely with Alexander Shlyapnikov and together they helped organise the strikes that resulted in the February Revolution.
Molotov also became a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, led by Trotsky, which planned the October Revolution. In 1921, Molotov was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and three years later became a member of the Politburo. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Molotov switched his support to Joseph Stalin and played an important role in the launching of the Five Year Plans. In 1930, Stalin appointed Molotov as his Prime Minister. When the Jewish origins of Maxim Litvinov created problems for Stalin during his negotiations with Germany in 1939, Molotov became the new Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Soon afterwards Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. On 25th September 1940, the German foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, sent a telegram to Molotov informing him that Germany, Italy and Japan were about to sign a military alliance. Ribbentrop pointed out that the alliance was to be directed towards the United States and not the Soviet Union. Molotov already knew about the proposed German-Japanese Pact. Richard Sorge, a German journalist working in Tokyo, was a Soviet spy and had already informed Molotov that Hitler was involved in negotiations with Japan. In Sorge’s view, the pact was directed against the Soviet Union but it was not until December 1940 that he was able to send Molotov full details of Operation Barbarossa.
During the Great Patriotic War, Molotov was at Stalin’s side during the Allied conferences at Teheran in 1943, Yalta in 1945 and Potsdam in 1945. He also attended the San Francisco Conference which saw the birth of the United Nations. In 1949, Molotov lost his post when Stalin appointed Andrei Vyshinsky as his Foreign Minister. After the death of Stalin in 1953, Vyshinsky was sacked and Molotov returned to his old job. In June 1956, Molotov joined the group that unsuccessfully tried to oust Nikita Khrushchev from his newly acquired leadership of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev demoted him to the position of ambassador to Mongolia. He was later denounced as being involved in the arrest and execution of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and other leading Bolsheviks in the 1930’s, and in 1964 he was expelled from the party. Vyacheslav Molotov died in Moscow on 8th November 1986.
Lavrenty Beria (1899-1953)(Лaврентий Пaвлович Бepия, ლავრენტი ბერია) The son of a Georgian peasant, Beria joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917, while a student at a technical school in Baku. He was involved in security affairs for the Bolsheviks in Transcaucasia and quickly became the chief of Soviet security operations there. In the 1930’s, under Stalin’s patronage, he rose to national prominence and in 1934 was elected to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. In 1935 he wrote a book on the history of the Bolsheviks in Transcaucasia, a book that started the myth of a romantic young Stalin leading the revolutionary movement. Its publication firmly established his close relationship with Stalin. At the end of 1938, Beria – who had hitherto not been directly involved in the purge trials of the mid-1930’s – became the Commissar for Internal Affairs, in charge of the NKVD. He concluded the era of the Great Purge by liquidating police officials, including his erstwhile superior, Yezhov. Though he ended the party purges, Beria initiated terrorist activities of his own, including wholesale deportations from the Baltic areas to forced labour camps.
During the war, Beria enhanced his prestige by assuming a wide variety of party, government, and military posts, even becoming a Marshal of the Soviet Union. In 1946 he became a full member of the Politburo. However, he devoted most of his attention to the work of the NKVD and was undoubtedly responsible for the lesser purges of 1949 – notably the ‘Leningrad Case’. According to some accounts, by 1952 Stalin himself was alarmed by the amount of power wielded by Beria and planned to oust him.
When Stalin died in March 1953, Beria, Molotov and Malenkov formed a triumvirate in an apparent effort to rule the Soviet Union. However, other Bolsheviks, fearing that once again power would be concentrated in one man, conspired to dispose of Beria. Officially, it was announced that Beria had been arrested in the summer of 1953, charged with espionage and various other offenses, and then tried and executed at the end of the year. But there are persistent and well-placed rumours that he was shot to death at a Politburo meeting soon after Stalin’s death. In any case, news of his death was received with great relief by all levels of the population. As far as is known, Beria and his top aides were the last Bolsheviks of stature to have been executed. His name has been expunged from Soviet works, and he is generally regarded as one of the most heinous villains of the Stalin era.
Georgy Malenkov (1902-1988)(Гeópгий Maкcимилиáнoвич Maлeнкóв) Georgy Malenkov was born in Orenburg, Russia, into an army officer’s family of Macedonian-Slavonic origin. He joined the Red Army in 1919 and the Communist Party in April 1920. During his military service, he was a political commissar. After leaving the Red Army in 1921, he studied in Moscow Higher Technical School. After graduating in 1925, he worked for the Communist Party and became one of Stalin’s confidants. Together with Lavrenty Beria, Malenkov aided Stalin during the purges of the late 1930’s.
Named as candidate for the Politburo, Malenkov joined in 1946. Although Malenkov fell out of favour in place of his rivals Zhdanov and Beria, he soon came back into Stalin’s favour, especially because of Zhdanov’s downfall. Beria soon joined Malenkov, and both of them saw all of Zhdanov’s allies purged from the party and sent to labour camps. In 1952, Malenkov became Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. The death of Stalin in 1953 briefly brought Malenkov to the highest position he would ever hold. With Beria’s support, Malenkov became Chairman of the Council of Ministers, but he had to resign from the Secretariat on March 13th due to the opposition of other members of the Presidium. Nikita Khrushchev assumed the position of First Secretary in September ushering in a period of a Malenkov-Khrushchev duumvirate. Malenkov retained the office of Premier for two years. During these years, he was vocal about his opposition to nuclear armament, declaring “a nuclear war could lead to global destruction.” He also advocated refocusing the economy on the production of consumer goods and away from heavy industry, something his successor Nikita Khrushchev would escalate.
He was forced to resign in February 1955 after he came under attack for his closeness to Beria and for the slow pace of his reforms, particularly when it came to rehabilitating political prisoners. Malenkov remained in the Presidium, but in 1957 was again forced to resign due to participation in a failed attempt, together with Bulganin, Molotov, and Kaganovich, to depose Khrushchev. Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev spared their lives and reduced their influence on Soviet politics. In 1961, he was expelled from the Communist Party and exiled within the Soviet Union. He became a manager of a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan. In the last years before his death he was a singer in a church choir in Yelokhovsky Cathedral in Moscow. His death in 1988 was ignored by Soviet officials.
Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971)(Hикѝтa Cepгéeвич Xpyщёв) Nikita Khrushchev was born on April 17th 1894 in Kalinovka, Russia. His family moved to the Ukraine in 1908 and he only received about two years of formal education before being made an apprentice metalworker. After the start of the war in 1914, Nikita stayed home and helped to organise trade unions to protest worker oppression. When the February Revolution began in 1917, he took up arms with the Red Army until the end of the war. In 1918, he was made an official member of the Communist Party and given a management position in Kiev.
In 1931, he moved to Moscow and was promoted to the position of First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee. He was promoted again to First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1938. In 1939, he was elected to the Politburo, but left after the start of the War to serve in the Russian Army as a Lieutenant General. After the Germans invaded western Russia, he was placed in charge of the defence of the Ukraine, but failed to defend it and was recalled to Moscow. After that, he was made a political officer for the southern Soviet Union for the remainder of the war.
When Stalin died in 1953, a power struggle occurred, but Khrushchev rose to the top and seized the position of Communist Party Leader on September 7th 1953. He also made sure that his opponent, Beria, was executed shortly after to remove the threat of a coup. In a secret speech on February 23rd 1956, he denounced the excesses of Stalinism and promised to reform the Soviet Union. In early 1958, he was appointed Prime Minister and on March 27th 1958, he was declared Premier of the Soviet Union. After taking the reins of the economy, he began to focus workers on the production of consumer products rather than raw materials. In 1959, he invited United States President Richard Nixon for a tour of the Soviet Union and revealed his opinion that the US was a rival and not an evil country.
During a United Nations conference on September 29th 1960, Khrushchev made a fool of himself by interrupting speeches by talking loudly in Russian and pounding his desk, interrupting the British Prime Minister. He also verbally assaulted several other UN delegates, even calling the Filipino ambassador a lackey of capitalism. In 1961, the United States deployed nuclear missiles to Turkey, presenting a threat to the Soviet Union. Khrushchev decided to deploy similar missiles to revolutionary Cuba to create a more equalised military situation and did so in July of that year. When the United States discovered the presence of the missiles, a stand-off was started that nearly caused nuclear war. On October 22nd 1961, the United States formed a blockade around Cuba to prevent the arrival of new missiles and called for the Soviet Union to remove the missiles already there. After an emergency session at the United Nations and much diplomatic discussion, Khrushchev agreed to remove his missiles as long as US missiles in Turkey were removed. The entire situation created a huge embarrassment for Khrushchev, who was perceived as having backed down to the Americans. Fidel Castro felt betrayed by the Soviet Union and relations between the two countries never completely healed.
On October 14th 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power by his opponents in the Communist Party, who termed him an embarrassment to the Soviet Union. He was placed under house arrest and died on September 11th 1971 in Moscow.

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Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982)(Лeoнѝд Ильѝч Бpéжнeв) Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born on December 19th 1906 in Kamenskoe, Ukraine. He attended Dnepropetrovsk Industrial College, where he joined the Komsomol. In 1931 he became a full member of the Communist Party. He had no adult memories of life under Tsarist rule and was too young to have participated in the leadership feud after the death of Lenin. During the purges under Stalin, Brezhnev proved himself a loyal Stalinist, suitable for the ranks of the Communist hierarchy. In 1935 he was drafted into a tank school. There he started a career as Political Commissar and in 1936 was transferred to Regional Government, rising to the Party Secretary of Dnepropetrovsk in 1939. On June 22nd 1941, the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Brezhnev was assigned to evacuate military industries before the Nazis reached his city. During the war, Brezhnev was assigned as Political Commissar to Transcaucasian Front; then to First Ukrainian Front. There, Chief Political Commissar was Nikita Khrushchev, who had patronised Brezhnev’s career since 1931. He was promoted to Chief Political Commissar of the Fourth Ukrainian Front, rising to a Major General. He was in Prague on May 9th 1945 when the War ended. Brezhnev took part in the Victory Parade on June 22nd 1945 in Red Square, and saluted to Stalin, who stood atop the mausoleum of Lenin.
Brezhnev was promoted by Khrushchev to Communist Party Secretary of Moldavia in 1950. In 1952 he was promoted to the candidate member of the Politburo, and had a meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin. “What a handsome Moldavian”, said Stalin of Brezhnev. The death of Stalin on March 5th 1953 was followed by Khrushchev’s take-over as the Head of the Communist Party in September 1953. Main opponents were eliminated in a series of political executions, including that of Lavrenty Beria in December 1953. Others were exiled, or degraded, like Marshal Georgy Zhukov. In 1953, Brezhnev was made Chief of the Political Directorate of the Army and the Navy (GPU). In 1955 he was made Communist Party Secretary of Kazakhstan. In 1957 Brezhnev backed Khrushchev in a power-fight against Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich and in 1959 he was promoted to Second Secretary of the Central Committee. In May 1960, he became the President of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of the Soviet Union.
On October 14th 1964, Brezhnev with co-conspirators Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny, dismissed Khrushchev from office and denounced him. Khrushchev was forced into retirement under a house arrest on a small farm outside Moscow. Brezhnev reversed liberalisation, ended the “Khrushchev Thaw”, and enforced censorship and total control over information, cultural life and education. In his May 1965 speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of Victory in the Second World War, Brezhnev mentioned Stalin positively. Brezhnev died on November 10th 1982, while still in office. He was buried in the Kremlin Wall in an elaborate ceremony.
Yuri Andropov (1914-1984)(Юpий Bлaдѝмиpoвич Aндpóпoв) Yuri Andropov was born on June 15th 1914 in Nagutskoye, Russia. As a youth, he studied at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College, but left to join the Komsomol in 1930. In 1939, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was appointed first secretary of the Komsomol in the Karelo-Finnish Republic.
When the Second World War started, Andropov was involved in the organisation of guerrillas to fight the advancing German Army. In 1951, he moved to Moscow and joined the Secretariat. In 1954, he was appointed as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary and helped to make the decision to invade the country in 1956. In 1957, Andropov was recalled to Moscow and appointed Chairman of the Department for Liaison with Communist and Worker’s Parties in Socialist Countries. In 1961, he was given full membership in the Communist Party’s Central Committee. A year later, he was promoted to Secretariat of the Central Committee.
In 1967, Andropov was chosen to serve as head of the KGB and introduced to the Politburo. In 1973, he became a full member of the Politburo, but continued to work as head of the KGB. In May of 1982, he was appointed to the Secretariat as a replacement for Mikhail Suslov and was forced to resign from the KGB. On November 12th 1982, he was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. As leader of the Soviet Union, Andropov mostly worked towards improving the country’s economy and reducing rampant corruption. When he took office, the Soviet Union was in the process of invading Afghanistan, but he did nothing to stop it, despite protests from other countries. He proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union reduce nuclear weapons levels, but the Reagan administration refused to do so. While in office, he also made a famous move of inviting a young American girl named Samantha Smith to the Soviet Union after she wrote him a letter. On February 9th 1984, Yuri Andropov died from kidney failure. He was buried in Moscow’s Kremlin Wall.
Konstantin Chernenko (1911-1985)(Константѝи Устѝнович Чернéико) Chernenko was born on September 24th 1911 in Bolshaya Tes, Siberia. He attended the Higher School for Party Organisers from 1943 to 1945 and the Kishinev Pedagogical Institute in 1953. Having joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1931, he progressed through a series of positions in charge of agitation and propaganda, rising to the director level for the Krasnoyarsk territory. He spent the 1930’s writing propaganda to support Stalin’s campaign to liquidate the Kulaks. In 1941, he became head of the Krasnoyarsk Territorial Party Committee and from 1948 to 1956 served as head of the agitation and propaganda department of the Moldavian republic. Here he met Brezhnev and they became good friends.
After Stalin’s death, Brezhnev’s power built and brought advancement to Chernenko. He appointed Chernenko to chief of the Central Committee’s agitation and propaganda position in 1956; to chief of staff of the Presidium in 1960; and to head of the General Department of the Central Committee in 1965. Chernenko’s power developed primarily from his closeness to Brezhnev. In the 1970’s, Chernenko made a bid for power and became a full member of the Central Committee in 1971. He was appointed to the Communist Party Secretariat in 1976 and to full membership in the Politburo in 1978.
However, Chernenko’s political ascent was blocked by anti-Brezhnevite forces, including the KGB and the military, and he lost the struggle for power after Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Andropov soon weakened with poor health and Chernenko, though terminally ill, came to power with support from the party old guard. He was named General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Chairperson of the Presidium, and leader of the Defence Council after Andropov’s death in 1984. Chernenko was perceived only as a temporary caretaker of the government and an agent of change from the reforms of Andropov and his younger technocrats. While in power, he supported a greater role for the unions, educational reform, and trimming of the bureaucracy. In foreign policy, he escalated the cold war with the United States and negotiated a trade pact with China. He died on March 10th 1985 in Moscow after only a year in power.
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-)(Mиxaѝл Cepгéeвич Горбачёв) Born in the agricultural region of Stavropol, Gorbachev studied law at Moscow University and in 1953 married a philosophy student, Raisa Maksimovna Titorenko. Returning to Stavropol, he moved gradually upward in the local Communist Party. In 1970, he became Stavropol Party leader and was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Regarded as a skilled technocrat and a reformer, Gorbachev joined the Communist Party Secretariat as Agriculture Secretary, and in 1980 he joined the Politburo as the protégé of Yuri Andropov. After Andropov’s ascension to party leadership, Gorbachev assumed full responsibility for the economy. Following the death of Chernenko in 1985, Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the party despite being the youngest member of the Politburo. He embarked on a comprehensive program of political, economic, and social liberalisation under the slogans of glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring). The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 forced Gorbachev to allow even greater freedom of expression. The government released political prisoners, allowed increased emigration, attacked corruption, and encouraged the critical re-examination of Soviet history.
In a series of summit talks, Gorbachev improved relations with US President Ronald Reagan, with whom he signed an Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) arms limitation treaty in 1987. By 1989 he had brought about the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and had sanctioned the end of the Communist monopoly on political power in Eastern Europe. For his contributions to reducing East-West tensions, he was awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. By 1990, however, Gorbachev’s perestroika program had failed to deliver significant improvement in the economy, and the elimination of political and social control had released latent ethnic and national tensions in the Baltic states, in the constituent republics of Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova.
A newly created Congress of People’s Deputies voted in March 1990, to end the Communist party’s control over the government and elected Gorbachev Executive President. During 1990 and 1991, however, the reform drive stalled, and Gorbachev appeared to be mollifying remaining hard-liners, who were disgruntled over the deterioration of the Soviet Union and the increasing marginalisation of the Communist Party. An unsuccessful anti-Gorbachev coup by hard-liners in August 1991 shifted greater authority to the Russian Republic’s president, Boris Yeltsin, and greatly accelerated change. Gorbachev dissolved the Communist Party, granted the Baltic States independence, and proposed a much looser, chiefly economic, federation among the remaining republics. With the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) on December 8th 1991, the federal government of the Soviet Union became superfluous, and on December 25th, Gorbachev resigned as President. He currently heads the Gorbachev Foundation, Green Cross International, and the Civic Forum movement.

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Music:

APPROVED COMPOSERS:
Dimitri Kabalevsky Nikolai Kapustin Tikhon Khrennikov Nikolai Miaskovsky Sergei Prokofiev Sergei Rachmaninoff Vissarion Shebalin Dmitri Shostakovich Boris Tchaikovsky

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Movies:

APPROVED CINEMA:
Battleship Potemkin , Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1925) Strike , Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1925) October (Ten Days That Shook The World) , Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1927) Ivan The Terrible , Directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1944, 1958)

Books:

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E. Belfort Bax Alexander Bogdanov Amadeo Bordiga James Cannon Tony Cliff James Connolly Eugene Debs Daniel DeLeon Isaac Deutscher Hal Draper Raya Dunayevskaya Fredrick Engels Paul Foot Martin Glaberman Frank Glass Antonio Gramsci Ted Grant Che Guevara Duncan Hallas Evald Ilyenkov CLR James Karl Kautsky Alexandra Kollontai Vladimir Lenin Karl Liebknecht Rosa Luxemburg John MacLean Tan Malaka Ernest Mandel Karl Marx Paul Mattick William Morris George Novack John Reed Max Shachtman Leon Trotsky

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The Marxist Forum British Socialists The Red Army Communist Youth UK CWI-Committee For Workers' International The Communist Party of Great Britain The Marxists of Myspace! The Red Terror Revolution The South West London Young Neo-Communist And Socialist Movement The Karl Marx Society UK Socialists Trotsky UK! The Mikhail Gorbachev Society E.Z.L.N. Solidarity U?ITED S?VIET SIM?? ?EPU?LIC Komsomol VLKSM Russian Hockey 100% Russian THE BRUNIVERSE: The (In)Glorious Return of THE BRUNO MATTOX SAGA to MySpace!!! The Revolute Order of Socio-Communists A.C.O Star Trek: Mirror Universe History Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics Technocracy The Communist party of Bedford Michigan
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We are indebted to the following online resources:
The Marxist Internet Archive Youth for Socialist Action! Spartacus Educational Max Martin: Myspace.com/gebrauchsforschung_ferkel Onno van Rijen's Shostakovich & Other Soviet Composers History Guide Free Information Society Bookrags Fred Buch-Communism Online

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CONSTITUTION OF THE CCCP

I. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOVIET SOCIETY 1.      The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a socialist state of workers and peasants. 2.      The So...
Posted by CCCP on Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:27:00 PST