Soviet in the context of Gulag

Victory in Europe Day is the day celebrating the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces on Tuesday, 8 May 1945; it marked the official surrender of all German military operations.

Most former Soviet countries, and some others, celebrate on 9 May, as Germany's unconditional surrender entered into force at 23:01 on 8 May Central European Summer Time; this corresponded with 00:01 on 9 May in Moscow Time.

Unsafe abortions are defined as procedures for terminating a pregnancy that are “performed by persons lacking the necessary information or skills, in an environment lacking minimal medical standards, or both.” These include self-induced abortions, abortions in unhygienic conditions, and abortions performed by medical practitioners who do not provide appropriate post-abortion attention. About 45% of the 73 million abortions each year are considered unsafe, amounting to about 33 million unsafe abortions.

Most (97%) unsafe abortions occur in the developing world, where modern birth control is not readily available, and affordable, well-trained medical practitioners are scarce, and abortion is often illegal, with the more restrictive the law, the higher the rates of death and other complications.

Secret police (or political police) are police, intelligence or security agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's political, ideological or social opponents and dissidents. Secret police organizations are characteristic of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. They protect the political power of a dictator or regime and often operate outside the law to repress dissidents and weaken political opposition, frequently using violence. They may enjoy legal sanction to hold and charge suspects without ever identifying their organization.

Collective leadership (Russian: коллективное руководство, kollektivnoye rukovodstvo), or collectivity of leadership (Russian: коллективность руководства, kollektivnost rukovodstva), became - alongside doctrine such as democratic centralism - official dogma for governance in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and other socialist states espousing communism.In the Soviet Union itself, the collective leadership concept operated by distributing powers and functions among members of the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as well as the Council of Ministers, to hinder any attempts to create a one-man dominance over the Soviet political system by a Soviet leader, such as that seen under Joseph Stalin's rule between the late 1920s and 1953. On the national level, the heart of the collective leadership was officially the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Collective leadership was characterised by limiting the powers of the General Secretary and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers as related to other offices by enhancing the powers of collective bodies, such as the Politburo.

Collective leadership became institutionalised in the upper levels of control in the Soviet Union following Stalin's death in March 1953, and subsequent Soviet Communist Party leaders ruled as part of a collective. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev criticized Stalin's dictatorial rule at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, but Khrushchev's own increasingly erratic decisions led to his ouster in 1964. The Party replaced Khrushchev in his posts with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and with Alexei Kosygin as Premier. Though Brezhnev gained more and more prominence over his colleagues, he retained the Politburo's support by consulting its members on all policies. Collective leadership continued under Yuri Andropov (General Secretary from 1982 to 1984) and Konstantin Chernenko (General Secretary from 1984 to 1985). Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms espoused open discussion from about 1986, leading to members of the leadership openly disagreeing on how little or how much reform was needed to rejuvenate the Soviet system.

Socialism in one country was a Soviet state policy to strengthen socialism within the country rather than socialism globally. Given the defeats of the 1917–1923 European communist revolutions, Joseph Stalin developed and encouraged the theory of the possibility of constructing socialism in the Soviet Union alone. The theory was eventually adopted as Soviet state policy.

As a political theory, its exponents argue that it contradicts neither world revolution nor world communism. The theory opposes Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and the communist left's theory of world revolution.

The Baltic offensive, also known as the Baltic strategic offensive, was the military campaign between the northern Fronts of the Red Army and the German Army Group North in the Baltic States during the autumn of 1944. The result of the series of battles was the isolation and encirclement of the Army Group North in the Courland Pocket and Soviet re-occupation of the Baltic States. In Soviet propaganda, this offensive was listed as one of Stalin's ten blows.

Geoffrey C. Roberts (born 1952) is a British historian specialising in Soviet diplomatic and military history of World War II. He is an emeritus professor of modern history at University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland.

The Lebanese Civil War (Arabic: الحرب الأهلية اللبنانية Al-Ḥarb al-Ahliyyah al-Libnāniyyah) was a multifaceted armed conflict that took place from 1975 to 1990. It resulted in an estimated 150,000 fatalities and led to the exodus of almost one million people from Lebanon.

The religious diversity of the Lebanese people played a notable role in the lead-up to and during the conflict: Lebanese Christians and Lebanese Sunni Muslims comprised the majority in the coastal cities; Lebanese Shia Muslims were primarily based throughout southern Lebanon and in the Beqaa Valley in the east; and Druze and Christians populated the country's mountainous areas. At the time, the Lebanese government was under the influence of elites within the Maronite Christian community. The link between politics and religion was reinforced under the French Mandate from 1920 to 1943, and the country's parliamentary structure favoured a leading position for Lebanese Christians, who constituted the majority of the population. However, Lebanon's Muslims comprised a large minority and the influx of thousands of Palestinians—first in 1948 and again in 1967—contributed to Lebanon's demographic shift towards an eventual Muslim majority. Lebanon's Christian-dominated government had been facing increasing opposition from Muslims, pan-Arabists, and left-wing groups. The Cold War also exerted a disintegrative effect on the country, closely linked to the political polarization that preceded the 1958 Lebanese crisis. Christians mostly sided with the Western world while Muslims, pan-Arabists, and leftists mostly sided with Soviet-aligned Arab countries.

The Aral Sea was an endorheic salt lake lying between Kazakhstan to its north and Uzbekistan to its south, which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up into desert by the 2010s. It was in the Aktobe and Kyzylorda regions of Kazakhstan and the Karakalpakstan autonomous region of Uzbekistan. The name roughly translates from Mongolic and Turkic languages to "Sea of Islands", a reference to the large number of islands (over 1,100) that once dotted its waters. The Aral Sea drainage basin encompasses Uzbekistan and parts of Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.

Formerly the third-largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea began shrinking in the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 2007, it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into four lakes: the North Aral Sea, the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea, and the smaller intermediate Barsakelmes Lake. By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea. In subsequent years occasional water flows have led to the southeastern lake sometimes being replenished to a small degree. Satellite images by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in modern history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up. The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert.

The All-Russian Congress of Soviets evolved from 1917 to become the supreme governing body of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 until 1936, effectively. The 1918 Constitution of the Russian SFSR mandated that Congress shall convene at least twice a year, with the duties of defining (and amending) the principles of the Soviet Constitution and ratifying peace treaties. The October Revolution ousted the provisional government of 1917, making the Congress of Soviets the sole, and supreme governing body. This Congress was not the same as the Congress of Soviets of the Soviet Union which governed the whole Soviet Union after its creation in 1922.

For the earlier portion of its life, the Congress was a democratic body. Over Russia there were hundreds of soviets, democratic local governing bodies in which the surrounding population could participate. The soviets elected the delegates to the Congress, and then in turn the Congress held the national authority, making the highest decisions. There were several political parties represented in the various sessions of the Congress, each of which fought for increasing their own influence in the soviets. However, as the Russian Civil War progressed, the soviets' authority was progressively reduced, with the rise of Stalinism effectively cementing this situation and decisively turning the Congress into a rubber stamp. The Congress was formed of representatives of city councils (1 delegate per 25,000 voters) and the congresses of the provincial (oblast) and autonomous republican councils (1 deputy for every 125,000 inhabitants).

The Romashkino field (Russian: Ромашкинское нефтяное месторождение; Tatar: Ромашкино нефть чыганагы) is an oil field in Leninogorsky District, southeastern Tatarstan, Russia. It was discovered by the Soviet Government in 1944 in the village of Romashkino. Extraction began in 1948 and some 3.5 billion tonnes of oil had been extracted by July 2025. It is the largest oil field of Volga-Ural Basin. The field is operated by Tatneft.

The field covers approximately 4,200 square kilometres (1,600 sq mi). The oil deposit is lays in depth of about 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) in Kinovskiy and Pashiyskiy formations. Since its commissioning, the Romashkino field had produced over 15 billion barrels (2.4×10^ m) of oil. Statistic analysis predicted depletion at 16.5 to 17.2 billion barrels (2.62×10^ to 2.73×10^ m). However, advanced technologies allow for extraction of more oil, including water injection.

The 1991 Leningrad municipal elections took place on June 12, 1991 in the city of Leningrad (modern-day Saint Petersburg), located in the then-Soviet republic of Russia. The elections included the city's first popular mayoral election and a non-binding referendum on whether to change the city's name to its historic name of "Saint Petersburg". The elections coincided with the 1991 Russian presidential election.

Roughly two-thirds of the city's approximately three million eligible voters participated in the election.

The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA; Dari: حزب دموکراتیک خلق افغانستان), known as the Homeland Party (Dari: حزب وطن, Hezb-e Watan) after June 1990, was a Marxist–Leninist political party in Afghanistan established on 1 January 1965. Four members of the party won seats in the 1965 Afghan parliamentary election, reduced to two seats in 1969, albeit both before the party was fully legal. For most of its existence, the party was split between the hardline Khalq and moderate Parcham factions, each of which claimed to represent the "true" PDPA.

The party adhered to Marxist–Leninist ideology and toed a staunch pro-Soviet political line. The PDPA's secret constitution, which was adopted by the party during its founding congress in January 1965 but never publicly released to party cadres, described itself as "the vanguard of the working class and all laborers in Afghanistan" and defined its party ideology as "the practical experience of Marxism–Leninism". While PDPA's internal documents incorporated explicitly Marxist terminology, the party refrained from formally branding itself as "communist" in public, instead using labels such as "national democratic" and "socialist". PDPA's public platform document published in April 1966 asserted that its political objectives involved the creation of a "democratic national government" as well as the long-term goal of establishing a socialist state.

Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing (montage is French for 'assembly' or 'editing'). It is the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to global cinema, and introduced formalism into filmmaking.

Although Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s disagreed about how exactly to view montage, Sergei Eisenstein marked a note of accord in "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" when he noted that montage is "the nerve of cinema", and that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema". Its influence is far reaching commercially, academically, and politically. Alfred Hitchcock often emphasizes the pivotal role of editing (and montage) in filmmaking. In fact, montage is demonstrated in the majority of narrative fiction films available today. Post-Soviet film theories relied extensively on montage's redirection of film analysis toward language, a literal grammar of film. A semiotic understanding of film, for example, is indebted to and in contrast with Sergei Eisenstein's wanton transposition of language "in ways that are altogether new." While several Soviet filmmakers, such as Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub and Vsevolod Pudovkin put forth explanations of what constitutes the montage effect, Eisenstein's view that "montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots" wherein "each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other" has become most widely accepted.

A collectable, collectible, or collector's item is any object regarded as being of value or interest to a collector. Collectable items are not necessarily monetarily valuable or uncommon. There are numerous types of collectables and terms to denote those types. An antique is a collectable that is old. A curio is something deemed unique, uncommon, or weird, such as a decorative item. A manufactured collectable is an item made specifically for people to collect.

Georgy Nikolaevich (or Mykolayovych) Vysotsky (Russian: Гео́ргий Никола́евич Высо́цкий; Ukrainian: Георгій Миколайович Висоцький, romanized: Heorhii Mykolaiovych Vysotskyi; 7 February 1865 – 6 April 1940) was a Ukrainian and Soviet soil scientist and forester who worked in the steppe, where he examined forest growth and the effects of soil factors.

Vysotsky was born in Nikitovka and went to the St. Petersburg Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in 1886, where he came under the influence of Vasily Dokuchaev and Georgy Fedorovich Morozov. He worked from 1890 at the Berdyansk Reserve and in 1892 joined Dokuchaev on an expedition to Poltava and became manager of the Great Anatolian forest reserve. There, he experimented on the use of forest strips to manage droughts. From 1904, he worked on experimental forestry near Samara. From 1913, he worked on reforestation of the steppe near Kiev and from 1918, he began to teach first in Kiev and then in Simferopol, Minsk and Kharkiv.