USSR in the context of "Polarity (international relations)"

During and after the Greek Civil War of 1946–1949, members and or supporters of the defeated Communist forces fled Greece as political refugees. The collapse of the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) and subsequent evacuation of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to Tashkent in 1949 led thousands of people to leave the country. It has been estimated that by 1949, over 100,000 people had left Greece for Yugoslavia and the Eastern Bloc, particularly the USSR and Czechoslovakia. These included tens of thousands of child refugees who had been forcefully evacuated by the KKE. The war wrought widespread devastation right across Greece and particularly in the regions of Macedonia and Epirus, causing many people to continue to leave the country even after it had ended.

The demographics of Estonia in the 21st century result from historical trends over more than a thousand years, as with most European countries, but have been disproportionately influenced by events in the second half of the 20th century. The Soviet occupation (1944–1991), extensive immigration from Russia and other parts of the former USSR, and the eventual restoration of independence of Estonia, have all had a major effect on Estonia's current ethnic makeup. The influx was largely due to the country's troubled demographics and continued need for labour. After its independence, Estonia continued to bring in the needed labour power from the same countries as it did during the Soviet times.

The languages spoken in Estonia largely reflect the composition of the indigenous and immigrant ethnic groups residing in Estonia, and thus have changed with historical trends affecting the ethnic makeup of the country. Similarly to other northern European peoples, religion plays a rather small part in the lives of most Estonians.

Price controls are restrictions set in place and enforced by governments, on the prices that can be charged for goods and services in a market. The intent behind implementing such controls can stem from the desire to maintain affordability of goods even during shortages, and to slow inflation, or alternatively to ensure a minimum income for providers of certain goods or to try to achieve a living wage. There are two primary forms of price control: a price ceiling, the maximum price that can be charged; and a price floor, the minimum price that can be charged. A well-known example of a price ceiling is rent control, which limits the increases that a landlord is permitted by government to charge for rent. A widely used price floor is minimum wage (wages are the price of labor). Historically, price controls have often been imposed as part of a larger incomes policy package also employing wage controls and other regulatory elements.

Although price controls are routinely used by governments, Western economists generally agree that consumer price controls do not accomplish what they intend to in market economies, and many economists instead recommend such controls should be avoided; however, since the credibility revolution started in the 1990s, minimum wages have found strong support among some economists.

A montage (/mɒnˈtɑːʒ/ mon-TAHZH) is a film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information. Montages enable filmmakers to communicate a large amount of information to an audience over a shorter span of time by juxtaposing different shots, compressing time through editing, or intertwining multiple storylines of a narrative.

The term has varied meanings depending on the filmmaking tradition. In French, the word montage applied to cinema simply denotes editing. In Soviet montage theory, as originally introduced outside the USSR by Sergei Eisenstein, it was used to create symbolism. Later, the term "montage sequence", used primarily by British and American studios, became the common technique to suggest the passage of time.

Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (Arabic: أبو نصر محمد الفارابي, romanized: Abū Naṣr Muḥammad al-Fārābī; c. 870 – 14 December 950–12 January 951), known in the Latin West as Alpharabius, was an early Islamic philosopher and music theorist. He has been designated as "Father of Islamic Neoplatonism", and the "Founder of Islamic Political Philosophy".

Al-Farabi's fields of philosophical interest included—but not limited to, philosophy of society and religion; philosophy of language and logic; psychology and epistemology; metaphysics, political philosophy, and ethics. He was an expert in both practical musicianship and music theory, and although he was not intrinsically a scientist, his works incorporate astronomy, mathematics, cosmology, and physics.

The Great Purge or Great Terror (Russian: Большой террор, romanized: Bol'shoy terror), also known as the Year of '37 (37-й год, Tridtsat' sed'moy god) and the Yezhovshchina (ежовщина [(j)ɪˈʐofɕːɪnə], lit. 'period of Yezhov'), was a political purge in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nikolaev in 1934, Joseph Stalin launched a series of show trials known as the Moscow trials to remove suspected dissenters from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (especially those aligned with the Bolshevik party). The term "great purge" was popularized by historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book, The Great Terror, whose title alluded to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.

The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. In 1936, the NKVD under Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central party leadership, Old Bolsheviks, government officials, and regional party bosses. Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned, or executed, by the NKVD. The purges were eventually expanded to the Red Army high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other segments of society: the intelligentsia, wealthy peasants—especially those lending money or other wealth (kulaks)—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries (known collectively as wreckers) began affecting civilian life.

In architecture, functionalism is the principle that buildings should be designed based solely on their purpose and function. An international functionalist architecture movement emerged in the wake of World War I, as part of the wave of Modernism. Its ideas were largely inspired by a desire to build a new and better world for the people, as broadly and strongly expressed by the social and political movements of Europe after the extremely devastating world war. In this respect, functionalist architecture is often linked with the ideas of socialism and modern humanism.

A new slight addition to this new wave of architecture was that not only should buildings and houses be designed around the purpose of functionality, architecture should also be used as a means to physically create a better world and a better life for people in the broadest sense. This new functionalist architecture had the strongest impact in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, the USSR and the Netherlands, and from the 1930s also in Scandinavia and Finland.

The Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian SFSR (Russian: Съезд народных депутатов РСФСР) and since 1992 Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Federation (Russian: Съезд народных депутатов Российской Федерации) was the highest organ of state authority in the Russian SFSR and in the Russian Federation from 16 May 1990 to 21 September 1993. Elected on 4 March 1990 for a period of five years, it was dissolved (without constitutional authority) by presidential decree during the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 and ended de facto when the Russian White House was attacked on 4 October 1993. The Congress played an important role in some of the most important events in the history of Russia during this period, such as the declaration of state sovereignty of Russia within the USSR (June 1990), the rise of Boris Yeltsin, and economic reforms.

The history of the Jews in the Soviet Union is inextricably linked to much earlier expansionist policies of the Russian Empire conquering and ruling the eastern half of the European continent already before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. "For two centuries – wrote Zvi Gitelman – millions of Jews had lived under one entity, the Russian Empire and its successor state the USSR. They had now come under the jurisdiction of fifteen states, some of which had never existed and others that had passed out of existence in 1939." Before the revolutions of 1989 which resulted in the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, a number of these now sovereign countries constituted the component republics of the Soviet Union.