The structure was formed in the 1930s as a department of the ministry called ‘The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs’, or NKVD in short, another terrifying abbreviation of the Soviet time. But the first camps appeared even before ‘Gulag’ was created. A group of prisoners and the...
On the assumption that most partisan activity was Jewish-inspired, whole villages were destroyed and their inhabitants murdered by the Nazi German army as well as by the police and security units. From June 1941, Nazi security forces in Russia did not spare Jewish women and children. At Babi ...
At the very beginning of WW2, the then 20-year-old young man took an accelerated three-month course at the NKVD radio engineering laboratory, and joined the army with the rank of lieutenant technician. In 1941 he was sent on a secret special op to Iran, in 1942 he served in the North...
SMERSH was set up by Stalin to root out and kill spies but it was also the fictional Soviet counter intelligence agency in James Bond, featuring in the classic From Russia with Love. Sinister past of Russian Novichok assassin's 'grandfather' who was commander in Stalin's notorious "death to...
However, with the advent of World War II, their space vehicle project had to be repurposed for military use if it was to survive. A 900-page report on space vehicles, prepared by the two in 1941, was rejected by the German Research Institute for Aviation due to its size and complexity...