We have been talking about the NKVD a lot in our War Against Humanity episodes and in several Between Two Wars episodes. If you found this video to be interesting, I can highly recommend you try our B2W episode on the Great Terror and Military Purges in 1938. It provides some crucial context that we couldn't expand on in this special episode. You can find it right here: th-cam.com/video/MNnK0LAoyMo/w-d-xo.html Cheers, Joram Other videos about the NKVD we mentioned in this special are: - War Against Humanity episode covering the Katyn Massacre: th-cam.com/video/gd5YhhNcC44/w-d-xo.html - War Against Humanity episode covering the Great Prison Massacre: th-cam.com/video/kykPusygzOw/w-d-xo.html - Biography episode on Richard Sorge: th-cam.com/video/fn9NyRfbSOo/w-d-xo.html Before commenting, read our rules of engagement at community.timeghost.tv/t/rules-of-conduct/4518
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 'Two Hundred Years Together' has some interesting insights into this topic. You can get it in German, so I presume you haven't read it?
@@pm2128 MVP = "Most Valued Player" It's a term originating from video games at the end of multiplayer games, usually FPS games. At the end of each round the name of the best players under certain categories are shown ("Best pilot," "best K/D ratio," etc) with MVP being the top grade seat. It has found its way outside of games to exress gratitude to people like a thank you, sometimes as a meme and sometimes to show genuine appreciation.
@@EJ_Red I guess for such an in-depth explanation you might also include some words about what k/d is. I mean, for a person that is familiar with fps/moba games that would be obvious, but those people wouldn't need the explanation of what an MVP is in the first place :D
The uncle of my grandpa was a Polish policeman, murdered by NKVD in Katyń. Our family didn't know his fate until early 1990s when the so-called Katyń List was published. Hundreds if not thousands of Polish families hoped for decades their loved ones will come back. In communist Poland talking openly and honestly about Katyń was punishable with prison. Only rumors were circulating among people as to what really happened with them in the east.
I'm of half Polish descent. I met a man of that age who somehow made it thru the Soviet Union and eventually became a US citizen. Me being curious I asked him about some of his 'adventures' but he was evasive. I can understand why. May your great uncle and Tommy rest in peace. Solidarity!
Being the policeman was they key circumstance. Unfortunately, one has to see the whole picture. And the whole picture was this: just from the beginning Pilsudskiy's Poland was highly hostile to Soviet Russia. It was Poland which started Soviet-Polish war of 1920 with a clear aim to annex Russian territory how it could be possible. The moment wasn't incidental: 1920 was the year when the Whites weren't finally defeated yet - Baron Wrangel still held on to Crimean peninsula but the Whites hadn't absolutely any chance of winning the Civil War. So for Poland it was the best moment to attack: the Reds were forced to fight on two fronts simultaneously. The Poles would fight along the Whites with great enthusiasm but there was one very small problem: they demanded for this recognizing of their independence. But every White General steadfastly proclaimed The Whole and Undivided Russia (in the 1913 borders). So this alliance didn't materialize. In the course of 1920 war Poland annexed Western Ukraine, which didn't add any affectionate love between the two states. But that wasn't the only thing. For the all 1920s and 1930s the border between Poland and Soviet Russia was a very hot point. There were incessant forays of former Whites from Poland into Soviet Russia with thousands of victims. And these attacks were armed and equipped by Polish secret services and police. Of course, weapons and ammunition came from France. So the hatred was huge. Add to this that all Red Army POWs in Poland died in captivity - and these were around 20 thousand men. The Poles simply shrugged off the issue: they died and that's all. And this was historical backdrop to the problem. Note that the Soviets didn't shoot all Polish POWs and even not all officers - otherwise there wouldn't be no Gen Anders army which refused to fight against the Germans on the Eastern Front and in the end was transferred to western Allies. In fact, those who were regular Army officers survived. But not who were reservists from the Police and upper echelons of the society in border areas. Was it cruel? Yes, it was. But think what may be if there wasn't the 1920 war and decades of cross-border attacks with numerous victims - these attacks ended only in 1940s when Soviet Union became too strong for them to continue.
At the risk of splitting hairs, Trotsky was actually killed with an ice axe, not an ice pick. It's a common misconception, even repeated in the lyrics of the 1977 song by The Stranglers, 'No More Heroes'. The real murder weapon, an ice axe, is quite a large tool used in mountaineering. Imagine getting one of those in the head. Ouch! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_axe An ice pick is a much smaller implement, something that a cocktail server might use, particularly before modern and domestic refrigeration became commonplace. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pick
It's really sad how the NKVD's crimes are rarely taught in schools anymore, this is why channels like this are so important. Thank you Time Ghost for making these videos!
It was interesting. In AP classes, reading Animal Farm, we learned about Stalin's atrocities. But I didn't get the sense that regular classes went into it at all.
Try and look up Zhao Ziyang, the secretary general of the CCP who was in favor of democratizaion and refused to sign his name under the order to deploy the army onto the Tiananmen students, on Baidu. All it says is that he was stripped off his titles for an unexaplained reason and that's it, no other context is apparently necessary. His name is basically taboo in the state media.
Bad old Feliks Dzherzinsky was a Pole. & so was Konstantin Rokossovsky (3 broken ribs while in Joel's gaol) who hated Poland, left Warsaw utterly crushed by the nazis while enjoying the show, guzzling vodka on the oriental bank of the Vistula. & in 1956, tried to convince Krustchev to send tanks to crush the Poznan uprising, in a pre-Budapest massacre. All in all, a very unattractive character.
@@Zhake_the_Mighty_Dragon Stalin kill everyone he felt disloyal to him, he didn't care about their race and ethnicity. If Stalin hate Pole so much, why he entrust Rokossovsky, a Pole, to command his army and then promote to Marshal? Also, Polish POWs in USSR formed 1st & 2nd Polish Army, and fight along side of Red Army.
@@cetus4449 Some evidence points to a large-scale fabrication of the Polish case. There is evidence of repression of citizens other nationalities as Poles in order to exaggerate the role of the Polish threat in Soviet society.
Big fan of your channel, but I have a question I was hoping you could answer... What was the typical background for an NKVD operative? We know what the average man of the SS was like, however I can't find much info about your "average" NKVD agent. Where they typically Russian or ranging from far areas? Came from poverty? Any insights will help me find an answer to this question!
Most haven't survived until Perestroika and those who did never confessed. I think only Baltic countries actually prosecuted them and maybe their governments have confessions of some NKVD officers.
And SMERSH is a weird abbreviation. Stems from "smert" (death) and "shpion" (spy) and is a sort of a slogan actually: "Death for the spies!". Russian is not my native language but it is pretty similar to Bulgarian (at least 90% of the entire vocabulary).
@@poiuyt975 Arguably, the modern Russian language is based on the so called Church Slavonic which was arguably Old (Medieval) Bulgarian. Also, the Russian language influenced the modern Bulgarian in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries... So, the relations have been complex.
I find it amusing how Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, the troika of State Security each had a falling-out with their bosses, were purged, and all died sobbing and begging for their lives. These men were all pleading, mewling cowards who displayed not a shred of dignity when faced with their own deaths.
Just to mention the role of Felix Dzerzhinsky , nicknamed "Iron Felix". Born into Polish nobility, from 1917 until his death in 1926 Dzerzhinsky led the first two Soviet state-security organizations, the Cheka and the OGPU, establishing a secret police for the post-revolutionary Soviet regime. He was one of the architects of the Red Terror
I read this book called "Government House". One of the people the author followed rose through the ranks of the NKVD. What a I found interesting was his vivacious wife. She loved the privileges of being his wife. From access to beautiful clothing, fine dining, social activities, vacations on the Black Sea, and staying in the homes of the former Russian aristocracy. She appeared to be oblivious her loving husband was a key architect in developing the NKVD killing machine. Of course her husband reached the revolution eating its children moment and he was liquidated.
With all of what happened before '39, it's still hard to imagine Stalin would be so cruel as to give up fellow communists. This is the sort of stuff that makes Lenin's cruelty seem like kid's play... he was a monster, but Stalin was the monster monsters have nightmares about.
I’m reading now a book called Man is Wolf to Man surviving Stalin’s Gulag by Janusz Bardach . Bardach was a Polish Jewish student conscripted into the Red Army in 1939. He soon afterwards is sent to various Soviet prison camps in Siberia. This story is amazing how he could survive. He talks about the horrors and power the NKVD enforce over the prisoners.
One of those families was my uncle Salek, who somehow got out with his wife and son to Palestine and escaped the fate of my grandparents and other family members trapped in Warsaw.
The SMERSH units were heavily heroified during and after the war. A popular Soviet novel "Moment of Truth: August 44" follows a SMERSH unit as they ride around the immediate rear in a lend-leased truck hunting Polish resistance groups and Nazi left-behinds. There is a 2000 Russian movie adaptation, which is pretty good... if you forget the _less heroic_ stuff SMERSH was involved in.
I wouldnt be so sure. It is purely western point of view - "bolsheviks are evil". There are a lot of practical mistakes as well - like Menzhynsky didnt die from "mysterious circumstances", he was severely ill for decades and so forth. It would be musch better to invite a russian historian, who would tell the narrative based on actual sourses (which are plenty in archives) and not solely on western point of view.
Thank you from the heart for reminding the western audiences about the Katyń forest Massacre. I hope to see a special episode about creating the Polish Army in USSR, Sikorski-Majski agreement, or exodus of Gen. Anders' Army from USSR to Iran, Middle East, Egypt, Libya and finally Italy. Keep up the great work! Never forget - Always remember
I’m sorry, some sort of upbeat Christmas ad played literally a second before Spartacus said Babi Yar and I think the mood whiplash may have given me a small aneurysm.
TH-cam has been putting ads in all videos regardless of whether the producers get the revenue or not. I would recommend an ad block for the best experience
Spartacus, what was the typical background for an NKVD operative? We know what the average man of the SS was like, however I can't find much info about your "average" NKVD agent. Where they typically Russian or ranging from far areas? Came from poverty? Any insights will help me find an answer to this question!
Plenty of NKVD people were not Russians. Hell, even the founder of Cheka, Feliks Dzierżyński was an ethnic Pole. Some NKVD agents survived well after the organization was long replaced by KGB. Take Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last president of communist Poland in the 1980s. He started his dirty career as an active agent of NKVD.
'Average NKVD operative' is difficult to say because - as the video points out - the NKVD's responsibilities were vast and included lots of ordinary interior ministry duties (firefighting, law and order etc) in addition to being the political police. If by average NKVD operative you mean average officer of the GUGB (the political police), then I can make an educated guess in saying that people with "proletarian" backgrounds (workers and peasants) would have been preferred as they were considered more reliable for ideological reasons - people with ties to 'counter-revolutionaries' such as kulaks, aristocrats, white army officers etc would have fallen under ideological suspicion. But as with any big bureaucratic structure, exceptions did exist, and certainly ideological commitment was prized over class or ethnicity. The founder of the Soviet secret police was an ethnic Polish nobleman, Felix Dzerzhinsky; Genrikh Yagoda was of Jewish origin; Lavrentiy Beria was a Georgian.
@@Darwinek More interesting information about the leadership of the OGPU, one of the predecessors of the NKVD After the creation of the Counterintelligence Department of the OGPU in the mid-1920s, 8 departments were formed in it. Two of them were headed by former agents of the Polish intelligence service (POV), who, after exposure, were admitted to the party and the OGPU at the insistence of Dzerzhinsky (4th department - Kiyakovsky-Stetskevich, 6th department - Sosnovsky-Dobrzhinsky). The other two departments were headed by former officers of the Austro-Hungarian army (7th department - Pataki, 8th department - Steinbrück). The 1st department was headed by a former PPS-Lewica militant (Formmeister), who in 1906 received 20 years in hard labor for robbing and murdering a pregnant woman. At the head of the 5th department was a man about whom no one knows anything, the 3rd department was led by a young protégé of Dzerzhinsky (Olsky-Kulikovsky). And only the 2nd department was headed by the boring Estonian communist Käspert, about whom there is nothing to tell.
The average SS dude was a Finnish dude fighting to take back Karelia from the Russians or a French conservative fighting against communism. Only 40% of the SS were even Germans
@@zeckiel6109 had proof read the documents and USSR admitted it. I am a person who has seen the archives of Soviet documents. My father worked in the KGB. Now the FSB. And NKVD officers killed children, old people and women. All these crimes have been declassified and almost half of them can be obtained from the public domain if you are Russian-speaking
@@tacerepace7868 ''Katyn ??? What Katyn ??? There is no Katyn but Khatyn !!!'' For years, Katyn, Bielorussia was buried under Khatyn, Ukraina an admittedly nazi crime like Babi Yar.
@@Charlesputnam-bn9zy The Polish POW-s were murdered at Katyn, Russia. As in, the area belonged to the Russian republic even in the times of the USSR. The Khatyn village cemetery that pays homage to the victims of Nazi terror is in Belarus, nowhere near the border of Ukraine. You got it all messed up.
@@yarpen26 That's the spirit of sarcasm, like : '' Mafia, mafia, mafia !!! '' What mafia ??? '' There is no mafia !!! '' And we kill anyone who says there is a mafia !!!'' Signed : The Mafia.
Savage. Thats what I think when the NKVD is mentioned. Dog eat dog, stab in the back, murder at will... Even Shakespeare couldnt have dreamed these guys up.
Perhaps someday you will try to study history not from the side that your government and similar custom videos are presenting to you, but on the other, you will study the sources, REAL facts and you will be able to come to some conclusions yourself
@@ЕгорП-д4р I might say the very same thing to you! ;-) I just dont recall the FBI rounding up people and shooting them because they MIGHT pose a threat.
Seems like "dying under mysterious circumstances" has been so very popular in Russia under the Tzars, then for 70 years under the Bolsheviks, and now for the last 30 years under Vlad And Friends. All so mysterious. And popular.
The first time that I heard NKVD when I played the very first Call of Duty in 2003. When playing as Alexei Voronin, they are storming a tank factory in Poland and you will hear two soldiers talking about NKVD.
This is how Western people are fooled: first in games, then in custom-made books without sources of information, then in government-sponsored videos. It's sad that you and millions like you are so easily misinformed
I just realized that I’d love to see Spartacus cosplay as Adam Savage and Indy cosplay Jamie Hyneman. Sparty is already half 3/4 of the way there, we just need to make his hair a little more Einsteiny. It’d be hilarious to see Indy in a walrus mustache and beret!
Amazing any Poles survived being trapped between the Soviets and the Nazis. History still seems to hang like a dark cloud over Poland when I went there a couple years ago.
@@caryblack5985 from the top of my head: it was actually 6 million out of ~35. Half of them were Jewish half of them Polish. Around 1970-80s we reach the 35 million population again (but please be aware that borders has changed and current territory is smaller than pre-war). It might be a good question to OOTF: "Did Jews consider themselves as Poles (French, German, etc.) with different faith or as Jews". I read recently labour camp memories from of one Jew (pre-war Polish citizen), who was thinking in the camp of how post-war would look like and how he would participate in rebuilding Poland. Eventually he moved to Israel.
@@arti8719 Well thats an interesting question. You have to look at it from both sides. There were some antisemitic Poles who considered Jews as aliens in their land. I am sure that some Jews also thought of their community as more of their identity than their Polish citizenship, How many Jews considered themselves Polish and how many Poles identified the Jews as countrymen is something that I couldn't confidently answer.
@@caryblack5985 Yes, unfortunately. When the reds entered Poland in 1939 many Polish-Jewish reds denounced the anti-red Poles to the soviets. And when the nazis came in '41 the Poles took revenge, although both suffered under the same bloodthirsty yoke. The Polish Resistance Army Of The Interior(AK) before the Warsaw Insurrection, sometimes conducted pogroms of its own. Yet, during the Warsaw Ghetto slaughter in 1943, the AK provided weapons for the Jewish fighters. And in 1946, there was another pogrom in Poland...
A couple of really nice elements to this tie, but compared to some of the absolute gems we've seen thus year, this yellow effort falls just a little short. You keep raising the expectations!! 2.5/5
OTOH, this characteristics of this subject matter are more of a continuous grinding, unfolding which is different from sharply defined, dramatic events of WW2. The major networks or documentarians only publish exciting, sharp events that capture attention.
Why in the hell do you value the superfluous so very much? You are on quite possibly the most serious and credible historic journalistic archive on the internet, and all you have to offer is fashion critiques? Also, and I've felt this for a long time now, it is just plain super weird of you you to ignore the entire vast human cataclysm of the content discussed, to focus on the detail of the presenter's wardrobe. Just super fucking weird man... How many dead bodies came across your screen? Your takeaway was a gold tie? That's a deep seated mental aberration you must be wrestling with on a daily basis. How do you even have normal human interactions in public with a predisposition that lends itself so repeatedly towards highlighting the inane and absurdly awkward?
that would be correct if the accent would fall on the first "A". However his family name is of Jewish origin. Yagòda is a russification of the Hebrew name Yehuda, or Judah
NKVD had it's role as Stalin main enforcer against "internal enemies" which weren't given chance to defend them self, but most of them were just regular police. 10th Rifle Division of NKVD fought in Staligrand until only 200 of original 7500 men were left standing
Thank you fo bringing the Katyn masacre topic. For many years in cointires in soviet block the talking about this was prohibitet. Soviets also puts a lot of misinformation about this. Thanks once more
The NKVD first job as blocking detachments was to send the soldiers back to the front lines. If that was not possible to round them up and decide whether they would go back to the front or put them in penal battalions. Sometimes they were put on trial and sent to the Gulag or shot in what they considered cowardly behavior.
That's true, but they would very rarely shoot them. And unlike in enemy at the gates they weren't after the soldiers who retreated after a failed attack but after the ones who tried to run from the front. The USSR had a mostly conscript army and many men just can't handle war even if they love their country. Stalin and his NKVD knew that if left unregulated they'd have a large numbers of men fleeing the battlefield and as Stalin put it "The panic mongerer cowards also cause good soldiers to also retreat in a panic". Can't believe I'm quoting Stalin. In fact I don't reccal hearing of a single instance of blocking units shooting fleeing men. I mean I'm sure it did happen but it was far from the norm. The soldiers were mostly detained and based on the severity of their subordonance they were either sent back to their units, demoted in rank and then sent back or sent to penal battalions. There were also many who got executed but that's a fraction of a fraction of those detained. Officers caught were the ones suffering the harshest reprisals and they make a disproportionatelly large number of those executed. Edit: You have to understand that the Red Army in the first year or so of the war struggled to form a frontline, their divisions got surrounded and destroyed on a daily basis, units fell back without authorisation and left gaps in the line and noone wanted to be left behind and taken by the germans so a lot of men just ran away as soon as they thought the front was going to move east. To the Stavka this was not acceptable and understandably so.
No mention of Dzerzhinsky!? He basically built the Cheka and was immensely popular both within the system and generally - he was one of the few men that could standup to Stalin and one of even fewer that could have (potentially) challenged his power!
Dzherzhinsky was actually very moderate and was against most Red terror methods. He also built hundreds of schools and orphanages for orphaned children of the Civil War. He is still very popular in Russia.
@Bogdan Radu Felix Dzherzhinsky was not a monster. He was against most red Red Terror methods and only was in favour of executions of white Army officers only as a defensive mean. After the war Dzherzhinsky opened hundreds of schools and orphanages for orphaned children of the Russian Civil War by cutting 20% of the paychecks of the Cheka operatives. Whether the children were from the Reds or the Whites it didn't matter. Dzherzhinsky is still respected in Russia by Communists and anti-communists alike. Was the man a monster because he tried to protect the revolution and his comrades from counter revolutionaries that would've murdered them if he didn't? You know how a war works right?
@Bogdan Radu what an asinine comment. As though the people of Russia themselves had no agency! After All it was Lenin who recognised, alone amongst his revolutionary peers, that a revolution had already taken place! That peasants *had* expropriated land and portioned it communally across the empire, that workers and soldiers had already formed Soviets and ceased to follow orders from their de jure leaders. This infantile notion of history as 'good' and 'bad' tells us nothing and completely fails to recognise any lived reality of the time.
@Bogdan Radu 1. Before Hitler came to power Soviet - German relations were just fine 2. So it went from 4th to 2nd in the world and that is bad ? 3. WTF ?? upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Growth_of_Russia_1547-1725_true_borders.png
NKVD be like: "You know you're life is pretty much done when the Big Boss lights up his smoking pipe and says "Send him east" while pointing out your ass" x.X
Describing the NKVD as bloodstained bureaucrats only becomes more fitting when you look at some of the anecdotes about them. Like executioners having to use german pistols when they purged soviet occupied poland from reserve officers because firing that number of bullets from a TT or nagant put too mutch stress on their wrists. It´s the equivalent of getting yourself an ergonomical mouse for your desk job. But with more dead poles.
Good episode. Nice link to future events like Anders Army and Germans discovering Katyn graves and starting to cover their own atrocities by burning bodies.
The true story of soviet and Stalin will probably never be known. Im guessing it's somewhere between the wests demonization & writing of history, and the die-hards idolization and stubborn worshipping of Stalin.
The biggest problem about Romanovs were their leadership and not hunting down bolsheviks and mensheviks after 1905. Doing a coup against Stalin was extremely hard after all
A good friend of mine (sadly gone from us) from Estonia told me that during the fall of Tallinn in 1941 and the failed attempt of the Soviets to pull off a Russian Dunkirk, the special targets for Estonians were striped shirts (Naval Infantry) and green hats (NKVD). No mercy.
Do organizations like this naturally attract paranoid sociopaths, or does it turn almost every member into one? Many groups issue a list of employees who are retiring or have transferred elsewhere. The NKVD sent out a monthly list of funeral notices with the list of promotions stapled to it.
When you do something to other people, its very easy to project and start thinking other people want to do the same to you. This is why you have the silly "white genocide" spouted by white supremacists. So if you spy and kill your political opponents NKVD style, after a few nights you are going to have some trouble sleeping.
That's simply untrue. Stalinism more or less died with Stalin, and even while Stalin was alive, his regime became much less brutal in its later years. History classes usually cover the 20s and 30s and then pretend that the Soviet Unions internal politics never changed again, which gives most people a really warped view of what the soviet union was actually like.
Leonardo Conti the Reich Health Leader and the head commissioner on Katyn investigation died suddenly while in British custody . he refused to sign confession taking the blame for the massacre .
One NKVD officer, Vasily Blokhin is said to likely be the individual who personally killed the most people in history, having executed tens of thousands during his decades-long career, including about 7 000 of the victims of the Katyn massacre. Eventually, he killed himself, after suffering from alcoholism and other mental problems in his retirement.
Although it is outside of the timeframe you're looking at, I'm surprised you didn't end by talking about what the NKVD gets renamed into in the 1950s--the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, more popularly known as the KGB.
There are bad internet historians,, and then there are good ones, like the team at World War Two and the Great War. You guys have brought awareness to facets of these conflicts I haven't known or heard of despite constant study for like, two decades. You are the ONLY game in town. Thank you for many hours of information and entertainment and most especially, for shining a light on the darkness.
Soviet Secret Police Director Radik Gradenko: Nadia this tea is excellent NKVD Director Nadia Zelenkov: Thank you I made it myself Gradenko: (chokes and dies) Nadia: Incompetence will not be tolerated
From pen pusher to killer....that would apply to Stalin. Stalin was appointed as Party Chairman under Lenin's govt because it was thought that was just a paper pushing job How wrong they were.
Hi there, i just started watching the episode and it seems like there is a mismatch in the subtitles at the start. at 1:26 the Subtitles state "in 1934, the NKVD sees a change of leadership" while Spartacus says "When Genrikh Yagoda rises to control the umbrella of the organization". After that the subtitles goes on t "Genrikh Yagoda has already been active with the OGPU Secret services before, where he was on of the founders of a poison factory. Well, using the techniques developed there Yagoda slowly poisoned his boss...." This is not what Spartacus is saying. Im guessing that there is a mismatch in the scripts but it really threw me for a loop XD
i just interfaced online with a former resident of the USSR , who stated that his homeland never was a dictatorship and all these claims of purges and assassinations were not true because "I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANY OF THIS OR HEARD OF IT FROM ANYONE" . When I mentioned and detailed said purges, Cheka, NKVD/OGPU/MVD/KGB, Vorkuta, the Gulag as well as quotes from Solzhenitsyn , he said he had no idea what I was talking about..........Ghosts still wield power......
@@lexbor3511 Maybe but I have quite a few acquaintances from the old days who state that , just like Mao, there are millions who still worship the Stalin era. And that this slander is all a (hohum again...) CIA/imperialist/fascist/capitalist propaganda machine still at work. Oh my!
@@tszirmay They teach Solzhenitsyn as a mandatory study in modern Russians schools but Stalin is still the most popular ruler in Russia. So some Russians just prefer to ignore his crimes.
Despite whatever historical errors there might be in that film, watch Zhukov punch Beria square in the face in the "coup" scene was incredibly satisfying.
Great episode. I know terrible the nazi participation in the Holocaust was but it always bothered me how little mention of the soviets there usually is, even when the reds get a cursory mention it usually gets pushed aside and forgotten while whole libraries are written up over the nazi horrors. Part of this comes from the very real fact that there is little written or photographic record in existance due to the difference in attitude between the communists and the nazis. The nazis took pride in their butchery while the reds were very thorough in wiping out any evidence of their crimes. Decades after the events there is still piles of nazi records to sort through while the communists made sure little could be traced back to them. The evidence that has been uncovered is all partially anecdotal. Something in the range of twenty to forty million dead can be attributed to Stalin and his henchmen. After they seized what would become eastern europe millions were taken away and sent to the labor camps and gulags from where few ever survived. German pows were worked to death and even german civilians were killed or allowed to starve in the millions many as the result of polish, czech hungarian etc efforts at retaliation all under the watchful eye of the red authorities. Today some soviet era records have been released but only in tiny driblets. We may never know the full extent of the communist Holocaust. Another factor that makes it difficult to uncover the truth is the fact that while the nazis worked under a fanatical racial agenda the soviets did not or at least not to the same level. The apparent glee with which the nazis carried out their efforts at extermination are lacking on the soviet side. Also I leave this bit for last because it has been known to produce an angry response, but it is still part of the historical record, ever since the advent of electronic media just over 100 years ago for one reason or another movie studios, radio and newspapers and finally TV all saw a large proportion of their ownership fall under control of a jewish element, not from any Zionist conspiracy but simply good business practice. During the war allied governments used the media to produce film, radio and print anti fascist propaganda. Because the soviets were our allies any evidence of atrocity perpetrated by them was covered up, then after the war the cold war shifted some of the thinking in the west but by then the discovery of death camps by allied troops helped create even more anti nazi fervor. It was considered to be too provocative in the growing cold war to mention soviet crimes. In the meantime as part of a real effort to drum up support for a jewish home in the middle east a vast amount of literature, films and television was focused on the Holocaust. There just wasn't room for a discussion on the soviet crimes. They were buried once more. Today very little is left, and to be honest it is possible the soviet crimes were not as great as that of the nazis but it is not really right to try and rate who was the worse? That makes a game out of horrible subject, but as a historian I hate to see the crimes of the reds to be brushed aside once more. It is great to find programs such as yours and i will just conclude by saying keep up the good work
you and your buddy sure turn out some great content...as i mentioned to him it should be available as part of the school curriculum here in UK. it would have saved me having to watch all them war movies in the 70s 80s that turned out to be just wrong...thank you for the clarity and the easy conveyance of this subject matter.....thank you
Wonder what the heads of NKVD were thinking when being offered the job. "Oh hey, the position whose previous holders always get killed on Stalins orders just became vacant. Better to apply now! Whatever could go wrong?"
My grandfather was arrested and his wife and three small children were deported to Kazakhstan; all of them miraculously survived and come back home (which is now Belarus, not far from Nesvizh)
@@Darwinek My great aunt came back. But she could only be in Estonia (her home) for a year then her neighbor gave out her and the NKVD sent her back. Miraculously she survived the second time too.
Don't think that this can't happen here in the U.S. If people don't trust the U.S. institutions and allow want to be a dictator to get what he/she wants, this will happen. That's why our laws and institutions are more important than one person.
We have been talking about the NKVD a lot in our War Against Humanity episodes and in several Between Two Wars episodes. If you found this video to be interesting, I can highly recommend you try our B2W episode on the Great Terror and Military Purges in 1938. It provides some crucial context that we couldn't expand on in this special episode. You can find it right here: th-cam.com/video/MNnK0LAoyMo/w-d-xo.html
Cheers,
Joram
Other videos about the NKVD we mentioned in this special are:
- War Against Humanity episode covering the Katyn Massacre: th-cam.com/video/gd5YhhNcC44/w-d-xo.html
- War Against Humanity episode covering the Great Prison Massacre: th-cam.com/video/kykPusygzOw/w-d-xo.html
- Biography episode on Richard Sorge: th-cam.com/video/fn9NyRfbSOo/w-d-xo.html
Before commenting, read our rules of engagement at community.timeghost.tv/t/rules-of-conduct/4518
Interrogators too.
As in torturers.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 'Two Hundred Years Together' has some interesting insights into this topic. You can get it in German, so I presume you haven't read it?
rapists, too.
@Jesus Christ are you really the child of Julius Caeser and Cleopatra?
@@rgbg66 There is a book Gulag a History by Ann Applebaum.
Channels like you guys' and The Great War are the MVPs of the internet. I'm glad to be a supporter. You guys rock.
what are MVPs?
@@pm2128 Most valuable player.
@@pm2128
MVP = "Most Valued Player"
It's a term originating from video games at the end of multiplayer games, usually FPS games. At the end of each round the name of the best players under certain categories are shown ("Best pilot," "best K/D ratio," etc) with MVP being the top grade seat.
It has found its way outside of games to exress gratitude to people like a thank you, sometimes as a meme and sometimes to show genuine appreciation.
@@EJ_Red I guess for such an in-depth explanation you might also include some words about what k/d is.
I mean, for a person that is familiar with fps/moba games that would be obvious, but those people wouldn't need the explanation of what an MVP is in the first place :D
History hustle is also good:)
"Why has the NKVD replaced the army all over Moscow? I'm smiling, but I am very fucking furious"- Georgy Zhukov, 1953
I Understood That Reference 🤓 😎
Spartacus has the best suits. Dressed to the nines.
His tie could have been a bit louder though !!
Shame his style of presentation is copied from Indy Neidell
And that mustache
Truly, he is dressed like a capitalist exploiter of the proletariat and must be eliminated as an obstacle to the people's revolution.
@@bevbevan6189 take a hike commie
The uncle of my grandpa was a Polish policeman, murdered by NKVD in Katyń. Our family didn't know his fate until early 1990s when the so-called Katyń List was published. Hundreds if not thousands of Polish families hoped for decades their loved ones will come back. In communist Poland talking openly and honestly about Katyń was punishable with prison. Only rumors were circulating among people as to what really happened with them in the east.
I'm of half Polish descent. I met a man of that age who somehow made it thru the Soviet Union and eventually became a US citizen. Me being curious I asked him about some of his 'adventures' but he was evasive. I can understand why. May your great uncle and Tommy rest in peace.
Solidarity!
What the Germans and soviets did to Poland was beyond reprehensible. There are no words.
Putin would love to bring that all back to you! Ukraine deals with this terror today!
@@dannyv2468va2facepalm...
Being the policeman was they key circumstance. Unfortunately, one has to see the whole picture. And the whole picture was this: just from the beginning Pilsudskiy's Poland was highly hostile to Soviet Russia. It was Poland which started Soviet-Polish war of 1920 with a clear aim to annex Russian territory how it could be possible. The moment wasn't incidental: 1920 was the year when the Whites weren't finally defeated yet - Baron Wrangel still held on to Crimean peninsula but the Whites hadn't absolutely any chance of winning the Civil War. So for Poland it was the best moment to attack: the Reds were forced to fight on two fronts simultaneously. The Poles would fight along the Whites with great enthusiasm but there was one very small problem: they demanded for this recognizing of their independence. But every White General steadfastly proclaimed The Whole and Undivided Russia (in the 1913 borders). So this alliance didn't materialize. In the course of 1920 war Poland annexed Western Ukraine, which didn't add any affectionate love between the two states. But that wasn't the only thing. For the all 1920s and 1930s the border between Poland and Soviet Russia was a very hot point. There were incessant forays of former Whites from Poland into Soviet Russia with thousands of victims. And these attacks were armed and equipped by Polish secret services and police. Of course, weapons and ammunition came from France. So the hatred was huge. Add to this that all Red Army POWs in Poland died in captivity - and these were around 20 thousand men. The Poles simply shrugged off the issue: they died and that's all. And this was historical backdrop to the problem. Note that the Soviets didn't shoot all Polish POWs and even not all officers - otherwise there wouldn't be no Gen Anders army which refused to fight against the Germans on the Eastern Front and in the end was transferred to western Allies. In fact, those who were regular Army officers survived. But not who were reservists from the Police and upper echelons of the society in border areas. Was it cruel? Yes, it was. But think what may be if there wasn't the 1920 war and decades of cross-border attacks with numerous victims - these attacks ended only in 1940s when Soviet Union became too strong for them to continue.
Last time I was this early trotsky didn't have an icepick in his head.
Haha!
🤣🤣🤣🤣 Good one
That made his ears burn
Oooo nice one!
At the risk of splitting hairs, Trotsky was actually killed with an ice axe, not an ice pick. It's a common misconception, even repeated in the lyrics of the 1977 song by The Stranglers, 'No More Heroes'. The real murder weapon, an ice axe, is quite a large tool used in mountaineering. Imagine getting one of those in the head. Ouch!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_axe
An ice pick is a much smaller implement, something that a cocktail server might use, particularly before modern and domestic refrigeration became commonplace.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_pick
It's really sad how the NKVD's crimes are rarely taught in schools anymore, this is why channels like this are so important. Thank you Time Ghost for making these videos!
You guys must have gone to a different school then I did.
@@martijn9568 Exactly. They are are either far-right, or grew up in USSR.
It was interesting. In AP classes, reading Animal Farm, we learned about Stalin's atrocities. But I didn't get the sense that regular classes went into it at all.
They hardly teach Japanese warcrimes too. The Germans always overshadow them
@BossHossGT500 that's correct man....I can say so atleast for an asian education system
The NKVD: when "the shootings will continue until morale improves" wasn't a joke.
When you though Gestapo was bad ass?
The beatings will continue until moral improves😂
@@senorpepper3405 Or at least until quota for confessions is achieved so that enough people can be killed.
When we had "Kazakh literature" classes, I remember that we studied works of so many writers whose life ended in 1937-1938.
During the Soviet years, schoolchildren and students were often interested in the strange deaths of many generals and politicians in 1937-1938.
@@jangrosek4334
Wolfgang Leonhard's ''Child Of The Revolution''
He was in the USSR during this period & the war years.
The 17th soviet congress has a lot of similar correlations.
Try and look up Zhao Ziyang, the secretary general of the CCP who was in favor of democratizaion and refused to sign his name under the order to deploy the army onto the Tiananmen students, on Baidu. All it says is that he was stripped off his titles for an unexaplained reason and that's it, no other context is apparently necessary. His name is basically taboo in the state media.
@@yarpen26
Zhao Ziyang The Just.
Stalin: I'm suspicious of the Poles
NKVD: Did you hear that comrades unleash the bureaucracy!
@@Marinealver that's why it's called *The Red Army*
KATYN FOREST
@@cetus4449 yes
Bad old Feliks Dzherzinsky was a Pole.
& so was Konstantin Rokossovsky (3 broken ribs while in Joel's gaol) who hated Poland,
left Warsaw utterly crushed by the nazis while enjoying the show,
guzzling vodka on the oriental bank of the Vistula.
& in 1956, tried to convince Krustchev to send tanks to crush the Poznan uprising, in a pre-Budapest massacre.
All in all, a very unattractive character.
@@dubya85 Which adipose-leonid tried to bury under Khatyn, Ukraina.
When Stalin was asked by Polish Goverment in Exile about their POWs he said: "Idk where they are, maybe they escaped to Manchuria".
When Churchill asked him about the Polish Officers at dinner, Stalin told him, "we killed them." No big deal to him.
@@terry_robinson Then, they were blaming it on Germans until the collapse of the CCCP.
@@Zhake_the_Mighty_Dragon Not ethnic cleansing, class cleaning. Only officers, which they consider to be part of the bourgeoisie, are murdered.
@@Zhake_the_Mighty_Dragon Stalin kill everyone he felt disloyal to him, he didn't care about their race and ethnicity. If Stalin hate Pole so much, why he entrust Rokossovsky, a Pole, to command his army and then promote to Marshal? Also, Polish POWs in USSR formed 1st & 2nd Polish Army, and fight along side of Red Army.
@@cetus4449 Some evidence points to a large-scale fabrication of the Polish case. There is evidence of repression of citizens other nationalities as Poles in order to exaggerate the role of the Polish threat in Soviet society.
These guys were brutal. Thanks for making a video about this formation. Always wonder if they interviewed ex service men about their brutal tasks.
Big fan of your channel, but I have a question I was hoping you could answer... What was the typical background for an NKVD operative? We know what the average man of the SS was like, however I can't find much info about your "average" NKVD agent. Where they typically Russian or ranging from far areas? Came from poverty? Any insights will help me find an answer to this question!
I'm sure glad this could never happen in the USA.
@@ToddBoyle As societies degenerate, it could happen anywhere.
.
Most haven't survived until Perestroika and those who did never confessed. I think only Baltic countries actually prosecuted them and maybe their governments have confessions of some NKVD officers.
And SMERSH is a weird abbreviation. Stems from "smert" (death) and "shpion" (spy) and is a sort of a slogan actually: "Death for the spies!". Russian is not my native language but it is pretty similar to Bulgarian (at least 90% of the entire vocabulary).
It is the actual meaning of the abbreviation.
It also sounds like "Smerch" ("tornado"/"whirlwind"), which probably reinforced the image of a relentless fast-moving "justice".
I wasn't aware that Bulgarian and Russian were THAT similar. But as a Pole I do know of Smersz...
@@poiuyt975 Arguably, the modern Russian language is based on the so called Church Slavonic which was arguably Old (Medieval) Bulgarian. Also, the Russian language influenced the modern Bulgarian in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries... So, the relations have been complex.
@@valentinstoyanov304 It's interesting how the Russian derives from Bulgarian, but later influenced it. How the history meanders...
I find it amusing how Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria, the troika of State Security each had a falling-out with their bosses, were purged, and all died sobbing and begging for their lives. These men were all pleading, mewling cowards who displayed not a shred of dignity when faced with their own deaths.
Tyrants often are the weakest of men when stripped of power.
-TimeGhost Ambassador
"The NKVD: Just your average ministry of internal affairs." Well ok then
It was for your average totalitarian police state.
Got to keep that homeland good and secure.
Just to mention the role of Felix Dzerzhinsky , nicknamed "Iron Felix". Born into Polish nobility, from 1917 until his death in 1926 Dzerzhinsky led the first two Soviet state-security organizations, the Cheka and the OGPU, establishing a secret police for the post-revolutionary Soviet regime. He was one of the architects of the Red Terror
As was Salomon Morel and red Judge Helena Brus. Both career NKVD. Clawed way to security.
I think it was Vyachislav Menzhinsky who founded the OGPU.
Ironically, Dzerzhinsky had himself been the victim of similar brutality carried out by the Tsarist government, and ended up in Siberia for a time
no , he was a Litwin , unfortunately
These guys were every bit as ruthless as the Gestspo and SS.
I read this book called "Government House". One of the people the author followed rose through the ranks of the NKVD. What a I found interesting was his vivacious wife. She loved the privileges of being his wife. From access to beautiful clothing, fine dining, social activities, vacations on the Black Sea, and staying in the homes of the former Russian aristocracy. She appeared to be oblivious her loving husband was a key architect in developing the NKVD killing machine. Of course her husband reached the revolution eating its children moment and he was liquidated.
With all of what happened before '39, it's still hard to imagine Stalin would be so cruel as to give up fellow communists. This is the sort of stuff that makes Lenin's cruelty seem like kid's play... he was a monster, but Stalin was the monster monsters have nightmares about.
I’m reading now a book called Man is Wolf to Man surviving Stalin’s Gulag by Janusz Bardach .
Bardach was a Polish Jewish student conscripted into the Red Army in 1939. He soon afterwards is sent to various Soviet prison camps in Siberia. This story is amazing how he could survive. He talks about the horrors and power the NKVD enforce over the prisoners.
One of those families was my uncle Salek, who somehow got out with his wife and son to Palestine and escaped the fate of my grandparents and other family members trapped in Warsaw.
Lucky man
The SMERSH units were heavily heroified during and after the war. A popular Soviet novel "Moment of Truth: August 44" follows a SMERSH unit as they ride around the immediate rear in a lend-leased truck hunting Polish resistance groups and Nazi left-behinds. There is a 2000 Russian movie adaptation, which is pretty good... if you forget the _less heroic_ stuff SMERSH was involved in.
Forest Brothers were good at taking down the NKVD many times one time they even managed to kill 500 NKVD soldiers.
Thank you guys for providing a completely unbiased and historically accurate view of past events it really helps educate those who weren't there
The American View Cannot Be Historically Accurate NEVER, take it as an axiom
I wouldnt be so sure. It is purely western point of view - "bolsheviks are evil". There are a lot of practical mistakes as well - like Menzhynsky didnt die from "mysterious circumstances", he was severely ill for decades and so forth. It would be musch better to invite a russian historian, who would tell the narrative based on actual sourses (which are plenty in archives) and not solely on western point of view.
@@ЕгорП-д4р Ok Ivan, stop trying to white-wash these fucking criminals.
Thank you from the heart for reminding the western audiences about the Katyń forest Massacre.
I hope to see a special episode about creating the Polish Army in USSR, Sikorski-Majski agreement, or exodus of Gen. Anders' Army from USSR to Iran, Middle East, Egypt, Libya and finally Italy. Keep up the great work!
Never forget - Always remember
Thank you for covering this. This is an often overlooked part of history.
Believe that these egregious events are known in many countries and not forgotten.
NKVD: Taking state within a state to the next level
I’m sorry, some sort of upbeat Christmas ad played literally a second before Spartacus said Babi Yar and I think the mood whiplash may have given me a small aneurysm.
TH-cam has been putting ads in all videos regardless of whether the producers get the revenue or not. I would recommend an ad block for the best experience
I would argue that if Stalin is the prototype of Big Brother from "1984", than Yagoda's face inspired Orwell for the rat - Winston's atavistic fear...
Actually Orwell’s book Animal Farm is based on Stalin, with the pigs in the end becoming the leaders of the farm.
Trotzki is Emmanuel Goldstein.
@@Marinealver
George Orwell, The Face Of Greatness.
Spartacus, what was the typical background for an NKVD operative? We know what the average man of the SS was like, however I can't find much info about your "average" NKVD agent. Where they typically Russian or ranging from far areas? Came from poverty? Any insights will help me find an answer to this question!
Mostly working class. Some middle upper class. Rarely from the peasantry.
Plenty of NKVD people were not Russians. Hell, even the founder of Cheka, Feliks Dzierżyński was an ethnic Pole. Some NKVD agents survived well after the organization was long replaced by KGB. Take Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last president of communist Poland in the 1980s. He started his dirty career as an active agent of NKVD.
'Average NKVD operative' is difficult to say because - as the video points out - the NKVD's responsibilities were vast and included lots of ordinary interior ministry duties (firefighting, law and order etc) in addition to being the political police.
If by average NKVD operative you mean average officer of the GUGB (the political police), then I can make an educated guess in saying that people with "proletarian" backgrounds (workers and peasants) would have been preferred as they were considered more reliable for ideological reasons - people with ties to 'counter-revolutionaries' such as kulaks, aristocrats, white army officers etc would have fallen under ideological suspicion. But as with any big bureaucratic structure, exceptions did exist, and certainly ideological commitment was prized over class or ethnicity. The founder of the Soviet secret police was an ethnic Polish nobleman, Felix Dzerzhinsky; Genrikh Yagoda was of Jewish origin; Lavrentiy Beria was a Georgian.
@@Darwinek More interesting information about the leadership of the OGPU, one of the predecessors of the NKVD
After the creation of the Counterintelligence Department of the OGPU in the mid-1920s, 8 departments were formed in it. Two of them were headed by former agents of the Polish intelligence service (POV), who, after exposure, were admitted to the party and the OGPU at the insistence of Dzerzhinsky (4th department - Kiyakovsky-Stetskevich, 6th department - Sosnovsky-Dobrzhinsky). The other two departments were headed by former officers of the Austro-Hungarian army (7th department - Pataki, 8th department - Steinbrück). The 1st department was headed by a former PPS-Lewica militant (Formmeister), who in 1906 received 20 years in hard labor for robbing and murdering a pregnant woman. At the head of the 5th department was a man about whom no one knows anything, the 3rd department was led by a young protégé of Dzerzhinsky (Olsky-Kulikovsky). And only the 2nd department was headed by the boring Estonian communist Käspert, about whom there is nothing to tell.
The average SS dude was a Finnish dude fighting to take back Karelia from the Russians or a French conservative fighting against communism.
Only 40% of the SS were even Germans
At Nuremberg the Soviet Union tried to put the blame on Germany for the Katyn massacre.
There's no proof that the USSR did the katyn massacre
@@zeckiel6109 had proof read the documents and USSR admitted it. I am a person who has seen the archives of Soviet documents. My father worked in the KGB. Now the FSB. And NKVD officers killed children, old people and women. All these crimes have been declassified and almost half of them can be obtained from the public domain if you are Russian-speaking
@@tacerepace7868 ''Katyn ??? What Katyn ??? There is no Katyn but Khatyn !!!''
For years, Katyn, Bielorussia was buried under Khatyn, Ukraina an admittedly nazi crime like Babi Yar.
@@Charlesputnam-bn9zy The Polish POW-s were murdered at Katyn, Russia. As in, the area belonged to the Russian republic even in the times of the USSR. The Khatyn village cemetery that pays homage to the victims of Nazi terror is in Belarus, nowhere near the border of Ukraine. You got it all messed up.
@@yarpen26
That's the spirit of sarcasm, like :
'' Mafia, mafia, mafia !!!
'' What mafia ???
'' There is no mafia !!!
'' And we kill anyone who says there is a mafia !!!''
Signed : The Mafia.
Savage. Thats what I think when the NKVD is mentioned. Dog eat dog, stab in the back, murder at will... Even Shakespeare couldnt have dreamed these guys up.
Perhaps someday you will try to study history not from the side that your government and similar custom videos are presenting to you, but on the other, you will study the sources, REAL facts and you will be able to come to some conclusions yourself
"Well, tovarisch, it's you today, and me tomorrow..."
Shakespeare would have been committed.
@@ЕгорП-д4р I might say the very same thing to you! ;-) I just dont recall the FBI rounding up people and shooting them because they MIGHT pose a threat.
@@billd.iniowa2263 WACO
Seems like "dying under mysterious circumstances" has been so very popular in Russia under the Tzars, then for 70 years under the Bolsheviks, and now for the last 30 years under Vlad And Friends. All so mysterious. And popular.
The first time that I heard NKVD when I played the very first Call of Duty in 2003. When playing as Alexei Voronin, they are storming a tank factory in Poland and you will hear two soldiers talking about NKVD.
This is how Western people are fooled: first in games, then in custom-made books without sources of information, then in government-sponsored videos. It's sad that you and millions like you are so easily misinformed
@@ЕгорП-д4р What problem do you have with the video lol
Good video. I have to point out that Kirov wasn't just the "chief of Leningrad", he was the vicepresident at the time.
He wasn't vice president. He was second General Secretary of the Party.
There is evidence he was plotting against Stalin. Can't blame him but old Joe wasn't someone you wanted as a rival.
@@dongately2817 Actually he was killed during a passional dispute...
Great voice. Well written, researched, and looks completely spontaneous. Bravo!
1:49- Behind Yagoda is little Nikita K.
I just realized that I’d love to see Spartacus cosplay as Adam Savage and Indy cosplay Jamie Hyneman. Sparty is already half 3/4 of the way there, we just need to make his hair a little more Einsteiny. It’d be hilarious to see Indy in a walrus mustache and beret!
They're busting myths already, so you're onto something there!
YES! PLEASE.
Man, Sparty is getting better and better at this. Awesome work guys!
Amazing any Poles survived being trapped between the Soviets and the Nazis. History still seems to hang like a dark cloud over Poland when I went there a couple years ago.
Yes 20% of the prewar population was killed. Six million out of 20 million.
@@caryblack5985 from the top of my head: it was actually 6 million out of ~35. Half of them were Jewish half of them Polish. Around 1970-80s we reach the 35 million population again (but please be aware that borders has changed and current territory is smaller than pre-war). It might be a good question to OOTF: "Did Jews consider themselves as Poles (French, German, etc.) with different faith or as Jews". I read recently labour camp memories from of one Jew (pre-war Polish citizen), who was thinking in the camp of how post-war would look like and how he would participate in rebuilding Poland. Eventually he moved to Israel.
@@arti8719 Well thats an interesting question. You have to look at it from both sides. There were some antisemitic Poles who considered Jews as aliens in their land. I am sure that some Jews also thought of their community as more of their identity than their Polish citizenship, How many Jews considered themselves Polish and how many Poles identified the Jews as countrymen is something that I couldn't confidently answer.
@@caryblack5985 30%
@@caryblack5985
Yes, unfortunately.
When the reds entered Poland in 1939 many Polish-Jewish reds denounced the anti-red Poles to the soviets.
And when the nazis came in '41 the Poles took revenge, although both suffered under the same bloodthirsty yoke.
The Polish Resistance Army Of The Interior(AK) before the Warsaw Insurrection, sometimes conducted pogroms of its own.
Yet, during the Warsaw Ghetto slaughter in 1943, the AK provided weapons for the Jewish fighters.
And in 1946, there was another pogrom in Poland...
A couple of really nice elements to this tie, but compared to some of the absolute gems we've seen thus year, this yellow effort falls just a little short. You keep raising the expectations!! 2.5/5
Fashion, the least interesting subject of history
OTOH, this characteristics of this subject matter are more of a continuous grinding, unfolding which is different from sharply defined, dramatic events of WW2. The major networks or documentarians only publish exciting, sharp events that capture attention.
@@yourstruly4817 I was of the same opinion, but tbh I found some interesting links between military history and men's fashion.
Why in the hell do you value the superfluous so very much?
You are on quite possibly the most serious and credible historic journalistic archive on the internet, and all you have to offer is fashion critiques?
Also, and I've felt this for a long time now, it is just plain super weird of you you to ignore the entire vast human cataclysm of the content discussed, to focus on the detail of the presenter's wardrobe.
Just super fucking weird man...
How many dead bodies came across your screen? Your takeaway was a gold tie? That's a deep seated mental aberration you must be wrestling with on a daily basis. How do you even have normal human interactions in public with a predisposition that lends itself so repeatedly towards highlighting the inane and absurdly awkward?
@@BeingFireRetardant My understanding is that TimeGhost really values his little asides, bit of a morale boost after discussing such tragedy.
It's just crazy the amount of photos there are compared to that of the Holocaust.
"Yagoda" literally means "a strawberry". How sweet... On the other hand "Yezhov" means "a hedgehog".
What about Lavrentiy?
Not exactly, "yagoda" means just a "berry". "Strawberry" is the meaning of "клубника".
Strawberry fields of hedgehogs
that would be correct if the accent would fall on the first "A". However his family name is of Jewish origin. Yagòda is a russification of the Hebrew name Yehuda, or Judah
@@ivarkich1543 Sorry! I guessed it's the same as in Bulgarian!
8:50 when the mass murderers discover your mass graves and think you a barbarian
Greatest TH-cam channel ever!
NKVD: You’re not tied to a chair, this fight isn’t fair
NKVD had combat units that were at front lines in the Great Patriotic War.
NKVD had it's role as Stalin main enforcer against "internal enemies" which weren't given chance to defend them self, but most of them were just regular police. 10th Rifle Division of NKVD fought in Staligrand until only 200 of original 7500 men were left standing
@@thechekist2044 At the front lines, in back of the troops actually fighting.
Thats like calling the SS Einsatzgruppen as being at the "front lines"
Maybe they invented Putin's specially of launching oneself out the upstairs window of a hotel.
Thank you fo bringing the Katyn masacre topic. For many years in cointires in soviet block the talking about this was prohibitet. Soviets also puts a lot of misinformation about this. Thanks once more
The NKVD, where the origin of "Go to Gulag" started...
The concept of sending people to exile in Siberia was actually a long tradition in the Russian empire, but the communists made it more deadly
Gulags were are located not only Siberia, but everywhere around the country
'Do not pass "Go", do not collect 200 rubles.'
that comment will also make you go to Gulag,comrade
How about the NKVD being placed behind attacking troops to stop them from retreating
The NKVD first job as blocking detachments was to send the soldiers back to the front lines. If that was not possible to round them up and decide whether they would go back to the front or put them in penal battalions. Sometimes they were put on trial and sent to the Gulag or shot in what they considered cowardly behavior.
That's true, but they would very rarely shoot them. And unlike in enemy at the gates they weren't after the soldiers who retreated after a failed attack but after the ones who tried to run from the front.
The USSR had a mostly conscript army and many men just can't handle war even if they love their country. Stalin and his NKVD knew that if left unregulated they'd have a large numbers of men fleeing the battlefield and as Stalin put it "The panic mongerer cowards also cause good soldiers to also retreat in a panic". Can't believe I'm quoting Stalin.
In fact I don't reccal hearing of a single instance of blocking units shooting fleeing men. I mean I'm sure it did happen but it was far from the norm.
The soldiers were mostly detained and based on the severity of their subordonance they were either sent back to their units, demoted in rank and then sent back or sent to penal battalions.
There were also many who got executed but that's a fraction of a fraction of those detained.
Officers caught were the ones suffering the harshest reprisals and they make a disproportionatelly large number of those executed.
Edit: You have to understand that the Red Army in the first year or so of the war struggled to form a frontline, their divisions got surrounded and destroyed on a daily basis, units fell back without authorisation and left gaps in the line and noone wanted to be left behind and taken by the germans so a lot of men just ran away as soon as they thought the front was going to move east.
To the Stavka this was not acceptable and understandably so.
No mention of Dzerzhinsky!? He basically built the Cheka and was immensely popular both within the system and generally - he was one of the few men that could standup to Stalin and one of even fewer that could have (potentially) challenged his power!
Dzherzhinsky was actually very moderate and was against most Red terror methods. He also built hundreds of schools and orphanages for orphaned children of the Civil War. He is still very popular in Russia.
@Bogdan Radu Felix Dzherzhinsky was not a monster. He was against most red Red Terror methods and only was in favour of executions of white Army officers only as a defensive mean. After the war Dzherzhinsky opened hundreds of schools and orphanages for orphaned children of the Russian Civil War by cutting 20% of the paychecks of the Cheka operatives. Whether the children were from the Reds or the Whites it didn't matter. Dzherzhinsky is still respected in Russia by Communists and anti-communists alike. Was the man a monster because he tried to protect the revolution and his comrades from counter revolutionaries that would've murdered them if he didn't? You know how a war works right?
@Bogdan Radu what an asinine comment. As though the people of Russia themselves had no agency!
After All it was Lenin who recognised, alone amongst his revolutionary peers, that a revolution had already taken place! That peasants *had* expropriated land and portioned it communally across the empire, that workers and soldiers had already formed Soviets and ceased to follow orders from their de jure leaders.
This infantile notion of history as 'good' and 'bad' tells us nothing and completely fails to recognise any lived reality of the time.
@Bogdan Radu 1. Before Hitler came to power Soviet - German relations were just fine
2. So it went from 4th to 2nd in the world and that is bad ?
3. WTF ??
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Growth_of_Russia_1547-1725_true_borders.png
@Bogdan Radu This is a particularly weird type of sophistry you're engaging in sir, put on your blog or something.
Nice to see a video on Stalin's personal hit squad. Great job.
I wish I had Sparty's style man that suit and gold tie are poppin
NKVD be like: "You know you're life is pretty much done when the Big Boss lights up his smoking pipe and says "Send him east" while pointing out your ass" x.X
Describing the NKVD as bloodstained bureaucrats only becomes more fitting when you look at some of the anecdotes about them. Like executioners having to use german pistols when they purged soviet occupied poland from reserve officers because firing that number of bullets from a TT or nagant put too mutch stress on their wrists. It´s the equivalent of getting yourself an ergonomical mouse for your desk job. But with more dead poles.
Good episode. Nice link to future events like Anders Army and Germans discovering Katyn graves and starting to cover their own atrocities by burning bodies.
Excellent.You are such a good teacher.Greetings from Greece.
How so many people stood by and let Stalin take control is just beyond me.
At the time, he seemed like a moderate. By the time things looked bad, it was basically too late.
The true story of soviet and Stalin will probably never be known. Im guessing it's somewhere between the wests demonization & writing of history, and the die-hards idolization and stubborn worshipping of Stalin.
The biggest problem about Romanovs were their leadership and not hunting down bolsheviks and mensheviks after 1905.
Doing a coup against Stalin was extremely hard after all
We find bright spots where we can - I heard "manifold" as" manyful" and enjoyed that newly minted word very much!
A good friend of mine (sadly gone from us) from Estonia told me that during the fall of Tallinn in 1941 and the failed attempt of the Soviets to pull off a Russian Dunkirk, the special targets for Estonians were striped shirts (Naval Infantry) and green hats (NKVD). No mercy.
I get the NKVD, but why the marines?
Well the soviets won anyway, so what did that no mercy of yours get you?
@@invisigaming357 as if in 1941 you knew what would happen in the future. You sure knew what was going on in the present.
@@thesayxx Naval Infantry were used for population suppression.
Do organizations like this naturally attract paranoid sociopaths, or does it turn almost every member into one? Many groups issue a list of employees who are retiring or have transferred elsewhere. The NKVD sent out a monthly list of funeral notices with the list of promotions stapled to it.
When you do something to other people, its very easy to project and start thinking other people want to do the same to you. This is why you have the silly "white genocide" spouted by white supremacists.
So if you spy and kill your political opponents NKVD style, after a few nights you are going to have some trouble sleeping.
Google Salomon Morel if you want wiki read about typical NKVD officer.
@@thehobbster6367 I see what you did there oy vey
This death machine didn’t stop in 1945 like the German one, and kept going for the decades to come, just under different names
@@dmpope1527 communists want to set up a dictatorship
that sounds
terrible.
Well, they stop in 1991, but the one USA had, still operating in full swing until now.
@@briantarigan7685 aww..
Cry more please it entertains me.
@@dmpope1527 coddle dictatorships often?
That's simply untrue. Stalinism more or less died with Stalin, and even while Stalin was alive, his regime became much less brutal in its later years. History classes usually cover the 20s and 30s and then pretend that the Soviet Unions internal politics never changed again, which gives most people a really warped view of what the soviet union was actually like.
Great work, Spartacus, Time Ghost Army, et al
I knew a man that survived the Soviets and Germans in Poland.
I knew a woman that survived both the Soviets and Nazi's in Poland, Krakow 🙏
Most did survive.
Leonardo Conti the Reich Health Leader and the head commissioner on Katyn investigation died suddenly while in British custody .
he refused to sign confession taking the blame for the massacre .
Do a special on the Kenpeitai!
I like the way Spartacus doesn't just focus on the crimes of the Nazi's (evil though they are) and documents the crimes and murder's of the USSR.
I'm "looking forward" to 1944/45
Yagoda just looks like a comic book villain
Sparty’s segments are dark & serious - and yet - I can’t help thinking he’s wearing gym shorts under the desk.
One NKVD officer, Vasily Blokhin is said to likely be the individual who personally killed the most people in history, having executed tens of thousands during his decades-long career, including about 7 000 of the victims of the Katyn massacre. Eventually, he killed himself, after suffering from alcoholism and other mental problems in his retirement.
Indeed, look here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin
You could say he died doing what he loved.
Amazing work as always!
Dying under "mysterious circumstances" seems to be a reoccurring trend in the Soviet Union....
And in Putin's Russia
today they fall out of windows of very tall buildings
The Clintons: “Write that down! Write that down!”
Although it is outside of the timeframe you're looking at, I'm surprised you didn't end by talking about what the NKVD gets renamed into in the 1950s--the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, more popularly known as the KGB.
My great great grandfather was in the nkvd in ww2
Thanks for the video
An nkfd special not apart of the war against humanity series? Seems they'd fit in..
Yes, there were cases, often in the special forces were just guys 18 years old. They gave me a light.
it's sad to see that Russia still employs these tactics as there was never any Nuremburg for the Soviet war of agresion and crimes against humanity
How does Russia continue to use these tactics? Can you give examples?
There are bad internet historians,, and then there are good ones, like the team at World War Two and the Great War. You guys have brought awareness to facets of these conflicts I haven't known or heard of despite constant study for like, two decades. You are the ONLY game in town. Thank you for many hours of information and entertainment and most especially, for shining a light on the darkness.
Interesting. I hope you guys can do a video about food one day about the different rations the soldiers were eating
Should probably get a collaboration with Steve1989MRE on this. Nice!
There is a out of the foxholes one for food on american, british, italian, german, french, russian/soviet, chinese and japanese rations
Plus what the common citizen got on the home front, rationing was brutal. Merry Christmas.
Excellent video.
Thanks!
6:38 A man has fallen into the river of Lego City!
A good video Spartacus I liked it.
These guys we're just crocodiles in human form. The most evil acting men in history I've ever read of.
Soviet Secret Police Director Radik Gradenko: Nadia this tea is excellent
NKVD Director Nadia Zelenkov: Thank you I made it myself
Gradenko: (chokes and dies)
Nadia: Incompetence will not be tolerated
Nadia Zelenkov? Why a female have a masculine surname (should be Zelenkova)?
@@Mikhalych88 Ask Westwood.
From pen pusher to killer....that would apply to Stalin. Stalin was appointed as Party Chairman under Lenin's govt because it was thought that was just a paper pushing job
How wrong they were.
He was a literal bandit robbing to fund revolution before that
Stalin regulary purged both those who helped him. NKVD leaders are a good example of that.
Why isn't this a part of the War Against Humanity series?
Great work, now let's try to put all that aside, Merry Christmas to all ! (or happy holidays)
Hi there, i just started watching the episode and it seems like there is a mismatch in the subtitles at the start. at 1:26 the Subtitles state "in 1934, the NKVD sees a change of leadership" while Spartacus says "When Genrikh Yagoda rises to control the umbrella of the organization". After that the subtitles goes on t "Genrikh Yagoda has already been active with the OGPU Secret services before, where he was on of the founders of a poison factory. Well, using the techniques developed there Yagoda slowly poisoned his boss...." This is not what Spartacus is saying. Im guessing that there is a mismatch in the scripts but it really threw me for a loop XD
Been fixed - that was the non-fact checked earlier version - sorry about that.
@@WorldWarTwo No worries, it just confused me for a second :) Thanks for fixing it so quickly!
i just interfaced online with a former resident of the USSR , who stated that his homeland never was a dictatorship and all these claims of purges and assassinations were not true because "I HAVE NEVER SEEN ANY OF THIS OR HEARD OF IT FROM ANYONE" . When I mentioned and detailed said purges, Cheka, NKVD/OGPU/MVD/KGB, Vorkuta, the Gulag as well as quotes from Solzhenitsyn , he said he had no idea what I was talking about..........Ghosts still wield power......
he was trolling u
@@lexbor3511 Maybe but I have quite a few acquaintances from the old days who state that , just like Mao, there are millions who still worship the Stalin era. And that this slander is all a (hohum again...) CIA/imperialist/fascist/capitalist propaganda machine still at work. Oh my!
@@tszirmay They teach Solzhenitsyn as a mandatory study in modern Russians schools but Stalin is still the most popular ruler in Russia. So some Russians just prefer to ignore his crimes.
Every time I hear about the NKVD I think of the death of Stalin movie lolol
With Michael Palin as Molotov 😂
Go and kill them.
Despite whatever historical errors there might be in that film, watch Zhukov punch Beria square in the face in the "coup" scene was incredibly satisfying.
Sir......that suit!! wow!
Great episode. I know terrible the nazi participation in the Holocaust was but it always bothered me how little mention of the soviets there usually is, even when the reds get a cursory mention it usually gets pushed aside and forgotten while whole libraries are written up over the nazi horrors. Part of this comes from the very real fact that there is little written or photographic record in existance due to the difference in attitude between the communists and the nazis. The nazis took pride in their butchery while the reds were very thorough in wiping out any evidence of their crimes. Decades after the events there is still piles of nazi records to sort through while the communists made sure little could be traced back to them. The evidence that has been uncovered is all partially anecdotal. Something in the range of twenty to forty million dead can be attributed to Stalin and his henchmen. After they seized what would become eastern europe millions were taken away and sent to the labor camps and gulags from where few ever survived. German pows were worked to death and even german civilians were killed or allowed to starve in the millions many as the result of polish, czech hungarian etc efforts at retaliation all under the watchful eye of the red authorities. Today some soviet era records have been released but only in tiny driblets. We may never know the full extent of the communist Holocaust. Another factor that makes it difficult to uncover the truth is the fact that while the nazis worked under a fanatical racial agenda the soviets did not or at least not to the same level. The apparent glee with which the nazis carried out their efforts at extermination are lacking on the soviet side. Also I leave this bit for last because it has been known to produce an angry response, but it is still part of the historical record, ever since the advent of electronic media just over 100 years ago for one reason or another movie studios, radio and newspapers and finally TV all saw a large proportion of their ownership fall under control of a jewish element, not from any Zionist conspiracy but simply good business practice. During the war allied governments used the media to produce film, radio and print anti fascist propaganda. Because the soviets were our allies any evidence of atrocity perpetrated by them was covered up, then after the war the cold war shifted some of the thinking in the west but by then the discovery of death camps by allied troops helped create even more anti nazi fervor. It was considered to be too provocative in the growing cold war to mention soviet crimes. In the meantime as part of a real effort to drum up support for a jewish home in the middle east a vast amount of literature, films and television was focused on the Holocaust. There just wasn't room for a discussion on the soviet crimes. They were buried once more. Today very little is left, and to be honest it is possible the soviet crimes were not as great as that of the nazis but it is not really right to try and rate who was the worse? That makes a game out of horrible subject, but as a historian I hate to see the crimes of the reds to be brushed aside once more. It is great to find programs such as yours and i will just conclude by saying keep up the good work
"Не ищи черную кошку в темной комнате"
И не сравнивай НКВД и СС
you and your buddy sure turn out some great content...as i mentioned to him it should be available as part of the school curriculum here in UK. it would have saved me having to watch all them war movies in the 70s 80s that turned out to be just wrong...thank you for the clarity and the easy conveyance of this subject matter.....thank you
From NKVD to KGB to FSB - the russian way
Wonder what the heads of NKVD were thinking when being offered the job.
"Oh hey, the position whose previous holders always get killed on Stalins orders just became vacant. Better to apply now! Whatever could go wrong?"
My great aunts family was deported to Siberia by NKVD.
Did any of them made it back?
My grandfather was arrested and his wife and three small children were deported to Kazakhstan; all of them miraculously survived and come back home (which is now Belarus, not far from Nesvizh)
@@Darwinek My great aunt came back. But she could only be in Estonia (her home) for a year then her neighbor gave out her and the NKVD sent her back. Miraculously she survived the second time too.
When are we getting a War Against Humanity episode about the Ustase?
Already covered several times - both in War Against Humanity and between 2 wars.
when you own the Trotskyites epic style
:(
@@leant6487 long live the tankie
Reject Trotskyism, return to tankie
(Free T-34 85 and BT-5 tenks guaranteed)
Based NKVD
GAMER YAGODA
BOTTOM TEXT
Don't think that this can't happen here in the U.S. If people don't trust the U.S. institutions and allow want to be a dictator to get what he/she wants, this will happen. That's why our laws and institutions are more important than one person.
naw it can happen just matters the way we do it , as much as I hate to say this people like trump who have such a cult following have power like that