NKVD

thumb|A punishment cell block in one of the subcamps of Vorkutlag, 1945 The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Glávnoye upravléniye ispravítel'no-trudovýkh lageréy " (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере

The '''People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD''' (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) secret police organization, and thus had a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. The NKVD is known for carrying out political repression and the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin, as well as counterintelligence and other operations on the Eastern Front of World War II. The head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Ye

Soviet campaign of political repression, imprisonment, and execution (August 1936 - March 1938)

SMERSH () was an umbrella organization for three independent counter-intelligence agencies in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially announced only on 14 April 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph Stalin. The formal justification for its creation was to subvert the attempts by Nazi German forces to infiltrate the Red Army on the Eastern Front.

The militsiya was the police force of the Russian SFSR and Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. The term was likewise used for police forces in several Eastern Bloc countries and in the SFR Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1992.

thumb|Kurapaty forest graves

Prison in Moscow, Russia

actress (1897-1980)

Soviet politician (1878–1958)

place of mass executions during Stalinism near Moscow

Soviet concentration camp on the Solovetsky Islands that operated from 1923 to 1939. It became a symbol of the Gulag system

execution site

Soviet national security agency (1934-1943)

security police meetings organized by Germany and the Soviet Union

Dalstroy (, ), also known as Far North Construction Trust, was an organization set up in 1931 in order to manage road construction and the mining of gold in the Russian Far East, including the Magadan Region, Chukotka, parts of Yakutia and parts of present-day Kamchatka Krai.

memorial and mass grave for Soviet dissidents in Kyiv, Ukraine

type of military unit

Soviet / Russian paramilitary force

Russian writer (1886–1938)

officer of the White Army; Russian and Soviet publicist, writer, NKVD agent (1893–1941)

neighborhood of Kharkiv, Ukraine

house of culture in Kyiv, Ukraine

Russian politician (1907–1950)

cemetery in Saint Petersburg, Russia

Russian sinologist (1897-1938)

Spanish communist and NKVD agent (1892-1975)

Russian linguist (1892-1937)

secret research facility

law enforcement agency

Svirlag, SvirLAG (Svirskiy Lager' – Svir Concentration-Camp, , also ' / ' – ) was a Soviet forced labour camp run by NKVD's GULAG Directorate. It was located on the river Svir (hence the name Svirskiy in Russian) in the forests by the town Lodeynoye Pole, 244 km north-east of Saint Petersburg, in Leningrad Oblast, operated in the 1930s (Joseph Stalin's time) and onwards. SvirLAG concentration camp was supplier of wood to Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

Legal category in Russian SFSR

graves of executed Soviet citizens and foreigners

thumb|Litene thumb|Litene manor house Litene () is the center of the Litene Parish of Gulbene Municipality in the Vidzeme region of Latvia. Other names: Lytene, Myza Lytene. A notable building is Litene Manor.

resistance organization in German-occupied Norway (1940–44)

government agency in the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1953

monastery once used as a Soviet prison

American spy (1908-1967)