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Understanding the NKVD: A Historical Quiz

This quiz tests your knowledge about the NKVD, its historical context, and its impact on society. Answer questions related to its operations, key figures, and significant events.

#NKVD #Soviet history #Cold War #intelligence agencies #human rights #historical quiz

1 The NKVD's intelligence and special operations (Inostranny Otdel) unit organized overseas ________ of ex-Soviet citizens and foreigners who were regarded as enemies of the USSR by Josef Stalin.

2 the quotas for ________, former nobles etc, regardless of identity).

3 Where are the headquarters of NKVD?

4 When did NKVD form?

5 NKVD, Guantanamo Bay detention camp and The Troubles are all:

6 Estabilishment of later People's Republic of Poland communist parties and training activists, during and after ________.

7 In the 1990s and 2000s a small number of ex-NKVD agents living in the ________ were convicted of crimes against the local population.

8 NKVD, Cuba and Berlin Wall are all:

9 Among such sharashka members were ________, the head designer of the Soviet rocket program and first human space flight mission in 1961, and Andrei Tupolev, the famous airplane designer.

10 NKVD, Cold War and Korean War are all:

💡 Interesting Facts

  • despite being a Soviet citizen and a confirmed NKVD agent, Alexandru Nicolschi served as head of Communist Romania's secret police.
  • celebrated Azerbaijani activist of the French Resistance Ahmadiyya Jabrayilov was persecuted by the NKVD upon his return to the USSR.
  • after being sent to the GULAG, Ukrainian writer Hryhorii Epik continued to write and sent one of his works to the NKVD in Moscow before his execution during the Great Purge in 1937.
  • the Gestapo and NKVD convened four conferences discussing the elimination of the Polish resistance movement.
  • the Russian Communist Varvara Yakovleva was a member of the board of the Secret Police and led food inspections that requisitioned food as a punitive measure.
  • the writer Mikhail Mikhalkov, brother of Sergei Mikhalkov, who wrote the Soviet anthem, was an NKVD agent acting in Nazi Germany and later a GULAG inmate.
  • the May 1945 Battle of Kurylowka was one of the biggest clashes fought between the NKVD and Polish anti-communist resistance.
  • the massacre in Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the purges of 1937-1938 was investigated in 1943 during the German invasion of Ukraine and used in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union.
  • a Soviet and former Russian Imperial and Azerbaijani military commander, combrig Jamshid Nakhichevanski, became a victim of the Great Purge and was executed in 1938 after his third arrest by NKVD.
  • German nuclear physicist Heinz Barwich had illegal contacts to the Soviet secret police NKVD during Nazi rule, and then spied on the Soviet Union for the West while working in the East.
  • Joseph Zack Kornfeder, a founding member of the Communist Party of America in 1919, became a vigorous anti-Communist after his wife was arrested by the NKVD during the Great Purge of 1937–38.
  • Jan StanisÅ‚aw Jankowski, the World War II political leader of the Polish Secret State, was kidnapped by the NKVD and killed in a Soviet prison.
  • Russian composer Boris Sobinov was abducted from the Berlin American Zone by the NKVD and condemned to ten years in prison in the Soviet Union.
  • Leonard Skierski was one of fourteen Polish generals to be murdered by the NKVD in the Katyn massacre of 1940.
  • Sara Szweber, one of a few women who held leadership positions in the Jewish socialist movement, after the invasion of Poland was threatened with arrest by the NKVD and fled to the United States.
  • WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Filipkowski, a Polish resistance fighter and commander of the Lwów Uprising against Nazi Germany occupiers in 1944, was soon afterwards arrested by the Soviet NKVD and imprisoned for three years.
  • Vasili Blokhin, chief executioner of the Stalinist NKVD, led a company of executioners that performed more than 828,000 official executions during Joseph Stalin's reign, including tens of thousands by his own hands.
  • NKVD official Yakov Blumkin organised and personally took part in an expedition to find the Shambhala, a mystical kingdom hidden in the Himalayas.
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