Important terms and phrases appearing throughout the RED FILES are explained below.

Armenia

Small ancient republic south of Georgia bordering, Turkey and Azerbaijan. Capital city Yerevan. Independent 1917-1920; Regained independence in 1991.

Caucasus

Mountainous region in the USSR between Black and Caspian Seas.

Football

Soccer in America. The Most popular sport in the Soviet Union.

Georgia, Georgian

An ancient state, long an independent Kingdom south of Russia, by the Black Sea in the Caucasus. Georgia became a Russian protectorate in 1801, under Tsar Alexander I. Georgia enjoyed independence under a non-Bolshevik socialist government 1917-1921. Bolshevik troops invaded and soon joined Georgia to Bolshevik Moscow. Georgia regained independence in 1991. The people of Georgia, Georgians are a non-Slavic peoples with their own unique language and a rich and ancient culture, religion (Georgian Orthodoxy--they converted to Christianity in the fourth century; Russians did so only in the tenth century), and way of life. Georgians say they can trace their civilization back 3,000 years. Stalin and his NKVD boss, Lavrenty Beria were both Georgians.

Glasnost

Openness or candor. The more honest discussion of the Soviet past. Filling in the blank spots of Soviet History Gorbachev once called for was an important but not the only part of his opening of the Communist party and Soviet society to reform and to new ideas. A campaign of truth telling begun by Mikhail Gorbachev. Glasnost allowed archives and secret information to be published. 

GRU

Soviet Military Intelligence. During WWII Soviet military counter-intelligence was called SMERSH (Death to Spies).

Gulag

The System of Prison, Labor and Concentration Camps Spread across the Soviet Union. Officially most were "corrective labor colonies." Rooted in the exile in Siberia system of the tsarist period, the GULAG was organized by the Communist government in 1918 and vastly expanded under Stalin. GULAG is a Russian acronym for a department of the secret police, "chief administration of corrective labor camps."

Homo Sovieticus

Soviet Man. The everyday man in the Soviet Union. Sometimes style as Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov.

Iron Curtain

A term used during the Cold War to refer to the closed societies of the Soviet socialist block. Usually refers to the satellite nations enslaved or forcibly tied to Moscow and the Soviet Union itself. The dividing line between the 'free' west and 'enslaved' socialist puppet states of Eastern Europe. The terms comes from the first major speech Winston S. Churchill gave in the United States as British ex-Prime Minister (voters turned their wartime leader out of office in July 1945 parliamentary elections) at Westminster College, Fulton Missouri on 5 March 1946. He said, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent." Churchill's Fulton Speech is sometimes used to periodize the start of the Cold War. The Iron Curtain metaphor was not an original coinage by Churchill. 

KGB

Soviet political police. Abbreviations of Russian for Committee for State Security. Many refer to it as the Cheka, its operatives as Chekisty, these names come from the original Bolshevik organized agency created in December 1917 by V.I.Lenin's revolutionary government under the leadership of Felix E.Dzerzhinsky ("Iron Felix"). Cheka stands for The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. The Soviet government reorganized the Cheka in 1922. Over the years it had many different names. During the worst period of Stalin's bloody regime when its agents murdered millions it was called the NKVD, The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. In the years of great terror some feared even to whisper the letters NKVD; some referred to it as the Okhranka, The Guards, the name for the tsarist era secret police; others called it "the organs." During WWII the NKVD changed its name briefly to NKGB. At other times it was called or was part of the GPU, OGPU, GUGB, MVD, MGB. A post-Stalin reorganization created the KGB formula in 1954. Since the Soviet government moved to Moscow from Petrograd in 1918 it has been headquartered not far from the Kremlin in a complex of building, starting at n.11 Bolshaya Lubyanka Street and quickly spreading out into building n.2 on the same street. That infamous building, once the Rossiya Insurance Company, fronts on Lubyankaya Square. For many years a giant statue of "Iron Felix" stood in the center of the Square. Jubilant crowds tore it down in the fury that followed a failed hard-line Communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1981.  

Kremlin

Literally it means "fort". Every early Russian city had one. Moscow's Kremlin started as wooden stockade. Traditionally, it is dated from 1147. The Kremlin often refers to top rulers of the Soviet Union or Russia, just as Americans say, "The White House announced today....."

Lubyanka

Headquarters building of the KGB/NKVD/OGPU/CHEKA since spring 1918. Contains offices, jail, and torture chambers. Many prisoners summarily executed by a single bullet to the back of the head in its basement. The most feared building in Europe. See KGB.

Pavlovian

Based on the theories of Ivan Pavlov who experimented with stimulating automatic responses in dogs.

Physcultura

Sometimes Physkultura. Gymnastics, especially public staged performances of massed gymnastic exercises.

Spartakiad

From Spartacus the name of a slave who fled from a school for gladiators and lead a revolt against Imperial Rome, 73-71 B.C. International multi-sport competition of 'workers' organized in Soviet Russia, Germany and Czechoslovakia in the 1920's. They included military events. Parachute jumping particularly popular in the 1930s. 1928 meet in Moscow. After 1956 Spartakiads were internal Soviet competitions.