152-687: Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov ( Russian : Андрей Александрович Жданов , IPA: [ɐnˈdrʲej ɐlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪdʑ ˈʐdanəf] ; 26 February [ O.S. 14 February] 1896 – 31 August 1948) was a Soviet politician. He was the Soviet Union's "propagandist-in-chief" after the Second World War , and was responsible for developing the Soviet cultural policy, the Zhdanov Doctrine , which remained in effect until
304-674: A constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%. Starting in 2019, instruction in Russian will be gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, and in general instruction in Latvian public high schools. On 29 September 2022, Saeima passed in
456-519: A new education law which requires all schools to teach at least partially in Ukrainian, with provisions while allow indigenous languages and languages of national minorities to be used alongside the national language. The law faced criticism from officials in Russia and Hungary. The 2019 Law of Ukraine "On protecting the functioning of the Ukrainian language as the state language" gives priority to
608-810: A show trial and executed less than 30 days later. Kirov's assassination was used by Stalin as a reason for starting the Moscow trials and the Great Purge . Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov was born on 27 March [ O.S. 15 March] 1886 in Urzhum in Vyatka Governorate , Russian Empire , as one of seven children born to Miron Ivanovich Kostrikov and Yekaterina Kuzminichna Kostrikova ( née Kazantseva). Their first four children had died young, while Anna (born 1883), Sergei (1886), and Yelizaveta (1889) survived. Miron, an alcoholic , abandoned
760-538: A Politburo member, it would have been ordered verbally by Stalin to NKVD director Genrikh Yagoda . Many cities, streets, and factories were named or renamed after Kirov in Russia, including the cities of Kirov (formerly Vyatka) and Kirov Oblast , Kirovsk ( Murmansk Oblast ), Kirov ( Kaluga Oblast ), Kirovohrad (formerly Zinovyevsk, now Kropyvnytskyi) and Kirovohrad Oblast ( Ukrainian SSR ; now Ukraine ), Kirovabad ( Azerbaijani SSR ; now Ganja, Azerbaijan ), Kirovakan ( Armenian SSR ; now Vanadzor, Armenia ),
912-661: A bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot." In 1921, Kirov became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan , the Bolshevik party organization in the Azerbaijan SSR . Kirov was a loyal supporter of Joseph Stalin , the successor of Vladimir Lenin , and in 1926 was rewarded with command of the Leningrad party organization. Kirov was a close personal friend of Stalin, and
1064-590: A device that was used to remove them. Zhdanov was one of the few provincial party leaders in Russia to remain in post throughout the Great Purge. In May 1937, he called leaders of the Leningrad party together to tell them that the long-time second secretary of the provincial party, Mikhail Chudov , and the former Mayor of Leningrad, Ivan Kodatsky , had been arrested. When an Old Bolshevik , Dora Lazurkina , went up to him afterwards to vouch for Kodatsky, Zhdanov warned her that such talk "will end badly for you". She
1216-544: A formula with V standing for the nucleus (vowel) and C for each consonant, the maximal structure can be described as follows: (C)(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) Sergei Kirov Sergei Mironovich Kirov (born Kostrikov ; 27 March 1886 – 1 December 1934) was a Russian and Soviet politician and Bolshevik revolutionary. Kirov was an early revolutionary in the Russian Empire and a member of the Bolshevik faction of
1368-468: A friend he wanted to kill the head of the party control commission that had expelled him. Nikolayev's friend reported this to the NKVD. Ivan Zaporozhets then allegedly enlisted Nikolayev's friend to contact him, giving him money and a loaded 7.62 mm Nagant M1895 revolver. Nikolayev's first attempt at killing Kirov failed. On 15 October 1934, Nikolayev packed his Nagant revolver in a briefcase and entered
1520-663: A group of wealthy benefactors provided a scholarship for Kirov to attend an industrial school at Kazan . After gaining his degree in engineering , Kirov moved to Tomsk , a city in Siberia , where he became a Marxist and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1904. Kirov was a participant in the 1905 Russian Revolution and was arrested, joining with the Bolsheviks soon after being released from prison. In 1906, he
1672-467: A key figure in the Great Purge , who advocated an approach that would make the party a vehicle for political education, ideological agitation and cadre preparation on a mass scale. Zhdanov's encouragement of rank-and-file mobilisation helped create momentum for the Great Terror. Though somewhat less active than Vyacheslav Molotov , Joseph Stalin , Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov , Zhdanov
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#17327719174121824-484: A language that "belongs to the European cultural space". The financing of Russian-language content by the state will cease, which the concept says create a "unified information space". However, one inevitable consequence would be the closure of public media broadcasts in Russian on LTV and Latvian Radio, as well as the closure of LSM's Russian-language service. In Lithuania , Russian has no official or legal status, but
1976-661: A leading role during the Siege of Leningrad in the Second World War . In August 1941, he created a City Defence Council but was ordered by Stalin to disband it. When the siege was lifted, he was not officially given credit for saving the city. After the Moscow Armistice between Finland and the Soviet Union was signed on 4 September 1944, Zhdanov directed the Allied Control Commission in Finland to
2128-588: A lesser extent the languages to the south and the east: Uralic , Turkic , Persian , Arabic , and Hebrew . According to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California , Russian is classified as a level III language in terms of learning difficulty for native English speakers, requiring approximately 1,100 hours of immersion instruction to achieve intermediate fluency. Feudal divisions and conflicts created obstacles between
2280-744: A major role during the Great Purge . In 1939, he was promoted to full membership of the Politburo and as head of the Central Committee's Propaganda Department. Zhdanov's political standing was undermined during the Second World War due to his association with the Soviet–Finnish War and the failed Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact . Nevertheless, he played a leading role in the Soviet takeover of Estonia and defense of Leningrad . After
2432-622: A minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . 30% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 2% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Azerbaijan , Russian has no official status, but is a lingua franca of the country. 26% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 5% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. In Georgia , Russian has no official status, but it
2584-430: A number of historians concluded that the assassination was ordered by Stalin. According to Orlov, Stalin ordered Yagoda to arrange the assassination of Kirov. Orlov said that Yagoda ordered Medved's deputy, Vania Zaporozhets, to undertake the job. Zaporozhets returned to Leningrad in search of an assassin; in reviewing the files he found the name of Leonid Nikolayev. According to another Soviet defector, Grigori Tokaev ,
2736-673: A party leader such as Stalin to have done. He said: "Comrade Stalin personally directed the investigation of Kirov's assassination. He questioned Nikolayev at length. The leaders of the Opposition placed the gun in Nikolayev's hand!" Other speakers duly rose to purge the Communist Party of any opposition: "The Central Committee must be pitiless—the Party must be purged... the record of every member must be scrutinized...." No one at
2888-479: A practice common among Russian revolutionaries of the time. Kirov began using the pen name Kir, first publishing under the pseudonym Kirov on 26 April 1912. One account states that he chose the name Kir, the Russian version of Cyrus (from the Greek Kūros), after a Christian martyr in third-century Egypt from an Orthodox calendar of saints' days, and Russifying it by adding an -ov suffix . A second story
3040-526: A qualitatively new entity can be said to emerge—the general language of the working class... capitalism has the tendency of creating the general urban language of a given society. In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in
3192-563: A real oppositionist underground group assassinated Kirov. Author and Menshevik scholar Boris Nikolaevsky argued: "One thing is certain: the only man who profited by the Kirov assassination was Stalin." The idea of Stalin's complicity in Kirov's assassination has been backed by Robert Conquest and Amy Knight but challenged by revisionist historians who argued that this theory relies primarily on circumstantial evidence and Khrushchev-era investigations. Robert W. Thurston argued that Kirov
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#17327719174123344-530: A result of the Tito–Stalin split . He died of heart failure in 1948, resulting in a rise in the political fortunes of Georgy Malenkov . Zhdanov was born on 26 February [ O.S. 14 February] 1896 in Mariupol , Mariupol uezd , Yekaterinoslav Governorate , Russian Empire (now Ukraine ), where his father, Alexander Alekseevich Zhdanov (1860-1909), was a school inspector. His maternal grandfather
3496-676: A signed article in Pravda in which he expressed what he called his "personal" view "with which my friends do not agree" that Britain and France did not seriously want a military alliance with the Soviet Union. In retrospect, it was the first public hint of the Soviets signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact three months later. Zhdanov was very publicly associated with the decision to invade Finland in November 1939. In December, he signed
3648-612: A special congress of the Union of Soviet Composers . Zhdanov was the most openly cultured of the leadership group and his treatment of artists was mild by Soviet standards of the time. He even wrote a satirical sketch ridiculing the attack on modernism. Zhdanov's son Yuri (1919–2006) married Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva in 1949. She described the Zhdanov household as imbued with "an inveterate spirit of bourgeois acquisitiveness ... There were trunkloads of possessions ... The place
3800-485: A strong supporter of industrialisation and forced collectivisation . At the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1930, Kirov stated: "The General Party line is to conduct the course of our country industrialization. Based on the industrialisation, we conduct transformation of our agriculture . Namely, we centralise and collectivise." In 1934, at the 17th Congress of
3952-613: A willing accomplice when the full force of Stalin's terror was unleashed in Leningrad. Knight's contention is supported by the fact that whereas most of the elite tried to anticipate what Stalin desired and to act accordingly, Kirov did not always do what Stalin wanted. In 1934, Stalin wanted Kirov to come to Moscow permanently. Whereas all the other members of the Politburo would have complied, Stalin accepted that, as Kirov had no desire to leave Leningrad, he would not come to Moscow until 1938. When Stalin wanted Filipp Medved moved from
4104-539: Is Belarusian, among ethnic Belarusians this share is 28.5%; the highest share of those who speak Belarusian at home is among ethnic Poles — 46.0%. In Estonia , Russian is spoken by 29.6% of the population, according to a 2011 estimate from the World Factbook, and is officially considered a foreign language. School education in the Russian language is a very contentious point in Estonian politics, and in 2022,
4256-481: Is a co-official language per article 5 of the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan . The 2009 census states that 482,200 people speak Russian as a native language, or 8.99% of the population. Additionally, 1,854,700 residents of Kyrgyzstan aged 15 and above fluently speak Russian as a second language, or 49.6% of the population in the age group. In Tajikistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication under
4408-401: Is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian , and a moderate degree of it in all modern Slavic languages, at least at the conversational level. Russian is written using a Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The following table gives their forms, along with IPA values for each letter's typical sound: Older letters of
4560-610: Is a post-posed definite article -to , -ta , -te similar to that existing in Bulgarian and Macedonian. In the Southern Russian dialects , instances of unstressed /e/ and /a/ following palatalized consonants and preceding a stressed syllable are not reduced to [ɪ] (as occurs in the Moscow dialect), being instead pronounced [a] in such positions (e.g. несл и is pronounced [nʲaˈslʲi] , not [nʲɪsˈlʲi] ) – this
4712-488: Is being used less frequently by Russian-speaking typists in favor of the extension of Unicode character encoding , which fully incorporates the Russian alphabet. Free programs are available offering this Unicode extension, which allow users to type Russian characters, even on Western 'QWERTY' keyboards. The Russian language was first introduced to computing after the M-1 , and MESM models were produced in 1951. According to
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4864-624: Is called yakanye ( яканье ). Consonants include a fricative /ɣ/ , a semivowel /w⁓u̯/ and /x⁓xv⁓xw/ , whereas the Standard and Northern dialects have the consonants /ɡ/ , /v/ , and final /l/ and /f/ , respectively. The morphology features a palatalized final /tʲ/ in 3rd person forms of verbs (this is unpalatalized in the Standard and Northern dialects). During the Proto-Slavic (Common Slavic) times all Slavs spoke one mutually intelligible language or group of dialects. There
5016-573: Is more spoken than English. Sizable Russian-speaking communities also exist in North America, especially in large urban centers of the US and Canada, such as New York City , Philadelphia , Boston , Los Angeles , Nashville , San Francisco , Seattle , Spokane , Toronto , Calgary , Baltimore , Miami , Portland , Chicago , Denver , and Cleveland . In a number of locations they issue their own newspapers, and live in ethnic enclaves (especially
5168-564: Is odd") – чу́дно ( chúdno – "this is marvellous"), молоде́ц ( molodéts – "well done!") – мо́лодец ( mólodets – "fine young man"), узна́ю ( uznáyu – "I shall learn it") – узнаю́ ( uznayú – "I recognize it"), отреза́ть ( otrezát – "to be cutting") – отре́зать ( otrézat – "to have cut"); to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words, especially personal and family names, like афе́ра ( aféra , "scandal, affair"), гу́ру ( gúru , "guru"), Гарси́я ( García ), Оле́ша ( Olésha ), Фе́рми ( Fermi ), and to show which
5320-402: Is recognized as a minority language under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . Russian is the language of 9% of the population according to the World Factbook. Ethnologue cites Russian as the country's de facto working language. In China , Russian has no official status, but it is spoken by the small Russian communities in the northeastern Heilongjiang and
5472-529: Is reputed to have been a scandal, when Kirov topped the poll in elections to the Central Committee, and Stalin's acolyte, Lazar Kaganovich ordered a number of ballots be destroyed so that Stalin and Kirov could share top billing. Amy Knight , a historian of the Soviet Union, suggests that whereas Kirov "might have toed the line as others did, on the other hand, he might have acted as a rallying point for those who wanted to oppose his [Stalin's] dictatorship." Furthermore, Knight suggests that Kirov would not have been
5624-569: Is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. Also, Russian has notable lexical similarities with Bulgarian due to a common Church Slavonic influence on both languages, but because of later interaction in the 19th and 20th centuries, Bulgarian grammar differs markedly from Russian. Over the course of centuries, the vocabulary and literary style of Russian have also been influenced by Western and Central European languages such as Greek, Latin , Polish , Dutch , German, French, Italian, and English, and to
5776-585: Is spoken by 14.2% of the population according to an undated estimate from the World Factbook. In 2005, Russian was the most widely taught foreign language in Mongolia, and was compulsory in Year 7 onward as a second foreign language in 2006. Around 1.5 million Israelis spoke Russian as of 2017. The Israeli press and websites regularly publish material in Russian and there are Russian newspapers, television stations, schools, and social media outlets based in
5928-959: Is that Kirov based it on the name of the Persian king Cyrus the Great . Kirov became commander of the Bolshevik military administration in Astrakhan and fought for the Red Army in the Russian Civil War until 1920. Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: "During the Civil War, he was one of the swashbuckling commissars in the North Caucasus beside Ordzhonikidze and Mikoyan . In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal bloodletting; more than 4,000 were killed. When
6080-532: Is the most spoken native language in Europe , the most spoken Slavic language , as well as the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia . It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers , and the world's ninth-most spoken language by total number of speakers . Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station , one of
6232-773: Is the native language of the Russians . It was the de facto and de jure official language of the former Soviet Union . Russian has remained an official language of the Russian Federation , Belarus , Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and Tajikistan , and is still commonly used as a lingua franca in Ukraine , Moldova , the Caucasus , Central Asia , and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel . Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It
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6384-518: Is the stressed word in a sentence, for example Ты́ съел печенье? ( Tý syel pechenye? – "Was it you who ate the cookie?") – Ты съе́л печенье? ( Ty syél pechenye? – "Did you eat the cookie?) – Ты съел пече́нье? ( Ty syel pechénye? "Was it the cookie you ate?"). Stress marks are mandatory in lexical dictionaries and books for children or Russian learners. The Russian syllable structure can be quite complex, with both initial and final consonant clusters of up to four consecutive sounds. Using
6536-470: The 2011 Lithuanian census , Russian was the native language for 7.2% of the population. In Moldova , Russian was considered to be the language of interethnic communication under a Soviet-era law. On 21 January 2021, the Constitutional Court of Moldova declared the law unconstitutional and deprived Russian of the status of the language of interethnic communication. 50% of the population
6688-1000: The Apollo–Soyuz mission, which first flew in 1975. In March 2013, Russian was found to be the second-most used language on websites after English. Russian was the language of 5.9% of all websites, slightly ahead of German and far behind English (54.7%). Russian was used not only on 89.8% of .ru sites, but also on 88.7% of sites with the former Soviet Union domain .su . Websites in former Soviet Union member states also used high levels of Russian: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan and 81.8% in Tajikistan. However, Russian
6840-413: The Constitution of Tajikistan and is permitted in official documentation. 28% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 7% used it as the main language with family, friends or at work. The World Factbook notes that Russian is widely used in government and business. In Turkmenistan , Russian lost its status as the official lingua franca in 1996. Among 12% of the population who grew up in
6992-995: The Kirovskaya station of the Moscow Metro (now Chistye Prudy station), the Kirov Ballet (now the Mariinsky Ballet), the massive Kirov Plant in Saint Petersburg, Kirov Square in Yekaterinburg , the Kirov Islands in the Kara Sea , and various small settlements. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the locations and buildings named after Kirov have been renamed, especially outside of Russia . In order to comply with Ukrainian decommunization laws , Kirovohrad
7144-430: The Paris Peace Treaty in 1947. That meant that he had to spend several months in Helsinki and relinquish his position as head of the Leningrad party organisation, which he had held for nine years, but he was able to leave it in the hands of his ally, Alexey Kuznetsov . In January 1945, when Pravda celebrated the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad, it emphasised that Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov had been dispatched to
7296-428: The Politburo Lavrentiy Beria , Georgy Malenkov , and Nikita Khrushchev , an opportunity to undermine him. Stalin would later blame Zhdanov's death on Kremlin doctors and "Zionist" conspirators. Zhdanovshchina was the emphasis on purified communist ideology developed during the war by Zhdanov. It emerged from his arguments inside the party hierarchy opposing the pragmatist faction of Georgy Malenkov. Malenkov stressed
7448-426: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party . Kirov became an Old Bolshevik and personal friend to Joseph Stalin , rising through the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ranks to become head of the party in Leningrad and a member of the Politburo . On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by Leonid Nikolaev at his offices in the Smolny Institute . Nikolaev and several alleged accomplices were convicted in
7600-411: The Smolny Institute offices and made his way to the third floor unopposed, waiting in a hallway until Kirov and his bodyguard Borisov stepped into the corridor. Borisov appeared to have stayed some 20 to 40 paces behind Kirov, with some sources alleging Borisov parted company with Kirov in order to prepare his lunch. Kirov turned a corner and passed Nikolayev, who then drew his revolver and shot Kirov in
7752-476: The Ukrainian language in more than 30 spheres of public life: in particular in public administration , media, education, science, culture, advertising, services . The law does not regulate private communication. A poll conducted in March 2022 by RATING in the territory controlled by Ukraine found that 83% of the respondents believe that Ukrainian should be the only state language of Ukraine. This opinion dominates in all macro-regions, age and language groups. On
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#17327719174127904-403: The Union of Soviet Writers , and gave the opening address to the first Soviet Writers' Congress in August 1934. In his speech, as well as paying tribute to "the guiding genius of our great leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin", he repeated Stalin's famous line that writers are "engineers of human souls". He declared that the only good literature was political: Our Soviet literature is not afraid of
8056-507: The United States Census , in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States. Russian is one of the official languages (or has similar status and interpretation must be provided into Russian) of the following: The Russian language is also one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station – NASA astronauts who serve alongside Russian cosmonauts usually take Russian language courses. This practice goes back to
8208-406: The Zhdanov Doctrine ("The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best"). In December 1946, he launched the attack on Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko , two writers living in Zhdanov's former Leningrad fiefdom. He described Akhmatova, arguably then the greatest living Russian poet, as "half nun, half whore". Zhdanov was the founding editor-in-chief of
8360-474: The burning of the Reichstag in Nazi Germany in 1933. The fire at the Reichstag was often said to have been organized by the Nazis as a pretext for the mass persecution of the Communists and Social Democrats in Germany. The physical removal of Kirov meant the elimination of a future potential rival for Stalin; the principal objective, as with the fire at the Reichstag, was to manufacture an excuse for repression and control. Based on circumstantial evidence ,
8512-416: The intelligentsia , with punishment being applied for failing to conform to what was considered acceptable by Zhdanov's standards. This policy officially ended in 1952, seen as having a negative impact on culture within the Soviet Union. The origins of this policy can be seen before 1946 when critics proposed (wrongly according to Zhdanov) that Russian classics had been influenced by famous foreign writers, but
8664-590: The show trial called The Trial of the Twenty-One accused of Kirov's death, while Tomsky committed suicide expecting his arrest by the NKVD . After his assassination, Kirov acquired a reputation for having repeatedly stood up to Stalin in private and for becoming so popular that he was a threat to Stalin's supremacy, as he displayed some independence from Stalin. In an alleged example from 1932, Stalin wanted to have Martemyan Ryutin executed for writing an attack on his leadership but Kirov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze talked him out of it. Alexander Orlov , who defected to
8816-412: The 1930s; this was the same Pospelov who had drafted the famous Secret Speech for Khrushchev at the 20th Congress . Khrushchev stated: There are reasons for the suspicion that the killer of Kirov, Nikolayev, was assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was protect the person of Kirov. A month and a half before the killing, Nikolayev was arrested on the grounds of suspicious behavior, but he
8968-405: The 20th century, Russian was a mandatory language taught in the schools of the members of the old Warsaw Pact and in other countries that used to be satellites of the USSR. According to the Eurobarometer 2005 survey, fluency in Russian remains fairly high (20–40%) in some countries, in particular former Warsaw Pact countries. In Armenia , Russian has no official status, but it is recognized as
9120-425: The Agitprop journal Kultura i zhizn which he held until 1948. In 1947, he organised the Cominform , which was designed to coordinate and control the communist parties around the world. At a famous speech at Szklarska Poręba in September 1947, Zhdanov warned his fellow communists that the world was now split into two hostile camps and that the Cominform was needed to oppose the "frank expansionist programme" of
9272-453: The All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) , Kirov delivered the speech called "The Speech of Comrade Stalin Is the Program of Our Party", which refers to Stalin's speech delivered at the Congress earlier. Kirov praised Stalin for everything he had done since the death of Lenin. Moreover, Kirov personally named and ridiculed Nikolai Bukharin , Alexei Rykov , and Mikhail Tomsky —former party allies of Stalin. Bukharin and Rykov were later tried in
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#17327719174129424-412: The Belarusian society the Russian language prevails, so according to the 2019 census 6,718,557 people (71.4% of the total population) stated that they speak Russian at home, for ethnic Belarusians this share is 61.4%, for Russians — 97.2%, for Ukrainians — 89.0%, for Poles — 52.4%, and for Jews — 96.6%; 2,447,764 people (26.0% of the total population) stated that the language they usually speak at home
9576-409: The Great and developed from the Moscow ( Middle or Central Russian ) dialect substratum under the influence of some of the previous century's Russian chancery language. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution , the spoken form of the Russian language was that of the nobility and the urban bourgeoisie. Russian peasants, the great majority of the population, continued to speak in their own dialects. However,
9728-468: The Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an optional acute accent ( знак ударения ) may, and sometimes should, be used to mark stress . For example, it is used to distinguish between otherwise identical words, especially when context does not make it obvious: замо́к ( zamók – "lock") – за́мок ( zámok – "castle"), сто́ящий ( stóyashchy – "worthwhile") – стоя́щий ( stoyáshchy – "standing"), чудно́ ( chudnó – "this
9880-470: The Leningrad NKVD to Minsk , Kirov refused to agree; in a rare move for Stalin, he had to accept defeat. In the first days when Leningrad was orphaned, Stalin rushed there. He went to the place where the crime against our country was committed. The enemy did not fire at Kirov personally. No! He fired at the proletarian revolution. — Pravda , 5 December 1934 On the afternoon of Saturday, 1 December 1934, Kirov's assassin, Leonid Nikolayev , arrived at
10032-411: The Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin America – 0.2 million, U.S., Canada , Australia, and New Zealand – 4.1 million speakers. Therefore, the Russian language is the seventh-largest in the world by the number of speakers , after English, Mandarin, Hindi -Urdu, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Portuguese. Russian is one of the six official languages of
10184-407: The NKVD in protecting such a high party official was without precedent in the Soviet Union." Kirov was cremated and his ashes interred in the Kremlin Wall necropolis in a state funeral , with Stalin and other prominent members of the CPSU personally carrying his coffin . After Kirov's death, Stalin called for swift punishment of the traitors and those found negligent in Kirov's death. Nikolayev
10336-411: The NKVD officers were executed in the aftermath, and none actually served time in prison. Instead, they were transferred to executive posts in Stalin's Gulag labour camps for a period of time—in effect, a demotion. According to Nikita Khrushchev , the same NKVD officers were later shot in 1937. Lajos Magyar , a Hungarian communist and refugee from the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 ,
10488-409: The People's Supply System. In his deposition, Kirchakov wrote that he had discussed Kirov's murder and the role of Fyodor Medved with Olsky. Olsky was of the firm opinion that Medved, Kirov's friend and NKVD security chief of the Leningrad branch, was innocent of the murder. Olsky also told Kirchakov that Medved had been barred from the NKVD Kirov assassination investigation. Instead, the investigation
10640-807: The Russian alphabet include ⟨ ѣ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ е ⟩ ( /je/ or /ʲe/ ); ⟨ і ⟩ and ⟨ ѵ ⟩ , which both merged to ⟨ и ⟩ ( /i/ ); ⟨ ѳ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ф ⟩ ( /f/ ); ⟨ ѫ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ у ⟩ ( /u/ ); ⟨ ѭ ⟩ , which merged to ⟨ ю ⟩ ( /ju/ or /ʲu/ ); and ⟨ ѧ ⟩ and ⟨ ѩ ⟩ , which later were graphically reshaped into ⟨ я ⟩ and merged phonetically to /ja/ or /ʲa/ . While these older letters have been abandoned at one time or another, they may be used in this and related articles. The yers ⟨ ъ ⟩ and ⟨ ь ⟩ originally indicated
10792-458: The Russian principalities before and especially during Mongol rule. This strengthened dialectal differences, and for a while, prevented the emergence of a standardized national language. The formation of the unified and centralized Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the gradual re-emergence of a common political, economic, and cultural space created the need for a common standard language. The initial impulse for standardization came from
10944-541: The Smolny Institute and then left. On 1 December 1934, the usual guard post at the entrance to Kirov's offices was supposedly left unmanned, even though the building housed the chief offices of the Leningrad party apparatus and was the seat of the local government. According to some reports, only a single friend, Commissar Borisov, an unarmed bodyguard of Kirov's, remained. Given the circumstances of Kirov's death, Alexander Barmine stated that "the negligence of
11096-529: The Smolny Institute where Kirov now worked. Although Nikolayev was initially passed by the main security desk at Smolny, he was arrested after an alert guard asked to examine his briefcase, which was found to contain the revolver. A few hours later, Nikolayev's briefcase and loaded revolver were returned to him, and he was told to leave the building. With Stalin's approval, the NKVD had previously withdrawn all but four police bodyguards assigned to Kirov. These four guards accompanied Kirov each day to his offices at
11248-532: The Soviet Union to review the Kirov murder case was made by the Politburo Commission headed by Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev in 1989. After two years of investigations, the working team of the Commission concluded that no materials were found to support Stalin's or NKVD's participation in Kirov's murder. Kirov's assassination became a major event in the history of the Soviet Union because it
11400-405: The Soviet era can speak Russian, other generations of citizens that do not have any knowledge of Russian. Primary and secondary education by Russian is almost non-existent. In Uzbekistan , Russian is the language of inter-ethnic communication. It has some official roles, being permitted in official documentation and is the lingua franca of the country and the language of the elite. Russian
11552-530: The US. In January 1948, he presided over a three-day conference in the Kremlin, to which more than 70 composers, musicians and music critics, including Dmitri Shostakovich , Sergei Prokofiev , Aram Khachaturian , and Nikolai Myaskovsky were summoned to be lectured by Zhdanov on why they should avoid "formalism" in music. A persistent story is that Zhdanov played the piano during the conference to demonstrate how music should be written, but years later that story
11704-467: The United Nations. Education in Russian is still a popular choice for both Russian as a second language (RSL) and native speakers in Russia, and in many former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics. In Belarus , Russian is a second state language alongside Belarusian per the Constitution of Belarus . 77% of
11856-584: The West, listed a series of incidents in which Kirov allegedly clashed with Stalin, based on rumours he must have heard from fellow NKVD officers. Kirov's reputed rivalry is a major theme of the historical novel Children of the Arbat , by Anatoli Rybakov , who wrote: In his hunger for popularity, Kirov opted for the simple style. He lived on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt in a large house , inhabited by all sorts of people, he walked to work, wandered on his own around
12008-527: The apparent threat that the founding of Cominform posed to peace, Zhdanov is reckoned by many Soviet scholars to have been a "moderate" within the context of the post-war Stalinist regime. The worst events of Stalin's final years, such as the rift with Yugoslavia, the Leningrad affair , the show trials in Bulgaria , Hungary and Czechoslovakia , and the anti-Semitic Doctors' plot all occurred after Zhdanov
12160-482: The back of the neck. Nikolayev was well known to the NKVD , which had arrested him for various petty offences in recent years. Various accounts of his life agree that he was an expelled party member and a failed junior functionary, with a murderous grudge and an indifference to his own survival. Nikolayev was unemployed, with a wife and child, and in financial difficulties. According to Orlov, Nikolayev had allegedly told
12312-403: The broader sense of expanding the use of Russian alongside or in favour of other languages. The current standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language ( современный русский литературный язык – "sovremenny russky literaturny yazyk"). It arose at the beginning of the 18th century with the modernization reforms of the Russian state under the rule of Peter
12464-475: The charge of being "tendentious". Yes, Soviet literature is tendentious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a literature which is not class literature, not tendentious, allegedly non-political. Zhdanov's second great promotion followed the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, when he succeeded Kirov as first secretary of the Leningrad ( Saint Petersburg ) provincial party and
12616-498: The city in 1941 and implied that they shared the credit with Zhdanov. Zhdanov made a political comeback during 1946, when his main rival, Malenkov, temporarily lost his position as a party secretary. For the next two years, he was delegated by Stalin to direct the Soviet Union's cultural policy and to handle relations with the Eastern European states under or coming under communist control. He formulated what became known as
12768-770: The city of Baku , the capital of Azerbaijan, erected on a hill in 1939. The statue was dismantled in January 1992, shortly after Azerbaijan gained its independence. The Kirov Prize, a speedskating match in the city of Kirov, was named for him. The Kirov Prize is the oldest annual organised race in speedskating, apart from the World Speed Skating Championships and the European Speed Skating Championships . The English communist poet John Cornford wrote an eponymous poem in his honour. The Soviet Navy cruiser Kirov
12920-433: The commission, Olga Shatunovskaya , as having knowledge of the Kirov murder. Kirchakov confirmed that he did talk to Shatunovskaya and Trunina about some of the unexplained aspects of the Kirov murder case and agreed to provide the commission with a written deposition. He stressed that his statement was based on the testimony of one Comrade Yan Olsky, a former NKVD officer who was demoted after Kirov's murder and transferred to
13072-507: The committee sessions, Olsky said he was present when Stalin asked Leonid Nikolayev why Comrade Kirov had been killed. To this Nikolayev replied that he carried out the instruction of the " Chekists " (meaning the NKVD) and pointed towards the group of "Chekists" (NKVD officers) standing in the room; Medved was not among them. Khrushchev's report, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences",
13224-583: The conclusion of the Congress in March 1939, Zhdanov was promoted to full membership of the Politburo. He was still one of four secretaries of the Central Committee—the others being Stalin, Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev , and Georgy Malenkov —but Malenkov was not a member of the Politburo, which meant that Zhdanov had replaced Lazar Kaganovich as Stalin's deputy in the party apparatus and appeared to be his most likely successor. On 29 June 1939, he had
13376-572: The country. There is an Israeli TV channel mainly broadcasting in Russian with Israel Plus . See also Russian language in Israel . Russian is also spoken as a second language by a small number of people in Afghanistan . In Vietnam , Russian has been added in the elementary curriculum along with Chinese and Japanese and were named as "first foreign languages" for Vietnamese students to learn, on equal footing with English. The Russian language
13528-539: The day after Kirov's assassination, allegedly falling from a moving truck while riding with a group of NKVD agents. According to Orlov, Borisov's wife was committed to an insane asylum , while Nikolayev's mysterious friend and alleged provocateur, who had supplied him with the revolver and money, was later shot on Stalin's personal orders. Several NKVD officers from the Leningrad branch were convicted of negligence for not adequately protecting Kirov and sentenced to prison terms of up to ten years. According to Barmine, none of
13680-475: The death of Joseph Stalin . Zhdanov was considered Stalin's most likely successor but died before him. Zhdanov joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and quickly rose through the party ranks. A close associate of Stalin, he became a secretary of the Central Committee in 1934, and later that year he was promoted to Leningrad party chief following the assassination of Sergei Kirov . He would go on to play
13832-477: The development of advanced munitions. Zhdanov sought to use the ideological purification of the party as a vehicle to restore the Kremlin's political control over the provinces and the technocrats. He worried that the provincial party bosses and the heads of the economic ministries had achieved too high a degree of autonomy during the war, when the top leadership realized the urgent necessity of maximum mobilization of human and material resources. The highest priority in
13984-526: The distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels . Stress , which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically , though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress – such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [ zamók , 'lock'] and за́мок [ zámok , 'castle']), or to indicate
14136-413: The factory and the industrial plant their local peasant dialects with their phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, and the very process of recruiting workers from peasants and the mobility of the worker population generate another process: the liquidation of peasant inheritance by way of leveling the particulars of local dialects. On the ruins of peasant multilingual, in the context of developing heavy industry,
14288-447: The family around 1890, and Yekaterina died of tuberculosis in 1893. Sergei and his sisters were raised for a brief time by their paternal grandmother, Melania Avdeyevna Kostrikova, but she could not afford to take care of them all on her small pension of 3 rubles per month. Through her connections, Melania succeeded in having Sergey placed in an orphanage at the age of seven, but he saw his sisters and grandmother regularly. In 1901,
14440-456: The final reading amendments that state that all schools and kindergartens in the country are to transition to education in Latvian . From 2025, all children will be taught in Latvian only. On 28 September 2023, Latvian deputies approved The National Security Concept, according to which from 1 January 2026, all content created by Latvian public media (including LSM ) should be only in Latvian or
14592-416: The former Soviet archives, went as far as to claim that "the conventional narratives are almost entirely myth". Edvard Radzinsky argued in his biography of Stalin that written documents about Stalin ordering the assassination of Kirov were never found simply because they never existed and could not exist. Radzinsky believes that Stalin was behind the assassination, but given the prominent status of Kirov as
14744-631: The generation of immigrants who started arriving in the early 1960s). Only about 25% of them are ethnic Russians, however. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the overwhelming majority of Russophones in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in New York City were Russian-speaking Jews. Afterward, the influx from the countries of the former Soviet Union changed the statistics somewhat, with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians immigrating along with some more Russian Jews and Central Asians. According to
14896-480: The government bureaucracy for the lack of a reliable tool of communication in administrative, legal, and judicial affairs became an obvious practical problem. The earliest attempts at standardizing Russian were made based on the so-called Moscow official or chancery language, during the 15th to 17th centuries. Since then, the trend of language policy in Russia has been standardization in both the restricted sense of reducing dialectical barriers between ethnic Russians, and
15048-491: The late 1950s, Zhdanov's ideological code, known as the Zhdanov Doctrine or Zhdanovism ( zhdanovshchina ), defined cultural production in the Soviet Union. Zhdanov intended to create a new philosophy of artistic creation valid for the entire world. His method reduced all of culture to a sort of chart, wherein a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral value. Zhdanov and his associates further sought to eliminate foreign influence from Soviet art, proclaiming that "incorrect art"
15200-524: The meeting mentioned the initial theory that fascist agents had been responsible for the assassination. Barmine asserts Stalin even used the Kirov assassination to eliminate the remainder of the Opposition leadership, accusing Grigory Zinoviev , Lev Kamenev , Abram Prigozhin, and others who had stood with Kirov in opposing Stalin (or who had simply failed to acquiesce to Stalin's views), of being "morally responsible" for Kirov's murder, and therefore guilty of complicity. Barmine also claimed that Stalin arranged
15352-413: The murder with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, who armed Nikolayev and sent him to assassinate Kirov. In his Secret Speech in 1956, Khrushchev said that the murder of Kirov was organized by NKVD agents who were tasked with protecting Kirov and were eventually shot in 1937. Khrushchev entrusted Pyotr Pospelov , Secretary of the Central Committee, to form a commission to investigate the repression of
15504-524: The northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region . Russian was also the main foreign language taught in school in China between 1949 and 1964. In Kazakhstan , Russian is not a state language, but according to article 7 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan its usage enjoys equal status to that of the Kazakh language in state and local administration. The 2009 census reported that 10,309,500 people, or 84.8% of
15656-515: The other hand, before the war, almost a quarter of Ukrainians were in favour of granting Russian the status of the state language, while after the beginning of Russia's invasion the support for the idea dropped to just 7%. In peacetime, the idea of raising the status of Russian was traditionally supported by residents of the south and east . But even in these regions, only a third of the respondents were in favour, and after Russia's full-scale invasion , their number dropped by almost half. According to
15808-461: The other three languages in the East Slavic branch. In many places in eastern and southern Ukraine and throughout Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixtures such as Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect , although it vanished during the 15th or 16th century,
15960-446: The parliament approved a bill to close up all Russian language schools and kindergartens by the school year. The transition to only Estonian language schools and kindergartens will start in the 2024-2025 school year. In Latvia , Russian is officially considered a foreign language. 55% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 26% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 18 February 2012, Latvia held
16112-453: The peasants' speech was never systematically studied, as it was generally regarded by philologists as simply a source of folklore and an object of curiosity. This was acknowledged by the noted Russian dialectologist Nikolai Karinsky , who toward the end of his life wrote: "Scholars of Russian dialects mostly studied phonetics and morphology. Some scholars and collectors compiled local dictionaries. We have almost no studies of lexical material or
16264-488: The policy came into effect specifically to target "apolitical, 'bourgeois', individualistic works of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova ", respectively writing for the literary magazines Zvezda and Leningrad . On 20 February 1948, Zhdanovshchina shifted its focus towards anti-formalism, targeting composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich . That April, many of the persecuted composers were pressed into repenting for displaying formalism in their music in
16416-459: The population aged 15 and above, could read and write well in Russian, and understand the spoken language. In October 2023, Kazakhstan drafted a media law aimed at increasing the use of the Kazakh language over Russian, the law stipulates that the share of the state language on television and radio should increase from 50% to 70%, at a rate of 5% per year, starting in 2025. In Kyrgyzstan , Russian
16568-418: The population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 67% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2019 Belarusian census , out of 9,413,446 inhabitants of the country, 5,094,928 (54.1% of the total population) named Belarusian as their native language, with 61.2% of ethnic Belarusians and 54.5% of ethnic Poles declaring Belarusian as their native language. In everyday life in
16720-421: The post-war era was physical reconstruction after the massive wartime destruction. The same argument that strengthened the technocrats continued to operate, and the united opposition of Malenkov, the technocrats, the provincial party bosses, and the key ministries doomed Zhdanov's proposals. He therefore pivoted to devote his attention to purification of the arts and culture. Originating in 1946 and lasting until
16872-479: The pronunciation of ultra-short or reduced /ŭ/ , /ĭ/ . Because of many technical restrictions in computing and also because of the unavailability of Cyrillic keyboards abroad, Russian is often transliterated using the Latin alphabet. For example, мороз ('frost') is transliterated moroz , and мышь ('mouse'), mysh or myš' . Once commonly used by the majority of those living outside Russia, transliteration
17024-472: The proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names. Russian is an East Slavic language of the wider Indo-European family . It is a descendant of Old East Slavic , a language used in Kievan Rus' , which was a loose conglomerate of East Slavic tribes from the late 9th to the mid-13th centuries. From the point of view of spoken language , its closest relatives are Ukrainian , Belarusian , and Rusyn ,
17176-491: The respondents), while according to the 2002 census – 142.6 million people (99.2% of the respondents). In Ukraine , Russian is a significant minority language. According to estimates from Demoskop Weekly, in 2004 there were 14,400,000 native speakers of Russian in the country, and 29 million active speakers. 65% of the population was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 38% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. On 5 September 2017, Ukraine's Parliament passed
17328-567: The six official languages of the United Nations , as well as the fourth most widely used language on the Internet . Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script ; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has a hard or soft counterpart, and
17480-473: The streets of the city, took his children for rides in his car and played hide-and-seek with them in the yard ... as if to emphasize that Stalin lived in the Kremlin, with guards, didn't wander the streets or play hide-and-seek with his children, thus underlining the idea that Stalin was afraid of the people, whereas Kirov was not. At the end of the Communist Party's Seventeenth Congress in February 1934, there
17632-679: The survey carried out by RATING in August 2023 in the territory controlled by Ukraine and among the refugees, almost 60% of the polled usually speak Ukrainian at home, about 30% – Ukrainian and Russian, only 9% – Russian. Since March 2022, the use of Russian in everyday life has been noticeably decreasing. For 82% of respondents, Ukrainian is their mother tongue, and for 16%, Russian is their mother tongue. IDPs and refugees living abroad are more likely to use both languages for communication or speak Russian. Nevertheless, more than 70% of IDPs and refugees consider Ukrainian to be their native language. In
17784-459: The syntax of Russian dialects." After 1917, Marxist linguists had no interest in the multiplicity of peasant dialects and regarded their language as a relic of the rapidly disappearing past that was not worthy of scholarly attention. Nakhimovsky quotes the Soviet academicians A.M Ivanov and L.P Yakubinsky, writing in 1930: The language of peasants has a motley diversity inherited from feudalism. On its way to becoming proletariat peasantry brings to
17936-499: The time of Kirov's assassination, and who had no demonstrable connection to Nikolayev, were found guilty of complicity in the "fascist plot" against Kirov, and summarily executed; however, a few days later, during a subsequent Communist Party meeting of the Moscow District, the party secretary announced in a speech that Nikolayev had been personally interrogated by Stalin the day after the assassination, something unheard-of for
18088-424: The traces of the organizers of Kirov's killing. Pospelov's committee came to the conclusion that Kirov’s murder was facilitated by NKVD officers who were responsible for his security, and that NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda was declared a hero, instead of holding him responsible. Pospelov spoke to Dr. Kirchakov and former nurse Trunina, former members of the party, who had been mentioned in a letter by another member of
18240-464: The treaty between the Soviets and Finnish puppet government, headed by Otto Wille Kuusinen . As the Leningrad party boss and the official overseeing the navy, he had an interest in increasing the Soviet presence in the Baltic Sea at the expense of Finland, Estonia and Latvia . The final peace treaty between Finland and the Soviet Union was signed by Zhdanov on 12 March 1940. In June 1940, Zhdanov
18392-786: The two. Others divide the language into three groupings, Northern , Central (or Middle), and Southern , with Moscow lying in the Central region. The Northern Russian dialects and those spoken along the Volga River typically pronounce unstressed /o/ clearly, a phenomenon called okanye ( оканье ). Besides the absence of vowel reduction, some dialects have high or diphthongal /e⁓i̯ɛ/ in place of Proto-Slavic * ě and /o⁓u̯ɔ/ in stressed closed syllables (as in Ukrainian) instead of Standard Russian /e/ and /o/ , respectively. Another Northern dialectal morphological feature
18544-414: The universal values of science and engineering, and proposed to promote the technological experts to the highest positions in the Soviet administrative elite. Zhdanov's faction said proper ideology trumped science and called for prioritizing political education and ideological purity. However, the technocrats had proven amazingly successful during the war in terms of engineering, industrial production, and
18696-511: The use of the language has some presence in certain areas. A large part of the population, especially the older generations, can speak Russian as a foreign language. However, English has replaced Russian as lingua franca in Lithuania and around 80% of young people speak English as their first foreign language. In contrast to the other two Baltic states, Lithuania has a relatively small Russian-speaking minority (5.0% as of 2008). According to
18848-521: The war, Zhdanov was tasked by Stalin with directing cultural policy. His campaign, known as the Zhdanovshchina , was strictly enforced and led to the denouncement of artists including Anna Akhmatova and Dmitri Shostakovich . He also oversaw the creation of the Cominform in 1947. Initially considered the successor-in-waiting to Stalin, Zhdanov suffered from ill health and fell out of favour as
19000-522: Was a major perpetrator of the Great Terror and personally approved 176 documented execution lists. On a holiday with Stalin in August 1936, he co-signed the telegram that brought about the dismissal of the head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda , who was accused, among other failings, of having impeded Zhdanov and Leonid Zakovsky in their purge of the Leningrad party organisation. During a Central Committee plenum in March 1937, Zhdanov announced that all provincial party secretaries were to be subject to re-election,
19152-497: Was an ideological diversion. This doctrine suggested that the world was split into two opposing camps, namely the "imperialistic", led by the United States; and the "democratic", led by the Soviet Union. The one sentence that came to define his doctrine was "The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best". This cultural policy became strictly enforced, censoring writers, artists and
19304-573: Was arrested and survived 17 years in the gulag . In September 1938, Zhdanov was appointed head of the reorganised Central Committee Directorate for Propaganda and Agitation, which brought all branches of the news media and arts under centralised party control. He was also Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from July 1938 to June 1947 and from 1938 he
19456-546: Was arrested once again, but this time jailed for over three years, charged with printing illegal literature. Soon after his release, Kirov again took part in revolutionary activity, once again being arrested for printing illegal literature. After a year in custody, Kirov moved to the Caucasus , where he stayed until the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II after the February Revolution in March 1917. By this time, Kirov had shortened his last name from Kostrikov to Kirov,
19608-531: Was carried out by a senior NKVD chief, Yakov Agranov , and later by another NKVD bureau officer whose name he did not remember. The other NKVD official may have been Yefim Georgievich Yevdokimov (1891–1939), a Stalin crony, mass-killing specialist, and architect of the Shakhty purge trials , who continued to lead a secret police team within the NKVD even after technically retiring from the OGPU in 1931. During one of
19760-552: Was co-opted as a candidate member of the Politburo . Early in 1935, he and the head of the Leningrad NKVD , Leonid Zakovsky , organised the deportation of 11,702 so-called "Leningrad aristocrats", people who had belonged to the nobility or the middle class before the revolution. They also hunted any current or former party members suspected of having supported Leon Trotsky or the former Leningrad party boss, Grigory Zinoviev . Zhdanov has been described by J. Arch Getty as
19912-507: Was dead. The Leningrad Affair was a brutal purge of Zhdanov's former allies, notably Kuznetsov and Nikolai Voznesensky . The most notable survivor of that purge was future Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin . In Khrushchev Remembers , Nikita Khrushchev recalled that Zhdanov was an alcoholic and that during his last days, Stalin would shout at him to stop drinking and insist on him drinking only fruit juice. Stalin had talked of Zhdanov being his successor, but Zhdanov's ill health gave his rivals in
20064-609: Was elected chairman of the Tver Governorate soviet in 1923. From 1924 to 1934, he was first secretary of the Nizhny Novgorod provincial party committee. Zhdanov's first major promotion came at the end of the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , in February 1934, when he was transferred to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee , responsible for ideology. In that capacity, he inserted his protégé, Aleksandr Shcherbakov , as secretary of
20216-441: Was falsely accused of complicity in Kirov's assassination. Magyar was convicted as a " Zinovievite -Terrorist" and sent to a Gulag, where he died in 1940. A Communist Party communiqué initially reported that Nikolayev had confessed his guilt as an assassin in the pay of a " fascist power," having received money from an unidentified " foreign consul " in Leningrad. The same author claims 104 defendants who were already in prison at
20368-405: Was first introduced in North America when Russian explorers voyaged into Alaska and claimed it for Russia during the 18th century. Although most Russian colonists left after the United States bought the land in 1867, a handful stayed and preserved the Russian language in this region to this day, although only a few elderly speakers of this unique dialect are left. In Nikolaevsk, Alaska , Russian
20520-421: Was fluent in Russian in 2006, and 19% used it as the main language with family, friends, or at work. According to the 2014 Moldovan census , Russians accounted for 4.1% of Moldova's population, 9.4% of the population declared Russian as their native language, and 14.5% said they usually spoke Russian. According to the 2010 census in Russia , Russian language skills were indicated by 138 million people (99.4% of
20672-654: Was furiously denied by Shostakovich, who attributed it to "toadies". Zhdanov's cultural policy rested on the Soviets' "critically assimilating the cultural heritage of all nations and all times" to "take what was most inspiring". In June 1948, Stalin sent Zhdanov to the Cominform meeting in Bucharest. Its purpose was to condemn Yugoslavia , but Zhdanov took a more restrained line than his co-delegate and rival, Georgy Malenkov . That infuriated Stalin, who removed Zhdanov from all his posts and replaced him with Malenkov. Zhdanov
20824-570: Was in agreement with Stalin on all major issues and that on the Seventeenth Party Congress, at least 86,5% of voting delegates were in favour of Stalin's membership of the Central Committee; hence, Stalin had little to fear from Kirov. Moreover, nothing in Nikolaev's personal diary indicates that he did not carry out the assassination on his own. Alla Kirilina and Oleg Khlevniuk , who did not find any orders of assassination in
20976-525: Was initially controlled by Malenkov and Lavrentiy Beria . According to the historian Anton Antonov-Ovseenko : Beria and Malenkov zealously sawed away at the chair holding Andrei Zhdanov, the first in line to succeed Stalin. They laid the groundwork for his transfer to the doomed city of Leningrad. No place was found for Zhdanov, Stalin's favourite, even when the State Defence Committee was revamped. Along with Georgy Zhukov , Zhdanov took
21128-481: Was later read at closed-door Party meetings. Afterwards, new material was received by the Pospelov Committee, including the assertion by Kirov's chauffeur, Kuzin, that Commissar Borisov, Kirov's friend and bodyguard, who was responsible for Kirov's round-the-clock security at the Smolny Institute, was intentionally killed, and that his death in a road accident was not an accident at all. The last attempt in
21280-479: Was named after him, and by extension the Kirov -class cruiser . The Kirov name was again used for the battlecruiser Kirov and the Kirov -class battlecruiser . The Khai-3 tailless airplane was also named after him. Kirov was married to Maria Lvovna Markus (1885–1945) since 1911, although they never formally registered their relationship. Yevgenia Kostrikova (1921–1975), who claimed to be Kirov's daughter,
21432-551: Was on the military council of the Soviet Navy . His rise coincided with the fall of Nikolai Yezhov . At the 18th Party Congress, Zhdanov noted that "other means apart from repression" could be used to enforce "state and labour discipline". Zhdanov gave a key speech in which he proposed "to abolish mass Party purges... now that the capitalist elements have been eliminated". He declared that the purges had been co-opted by "hostile elements" to "persecute and ruin honest people". At
21584-481: Was presided over by Zinaida Zhdanova, the widow, and the ultimate embodiment of this mixture of Party bigotry and the complacency of the bourgeois woman." In 1952, Yuri Zhdanov was raised to membership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , as head of its Department of Science and Culture, but was sacked very soon after Stalin's death. That marriage ended in divorce in 1952. They had one daughter, Yekaterina. Zhdanov's birthplace, Mariupol ,
21736-615: Was released and not even searched. It is an unusually suspicious circumstance that when the Chekist [Borisov] assigned to protect Kirov was being brought for an interrogation, on 2 December 1934, he was killed in a car "accident" in which no other occupants of the car were harmed. After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD were relieved of their duties and were given very light sentences, but in 1937 they were shot. We can assume that they were shot in order to cover
21888-604: Was removed from direct control of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, which was taken over by Georgy Aleksandrov , an ally of his rival Malenkov. He was undermined further by the German invasion of the Soviet Union because he had been so publicly associated with the failed pact with Hitler. He was excluded from the State Defense Committee (GOKO), which directed the war effort and
22040-596: Was renamed Kropyvnytskyi by the Ukrainian Parliament on 14 July 2016. In 2019, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine approved the change of the oblast's name to Kropyvnytskyi Oblast, or Kropyvnychchyna. The S. M. Kirov Forestry Academy in Leningrad was named after him but renamed the Saint Petersburg State Forest Technical University. For many years, a huge granite and bronze statue of Kirov dominated
22192-550: Was renamed Zhdanov in his honor at Joseph Stalin 's instigation in 1948 and a monument to Zhdanov was built in the central square of the city. The name reverted to Mariupol in 1989 and the monument was dismantled in 1990. Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and
22344-709: Was sent to Estonia to supervise the establishment of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and its annexation by the Soviet Union . In the United States House of Representatives ' 1953–1954 Kersten Committee investigation Zhdanov was one of the accused charged with the 1940 Soviet aggression and forced incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSR. The Finnish debacle weakened Zhdanov's political standing. In September 1940 he
22496-630: Was soon transferred to a sanatorium . Zhdanov died on 31 August 1948 in Moscow of heart failure. It is possible that his death was the result of an intentional misdiagnosis. Zhdanov was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis , in one of the twelve individual tombs located between the Lenin's Mausoleum and the Moscow Kremlin Wall . Despite his bullying of Akhmatova, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and other cultural figures, and
22648-684: Was the former rector of the Moscow Theological Academy . He studied at the Moscow Commercial Institute . In 1914, he was drafted into the Russian army , graduated from an officers' school and served in the reserves. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1915. In 1917, he was chairman of the Shadrinsk committee of the Bolsheviks. He was a political commissar in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and
22800-402: Was the sixth-most used language on the top 1,000 sites, behind English, Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Despite leveling after 1900, especially in matters of vocabulary and phonetics, a number of dialects still exist in Russia. Some linguists divide the dialects of Russian into two primary regional groupings, "Northern" and "Southern", with Moscow lying on the zone of transition between
22952-546: Was tried alone and secretly by Vasili Ulrikh , Chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR . He was sentenced to death by shooting on 29 December 1934, and the sentence was carried out that very night. The Soviet government , led by Stalin, stated that their investigation proved that the assassin was acting on behalf of a secret Zinovievist group. The hapless Commissar Borisov died
23104-515: Was used by Stalin to justify Moscow trials and his campaign of terror known as the Great Purge . At the time of Kirov's murder, Maxim Litvinov , the Soviet Foreign Minister, was out of the country; his daughter Tanya implied that Litvinov realised this event might be an excuse for Stalin to unleash a reign of terror. This view was confirmed by Anastas Mikoyan's son, who stated that the murder of Kirov had certain similarities to
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