On October 1, 1937, as Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's brutal purge raged, a brilliant, one-handed Russian linguist penned a complaint from Moscow's notorious Butyrka prison about his treatment by the ...

More than 100 Belarusians, including 22 writers and poets, were executed by the NKVD secret police (the predecessor to Belarus's present-day KGB), overnight on October 29, 1937. While not officially ...

Poland, along with Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, became an independent republic after World War I. As a consequence, Russia’s territory in the west shrank, as did Germany’s in the east.

What caused Joseph Stalin to become one of history’s most notorious mass murders? Unlike Adolph Hitler, whose victims were anonymous Jews and other “undesirables” whom he did not know, Stalin’s ...

This article by Alisa Selezneva was originally published in Russian in Holod Magazine on February 19, 2025. Global Voices translated the article, edited it for clarity, and is republishing it with ...