Tag Archives: history

Mama-Motherland – A song by Oleg Gazmanov and Alexander Marshal, with lament by Mihail Zhvanetsky

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Newly, we translated Soviet Union – a music video by Kersari, which resonated with a lot of people both of younger generation and those who were born in the USSR. That song was from a younger generation, feeling that something great was lost, yet not fully comprehending the magnitude of the loss.

The song are about to listen to and watch, premiered by Oleg Gazmanov and Alexander Marshal on June 10, 2022, is a song from the generation of us, who were born and lived in the USSR…


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This is a brief emotional story of every Soviet child and the Soviet Union itself.

It is also a sincere declaration of love.

The footage of the clip shows a chronicle of those years and the ill-fated period when devastating events began to occur in the country, which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the last frames, the map of the USSR explodes into small pieces…💔

So, in this way, the lost children ask their Mother for forgiveness for the fact that many fell for the propaganda of perestroika, blasphemed the Motherland for nothing…

The song is inspired by the lament About Our Soviet Motherland, written in 2008 by Mihail Zhvanetsky, which we translated further down in this article.

🚩🚩🚩

Lyrics

She wasn’t a glamorous diva,
And she couldn’t boast of her pedigree,
And she didn’t think about how to be happy herself —
She worked day and night.

She dealt with everything at once, and with us.
She raised us, young brats,
Fed and clothed us as best she could,
Giving her last to us.
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35 Years Without the Union – memories of the bygone time in Bulgaria

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As part of the project “35 Years without the USSR”, corresponded Georgy Zotov visited Germany, looking for the memories of the not so distant past. The article below appeared in “Argumenty i Fakty” on February 27, 2026.

“It was terrible.” What happened to Bulgarian products, beloved in the USSR?

Bulgarplodexport, Slynchev Bryag and ketchup were extremely popular in the Soviet Union.


I am looking for the famous Bulgarian ketchup in the Plovdiv supermarket, which was loved by all families of the USSR. Glass bottle, ribbed surface, red lid. No, it’s not to be found. They say it’s still there, in very small shops, produced in negligible quantities. But Heinz is offered everywhere — from America, also Austrian, German ketchups, and even French one.

A ketchup counter in a Bulgarian supermarket.

I manage to find Bulgarian as well, in a standard plastic package. “It’s not profitable to produce in glass,” the saleswoman tells me. — “Plastic is popular everywhere. And that ketchup had a different recipe — it had a more tomato flavour, much less sugar. Now the American standard is everywhere, chemicals instead of tomatoes, and it’s very sweet.”
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Decoys and camouflage in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War

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On May 24, 2021, TV Zvezda aired episode №64 of program “Hidden Threats”, which contained a fragment on the use of decoy mock-ups and camouflage during the the Great Patriotic War. Here we present our translation of this fragment. These days, Iran used decoys to fool the American-Zionist aggressors, just like the Soviet Union had been fooling the German-Nazi ones before.


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Presentation of the material at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

The program was introduced in a dedicated article at TV Zvezda site:

During the Great Patriotic War, the victory of the USSR was forged not only in weapons factories, but also in special factories that massively “stamped” inflatable and plywood tanks and airplanes. They immediately went to the front on a par with real equipment — about a thousand real-sized models “fought” on the Kursk Bulge alone. So the ingenuity of the Soviet people helped in the fight against the Nazi invaders.

In 1942, the 23rd special squad was created, which consisted of more than a thousand artists. Their task was to recreate Soviet military installations, imitated as accurately as possible. Then the dummy armored vehicles were mounted on tractors. For reliability, they were equipped with a soundtrack that mimicked the hum of engines. And branches were attached to the bottom so that the same dust rose after the “tank” as behind real military equipment.

However, it wasn’t limited to technology alone: sometimes mock-ups of soldiers were used to mislead the enemy. For example, when enemy aircraft approached the actual location of the Soviet troops, “equipment” with “military personnel” sitting inside was pushed forward. So, the German pilot fired bullets at it and threw bombs without harming real people.

👉 Original video source at TV Zvezda, and a properly-deinterlaced copy at Odnoklassniki.

Following is a fragment from the memoirs of the head of the engineering troops of the Leningrad Front, Boris Vladimirovich Bychevsky, chapter 4, “The Assault Has Been Repelled”:

I put down the maps and began to show what had been done before the start of the breakthrough at Krasnoe Selo, Krasnogvardeisk and Kolpin, what we have now at the Pulkovo position, what is being done in the city, on the Neva, on the Karelian Isthmus, where miners and pontoons are working.
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Remembering the Khatyn Massacre of March 22, 1943

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83 years ago, the peaceful Soviet Belarusian village of Khatyn was wiped out – nearly all of the inhabitants were burned alive and shot by the SS punitive unit Dirlewanger (Sonderkommando Dirlewanger) and the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion.

Khatyn – a small village of just 26 households – was located 54 kilometres northwest of Minsk. (BATS note: A short node about the name of the village. There is no sound “k” in Khatyn – the first sound is “h” as in “he, home”.)

On March 22, 1943, Belarusian partisans intercepted a Nazi motor convoy in the area, inflicting casualties, including killing a German officer. In retaliation, the Hitlerites encircled Khatyn and decided to unleash their fury on defenceless civilians – women, the elderly and children.

All residents – 149 people, including 75 children – were forced into a wooden barn, locked inside and set ablaze. Those who, in desperation, tried to escape were ruthlessly shot at point-blank range.

✍️ From the interrogation record of Ostap Knap, a collaborator from the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion, a native of the Lvov region (31 May 1986):

“The roof was thatched and immediately caught fire. Screams of horror rose from the barn as those trapped inside, facing certain death, began forcing the door. The policemen surrounding the site opened fire on them”.

Only six people managed to escape the inferno alive – five children and one adult, 56-year-old blacksmith Iosif Kaminsky. He regained consciousness late at night after the perpetrators had left the burnt village. Among the bodies of his fellow villagers, he found his son Adam, who died from his wounds in his father’s arms…

❗️ The atrocities in Khatyn were carried out by the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion, formed in October 1942 in Kiev largely from Ukrainian nationalists and members of the Organisation of Ukrainian nationalists. Earlier, its members took part in mass executions of Jews at Babi Yar. The battalion was commanded by Konstantin Smovsky, born in the Poltava Governorate, who later fled to the US, where he died in 1960. The Supreme court of Belarus has found him guilty of genocide.

***

In 1969, one of Belarus’s most revered memorial sites – the Khatyn Memorial Complex – was opened on the site of the destroyed village, a silent witness to the monstrous crimes of Nazism. At its centre stands a six-metre bronze sculpture, The Unconquered Man, depicting Iosif Kaminsky carrying his dead son in his arms. Each of the 26 burned homes is marked by a symbolic log structure with an obelisk in the shape of a chimney, bearing the names of those who perished and a bell that tolls every hour.

The tragedy of Khatyn has become a symbol of the inhuman cruelty of Nazism – a living reminder of hundreds of annihilated villages and thousands of innocent civilians of the Soviet Union whose lives were shattered by Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices – a genocide of the Soviet people. Our duty is to ensure that these crimes, which have no statute of limitations, are never forgotten.

On April 19, by Presidential Decree, Russia established the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People during the Great Patriotic War. According to even the most conservative estimates, 13.7 million civilians were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

🕯 We mourn together with the fraternal people of Belarus.

Source: Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in an Izvestia article

✍️ Today marks the anniversary of one of the most heinous crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices – the destruction in 1943 of the Belarusian village of Khatyn together with all its inhabitants.

149 people, including 75 children, were burned alive.

Since 1969, a memorial complex stands on the site of the burned Khatyn, commemorating the mass murder of civilians on the occupied territory of the USSR.
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The Unburied Corpses: How American Empire Recycles Fascism

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We re-blog an excellent article by Ryan Perkins, published on October 02, 2025 at his Substack. This article complements well the materials in two of Dmitry Medvedev’s publications that we translated on the pages of the Beehive:

From European Nazis to Japanese war criminals; from Latin American death squads to Salafist Jihadists, the names of the actors and enemies may change, but the script remains the same.

Introduction to The Anatomy of Empire

We are living through a global conflict of connected crises. Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, the South China Sea and in Ukraine, where battalions adorned with neo-Nazi insignia fight with Western arms. Meanwhile, in the halls of European power the ancestry of leaders echoes with fascist collaboration. These are not historical accidents but the symptomatic convulsions of an Empire in continuity, repurposing its oldest tools to preserve a core of power that is fundamentally unchanged. Behind the headlines of military alliances and ideological battles lies a deeper, more disturbing truth—a war waged not against fascism, but with it.

This series, The Anatomy of Empire, has traced the obscured path that brought us to this precipice. It is a history not of chance, but of cold calculation; not of isolated compromises, but of a systemic logic pursued with relentless determination. We have seen how the engines of capital accumulation require global expansion and how raw military power was institutionalized to secure it. Now, we turn to the system’s most cynical and durable adaptation: the wholesale absorption of its defeated enemy into the very infrastructure designed to fight the next enemy.

Parts of this story are familiar, often presented as isolated incidents and justified as moral compromises in the name of realpolitik. But this is not true. Taken together they represent a cold, clear, calculated strategy, executed with the presence of foresight, to wholesale incorporate the infrastructure of fascism into the architecture of the Empire’s next war of choice: The Cold War.

This was not merely the recruitment of a few useful individuals, but the systematic integration of personnel, tactics, and ideologies into intelligence agencies, scientific programs, and military commands. A clandestine architecture whose logical endpoint is not peace, but a state of perpetual, undeclared war waged with democratic façades and fascist instruments.

It was a corporate takeover that transformed a group of disparate regional start-ups into a global franchise.
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Samples of the Ukrainian Nazi-Banderite nationalism

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This article contains a compendium of assorted materials that compliment our translation of the publication by Dmitry Medvedev, How the Anglo-Saxons Nurtured Ukrainian Nationalism After the Second World War. We have posted most of these materials at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Sieldmaiden”, leading up to the presentation of Dmitry Medvedev’s article.

Ukrainisches Reich: A border post on the border of Ukraine with Russia, during the Hetmanate and the alliance with Germany, 1918.

The name “Ukraine” first appeared in official international documents only in 1918 after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers.

Even then, it existed only on paper, under German occupation, ruled by the puppet Central Rada headed by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, and later by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.

When Germany lost the war, the project collapsed within months.

Then came a new figure, Symon Petliura, a former Socialist Revolutionary and military journalist, who led the so-called Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and declared war on Soviet Russia.

What’s rarely mentioned is that Petliura worked closely with Western intelligence. Already in 1917–1918, he maintained contact with the French military mission in southern Russia, which financed anti-Bolshevik movements.

Later, in 1919, he signed a deal with Józef Piłsudski, giving up part of Ukrainian territory to Poland in exchange for military aid. In reality, Petliura was nothing more than a tool of Polish and French geopolitics, used to create a buffer state against Russia.

His “republic” survived barely three years, disappearing by 1921 after defeat by the Red Army. Petliura fled to Paris, where he was assassinated in 1926.

Source: RussianBaZa

👉 Read also: The repeat of Ukrainian-German incursion into Kursk

“…With shouts in honour of Ukraine, Führer Hitler, and Stepan Bandera…”

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How the Anglo-Saxons Nurtured Ukrainian Nationalism After the Second World War – Dmitry Medvedev

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An article by Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, publish in magazine Rodina on December 25, 2025.

Nationalism is a manifestation of a nation’s weakness, not its strength. For the most part, weak nations are infected with nationalism <...> Like any evil, it hides, lives in darkness, and only pretends to be born out of love for its country. But it is actually generated by anger, hatred towards other nations and towards that part of their own people who do not share nationalist views.

D.S. Lihachev [1]

The claw of England.
The inscription in French reads: “Shame on anyone who thinks evil of it. God is my right.”

1. Tantum scimus, quantum memoria tene-mus [2]

(Latin: “We know as much as we remember”)

The Anglo-Saxon ideological roots of the Nazi “death machine” were discussed in detail in the article “How the Anglo-Saxons Promoted Fascism in the 20th Century and Revived It in the 21st. Five historical questions for our former Allies”. [3] At the same time, the defeat of Nazism in May 1945 did not stop Washington and London from trying to find another object for political vivisection under a nationalist sauce.

The traditional garment of the Malorossians

The shocking details of the biography of the ancestors of Blaise Matreveli, a high-ranking employee of the British state security agencies who took up the post of director of the Secret Intelligence Service of the British Foreign Office (MI6) on October 1, 2025, which surfaced in June 2025, are an excellent illustration of the carefully hidden context in Anglo-Saxon countries [4], [5]. As historians and public figures who are not indifferent to upholding the truth about the past have found out, her paternal grandfather was the collaborator K.A. Dobrovolsky, who in August 1941 voluntarily surrendered to the Germans and was then placed by the occupation authorities at the head of a detachment of auxiliary police in the village Sosnitsa, Chernigov region, engaged in the mass extermination of civilians and partisans. By December 1941, his unit was operating far beyond the area of the village “entrusted” to him, participating in monstrous punitive actions and looting. The Judas himself joined in July 1942 a secret field police [6], was distinguished by extreme brutality, earning the nickname “The Butcher” from his colleagues, and his handwritten reports with the signature “Heil Hitler” are still in the German archives (one can only wonder how the long hands of unscrupulous British spies did not get to such sensitive materials over the past decades, and did not destroy them). In 1943, fearing just retribution, K.A. Dobrovolsky and his family joined the German troops retreating from the Red Army to the west, after which the traces of the bloody henchman of the third Reich are lost.
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Soviet Union – Kersari Music Video

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In this music video by Kersari, the young generation is picking up the banner of remembrance of the great and mighty Soviet Union.

“That country didn’t disappear from the map, do realise —
It’s in the DNA, it’s somewhere inside…”


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Translated by and first presented at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

In our translation we took one artistic liberty and translated a certain word as “simply”, and not “poorly” – as it appears in the original in Russian. We who lived in the USSR, had everything there was to have, but without excesses. Younger generation today, brought up in the capitalist consumerism-oriented environment, might view such lack of excesses as being “poor”, not quite seeing the difference between really poor and just plain simple lifestyle.

On March 17, 1991, an All-Union referendum was held, where people overwhelmingly voted for the preservation of the Union – a popular vote that was completely disregarded.

Read out articles:

Zionism Before the Court of History (1982) – Soviet Film

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A damning documentary exposing the reactionary ideology and practices of Zionism and the State of Israel.


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The documentary titled “Сионизм перед судом истории” (Zionism Before the Court of History) from 1982 presents a critical examination of Zionism, its historical roots, and its consequences for both Jews and Palestinians. This post aims to summarize the key points raised in the documentary, providing a comprehensive understanding of the complex issues surrounding Zionism.

Director: Oleg Uralov
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The Council of Ministers of the USSR announced a reduction in prices for consumer goods on February 28, 1949

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After the Great Patriotic War, the financial system of the USSR was in a difficult situation. In order to restore the purchasing power of the rouble and improve the welfare of the population, monetary reform was initiated at the end of 1947, during which banknotes and deposits were changed out, as well as starting a gradual reduction in commodity prices. The first stage of the price reform was carried out by an order of the USSR Ministry of Trade dated December 14, 1947, which established fixed reduced prices for a limited list of food and industrial goods, which included bread, flour, sugar, butter, sunflower oil, beef meat and other goods.

By the beginning of 1949, thanks to the rise of the national economy, a reduction in the cost of goods and an increase in production, it became possible to carry out another price reduction for a wider range of goods in high demand. The corresponding joint resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) was published on February 28, 1949 in the newspaper Pravda. Since March 1, 1949, the prices of bread, meat, sausages, fish, butter, wool and silk fabrics, furs, household goods and electrical goods, cameras and binoculars has reduced by 10%, the price of woollen garments has decreased by 12%, hats and dresses have become cheaper by 15%, and cheeses, perfumes, jewellery, bicycles, tableware and household appliances fell in price by 20%. In addition, the price of hay has decreased by 30%, and mixed feed has become 20% cheaper.

Due to the decrease in prices made on March 1, 1949, the purchasing power of the rouble increased significantly, its exchange rate improved compared to the exchange rate of foreign currencies, real wages of workers increased and the costs incurred by the peasants for the purchase of industrial goods decreased. “In this undertaking, the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government demonstrated with renewed vigour the great concern for the working people, for their prosperity, for the growth of well-being and culture,” the newspaper Pravda reported in an editorial on March 1, 1949.

Source: CPRF, translated by Beorn And The Shieldmaiden

Read also April 1 — The Day of Price Reductions in Stalin’s Time

Stalin against Nepotism

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Vasily Stalin

Unlike many prominent figures of those times, Stalin never sought to protect his family from the war. In total, the leader had four children – two native sons and a daughter, as well as an adopted son.

Iosif sent his eldest son, Yakov, to the front right with the outbreak of war on June 22, 1941. The man did not manage to stay in battle for a long time – a month later he was captured by the Germans.

According to legend, the Fascists offered Stalin to exchange Yakov for the captured German officer Paulus, to which he replied that “one does not exchange soldiers for field marshals”. Stalin’s son spent two years in concentration camps before his psyche broke down and he tried to escape in the hope that he would be shot. And so it happened.

The youngest son, Vasily, built a brilliant career at the front, but his father was also strict with him. According to historians, the officer was offered the rank of general many times, but Iosif always crossed him off the list – he left him there only on the 12th time, considering that now his son was worthy of such an honour.

Source: Historical Facts, translated by Beorn And The Shieldmaiden

When the liberators are made into enemies – Soviet war memorial vandalised in Norway

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“In Neiden in Southern Varanger, a memorial to Soviet soldiers has been subjected to serious vandalism. The incident joins a European wave of attacks on Red Army monuments. Soldiers who died fighting Nazism are now treated as political targets.”

By Dan-Viggo Bergtun, published at Steigan on March 7, 2026

👉 Make sure to read our series of materials on the liberation of Northern Norway at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”, including For the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Northern Norway, the WWII History Is Being Rewritten There.

👉 The erasure of historical memory is nothing new. In our 2024 publication 80 Years since the Red Army liberated Northern Norway from Nazi German occupation we mention “Operation Asphalt”, when in 1951 the graves of Soviet soldiers were ravaged and the remains were taken to the island of Tjøtta, where they were buried in a common cemetery. The stated reason for this was the fear that visits to soldiers’ graves would become a cover for espionage operations of the Soviet intelligence.

Here is the memorial in Neiden that was recently torn down, probably with ropes and snowmobiles. Photo: Hallgeir Henriksen.

Vandalising of the memorial to Soviet soldiers in Neiden is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern that spreads throughout Western Europe. War memorials to Soviet soldiers are vandalised, removed, or politically delegitimised. In Norway, too, we are now seeing signs of the same development.

Neiden is a small village in South Varanger municipality in Finnmark, along the E6 at Neiden River, about 40 kilometers west of Kirkenes. Here stands a memorial erected in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of East Finnmark. The monument was erected by Norwegian organisations and local initiatives to honour Soviet soldiers who fell in battle against the Nazi occupation in 1944.

On the memorial are the names of soldiers from the Red Army who were killed and buried in Neiden. They came from different parts of the USSR, including Ukraine. They died far from home during the fighting that led to the liberation of Eastern Finnmark from German control.

Nevertheless, this memorial has now been subjected to severe vandalism. The nameplates have been knocked down, probably by means of a snowmobile. This is not accidental vandalism. It is a politically motivated attack on historical memory that makes the liberators into enemies.

The same events are happening across much of Europe. In several countries, Soviet war monuments have been torn down or removed by political decisions. Elsewhere, they are vandalised or subjected to campaigns that attempt to portray them as propaganda.

This is not just a loss of history. It is moral decay.
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Liberation of Bulgaria in 1878. With a prophetic essay by Fyodor Dostoevsky from 1877.

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On March 3, 1878, the Treaty of San Stefano was signed in a suburb of Constantinople, recording our country’s victory in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

Under the terms of the Treaty, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro gained full independence, while Bulgaria, which had been under Ottoman rule for nearly 500 years (!), was granted broad autonomy.

The date of the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano became a national holiday in Bulgaria – the Day of Liberation from Ottoman Rule.

The victory of the Russian forces in the war against the Ottoman Empire and the conclusion of the Treaty laid the foundation for future constructive cooperation between Russia and Bulgaria. For a long time, relations between our countries developed steadily and progressively.

History Of Diplomacy: A key role in the conclusion of the Treaty of San Stefano was played by the distinguished Russian diplomat and statesman Nikolai Ignatyev, who for more than ten years served as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire, and signed the Treaty on behalf of Russia.

* * *

🇷🇺🇧🇬  Today, Russian-Bulgarian relations have been virtually reduced to zero. The current government is pursuing an openly Russophobic policy, continuing to dismantle the foundations of bilateral cooperation. Unfortunately, this also affects the way historical events are presented in the local media landscape.

Ambassador of Russia to Bulgaria Eleonora Mitrofanova:

“In recent years, the chronicle of the Liberation has been ruthlessly rewritten. Alleged ‘imperial ambitions’ of Russia are brought to the forefront, while nothing is said about the truly nationwide movement in defence of our enslaved Bulgarian brothers, which played a decisive role in the decision of Emperor Alexander II to declare war on the Ottoman Empire.”

Excerpts from the congratulatory message by Russian Ambassador to Bulgaria Eleonora Mitrofanova on the occasion of Bulgaria’s national holiday, the Day of Liberation from Ottoman Rule, March 3, 2026.

☝️ We recall that 100,000 Russian soldiers gave their lives for the freedom of the peoples of the Balkans, including Bulgaria.

Source: Russian MFA


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The Myth of the “Stalinist Purges”

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The fairy tale hour of Western historians regarding Stalin has many chapters, much rubbish and black myths have been piled over his name. The period of the purges of 1937 is one such area. It was later inflated by Solzhenicin’s imagination to come up with outlandish numbers of “Stalin’s victims”.

The material in this series, first translated by us at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”, from ANALYTICS & NEWS will address that trouble period. Troubled, for quite different reasons than what Western historiography is propagating.

Other materials on this topic:
👉 The history of repressions devoid of emotion. Viktor Zemskov’s arguments and facts
👉 Myths about Stalin. Where do legs grow from?

The fairy tale hour of Western historians regarding Stalin has many chapters. After the myth of the “Holodomor”, we will now clear up the next myth.

❗️Throughout this article, crucial questions will arise that apparently 99% of historians have not asked themselves, have refused to ask, or were not allowed to ask.

⚠️ We do not question that these years of “terror” and the subsequent purge took place. However, we will show who was responsible for the first phase and why it became necessary for phase 2, the purge, to be carried out.

🔻First, we would like to begin with two quotes that you should keep in mind:

“This is how I remember encounters, conversations with Stalin, how often about certain topics – all of this fell on deaf ears! When did I start to remember? When they began to heap all kinds of dirt on Stalin. I do not wonder how many people died under him, but how he managed to put an end to it! After all, the general mood was such that they could have destroyed half the country with their own hands. And you think to yourself, the devil take it, how things are going in our Russia! You think of past times, of Peter the Great, and you see: everything repeats itself. History repeats itself, perhaps in a new way, but it repeats itself nonetheless. More than once I remembered how often Stalin said that being determines consciousness, and consciousness lags behind being! And the thought comes to me: Basically, we must think communistically. But it is thought as in the 18th century: how to push someone else aside!”
– Vyacheslav Molotov

“Learn self-control, dear comrade, otherwise, despite all your good professional qualities, you will not be able to keep your head: you will repeat my fate – you will be removed before you have time to fulfil the mission. You see for yourself that among the ‘leaders’ of the party there are no Bolshevik cadres capable of leadership… but the mission of Bolshevism must continue, otherwise the Freemasons and the foolishly babbling intelligence bound by them will completely overwhelm the people.”
– Note from Vladimir Lenin to Stalin

The Plenary Session from 23.02.1937 to 05.03.1937 and the Beginning of the “Great Terror”

Stalin proposed a very extensive and detailed program of reforms to the plenary. The goal was to set aside everything that happened during the civil wars and subsequently during the outbreaks of class struggle, including collectivisation. The most urgent economic problems were to be solved, and the focus was to be on building the nation and uniting the people.
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Plan GOELRO – Lenin’s revolutionary plan for the electrification of the USSR

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Electrification of the young Socialist state was one of the many vitally important tasks that Lenin embarked on after the Revolution, and that was carried to admirable heights in the subsequent years.

On December 22, 1920, the VIII All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened, adopting a plan for the electrification of Russia – the GOELRO plan

The initiator and inspiration of the GOELRO plan was V.I.Lenin. To draw up the plan, On February 21st 1920, the State Commission for Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) was created. GOELRO, short for “State Electrification of Russia” was the plan for the development of not only the energy sector, but the entire economy. The commission included over 200 of the best Russian engineers and scientists, headed by G.M.Krzhizhanovsky.

By December 1920, the commission had completed its work. The Congress, held on December 22-29, 1920, approved the GOELRO plan. In his report to the congress, Lenin, calling the GOELRO plan the second program of the party, put forward a brilliant formula:

“Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the entire country. Without an electrification plan, we cannot move on to real construction… Only when the country is electrified, when the technical base of modern large-scale industry is provided for industry, agriculture and transport, only then will we finally win.”

Lenin ended his historic speech to thunderous applause from the congress delegates with the following words:

“ …if Russia is covered with a dense network of electric stations and powerful technical equipment, then our economic communist construction will become a model for the future socialist Europe and Asia.”

The GOELRO plan was calculated for 10-15 years and provided for a radical reconstruction of the national economy based on electrification.
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