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Left to right, top to bottom: Memorial to the deportation in Eupatoria; candle-lighting ceremony in Kyiv; memorial rally in Taras Shevchenko park; cattlecar similar to the type used in the deportation; maps comparing the demographics of Crimea in 1939 and 2001.
Officially, the Soviet government presented the deportation as a policy of collective punishment, based on its claim that some Crimean Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany, but several modern scholars believe that the Soviet government carried out the deportation as a part of its plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Turkic ethnic kin of the Tatars lived, or remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. This was despite the fact that twice as many Crimean Tatars served in the Red Army, 40,000, than had collaborated with the Axis powers, 20,000. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands of other Crimean Tatars subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions which they were forced to live under during their exile. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars resulted in the abandonment of 80,000 houses and it also resulted in the abandonment of 360,000 acres of land. (Full article...)
... that the proposals for a new Crimean flag after the collapse of the Soviet Union included a white flag with seven rainbow colors at the top and a blue-white-red tricolor design , which was officially adopted in 1999?
... that the massacre in Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD in the purges of 1937-1938 was investigated in 1943 during the German invasion of Ukraine and used in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union?
If the Russian word "perestroika" has easily entered the international lexicon, this is due to more than just interest in what is going on in the Soviet Union. Now the whole world needs restructuring, that is progressive development, a fundamental change.
”
— Mikhail Gorbachev, talking about future change in the USSR and the world
As Prime Minister Pavlov initiated the 1991 Soviet monetary reform, commonly referred to as the Pavlov reform, in early 1991. Early on he told the media that the reform was initiated to halt the flow of Soviet rubles transported to the Soviet Union from abroad. Although ridiculed at the time, the statement was later proven to be true. In June the same year, Pavlov called for a transfer of power from the President of the Soviet Union to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet of Ministers. When that failed, he joined a plot to oust Gorbachev. In August, he participated in the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, which tried to prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Pavlov was arrested for his involvement in the coup and went on to work in the banking sector in post-Soviet Russia. He can be seen as the last legitimate Soviet head of government since his successor, Ivan Silayev, was appointed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in breach of what were the Soviet constitutional principles. (Full article...)
Image 9Country emblems of the Soviet Republics before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (fifth in the second row) no longer exists as a political entity of any kind and the emblem is unofficial.) (from Soviet Union)
Image 17Map showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km2) (from Soviet Union)
Image 18Residents of Leningrad leave their homes destroyed by German bombing. About 1 million civilians died during the 871-day Siege of Leningrad, mostly from starvation. (from Soviet Union)
Image 32U.S. Lend Lease shipments to the USSR. During the war the USSR provided an unknown number of shipments of rare minerals to the US Treasury as a form of cashless repayment of Lend-Lease. (from Soviet Union)
Image 33Changes in national boundaries after the end of the Cold War (from Soviet Union)
... that development of the British UB.109Tcruise missile was given "super-priority" in 1951 to ward off an expected attack by the Soviet Union, only to be cancelled after the attack never came?
... that after being arrested for organizing a general strike in 1920, S. Girinis was sent to the Soviet Union following a Soviet-Lithuanian exchange of political prisoners?
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