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120-518: The Greek Operation ( Russian : Греческая Операция , romanized :  Grecheskaya Operatsiya ; Ukrainian : Грецька Операція , romanized :  Hretska Operatsiia ; Greek : Ελληνική επιχείρηση ) was an organised mass persecution of the Greeks of the Soviet Union that was ordered by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin , primarily motivated by widespread distrust of Greek populations living in

240-596: A commissariat of the Soviet Union in 1934. During the Great Purge in 1936–1938, on Stalin's orders, the NKVD conducted mass arrests, imprisonment, torture, and executions of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. The agency sent millions to the Gulag system of forced labor camps and, during World War II, carried out the mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians, and millions of ethnic minorities from

360-649: 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

480-633: 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 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

600-510: 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

720-593: A "foreign element" to the region that was "hostile" and "unreliable" to Soviet rule. Their removal, it was thought, would solidify Soviet hegemony in the Black Sea and Georgian regions. Population transfer was Soviet policy at the time when it came to weakening nationalistic or ethnic sentiments in potentially “problematic” populations. Resettlement was often carried out regardless of whether or not different ethnic groups were resistant to Soviet rule. The Chechen , Ingush , Crimean Tatar , and other minority communities around

840-596: A People's Commissar. However, the NKVD apparatus was overwhelmed by duties inherited from MVD, such as the supervision of the local governments and firefighting, and the Workers' and Peasants' Militias staffed by proletarians were largely inexperienced and unqualified. Realizing that it was left with no capable security force, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR established (20 December [ O.S. 7 December] 1917)

960-493: 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) NKVD First established in 1917 as the NKVD of the Russian SFSR , the ministry was tasked with regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, and its functions dispersed among other agencies before being reinstated as

1080-638: A given region (e.g., the quotas for clergy, former nobles , etc., regardless of identity). The families of the repressed, including children, were also automatically repressed according to NKVD Order no. 00486 . The purges were organized in a number of waves according to decisions of the Politburo of the Communist Party . Some examples are the campaigns among engineers ( Shakhty Trial ), party and military elite plots ( Great Purge with Order 00447 ), and medical staff (" Doctors' Plot "). Gas vans were used in

1200-558: A hard or soft counterpart, and 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

1320-479: 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

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1440-572: 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

1560-607: 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

1680-547: A purge coinciding with Stalin's Great Purge in 1937. Sheng and the Soviets alleged a massive Trotskyist conspiracy and a "Fascist Trotskyite plot" to destroy the Soviet Union. Soviet Consul General Garegin Apresoff , General Ma Hushan , Ma Shaowu , Mahmud Sijan, the official leader of Xinjiang province, Huang Han-chang, and Hoja-Niyaz were among the 435 alleged conspirators in the plot. Xinjiang came under Soviet influence. In

1800-516: 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

1920-551: A result, the Greek community was viewed as resistant and a hindrance to state control. Other motivators include gaining control over resources and land populated by the Greeks, who primarily reside around the Black Sea. The Soviet Union saw the deportation of the Greeks and other minorities in this area as a way to safeguard important agricultural and mineral resources along with oil reserves for

2040-593: A secret political police, the Cheka , led by Felix Dzerzhinsky . It gained the right to undertake quick non-judicial trials and executions if that was deemed necessary in order to "protect the Russian socialist- communist revolution." The Cheka was reorganized in 1922, as the State Political Directorate , or GPU, of the NKVD of the RSFSR. In 1922 the USSR formed, with the RSFSR as its largest member. The GPU became

2160-656: A seizure of state power led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks , who established a new Bolshevik regime, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The Provisional Government's Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), formerly under Georgy Lvov (from March 1917) and then under Nikolai Avksentiev (from 6 August [ O.S. 24 July] 1917) and Alexei Niketan (from 8 October [ O.S. 25 September] 1917), turned into NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) under

2280-568: A series of small scale uprisings between 1929 and 1931. Gkikas further claims that the number of Greeks deported to Gulags by 1942 did not exceed 2,610 people. In reality, there was virtually no widespread counter-revolutionary activity among the Soviet Greeks, though there were very few exceptions, such as Constantine Kromiadi , an anti-communist of Greek origin, who later became second in command in Andrey Vlasov 's Abwehr detachment during

2400-686: A small number of ex-NKVD agents in the Baltic states were convicted of crimes against the local population. These included: The extensive system of labor exploitation in the Gulag made a notable contribution to the Soviet economy and the development of remote areas. Colonization of Siberia , the Far North , and the Far East were among the explicitly stated goals in the first laws concerning Soviet labor camps . Mining, construction works (roads, railways, canals, dams, and factories), logging, and other functions of

2520-527: 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,

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2640-475: 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

2760-401: 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

2880-593: 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

3000-485: 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

3120-613: 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

3240-563: 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

3360-564: 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

3480-402: 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

3600-569: 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

3720-576: 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

Greek Operation - Misplaced Pages Continue

3840-518: 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

3960-461: 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

4080-966: 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

4200-631: The Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family . It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and 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

4320-598: The Battle of Stalingrad and the Crimean offensive . to stem desertions under Stalin's Order No. 270 and Order No. 227 decrees of 1941 and 1942, which aimed to raise troop morale through brutality and coercion. At the beginning of the war, the NKVD formed 15 rifle divisions, which grew by 1945 to 53 divisions and 28 brigades. Unlike the Waffen-SS , the NKVD did not field any armored or mechanized units. In enemy-held territories,

4440-444: The Black Sea also faced similar accusations of disloyalty from Soviet authorities. Soviet doctrine at the time pushed for the formation of an egalitarian society in addition to an ethnically homogenous one. As a result, extensive efforts were made to fill the newly established collective farms popping up all across Soviet territory. This contrasted directly with the long history the Greeks had of independent farming practices, and as

4560-537: The Caucasus , to remote areas of the country, resulting in millions of deaths. Hundreds of thousands of NKVD personnel served in Internal Troops divisions in defensive battles alongside the Red Army , as well as in " blocking formations ," preventing retreat. The agency was responsible for foreign assassinations, including that of Leon Trotsky . Within 1941 and from 1943 to 1946, secret police functions were split into

4680-413: 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

4800-583: The Deportation of the Soviet Greeks . Some scholars characterize the operation as a " genocide " against Greeks. A wave of Greek emigrants from the Soviet Union in 1937–1939 is often considered a consequence of Stalinist persecution of the Soviet Greek national movement. The Greeks living within the USSR had a history of maintaining close ties with outside powers, such as the Ottoman Empire leading up to

4920-723: The Nazi German occupation of the Soviet Union in World War II . About one thousand Greeks from Greece and more from the Soviet Union, presumably motivated by their ethnic persecution from Soviet authorities, joined the Waffen-SS, mostly in Ukrainian divisions. A special case was that of the Ukrainian-Greek Sevastianos Foulidis , an anti-communist who had been recruited by the Abwehr as early as 1938 and became an official of

Greek Operation - Misplaced Pages Continue

5040-558: The OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate), under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. The NKVD of the RSFSR retained control of the militsiya and various other responsibilities. In 1934, the NKVD of the RSFSR was transformed into an all-union security force, the NKVD (which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union leaders soon came to call "the leading detachment of our party"), and

5160-824: The People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB). In March 1946, the People's Commissariats were renamed to Ministries; the NKVD became the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), and the NKGB became the Ministry of State Security (MGB). After the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government dissolved the Tsarist police and set up the People's Militias . The subsequent Russian October Revolution of 1917 saw

5280-692: The Russian Orthodox Church , the Ukrainian Orthodox Church , the Roman Catholic Church , Greek Catholics , Islam , Judaism , and other religious organizations, an operation headed by Yevgeny Tuchkov . During the 1930s, the NKVD was responsible for political murders of those Stalin believed opposed him. Espionage networks headed by experienced multilingual NKVD officers such as Pavel Sudoplatov and Iskhak Akhmerov were established in nearly every major Western country, including

5400-645: The Spanish Civil War , the NKVD ran Section X, coordinating the Soviet intervention on behalf of the Spanish Republicans . NKVD agents acting in conjunction with the Communist Party of Spain exercised substantial control over the Republican government, using Soviet military aid to further Soviet influence. The NKVD established numerous secret prisons around Madrid, used to detain, torture, and kill hundreds of

5520-575: 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

5640-507: 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

5760-471: The sharashka were Sergey Korolev , head designer of the Soviet rocket program and first human space flight mission in 1961, and Andrei Tupolev , the famous airplane designer. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was also imprisoned in a sharashka and based his novel The First Circle on his experiences there. After World War II, the NKVD coordinated work on Soviet nuclear weaponry under the direction of General Pavel Sudoplatov . The scientists were not prisoners, but

5880-405: 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

6000-412: 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

6120-403: The Black Sea Region and also for the availability of resources. Greeks often use the term " pogrom " (πογκρόμ) for this persecution. It began on December 15, 1937, and marked the beginning of the repressions against Greeks that went on for 13 years. Depending on the sources, it is estimated that between 15,000 and 50,000 Greeks died during this campaign. Tens of thousands more were persecuted during

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6240-556: The German Gestapo . In March 1940, representatives of the NKVD and the Gestapo met for a week in Zakopane to coordinate the pacification of Poland. The Soviet Union allegedly deported hundreds of German and Austrian Communists to Nazi territories as unwanted foreigners. According to the work of Wilhelm Mensing , no evidence that which suggests that the Soviets specifically targeted German and Austrian Communists or others who perceived themselves as "anti-fascists" for deportations to Nazi Germany. Furthermore, many NKVD units later fought

6360-409: 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,

6480-405: The Greek Operation of the NKVD came as a response to counter-revolutionary activities of a portion of the ethnic Greek population. Gkikas claims that anti-Soviet resistance organizations had coordinated their actions with Metaxist societies in Greece and sought to create an autonomous Greek state in the Black Sea region. They engaged in wrecking , illegally accumulated foreign currency and launched

6600-468: 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

6720-411: 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

6840-477: The NKVD carried out numerous missions of sabotage. After the fall of Kiev , NKVD agents set fire to the Nazi headquarters and various other targets, eventually burning down much of the city center. Similar actions took place across the occupied Byelorussia and Ukraine . The NKVD (later the KGB ) carried out mass arrests, deportations, and executions. The targets included both collaborators with Germany and members of non-communist resistance movements such as

6960-451: The NKVD's enemies, first focusing on Spanish Nationalists and Spanish Catholics , then after late 1938 increasingly anarchists and Trotskyists as objects of persecution. In 1937, Andrés Nin , the secretary of the Trotskyist POUM , and his colleagues were tortured and killed in an NKVD prison in Alcalá de Henares. Before the German invasion, to accomplish its own goals, the NKVD was prepared to cooperate even with such organizations as

7080-441: The NKVD. The military CI was also upgraded from a department to a directorate and put in the NKVD organization as the Directorate of Special Departments , or UOO NKVD USSR. The NKVMF, however, did not return to the NKVD until January 11, 1942. It returned to NKVD control on January 11, 1942, as UOO 9th Department controlled by P. Gladkov. In April 1943, Directorate of Special Departments was transformed into SMERSH and transferred to

7200-487: The OGPU was incorporated into the NKVD as the Main Directorate for State Security (GUGB); the separate NKVD of the RSFSR was not resurrected until 1946 (as the MVD of the RSFSR). As a result, the NKVD also took over control of all detention facilities (including the forced labor camps, known as the gulag ), as well as the regular police. At various times, the NKVD had the following Chief Directorates, abbreviated as ""ГУ"ГУ"—Главное управление, Glavnoye upravleniye . Until

7320-439: The People's Defense and Commissariates. At the same time, the NKVD was reduced in size and duties again by converting the GUGB to an independent unit named the NKGB. In 1946, all Soviet commissariats were renamed "ministries." Accordingly, the Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the USSR became the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), while the NKGB was renamed the Ministry of State Security (MGB). In 1953, after

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7440-518: The Polish Home Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army , which were trying to separate from the Soviet Union, among others. The NKVD also executed tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners in 1940–1941, including at the Katyń massacre . On November 26, 2010, the State Duma issued a declaration acknowledging Stalin's responsibility for the Katyn massacre and the execution of intellectual leaders and 22,000 Polish POWs by Stalin's NKVD. The declaration stated that archival material "not only unveils

7560-425: The Pontic Greeks. Do you know what their answer was? They said, that if such societies were organised then we would have to expect a repetition of 1937. So many Greeks were deported then. Soviet Greeks were officially rehabilitated , among with other ethnic groups by the Russian Federation, amended by Decree no. 458 of September 12, 2015. Russian language Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to

7680-807: 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

7800-458: 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

7920-415: The Soviet Greeks were not officially rehabilitated by Soviet legislation. In the early 1990s, a movement arose advocating the creation of a new Greek autonomy in the Krasnodar region, but it failed to achieve support. One Soviet Greek man, born in 1959, described this outcome with the following words: When these Greek societies started emerging, I told the lads that there was a society that was reviving us,

8040-476: The Soviet Union during the Great Purge in the cities of Moscow , Ivanovo , and Omsk A number of mass operations of the NKVD related to persecution of entire ethnic categories. For example, the Polish Operation of the NKVD in 1937–1938 resulted in the execution of 111,091 Poles. Whole populations of certain ethnicities were forcibly resettled . Foreigners living in the Soviet Union were given particular attention. When disillusioned American citizens in

8160-476: The Soviet Union thronged the gates of the U.S. embassy in Moscow to plead for new U.S. passports to leave the USSR (their original U.S. passports had been taken for 'registration' purposes years before), none were issued. Instead, the NKVD promptly arrested the Americans, who were all taken to Lubyanka Prison and later shot. American factory workers at the Soviet Ford GAZ plant, suspected by Stalin of being 'poisoned' by Western influences, were dragged off with

8280-419: The Soviet economy. The 1926 Soviet census registered 213,765 Greeks in the country and the 1939 census recorded 286,444. On 9 August 1937, NKVD order 00485 was adopted to target "subversive activities of Polish intelligence" in the Soviet Union, but was later expanded to also include Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians and Chinese. The prosecution of Greeks in USSR was gradual: at first,

8400-405: 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

8520-423: The Soviet state (" enemies of the people "), untold multitudes of people were sent to GULAG camps, and hundreds of thousands were executed by the NKVD. Formally, most of these people were convicted by NKVD troikas ("triplets") – special courts martial . Evidence standards were very low: a tip-off by an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds for arrest. Use of "physical means of persuasion" (torture)

8640-542: The Soviets. Worries over a nationalist uprising or saboteur activity were only heightened by the resistance shown by Greek partisans in response to the German invasion of their country. Post WWII , the entry of Greece into the NATO alliance further drove Stalin's distrust of the Soviet Greek community, fearing they had come under the influence of the West. Soviet authorities viewed Greeks as

8760-538: The USSR, such as leaders of nationalist movements, former Tsarist officials, and personal rivals of Joseph Stalin . Among the officially confirmed victims of such plots were: Prominent political dissidents were also found dead under highly suspicious circumstances, including Walter Krivitsky , Lev Sedov , Ignace Reiss , and former German Communist Party (KPD) member Willi Münzenberg . Pro-Soviet leader Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang received NKVD assistance to conduct

8880-460: 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

9000-577: The United States. The NKVD recruited agents for its espionage efforts from all walks of life, from unemployed intellectuals such as Mark Zborowski to aristocrats such as Martha Dodd . Besides the gathering of intelligence, these networks provided organizational assistance for so-called wet business , where enemies of the USSR either disappeared or were openly liquidated. The NKVD's intelligence and special operations ( Inostranny Otdel ) unit organized overseas assassinations of political enemies of

9120-526: The Wehrmacht, for example the 10th NKVD Rifle Division , which fought at the Battle of Stalingrad . After the German invasion, the NKVD evacuated and killed prisoners . During World War II, NKVD Internal Troops were used for rear area security, including preventing the retreat of Soviet army divisions. Though mainly intended for internal security, NKVD divisions were sometimes used at the front, for example during

9240-453: The Wehrmacht, with extensive action in intelligence and agitation work on the Eastern front. The effects of Soviet forced deportation were extensive on the Greek community. The trauma alone of being uprooted from one's home, way of life, and culture corroded centuries of tradition and language, the loss of which is still seen to this day. Many lost their homes, businesses, and possessions alone in

9360-788: The arrest of Lavrenty Beria , the MGB merged back into the MVD. The police and security services finally split in 1954 to become: In 1935–1945, the Main Directorate of State Security of NKVD had its own ranking system before it was merged into the Soviet military standardized ranking system. The main function of the NKVD was to protect the state security of the Soviet Union through massive political repression , including authorized murders of many thousands of politicians and citizens, as well as kidnappings, assassinations, and mass deportations. In implemention of Soviet internal policy towards perceived enemies of

9480-438: The authorities shut down the Greek schools, cultural centers, theatres and publishing houses. Then, the secret police indiscriminately arrested all Greek men aged 16 years old or older. Greeks who were wealthy or self-employed professionals were targeted first. On many occasions, the central authorities sent telegrams to police forces with orders to arrest a certain number of Greeks, without giving any individual names, and

9600-403: 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

9720-562: 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

9840-402: The death of Stalin in 1953, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev halted NKVD purges. From the 1950s to the 1980s, thousands of victims were legally "rehabilitated," i.e., acquitted with their rights restored. Many of the victims and their relatives refused to apply for rehabilitation, either out of fear or a lack of documents. The rehabilitation was not complete; in most cases, the formulation

9960-595: The elements. On 3 February 1941, the 4th Department (Special Section, OO) of the GUGB NKVD security service responsible for the Soviet Armed Forces military counterintelligence, consisting of 12 sections and one investigation unit, was separated from the GUGB NKVD USSR. The official liquidation of OO GUGB within NKVD was announced on 12 February by joint order No. 00151/003 of NKVD and NKGB USSR. The rest of GUGB

10080-413: 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,

10200-451: 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

10320-617: 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

10440-480: 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

10560-525: The labor camps were part of the Soviet planned economy , and the NKVD had its own production plans. The most unusual part of the NKVD's achievements was its role in Soviet science and arms development . Many scientists and engineers arrested for political crimes were placed in special prisons, much more comfortable than the gulag, colloquially known as sharashkas . These prisoners continued their work in these prisons and were later released. Some of them became world leaders in science and technology. Among

10680-516: 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

10800-515: 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

10920-455: 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,

11040-699: The others to Lubyanka by the NKVD in the very same Ford Model A cars they had helped build, where they were tortured; nearly all were executed or died in labor camps. Many of the slain Americans were dumped in the mass grave at Yuzhnoye Butovo District , near Moscow. However, the people of the Soviet Republics were still the majority of NKVD victims. The NKVD also served as an arm of the Russian Soviet communist government for lethal mass persecution and destruction of ethnic minorities and religious beliefs, such as

11160-536: The outbreak of WWI . Such close ties made Soviet authorities wary of the loyalty of their Greek subjects. Beyond their association with the Ottoman Empire, the Greeks held particularly close ties with Greece and with the Greek Orthodox Church . Soviet authorities in particular "viewed religion as a force that undermined its power and authority". Strategically, the Greeks were viewed as a security threat by

11280-446: 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

11400-453: 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

11520-418: The police officers would arrest at random any persons of Greek origin until they reached the requested total number of arrests until the process was repeated at a later date. Estimates of the number of victims vary: according to Ivan Dzhukha 15,000 were executed and 20,000 were deported to Gulags, while Vlasis Agtzidis puts the number of deaths to 50,000. According to Greek Marxist historian Anastasis Gkikas

11640-455: 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

11760-418: 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

11880-468: The project was supervised by the NKVD because of its great importance and the corresponding requirement for absolute security and secrecy. The project also used information obtained by the NKVD from the United States. The agency was headed by a people's commissar (minister). His first deputy was the director of State Security Service (GUGB). Note: In the first half of 1941 Vsevolod Merkulov transformed his agency into separate commissariat (ministry), but it

12000-475: 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

12120-466: 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 ,

12240-486: The reorganization begun by Nikolai Yezhov with a purge of the regional political police in the autumn of 1936 and formalized by a May 1939 directive of the All-Union NKVD by which all appointments to the local political police were controlled from the center, there was frequent tension between centralized control of local units and the collusion of those units with local and regional party elements, frequently resulting in

12360-491: 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

12480-654: The scale of his horrific tragedy but also provides evidence that the Katyn crime was committed on direct orders from Stalin and other Soviet leaders." NKVD units were also used to repress the prolonged partisan war in Ukraine and the Baltics , which lasted until the early 1950s. NKVD also faced strong opposition in Poland from the Polish resistance movement known as the Armia Krajowa . After

12600-675: 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

12720-459: 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

12840-485: The thwarting of Moscow's plans. During Yezhov's time in office, the Great Purge reached its height. In the years 1937 and 1938 alone, at least 1.3 million were arrested and 681,692 were executed for 'crimes against the state'. The Gulag population swelled by 685,201 under Yezhov, nearly tripling in size in just two years, with at least 140,000 of these prisoners (and likely many more) dying of malnutrition, exhaustion and

12960-770: 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

13080-506: 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

13200-471: The various waves of resettlements, not to mention the loss of life from executions, disease, starvation, and exhaustion among the other harsh conditions in the camps. An exact figure of the number of Greeks killed is virtually impossible, although it's estimated that 19% of all those arrested in the Soviet Union between 1937 and 1938 were executed. Following Stalin's death , the practice of forced resettlement

13320-751: 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 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

13440-401: Was "due to lack of evidence of the case of crime." Only a limited number of persons were rehabilitated with the formulation "cleared of all charges.". Very few NKVD agents were ever officially convicted of a particular violation of anyone's rights. Legally, those agents executed in the 1930s were also "purged" without legitimate a criminal investigation or court decision. In the 1990s and 2000s,

13560-500: Was abandoned, although rehabilitation was tough for many Greeks returning to a region that completely changed in their absence. In 1938, 20,000 Soviet Greeks arrived in Greece. Between 1965 and 1975, another 15,000 Greeks emigrated from the Soviet Union and went to Greece. A monument to all Greek victims of the Gulag was unveiled in Magadan in 2011. Unlike many other "punished" ethnic groups,

13680-770: Was abolished, and staff were moved to the newly created People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB). Departments of former GUGB were renamed directorates. For example, the foreign intelligence unit known as the Foreign Department (INO) became the Foreign Directorate (INU); the GUGB political police unit represented by the Secret Political Department (SPO) became the Secret Political Directorate (SPU), and so on. The former GUGB 4th Department (OO),

13800-405: 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

13920-421: 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

14040-453: Was merged back to the people's commissariat of Interior soon after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union . In 1943 Merkulov once again split his agency this time for good. Andrei Zhukov singlehandedly identified every single NKVD officer involved in 1930s arrests and killings by researching a Moscow archive. There are just over 40,000 names on the list. See also: Bibliography of Stalinism and

14160-462: Was sanctioned by a special decree of the state, which opened the door to numerous abuses, documented in recollections of victims and members of the NKVD themselves. Hundreds of mass graves resulting from such operations were later discovered throughout the country. Evidence exists that the NKVD committed mass extrajudicial executions, guided by secret "plans." Those plans established the number and proportion of victims (officially "public enemies") in

14280-470: Was split into three sections. One section, which handled military counterintelligence in NKVD troops (former 11th Section of GUGB 4th Department OO) became the 3rd NKVD Department, or OKR (Otdel KontrRazvedki). The chief of OKR NKVD was Aleksander Belyanov. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941), the NKGB USSR was abolished, and on July 20, 1941, the units that formed the NKGB became part of

14400-402: 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

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