Baikal-Amur Mainline

Literal translation: “majoritarian”; originally a term denoting the revolutionary faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The leading political party in Russia after the civil war until the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1917 to 1952 the designation “B” for Bolshevik was added to the official party name: CPSU (B).

[Vserossiyskaya] Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya (po bor’bye s kontrrevolyutsiyei i sabotazhem), [All-Russian] Extraordinary Commission (for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage); designation of the Soviet secret police from 1917 to 1922.

Consolidation of farmers and agricultural workers in “collective farms” (“kolkhozy”), enforced in the USSR with great brutality from the end of the 1920s onwards.

Mass terror involving confiscations of property, deportations and shooting executions, carried out against the “kulaks” within the context of the collectivization of agriculture.

Term used to denote excessive terror in the years 1936–38, when Stalinist repression came to a head.

Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Lagyeryey, Chief Administration of Camps (in the NKVD/MVD). In the broader sense, “gulag” is also used to denote the entire Soviet penal camp system.

Inaccessible region in the far north-eastern area of Russia, extending from the mouth of the Kolyma River to the Sea of Okhotsk; also a term used to designate a camp complex reaching as far as the Bering Sea, primarily serving the purpose of gold mining, and dreaded on account of the extremely life-threatening conditions that prevailed there for the inmates.

Designation for relatively prosperous farmers; during collectivization also came to denote smaller independent farmers who resisted against joining the cooperative.

Novel of 1954 by Ilya Ehrenburg, the first  to take a critical look at Stalinism. The “Khrushchev Thaw” named after this novel, a relatively liberal cultural-political phase, was characterized by constant setbacks and ended with Nikita Khrushchev’s overthrow, if not earlier.

A special judicial committee consisting of three persons