History of Eastern Europe – Flashcards

The painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. The "euthanasia campaign" of mass murder in Nazi Germany gathered momentum on 14 January 1940 when the "handicapped" were killed with gas vans and killing centres, eventually leading to the deaths of 70,000 adult Germans.

A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure. During World War II, ghettos were established by the Nazis to confine Jews and sometimes Gypsies into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe. The Nazis most often referred to these areas in documents as Jewish quarter. These Nazi ghettos sometimes coincided with traditional Jewish ghettos and Jewish quarters, but not always. On June 21, 1943, Heinrich Himmler issued a decree ordering the dissolution of all ghettos in the East and their transformation into Nazi concentration camps.

An administrative agency imposed by Nazi Germany during World War II, predominantly within the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, in which the participants were Jews. The Nazi German administration required Jews to form a Judenrat in every community across the occupied territories. It became an ideological conflict for Jews in that the participants were considered collaborators by the resiting Jews, yet they had in reality little option.

Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass killings, primarily by shooting, during World War II. They had a leading role in the implementation of the Final Solution of the Jewish question in territories conquered by Nazi Germany. Almost all of the people they killed were civilians, beginning with the Polish intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to Soviet political commissars, Jews, and Gypsies throughout Eastern Europe. Under the direction of Heinrich Himmler and the supervision of Reinhard Heydrich, the Einsatzgruppen operated in territories occupied by the German armed forces following the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union) in June 1941.

Antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the 1935 annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party (NSDAP). After they seized power in 1933, the Nazis began to implement their party platform, which included the formation of a national community based on race, and racial cleansing via the active suppression of Jews, who would be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights and removed from German society.

An order issued by Adolf Hitler on 6 June 1941 before Operation Barbarossa. It demanded that any Soviet political commissar identified among captured troops be summarily executed as an enforcer of the Communist ideology and the Soviet Communist Party line in military forces. According to the order, all those prisoners who could be identified as "thoroughly bolshevized or as active representatives of the Bolshevist ideology" should also be killed.

City in central Poland. Occupied by Nazi Germany in 1939, who later established the Lodz Ghetto, and it was the last major ghetto to be liquidated, in August 1944. Lodz's entire Jewish community was wiped out.

Was a Nazi German Reichsgau (an administrative subdivision created in areas annexed to Nazi Germany), formed from Polish territory annexed in 1939. It comprised the Greater Poland and adjacent areas. The territory was inhabited by Poles and a German minority, then Poles and Jews were expelled from the territory into the occupied General Government.

An occupied area of the Second Republic of Poland that was under the colonial administration of Nazi Germany during World War II, from 1939 to early 1945. The Nazi government designated the territory as a separate administrative region of the Third Reich. In 1941 it comprised much of central and southern Poland and of modern-day western Ukraine, and expanded further after the German invasion of SU in Operation Barbarossa. The area was a colony rather than a puppet state; its rulers had no goal of cooperating with Poles or Ukrainians throughout the war, regardless of their political orientation. The authorities rarely even mentioned the name "Poland" in government correspondence. The government and administration was composed entirely of Germans, with the intent that the area was to be colonized by German settlers who would exterminate most Poles and reduce the remaining population to the level of serfs before their final genocide.

Was the civilian occupation regime of much of German-occupied Ukraine (which included adjacent areas of modern Belarus and pre-war Poland). Between September 1941 and March 1944, it was administered by Erich Koch. The administration's tasks included the pacification of the region and the exploitation, for German benefit, of its resources and people. Before the German invasion, Ukraine was a constituent republic of the USSR, inhabited by Ukrainians with Russian, Polish, Jewish, Belarusian, German, Romani and Crimean Tatar minorities. It was a key subject of Nazi planning for the post-war expansion of the German state and civilization.

1941, the civilian occupation regime in the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the northeastern part of Poland and the west part of the Belarusian SSR. The political organization for this territory was a German civilian administration. Germany's main political objectives, laid out by the Ministry within the framework of National Socialist policies for the east established by Adolf Hitler, included: the complete annihilation of the Jewish population and the settlement of ethnic Germans and Germanization of the rest. These policies applied in German-occupied Soviet territories. Through the use of Einsatzgruppen over a million Jews were killed. Throughout 1943 and 1944 the Red Army gradually recaptured most of the territory in their advance on Germany, but Wehrmacht forces held out. With the end of the war and the defeat of Germany in 1945, the Reichskommissariat ceased to exist completely.

A secretive Nazi German operation of the mass extermination of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto beginning July 22, 1942. During the Grossaktion Jews were terrorized in daily round-ups and herded at Unschlagplatz for the so-called "resettlement to the East". From there, they were sent aboard overcrowded Holocaust trains to the extermination camp in Treblinka. Treblinka, the killing centre was set up 80 kilometres specifically for the Final Solution. Treblinka was equipped with gas chambers disguised as showers for the "processing" of entire transports of people. The campaign codenamed Operation Reinhard became the critical part of the Holocaust in occupied Poland.

The square in Warsaw under German occupation, where Jews were gathered for deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp as part of Operation Reinhard during genocides in Poland.During the Grossaktion Warsaw, which began on 22 July 1942, Jews were deported in crowded freight cars to Treblinka. On some days as many as 10,000 Jews were deported. An estimated 300,000 Jews were taken to the Treblinka gas chambers; some sources describe it as the largest killing of a community in World War II. The Umschlagplatz was created by fencing off a western part of the Warszawa Gda?ska freight train station that was adjacent to the ghetto. The area was surrounded by a wooden fence, later replaced by a concrete wall. Railway buildings and installations on the site, as well as a former homeless shelter and a hospital were converted into a prisoner selection facility. The rest of the train station served its normal function for the rest of the city during the deportations.

Was Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler appointed him Commander of the Replacement (Home) Army and General Plenipotentiary for the administration of the entire Third Reich. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and one of the people most directly responsible for the Holocaust. Joined the Nazi Party in 1923 and the SS in 1925. In 1929, he was appointed Reichsführer-SS by Hitler. He developed the SS from a 290-man battalion into a powerful group with its own military, and, following Hitler's orders, set up and controlled the Nazi concentration camps. From 1943 forward, he was both Chief of German Police and Minister of the Interior, overseeing all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo (Secret State Police). Himmler formed the Einsatzgruppen and built extermination camps. He was facilitator and overseer of the concentration camps. The total number of civilians killed by the regime is estimated at eleven to fourteen million people. Most of them were Polish and Soviet citizens. Shortly before the end of the war, realising that the war was lost, he attempted to open peace talks with the western Allies without Hitler's knowledge. Hearing of this, Hitler dismissed him from all his posts in April 1945 and ordered his arrest. Himmler attempted to go into hiding, but was detained and then arrested by British forces once his identity became known. While in British custody, he committed suicide on 23 May 1945.

Leader of the Nazi Party, National Socialist German Workers Party. He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and Führer (leader) of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. He joined the German Workers' Party (precursor of the NSDAP) in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. Hitler frequently denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a Jewish conspiracy. Hitler's Nazi Party became the largest elected party in the Germany, and was appointed chancellor in 1933. The Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which began the process of transforming the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism. Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter the injustice of the post-WWI international order dominated by Britain and France. He brought rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, and the annexation of territories that were home to millions of ethnic Germans - actions which gave him popular support. Hitler actively sought Lebensraum ("living space") for the German people. He directed large-scale rearmament and on 1 September 1939 invaded Poland, resulting in British and French declarations of war on Germany. In June 1941, Hitler ordered an invasion of the Soviet Union. On 30 April 1945, less than two days later, the two committed suicide to avoid capture by the Red Army, and their corpses were burned. Under Hitler's leadership and racially motivated ideology, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews and millions of other victims whom he and his followers deemed "sub-humans" and socially undesirable.

"Protection squadron" or "defence corps"; was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP). It began in 1923 as a small, permanent guard unit known as the "Saal-Schutz" (Hall-Protection) made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for Nazi Party meetings in Munich. Later, in 1925, Heinrich Himmler joined the unit, which had by then been reformed and renamed the "Schutz-Staffel". Under Himmler's leadership (1929-45), it grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the largest and most powerful organizations in the Third Reich. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Himmler's command was responsible for many crimes against humanity during World War II (1939-45). The SS, along with the Nazi Party, was declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal, and banned in Germany after 1945.

Leader of the Yugoslav communist partisans fighting the Nazis.

Yugoslav anti-communist, anti-Nazi resistance. Guerrilla groups in Serbia and elsewhere that were remnant of the royal Yugoslav army.

Czech village destroyed in revenge for the Czech resistance's assassination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.

City in Poland. The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of at least 340 Polish Jews of all ages, by a segment of the Polish population in the presence of the German gendarmerie, that occurred on July 10, 1941 during the German occupation of Poland.

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Those parts of the city outside the walls of the Jewish Quarter (ghettos) were called "Aryan". For example in Warsaw, the city was divided into Jewish, Polish and German Quarters. Those living outside the ghetto had to have identification papers proving they were not Jewish (none of their grandparents was a member of the Jewish community), such as a baptism certificate. Such documents were sometimes called "Christian or Aryan papers". Catholic clergy in Poland forged on a mass scale baptism certificates, which were given out to Jews by the dominant Polish resistance movement Armia Krajowa (AK).

An extermination camp built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during WWII, NE of Warsaw. The camp operated officially between July 1942 and October 1943 as part of Operation Reinhard, the most deadly phase of the Final Solution. It is estimated that somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers. More Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz. Managed by the German SS, the camp consisted of two separate units: The first was a forced-labour camp, where they cut wood to fuel the crematoria. Between 1941 and 1944, more than half of its 20,000 inmates died from summary executions, hunger, disease and mistreatment. The second camp was designed purely for extermination. The camp was dismantled ahead of the Soviet advance. A farmhouse for a watchman was built on the site in an attempt to hide the evidence of genocide.

Jewish socialist, diaspora nationalist, anti-Zionist workers' movement. Jewish socialist party in Poland which promoted the political, cultural and social autonomy of Jewish workers (socialist), sought to combat antisemitism and was generally opposed to Zionism. Largest secular political formation of Jews.

A WWII resistance movement in occupied Poland, which was instrumental in engineering the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It took part in a number of other resistance activities as well. Notably, a second Jewish resistance organization called the Jewish Military League formed primarily of former officers of the Polish Army in late 1939 - and operating side by side with ?OB - equally instrumental in the Jewish armed struggle.

One of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943 and fighter of Warsaw Uprising 1944 both heroic struggle against Nazi German terror during World War II. After the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 he was in the area overrun by the Red Army and initially stayed in the Soviet zone of occupation, where he took active part in creation of various Jewish underground socialist organizations. In 1941 he became the deputy commander of the ?OB resistance organization. In this capacity, he served mainly as the envoy between the commander of ?OB and the commanders of the Polish resistance organizations of Armia Krajowa and Armia Ludowa.

One of the leaders of the Jewish underground in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and the only woman on the High Command of the resistance group (?OB). She survived the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland and immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1946.

A Jewish-Polish political and social activist. Last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Before WWII, he was a General Jewish Labour Bund activist. During the war he co-founded the Jewish Combat Organization (?OB). He took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, becoming its leader after the death of Mordechaj Anielewicz. He also took part in the city-wide 1944 Warsaw Uprising. As a member of Solidarity, he took part in the Polish Round Table Talks of 1989. Following the peaceful transformations of 1989, he was a member of various centrist and liberal parties.

The leader of ZOB during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from January to May 1943. His predecessor in command was Pinkus Kartin.

A Polish WWII resistance movement fighter. In 1942 and 1943 Karski reported to the Polish government in exile and the Western Allies on the situation in German-occupied Poland, especially the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the secretive German-Nazi extermination camps.

Bundist member of the National Council of the Polish government-in-exile. A Jewish-Polish socialist politician, leader of the Bund, and a member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile. He committed suicide to protest the indifference of the Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust.

Nazi general. An SS General during World War II. He is best known for being in command against the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and for writing the Stroop Report, a booklength account of the operation.

The dominant Polish resistance movement in World War II German-occupied Poland. It was formed in February 1942 from the Armed Resistance. Over the next two years, it absorbed most other Polish underground forces. Its allegiance was to the Polish Government-in-Exile, and it constituted the armed wing of what became known as the "Polish Underground State".

Communist partisan force set up by the communist Polish Workers' Party (PPR) during WWII. It was created by order of the Polish State National Council on January 1944. Its aims were to fight against Nazi Germans in occupied Poland, support the Soviet military against the German forces and to aid in the creation of a pro-Soviet Union communist government in Poland. Along with the National Armed Forces, it was one of the military resistance organizations that refused to join the structures of the Polish Underground State or its military arm, the Home Army. The People's Army was much smaller than the Home Army, but propaganda in communist Poland espoused the myth that the reverse was the case.

Council for aid to Jews. A codename for the Polish Council to Aid Jews , an underground organization of Polish resistance in German-occupied Poland active from 1942 to 1945. The Council to Aid Jews operated under the auspices of the Polish Government in Exile through the Government Delegation for Poland, in Warsaw. ?egota aided the country's Jews and found places of safety for them in occupied Poland. Poland was the only country in Nazi-occupied Europe where there existed such an organization.

Is a Polish politician, social activist, journalist, writer, historian, former Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner, WWII Resistance fighter, Polish underground activist, a soldier of the Home Army, participant of the Warsaw Uprising...

Prime minister of the Polish government in exile. Polish politician, was Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile during WWII, and later Deputy Prime Minister in postwar Poland, before the USSR took political control of Poland.

Site of the 1940 massacre of 15,000 Polish army officers by the Soviets

Major battle of WWII in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad, on the eastern boundary of Europe. Often regarded as the single largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. The heavy losses inflicted on the Wehrmacht make it arguably the most strategically decisive battle of the whole war. It was a turning point in the European theatre of World War II-the German forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force from the West to replace their losses.

The 1943 act of Jewish resistance that arose within the Warsaw Ghetto in German-occupied Poland during World War II, and which opposed Nazi Germany's final effort to transport the remaining Ghetto population to Treblinka extermination camp. The most significant portion of the rebellion took place beginning on 19 April, but ended when the poorly supplied resistance was defeated by the German soldiers. This officially finished their operation to liquidate the Ghetto on 16 May. It was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II.

A major WWII operation by the Polish resistance Home Army to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany. The Uprising was timed to coincide with the Soviet Union's Red Army approaching the eastern suburbs of the city and the retreat of German forces. However, the Soviet advance stopped short, enabling the Germans to regroup and demolish the city while defeating the Polish resistance, which fought for 63 days with little outside support. One of the largest single military effort taken by any European resistance movement during World War II. The Uprising began on 1 August 1944, as part of a nationwide plan, Operation Tempest, when the Soviet Army approached Warsaw. The main Polish objectives were to drive the German occupiers from the city and help with the larger fight against Germany and the Axis powers. Secondary political objectives were to liberate Warsaw before the Soviets, to underscore Polish sovereignty by empowering the Polish Underground State before the Soviet-backed Polish Committee of National Liberation could assume control. Also, short-term causes included the threat of a German round-up of able-bodied Poles, and Moscow radio calling for the Uprising to begin.

Despite easy capture of area south-east of Warsaw barely 10 km from the city centre and holding these positions for about 40 days, the Soviets did not extend any effective aid to the insurgents within Warsaw. They come in January with extraordinary measures of violence and rape and 'liberate'/take over by pushing the Germans west. Most polish soldier were sent to gulags/executed etc.

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During the WWII, Bolzano was the site of the Nazi's Bolzano Transit Camp, a concentration camp for persecuted Jews and political prisoners. After 1943, heavy fighting against Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers took place in the Dolomite Alps once the Allied Powers had liberated Italy.

The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were part of an ethnic cleansing operation carried out in Nazi German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)'s North Command in the regions of Volhynia and their South Command in Eastern Galicia (General Government) beginning in March 1943 and lasting until the end of 1944. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. Most of the victims were women and children.

The region was unified as a single political entity twice - during the Russian Civil War and under the Soviet rule from 12 March 1922 to 5 December 1936. In the 1940s, around 480,000 Chechens and Ingush, 120,000 Balkars, Karachays, and Meskhetian Turks, and 200,000 Kurds and Caucasus Germans were deported en masse to Central Asia and Siberia. About a quarter of them died.

The Karachays are a Turkic-speaking people of the North Caucasus region, mostly situated in the Russian Karachay-Cherkess Republic. In 1942 the Germans permitted the establishment of a Karachay National Committee to administer their "autonomous region"; the Karachays were also allowed to form their own police force and establish a brigade that was to fight with the Wehrmacht. This relationship with Nazi Germany resulted, when the Russians regained control of the region in November 1943, with the Karachays being charged with collaboration with Nazi Germany.

The Kalmyk people, a cultural group in Russia. In June 1941 the German army invaded the Soviet Union, ultimately taking (some) control of the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In December 1942, however, the Red Army in their turn re-invaded the Republic. On 28 December 1943, the Soviet government accused the Kalmyks of collaborating with the Germans and deported the entire population, including Kalmyk Red Army soldiers, to various locations in Central Asia and Siberia. Within 24 hours the population transfer occurred at night during winter without notice in unheated cattle cars.

??? During WWII, in 1942-43, the republic was partly occupied by Nazi Germany while 40,000 Chechens fought in the Red Army. On March 3, 1944, on the orders of Joseph Stalin, the republic was disbanded and its population forcibly deported upon the accusations of collaboration with the invaders and separatism.

A Turkic ethnic group in the Caucasus region, one of the titular populations of Kabardino-Balkaria. After the civil war and the establishment of Soviet power in 1920, the Balkars were integrated into the structure of the USSR and assigned their own national-territorial unit. In early 1944 Joseph Stalin accused the Balkars of collaborating with Nazi Germany and the entire population was subjected to a mass deportation to parts of Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Crimea became a republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in the USSR. In World War Two it was downgraded to the Crimean Oblast, and in 1954, the Crimean Oblast was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It became the Autonomous Republic of Crimea within newly independent Ukraine in 1991, with Sevastopol having its own administration, within Ukraine but outside of the Autonomous Republic.

A Turkic ethnic group that formed in the Crimean Peninsula. Crimean Tatars constituted the majority of Crimea's population from the time of its ethnogenesis until mid-19th century, and the relative largest ethnic population until the end of 19th century.[8][9] Almost immediately after the liberation of Crimea, in May 1944, the USSR State Defense Committee ordered the removal of a majority of the Tatar population from Crimea, including the families of Crimean Tatars serving in the Soviet Army - in trains and boxcars to Central Asia, primarily to Uzbekistan. Although a great number of Crimean Tatar men served in the Red Army and took part in the partisan movement in Crimea during the war, the existence of the Tatar Legion in the Nazi army and the collaboration of Crimean Tatar religious and political leaders with Hitler during the German occupation of Crimea provided the Soviet leadership with justification for accusing the entire Crimean Tatar population of being Nazi collaborators. In actuality, much of this is soviet revisionism as the persecution of "suspect nations" and most of the genocide of the Crimean Tatars preceded the war, while statements justifying it appear after the war - as the threat of war heightened Stalin's perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the potential source of an uprising in case of invasion.

The party leaders of a regional branch of the NSDAP ( the Nazi Party) or the head of a Gau or of a Reichsgau. Gauleiter was the second highest Nazi Party paramilitary rank, subordinate only to the higher rank Reichsleiter and to the position of Führer. During World War II, the rank of Gauleiter was obtained only by direct appointment from Adolf Hitler.

The codename for the 1947 forced resettlement of post-war Poland's Ukrainian minority to the Recovered Territories, carried out by the Soviet controlled Polish Communist authorities in order to remove the support base for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. About 141,000 civilians were forcibly resettled to formerly German territories ceded to Poland at the Yalta Conference at the end of World War II. The operation was named after the Vistula River, Wis?a in Polish.

An official term used by the People's Republic of Poland to describe the territory of the former Free City of Danzig and the parts of pre-war Germany that became part of Poland after World War II. The rationale for the term "Recovered" was that these territories were once part of the traditional Polish homeland. Over the centuries, however, they had become Germanized through the processes of German eastward settlement and political expansion and for the most part did not even contain a Polish-speaking minority. The great majority of the German inhabitants either fled or were expelled from the territories during the later stages of the war. The territories were resettled by the Polish communist government, mainly with Poles who moved voluntarily from Central Poland and the wartime Polish diaspora, but also with some Ukrainians and other minorities forcibly resettled under "Operation Vistula," as well as Polish "repatriates" forced to move from areas of former eastern Poland that were annexed by the Soviet Union. The communist authorities also made efforts to remove many traces of the German culture, such as place names and historic inscriptions on buildings, from the territories.

The informal yet common name of the Polish Armed Forces in the East in the period 1941-42, in recognition of its commander W?adys?aw Anders. The army was created in the Soviet Union but in March 1942 the army evacuated the Soviet Union and made its way through Iran to Palestine. There it passed under British command and provided the bulk of the units and troops of the Polish II Corps of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, which took part in fighting in the Italian Campaign.

A series of anti-Nazi uprisings conducted during World War II by the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), the dominant force in the Polish resistance. Operation Tempest was aimed at seizing control of cities and areas occupied by the Germans while they were preparing their defenses against the advancing Soviet Red Army. Polish underground civil authorities aimed at taking power before the arrival of the Soviets. The Germans' suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, in the absence of Soviet assistance to the insurgents, marked the end of Operation Tempest. Joseph Stalin would not let the Polish government in exile return and instead created a puppet Moscow-backed government, while arresting or killing Home Army personnel and members of the civil authorities. The Germans' strategic priority was now focused to the south, on the oil fields in Romania. In autumn 1944 many Home Army units were disbanded, while remaining forces returned underground.

Attended by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It was the first of the World War II conferences of the "Big Three" Allied leaders. It preceded the 1945 Yalta and Potsdam conferences. Although the three leaders arrived with differing objectives, the main outcome of the Tehran Conference was the Western Allies' commitment to open a second front against Nazi Germany.

aka Crimea Conference, between the Big Three, for the purpose of discussing Europe's post-war reorganization. The meeting was intended mainly to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe. Within a few years, with the Cold War dividing the continent, Yalta became a subject of intense controversy. Key points: Agreement to the priority of the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. After the war, Germany and Berlin would be split into four occupied zones, Nazi war criminals were to be hunted down and brought to justice.

Stalin, Churchill, and Truman—as well as Attlee, who participated alongside Churchill while awaiting the outcome of the 1945 general election, and then replaced Churchill as Prime Minister after the Labour Party's defeat of the Conservatives—gathered to decide how to administer punishment to the defeated Nazi Germany, which had agreed to unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier, on 8 May (V-E Day). The goals of the conference also included the establishment of post-war order, peace treaty issues, and countering the effects of the war.

An agreement between Stalin and Churchill during the Fourth Moscow Conference on October 1944, about how to divide various European countries into spheres of influence. Winston Churchill (not Stalin) proposed the agreement, under which the UK and USSR agreed to divide Europe into spheres of influence, with one country having "predominance" in each sphere. According to Churchill's account of the incident, Churchill suggested that the Soviet Union should have 90 percent influence in Romania and 75 percent in Bulgaria; the United Kingdom should have 90 percent in Greece; and they should have 50 percent each in Hungary and Yugoslavia. The result of these discussions was that the percentages of Soviet influence in Bulgaria and, more significantly, Hungary were amended to 80 percent.

Following the termination of hostilities in World War II, the Allied Powers were in control of the defeated Axis countries. Anticipating the defeat of Germany and Japan, they had already set up the European Advisory Commission and a proposed Far Eastern Advisory Commission to make recommendations for the post war period. Accordingly they managed their control of the defeated countries through Allied Commissions, often referred to as Allied Control Commissions (ACC), consisting of representatives of the major Allied Powers.

a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition. With it, an aggressor can influence and eventually dominate a landscape, typically political, piece by piece. In this fashion, the opposition is eliminated "slice by slice" until one realizes (too late) that it is gone in its entirety. In some cases it includes the creation of several factions within the opposing political party and then dismantling that party from the inside, without causing the "sliced" sides to protest. Salami tactics are most likely to succeed when the perpetrators keep their true long-term motives hidden and maintain a posture of cooperativeness and helpfulness while engaged in the intended gradual subversion. Soviets won't suddenly invade western Europe, but will annex areas slice by slice

An agrarian and Christian democratic political party in Poland. Interwar Polish political party that was created in 1913. When Poland became independent in 1918, it formed several other parties, eventually becoming the SL in 1931. During WWII formed part of the Polish resistance movement, led by Wincenty Witos.

Founded in 1908, the original party won an overwhelming majority in the first elections after WWII (Nov 1945), resulting in its leader, Zoltán Tildy, becoming prime minister. The Communist response was to intensify terror and to sponsor the coalition of "democratic" parties against the "reactionary" smallholders. The Smallholders-dominated parliament established a republic in 1946 with Tildy as president. He was succeeded as prime minister by Ferenc Nagy. However, the Soviet occupation of the country, the Hungarian Communist Party's salami tactic to break up opponent parties and widespread election fraud in 1947 elections led to a communist government. In 1947 the Communist Party carried out a coup d'état against the rule of the Smallholders' Party. Though not all democratic institutions were abolished, the Communists firmly held power.

A referendum held on the authority of the State National Council. The referendum presented an opportunity for the forces vying for political control of Poland to test their popularity among the general population. However, the results were forged and the referendum failed to meet democratic standards. 1. Are you in favor of abolishing the Senate? 2. Do you want consolidation, in the future constitution of the economic system founded on agricultural reform and the nationalisation of basic national industries, including the preservation of the statutory rights of private enterprise? 3. Do you want consolidation of the western border of the Polish State on the Baltic, Oder river and Lusatian Neisse? Following the referendum, the Allies called for democratic elections. However, the 1947 elections were completely manipulated.

A Czech diplomat and politician and Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948. Masaryk remained Foreign Minister following the liberation of Czechoslovakia as part of the multi-party, communist-dominated National Front government, as the only prominent minister in the new government who was neither a Communist nor a fellow traveller. He was concerned with retaining the friendship of the Soviet Union, but was dismayed by the veto they put on Czechoslovak participation in the Marshall Plan.

A Czechoslovak communist politician and longtime leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KS? or CPC). He was Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1946 to 1948 and President from 1948 to 1953. From 1939 onward he was one of the leaders of the Czech resistance. In March 1945, Edvard Beneš, agreed to form a National Front government with Gottwald. In 1946, Gottwald gave up the secretary-general's post and was elected to the new position of party chairman. That March, he led the party to an astonishing 38% of the votes. This was easily the KS?'s best performance in an election. As it turned out, it would be the best showing by a European Communist party in a free election. Gottwald initially tried to take a semi-independent line. However, that changed after a meeting with Stalin. Under his direction, Gottwald imposed the Soviet model of government on the country: he nationalized the country's industry and collectivised its farms. There was considerable resistance within the government to Soviet influence on Czechoslovak politics. In response, Gottwald instigated a series of purges, first to remove non-communists, later to remove some communists as well.

Elected President of Czechoslovakia 1935-38 and who had been head of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London since 1941. a leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement, Minister of Foreign Affairs and the second President of Czechoslovakia from 1935 to 1938 and again from 1940 to 1948. In 1940 he organised the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London with Jan Šrámek as Prime Minister and himself as President. Although not a Communist, Beneš was also on friendly terms with Stalin. Believing that Czechoslovakia had more to gain from an alliance with the Soviet Union than with Poland, he torpedoed the plans for a Polish-Czechoslovakian confederation and in 1943 he signed an entente with the Soviet Union. After the Prague uprising at the end of World War II, Beneš returned home and reassumed his former position as President. Beneš presided over a coalition government, from 1947 headed by Communist leader Klement Gottwald as prime minister.

An American initiative to aid Europe, in which the United States gave $13 billion (approximately $120 billion in current dollar value) in economic support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II. Although offered participation, the Soviet Union refused Plan benefits, and also blocked benefits to Eastern Bloc countries, such as East Germany and Poland. The United States provided similar aid programs in Asia, but they were not called "Marshall Plan".

Soviet writer, journalist, translator, and cultural figure. The novel The Thaw gave its name to an entire era of Soviet politics, namely, the liberalization after the death of Joseph Stalin. Ehrenburg was a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

Initiated by the Jewish Bund leaders Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter. Upon their arrests the Committee was reformed on Joseph Stalin's order in Kuibyshev in April 1942 with the official support of the Soviet authorities. It was designed to influence international public opinion and organize political and material support for the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany, particularly from the West. In 1952, as part of the persecution of Jews in the latter part of Stalin's rule (for example, the "Doctors' plot"), most prominent members of the JAC were arrested and executed.

Soviet/Russian Jewish poet and playwright who wrote predominantly in Yiddish. Joined the Soviet Communist party in 1942, and also the JAC.

President Harry S. Truman established that the United States would provide political, military and economic assistance to all democratic nations under threat from external or internal authoritarian forces. A United States policy to stop Soviet expansion during the Cold War. President Truman pledged to contain communism in Europe and elsewhere and impelled the US to support any nation with both military and economic aid if its stability was threatened by communism or the Soviet Union.

The first official forum of the international communist movement since the dissolution of the Comintern, and confirmed the new realities after WWII, including the creation of an Eastern Bloc. The intended purpose was to coordinate actions between Communist parties under Soviet direction. A Soviet-dominated organization of Communist parties founded in September 1947 at a conference of Communist party leaders in Poland. Stalin called the conference in response to divergences among communist governments on whether or not to accept Marshall Aid in July 1947. The Cominform was dissolved in 1956 after Soviet rapprochement with Yugoslavia and the process of De-Stalinization.

A uninhabited island that was the site of a political prison in use when Croatia was part of Yugoslavia. The prison was in operation between 1949 and 1989. The entire island was officially made into a high-security, top secret prison and labor camp run by the authorities of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

A Polish communist activist and politician. He was the de facto leader of post-war Poland until 1948, and again from 1956 to 1970. In 1926, he became a member of the Communist Party of Poland and was arrested for political activity. Gomu?ka was an activist in the leftist labor unions from 1926 and in the Central Trade Department of the KPP Central Committee from 1931. During the war, he became an influential Polish communist and in 1942 participated in the reformation of a Polish communist party (the KPP was destroyed in Stalin's purges in the late 1930s) under the name Polish Workers' Party. Gomu?ka became the Party's secretary general in November 1943. n occupied Warsaw Gomu?ka established a national quasi-parliament (the communist version) named the State National Council and was a deputy in that body. Gomu?ka was a deputy prime minister in the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland from January to June 1945, and in the Provisional Government of National Unity, from 1945 to 1947. As a minister of Recovered Territories (1945-48), he exerted great influence over the rebuilding, integration and economic progress of Poland within its new borders, by supervising the settlement, development and administration of the lands acquired from Germany. First secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party, the ruling communist party of Poland, from 1956 to 1970. In December 1945, at the First Congress of the PPR in Warsaw, Gomu?ka was elected a member of the Politburo and secretary-general of the Central Committee. Gomu?ka was ruthless in eliminating all opposition to communist rule. He personally led the struggle to crush the Polish Peasant Party (PSL), and he was a strong advocate of the merger, on communist terms, of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the PPR. At the same time, however, he came out against forcible collectivization of agriculture and spoke favourably of the socialist tradition. In opposing the formation of the Cominform in September 1947, he was even critical of the Soviet line. This led to his political eclipse. On Stalin's orders, Gomu?ka was accused of "nationalist deviation," and in September 1948 he was replaced as secretary-general of the PPR by Boles?aw Bierut. In August 1956 Gomu?ka was readmitted to the party and in October was reelected to the Politburo and to the position of first secretary of the Central Committee. Soon he was also elected a member of Poland's collective presidency, the Council of State.

Elected Prime Minister of Israel on March 17, 1969. Israel's first woman and the world's fourth woman to hold such an office, she was described as the "Iron Lady" of Israeli politics. Meir was appointed Israel's minister plenipotentiary (ambassador) to the Soviet Union, with her term beginning on September 2, 1948, and ending in March 1949. At the time, good relations with the Soviet Union were important for Israel's ability to secure arms from EE countries for the struggle that accompanied its independence, while Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov sought to cultivate a strong relationship with Israel as a means of furthering the Soviet position in the Middle East. Soviet-Israeli relations were complicated by Soviet policies against religious institutions and nationalist movements, made manifest in moves to shut down Jewish religious institutions as well as the ban on Hebrew language study and the prohibition of the promotion of emigration to Israel. In 1969 and the early 1970s, Meir met with many world leaders to promote her vision of peace in the Middle East, including Nicolae Ceau?escu (1972).

Hungarian Communist politician, who served as Minister of Interior and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was an important organizer of the Hungarian communists' power, but he eventually fell victim to Rákosi's show trials, probably, because he was a homegrown Communist, as opposed to the Stalin-backed Rákosi.

Czech Communist politician. Holding the post of the party's General Secretary after World War II, he was one of the leading creators and organizers of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. After the Tito-Stalin split, Stalin instigated a wave of "purges" of the respective Communist Party leaderships, to prevent more splits between the Soviet Union and its Central European "satellite" countries. In Czechoslovakia, Slánský was one of 14 leaders arrested in 1951.

1919 Treaty between Entente and Austria at end of WWI. Cession of territory to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania. Prevented Anschluss. Saint-Germaine: 1919 between the Allies and the Austria. - Dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Empire - Austria accepted responsibility for the war along with the central powers. - New republic of Austria recognized the independence of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. - War reparations towards the allies - The Covenant of the League of Unions was included - Austro-German union was prohibited - Territory: o Bohemia and Moravia formed the core of the newly created state Czechoslovakia. o Ceded Galicia to Poland o Austrian Silesia was split between Czech Silesia and polish Silesia o Burgenland (German speaking western parts of Hungary) were awarded to Austria. o Austria-Hungary's only over sea possession, Tianjin, was given to China.

1920, Allies and Hungary - Independent Hungary and defined its borders. - Left Hungary landlocked and with approx.. 36% of the pre-war population. - Limited army to 35,000 officers and the AH navy ceased to exist. - Territories granted to: Kingdom of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. - "Self determination of peoples" in order to give non-Hungarians their own national states. - Covenant of the League of Nation was included - Territory: o Romania got: most of Banat and all of Transylvania o Italy received Fiume o Czechoslovakia was given: Slovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia o Austria received: western Hungary o Yugoslavia got: Croatia-Slavonia and part of the Banat o Gained cities which were under the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovene administration: Pecs, Mohacs, Baja and Szigetvar

Signed by Allies and China. Key: states Austria as Germany's first victim. 1. recognize the necessity of establishing a general international organization (the United Nations), based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security. 2. regarding Italy: fascism and its influence should be completely destroyed 3. regarding Austria: the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Germany was null and void. Establishment of a free Austria after the victory over Nazi Germany. 4. regarding atrocities: Germans would be sent back to the countries where they committed their crimes and "judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged".

Austrian politician of the Social Democratic Party. He is called the Father of the Republic because he headed the first government in German Austria and the First Austrian Republic in 1918/19, and was once again decisive in establishing the present Second Republic after the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, becoming its first President (under People's Party). In April 1945, just before the end of the war, Renner set up a Provisional Government in Vienna with other politicians from the three revived parties Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), Austrian People's Party (ÖVP, a conservative successor to the Christian Social Party) and Communist Party (KPÖ). This Provisional Government separated Austria from Germany. As a result of Renner's actions Austria was to benefit greatly in the eyes of the Allies as she had fulfilled the stipulation of the Moscow Declaration of 1943, where the Allies declared that the annexation (Anschluss) of Austria by Germany was null and void calling for the establishment of a free Austria after the victory provided that Austria could demonstrate that she had undertaken suitable actions of her own in that direction. Thus Austria, having been invaded by Germany, was treated as an unwilling party and "the first victim" of Nazi Germany. In late 1945, he was elected the first President of the Second Republic.

A Christian democratic and conservative political party in Austria. A successor to the Christian Social Party of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, operating as catch-all parties of the centre-right. The Austrian People's Party was founded immediately following the reestablishment of the Federal Republic of Austria in 1945.

Leader of Hungary's Communist Party from 1945 to 1956. His rule was aligned with USSR politics during Joseph Stalin's government. Rákosi was then removed under pressure from the Soviet Politburo in June 1956 (shortly after Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech), and was replaced by his former second-in-command, Ern? Ger?.

Conservative Austrian politician, served as Federal Chancellor of Austria from 1953- 1961. Raab steered Allied-occupied Austria to independence, he negotiated and signed the Austrian State Treaty in 1955. Internally, Raab stood for a pragmatic social partnership and the "Grand coalition" of Austrian Conservatives and Social Democrats. April 1945, Raab was a member of Karl Renner's provisional government, formed in the Soviet zone of occupation in Austria. Raab co-founded the conservative Austrian People's Party (ÖVP). Despite clearly Western attitudes, Raab established excellent relations with post-Stalin Soviet Union. In February 1955 Vyacheslav Molotov proposed resuming the talks on Austrian independence, but Austria declared neutrality.

May 15, 1955 Re-established Austria as a sovereign state. It was signed among the Allied occupying powers (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union) and the Austrian government.

Soviet Union leader from 1953-64 as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. Party removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev. February, 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, he delivered the "Secret Speech", denouncing Stalin's purges and ushering in a less repressive era in the Soviet Union. His domestic policies, aimed at bettering the lives of ordinary citizens, were often ineffective, especially in agriculture. Hoping eventually to rely on missiles for national defense, Khrushchev ordered major cuts in conventional forces. Despite the cuts, Khrushchev's rule saw the tensest years of the Cold War, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Known for Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech", which denounced the personality cult and dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Delegates at this Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were given no advance warning of what to expect.

"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" was a report by Khrushchev made to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. Was sharply critical of the reign of Stalin, particularly with respect to the purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union which had marked the last years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership personality cult despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism.

Hungarian communist politician, appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary on two occasions. Nagy's second term ended when his non-Soviet-backed government was brought down by Soviet invasion in the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Nagy became Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary again, this time by popular demand, during the anti-Soviet revolution in 1956. Soon he moved toward a multiparty political system. November, he announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Appealed through the UN for recognition of Hungary's status as a neutral state. Throughout this period, Nagy remained committed to Marxism; but his conception was as "a science that cannot remain static", and he railed against the "rigid dogmatism" of "the Stalinist monopoly".

Hungarian communist leader and the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, presiding over the country from 1956-1988. As leader of Hungary, Kádár attempted liberalising the economic system to put greater effort to build up industries aimed at consumers. His rule was marked by what became known as 'Goulash Communism'. A significant increase in consumer expenditures because of the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) reintroduced certain market mechanisms into Hungary. As a result of the relatively high standard of living, and more relaxed travel restrictions than in other Eastern Bloc countries, Hungary was generally considered the best country to live in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Kádár pushed for an improvement in the standard of living. Engaged in increased international trade with non-communist countries, in particular those of Western Europe. However, his policies could not overcome the inherent limitations of the communist system and were viewed with distrust by the conservative leadership of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union. July 1989, Kádár died. Succeeded by Károly Grósz as General Secretary.

= refers to the variety of communism practiced in the Hungarian People's Republic from the 1960s until the collapse of communism in Hungary in 1989. With elements of free market economics and an improved human rights record, it represented a quiet reform and deviation from the soviet principles applied in Hungary in the previous decade. The name is a semi-humorous metaphor derived from "goulash", a popular Hungarian dish: an assortment of unlike ingredients, it represents how Hungarian communism was a mixed ideology and no longer strictly adhering to Marxist interpretations as in the past. Hungary in this particular period enjoyed many amenities not available in the rest of Eastern Bloc.

The General Secretary of the Central Committee (CC) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His eighteen-year term as General Secretary was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in duration. During Brezhnev's rule, the global influence of the Soviet Union grew dramatically, in part because of the expansion of the Soviet military during this time. His tenure as leader was marked by the beginning of an era of economic and social stagnation in the Soviet Union. in 1964, Brezhnev succeeded Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary. As a leader, Brezhnev took care to consult his colleagues before acting, but his attempt to govern without meaningful economic reforms led to a national decline by the mid-1970s, a period referred to as the Era of Stagnation. A significant increase in military expenditure, which by the time of Brezhnev's death stood at approximately 12.5% of the country's GNP, and an aging and ineffective leadership set the stage for a dwindling GNP compared to Western nations. While at the helm of the USSR, Brezhnev pushed for détente between the Eastern and Western countries. At the same time he presided over the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to stop the Prague Spring, and his last major decision in power was to send the Soviet military to Afghanistan in an attempt to save the fragile regime, which was fighting a war against the mujahideen. After suffering from various illnesses for several years, Brezhnev died on 10 November 1982 and was quickly succeeded in his post as General Secretary by Yuri Andropov. Brezhnev had fostered a cult of personality, although not nearly to the same degree as Stalin. Mikhail Gorbachev, who would lead the USSR from 1985 to 1991, denounced his legacy and drove the process of liberalization of the Soviet Union. In spite of this, opinion polls in Russia show Brezhnev to be the most popular Russian leader of the 20th century.

A policy of revision or modification, especially of Marxism on evolutionary socialist (rather than revolutionary) or pluralist principles. The theory or practice of revising one's attitude to a previously accepted situation or point of view. Various ideas, principles and theories that are based on a significant revision of fundamental Marxist premises. Those identified as "revisionists" have criticized "orthodox" Marxism for having disregarded Marx's view of the necessity of evolution of capitalism to achieve socialism by replacing it with an "either/or" dynamic between capitalism and socialism; for disregarding Marx's emphasis on the role of parliamentary democracy in achieving socialism.

Western Ukraine is not an administrative category within Ukraine. It is defined mainly in the context of European history pertaining to the 20th century wars and the ensuing period of annexations.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) - After WWII Ukrainian Catholics came under the rule of Communist Poland and the hegemony of the Soviet Union. Officially all of the church property was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate. Most of the UGCC clergy went underground. This catacomb church was strongly supported by its diaspora in the Western hemisphere. In the winter of 1944-45, Ukrainian Greek Catholic clergy were summoned to 'reeducation' sessions conducted by the NKVD. During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church did flourish throughout the Ukrainian diaspora. In 1968, when the Ukrainian Catholic Church was legalized in Czechoslovakia, a large scale campaign was launched to harass recalcitrant clergy who remained illegal.

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cultural policy of the Soviet Union during the Cold War period following World War II, calling for stricter government control of art and promoting an extreme anti-Western bias. Originally applied to literature, it soon spread to other arts and gradually affected all spheres of intellectual activity in the Soviet Union, including philosophy, biology, medicine, and other sciences. It was initiated by a resolution (1946) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that was formulated by the party secretary and cultural boss Andrey Aleksandrovich Zhdanov. It was directed against two literary magazines, Zvezda and Leningrad, which had published supposedly apolitical, bourgeois, individualistic works of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova, who were expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. The union itself underwent reorganization, but the aims of the resolution were more far-reaching: to free Soviet culture from "servility before the West." This period (1946-53) is generally regarded as the lowest ebb of Soviet literature, and, short though it was, it created a barrier in Soviet-Western cultural interchange that was difficult to overcome.

The First Secretary of the Communist party in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic 1963-1972, a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR. During his tenure and due to his cautious encouragement, there was a brief yet noticeable resurgence of the Ukrainian regional culture. Forced into retirement by Leonid Brezhnev.

A major economic reform launched in the People's Republic of Hungary in 1968. The period from 1956-1968 was one of reform in Eastern Europe. The beginning of these transformations was marked by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 which resulted in János Kádár's placement as the communist leader of the People's Republic of Hungary and the creation of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (HSWP). For the first ten years of his rule, Kádár's objective was to create a united Hungary, announcing in December 1961 that "those who are not against us are with us." Having reached social peace, Kádár turned his attention to economic improvement. On May 7, 1966, the Central Committee of the HSWP announced Kádár's plans for the reform of the economy, known as the New Economic Mechanism (NEM).[1] The reform is considered as "the most radical postwar change" of any Comecon country.[2] The plan, which became official January 1, 1968, was a major shift to decentralization in an attempt to overcome the inefficiencies of central planning. The NEM represented a move away from the soviet economic system of compulsory plan indicators in favor of a policy that states profits as the enterprise's main goal. The new economic policy was a "comprehensive reform of the economic system", creating market relationships among firms, using prices as allocative functions and firms responding to prices to maximize profits, and using profits to budget new investments.

Polish communist who played a prominent role in the history of the Polish People's Republic. He is known for his ultranationalist, xenophobic and antisemitic attitude which influenced Polish United Workers' Party politics in the late 1960s. During this time, General Moczar and his supporters challenged W?adys?aw Gomu?ka's authority. He is best known for his role in the so-called March 1968 events in Poland, in which he led the faction of hardliners inside the Communist Party.

The communist head of state of the People's Republic of Bulgaria (PRB) from 1954-1989. The longest-serving leader of any Eastern Bloc nation, and one of the longest ruling non-royal leaders in history. His rule marked a period of unprecedented political and economic stability for Bulgaria, marked both by complete submission of Bulgaria to Soviet directives and a desire for expanding ties with the West. His rule remained unchallenged until the deterioration of East-West relations in the 1980s, when a stagnating economic situation, a worsening international image and growing careerism and corruption in the BCP weakened his positions.

Communist leader of Romania from 1947-1965. Soviet influence in Romania under Joseph Stalin favored Gheorghiu-Dej, largely seen as a local leader with strong Marxist-Leninist principles. The economic influence of the Soviet Union was highlighted by the creation of the SovRom companies, which directed Romania's commercial exchanges towards unprofitable markets. Up until Stalin's death and even afterwards, Gheorghiu-Dej did not amend repression policies. Gheorghiu-Dej was at first unsettled by Nikita Khrushchev's reforms and the process of De-Stalinization. He then became the architect of Romania's semi-autonomous foreign and economic policy within the Warsaw Pact and the Comecon in the late 1950s, notably by initiating the creation of a heavy industry which went against Soviet directions for the Eastern Bloc as a whole. Romania's foreign policy towards the West was closely tied to its policy toward the Soviet Union; Romania could only develop trading with the West if it asserted its independence from the intensely anti-West Soviet Union. Gheorghiu-Dej realized this, and thus emphasized Romania's sovereignty. In the Second Party Congress which opened on December 23, 1955, Gheorghiu-Dej gave a five-hour speech in which he stressed the idea of national communism and Romania's right to follow its own interests rather than be forced to follow another's (referring to the Soviet Union). Gheorghiu-Dej also discussed opening up trade with the West.

Was a Romanian Communist politician. He was General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and as such was the country's second and last Communist leader. He was also the country's head of state from 1967 to 1989. After a brief period of relatively moderate rule, Ceau?escu's regime became increasingly brutal and repressive. By some accounts, his rule was the most rigidly Stalinist in the Soviet bloc. He maintained controls over speech and the media that were very strict even by Soviet-bloc standards, and internal dissent was not tolerated. His secret police, the Securitate, was one of the most ubiquitous and brutal secret police forces in the world. Ceau?escu's regime collapsed after he ordered his security forces to fire on anti-government demonstrators in the city of Timi?oara in December 1989. The demonstrations spread to Bucharest and became known as the Romanian Revolution, which was the only violent removal of a Communist government in the course of the revolutions of 1989.

A period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dub?ek was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KS?), and continued until 21 August when the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the country to halt the reforms. The Prague Spring reforms were an attempt by Dub?ek to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel. After national discussion of dividing the country into a federation of three republics, Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia and Slovakia, Dub?ek oversaw the decision to split into two, the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. This was the only formal change that survived the end of Prague Spring, though the relative success of the nonviolent resistance undoubtedly prefigured and facilitated the peaceful transition to liberal democracy with the collapse of Soviet hegemony in 1989. The reforms, especially the decentralization of administrative authority, were not received well by the Soviets, who, after failed negotiations, sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops and tanks to occupy the country. A large wave of emigration swept the nation. A spirited non-violent resistance was mounted throughout the country, involving attempted fraternization, painting over and turning street signs (on one occasion an entire invasion force from Poland was routed back out of the country after a day's wandering), defiance of various curfews, etc. While the Soviet military had predicted that it would take four days to subdue the country the resistance held out for eight months.

A political programme announced by Alexander Dub?ek and his colleagues agreed at Presidium of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on April 1968 after he became the chairman of the Party in January 1968. It was a process of mild democratization and political liberalization that would still enable the Communist Party to maintain real power. Still it initiated the Prague Spring, which on the night of 20-21 August 1968 was crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The programme initially called for greater participation of the people in local and country politics under the umbrella of the Communist Party, for greater freedom of the press and of culture, and emphasised the need for personal initiative in economics. The most loathed representatives of the previous style of rule were left to go. The programme did not envisage the existence of independent political parties or private ownership of companies. Participation in Eastern Bloc structures was not questioned. The events of the Prague Spring, especially their speed and escalation, outstripped the original programme, to the surprise and dismay of its authors.

A category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key administrative positions in all spheres of those countries' activity: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions were granted only with approval by the communist party of each country or region. Virtually all were members of the Communist Party. Critics of Stalin critically defined them as a new class. Trotskyism uses the term caste rather than class, because it sees the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state, not a new class society.

A Slovak politician and, briefly, leader of Czechoslovakia (1968-1969). He attempted to reform the communist regime during the Prague Spring but he was forced to resign following Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Later, after the overthrow of the government in 1989, he was Chairman of the federal Czechoslovak parliament. He was the recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament, in 1989.[1]

A political plan, devised by Alexander Dub?ek and his associates in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KS?), that was published in 1968. The program suggested that the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (?SSR) find its own path towards mature socialism rather than follow the Soviet Union. AP called for the acknowledgment of individual liberties, the introduction of political and economic reforms, and a change in the structure of the nation. In many ways, the document was the basis for Prague Spring and prompted the ensuing Warsaw Pact invasion of the ?SSR in August 1968.

A manifesto written by Czech reformist writer Ludvík Vaculík in the midst of the Prague Spring. In essence, the "Two Thousand Words" was a call for the people of Czechoslovakia to hold their party accountable to standards of openness—not open revolution.

Formally the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance, akin in format to NATO. Was a collective defense treaty among eight communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in existence during the Cold War. A collective defense treaty among eight communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in existence during the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was the military complement to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CoMEcon), the regional economic organization for the communist States of Central and Eastern Europe. Was in part a Soviet military reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955 per the Paris Pacts of 1954, but was primarily motivated by Soviet desires to maintain control over military forces in Central and Eastern Europe; in turn (according to The Warsaw Pact's preamble) meant to maintain peace in Europe, guided by the objective points and principles of the Charter of the United Nations (1945).

A Czech student of history and political economy at Charles University. He committed self-immolation as a political protest against the end of the Prague Spring resulting from the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies.

A Slovak politician, president of Czechoslovakia and a long-term Secretary General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1969-1987). His rule is known as the period of the so-called "Normalization" after the Prague Spring. Normalization was characterized by initial restoration of the conditions prevailing before the reform period led by Alexander Dub?ek (1963/1967 - 1968), first of all, the firm rule of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and subsequent preservation of this new status quo.

Refers to the normalization of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany) and Eastern Europe, particularly the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) beginning in 1969. Ostpolitik was an effort to break with the policies of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which was the elected government of West Germany from 1949 until 1969. The Christian Democrats under Konrad Adenauer and his successors tried to combat the Communist regime of East Germany, while Brandt's Social Democrats tried to achieve a certain degree of cooperation with East Germany.

A Polish communist politician. Gierek replaced Gomu?ka as First Secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party in the Polish People's Republic. He was removed from power after labor strikes led to the Gda?sk Agreement between the communist state and the workers of the Solidarity free trade union.

A Polish civil society group that emerged under communist rule to give aid to prisoners and their families after the June 1976 protests and ensuing government crackdown. KOR was an example of successful social organizing based on specific issues relevant to the public's daily lives. It was a precursor and inspiration for efforts of the Solidarity trade union a few years later. It was established in September 1976.

An agreement signed by 35 nations that concluded the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, held in Helsinki, Finland. The multifaceted Act addressed a range of prominent global issues and in so doing had a far-reaching effect on the Cold War and U.S.-Soviet relations. The Helsinki Accords were primarily an effort to reduce tension between the Soviet and Western blocs by securing their common acceptance of the post-World War II status quo in Europe.

In June 1979, Pope John Paul II travelled to Poland where ecstatic crowds constantly surrounded him. This first papal trip to Poland uplifted the nation's spirit and sparked the formation of the Solidarity movement in 1980, which later brought freedom and human rights to his troubled homeland. Poland's Communist leaders intended to use the Pope's visit to show the people that even though the Pope was Polish it did not alter their capacity to govern, oppress, and distribute the goods of society. They also hoped that if the Pope abided by the rules they set, that the Polish people would see his example and follow them as well. If the Pope's visit inspired a riot, the Communist leaders of Poland were prepared to crush the uprising and blame the suffering on the Pope.

A former Polish communist politician. After Gierek was forced to resign as General Secretary amidst social and economic unrest, Kania was elected his successor in 1980. He admitted that the party had made many economic mistakes, and advocated working with Catholic and trade unionist opposition groups. He met with Solidarity Union leader Lech Wa??sa, and other critics of the party. Though Kania agreed with his predecessors that the Communist Party must maintain control of Poland, he never assured the Soviets that Poland would take a tougher line against Solidarity. The final straw for Moscow came when a KGB bug caught Kania criticizing the Soviets for continuing to rely on an economic model that "failed the test," saying it could cost them any advantage they had over the United States. Within days, the Soviets forced Kania to resign as general secretary. He was replaced by Prime Minister Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski.

Polish military officer and communist politician. He was First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party from 1981 to 1989, and as such was the last leader of the Communist People's Republic of Poland. He also served as Prime Minister from 1981 to 1985 and the country's head of state from 1985 to 1990. He was also the last commander-in-chief of the Polish People's Army (LWP). He resigned from power after the Polish Round Table Agreement in 1989, which led to democratic elections in Poland. Jaruzelski was chiefly responsible for the imposition of martial law in Poland on 13 December 1981 in an attempt to crush the pro-democracy movements, which included Solidarity, the first non-Communist trade union in Warsaw Pact history. Subsequent years saw his communist government and its internal security forces censor, persecute, and jail thousands of journalists and opposition activists without charge; others lost their lives during these same events. During Jaruzelski's rule from 1981 to 1989, around 700,000 people left the country.

When the authoritarian communist government of the People's Republic of Poland drastically restricted normal life by introducing martial law in an attempt to crush political opposition. Thousands of opposition activists were jailed without charge and as many as 100 killed.

Soviet Union foreign policy announced to retroactively justify the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 that ended the Prague Spring, along with earlier Soviet military interventions, such as the invasion of Hungary in 1956. These interventions were meant to put an end to liberalization efforts and uprisings that had the potential to compromise Soviet hegemony inside the Eastern bloc, which was considered by the Soviets to be an essential defensive and strategic buffer in case hostilities with NATO were to break out. In practice, the policy meant that limited independence of the satellite states' communist parties was allowed. However, no country would be allowed to compromise the cohesiveness of the Eastern bloc in any way. That is, no country could leave the Warsaw Pact or disturb a ruling communist party's monopoly on power. Implicit in this doctrine was that the leadership of the Soviet Union reserved, for itself, the right to define "socialism" and "capitalism". Following the announcement of the Brezhnev Doctrine, numerous treaties were signed between the Soviet Union and its satellite states to reassert these points and to further ensure inter-state cooperation. The principles of the doctrine were so broad that the Soviets even used it to justify their military intervention in the non-Warsaw Pact nation of Afghanistan in 1979. The Brezhnev Doctrine stayed in effect until it was finally ended with the Soviet non-invasion of Poland during the 1980-1981 crisis, and the later unwillingness of Mikhail Gorbachev to use military force when Poland held free elections in 1989 and Solidarity defeated the Communist Party. It was superseded by the facetiously named Sinatra Doctrine in 1989, alluding to the Frank Sinatra song "My Way".

the 40th President of the United States (1981-89). His second term was primarily marked by foreign matters, such as the ending of the Cold War, the 1986 bombing of Libya, and the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair. Publicly describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", he supported anti-communist movements worldwide and spent his first term forgoing the strategy of détente in favor of rollback by escalating an arms race with the USSR. Reagan subsequently negotiated with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, culminating in the INF Treaty and the decrease of both countries' nuclear arsenals. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union occurred soon afterward.

Agreement between the US and the SU. Signed in Washington, D.C. by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. The treaty eliminated nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with intermediate ranges, defined as between 500-5,500 km.

Established comprehensive limits on key categories of conventional military equipment in Europe and mandated the destruction of excess weaponry. The treaty proposed equal limits for the two "groups of states-parties", the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact.

A political movement for reformation within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1980s (1986), widely associated with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost (meaning "openness") policy reform. The literal meaning of perestroika is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system. Perestroika allowed more independent actions from various ministries and introduced some market-like reforms. The goal of the perestroika, however, was not to end the command economy but rather to make socialism work more efficiently to better meet the needs of Soviet consumers. The process of implementing perestroika arguably exacerbated already existing political, social, and economic tensions within the Soviet Union and no doubt helped to further nationalism in the constituent republics. Perestroika and resistance to it are often cited as major catalysts leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

a policy that called for increased openness and transparency in government institutions and activities in the Soviet Union. Introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s. The word was frequently used by Gorbachev to specify the policies he believed might help reduce the corruption at the top of the Communist Party and the Soviet government and moderate the abuse of administrative power in the Central Committee. Glasnost can also refer to the specific period in the history of the USSR during the 1980s when there was less censorship and greater freedom of information.

Polish politician, trade-union organizer, philanthropist and human-rights activist. A charismatic leader, he co-founded Solidarity, the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as President of Poland from 1990 to 1995. Wa??sa was an electrician by trade. Soon after beginning work at the Lenin Shipyard he became a dissident trade-union activist. For this he was persecuted by the Communist authorities, placed under surveillance, fired in 1976, and arrested several times. In August 1980 he was instrumental in political negotiations that led to the ground-breaking Gda?sk Agreement between striking workers and the government. He became a co-founder of the Solidarity trade-union movement. Arrested again after martial law was imposed in Poland and Solidarity was outlawed, upon release he continued his activism and was prominent in the establishment of the 1989 Round Table Agreement that led to semi-free parliamentary elections in June 1989 and to a Solidarity-led government. In the Polish election of 1990, he successfully ran for the newly re-established office of President of Poland. He presided over Poland's transformation from a communist to a post-communist state

German politician who, as the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, led the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until the weeks preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As Cold War tensions eased in the late 1980s under the liberalising reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Honecker refused all but cosmetic changes to the East German political system and was consequently forced to resign by his party in October 1989 as the Communist regime sought to retain its power. Honecker's eighteen years at the helm of the soon-to-collapse German Democratic Republic came to an end.

Former Soviet statesman. The eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991 when the party was dissolved. The only general secretary in the history of the Soviet Union to have been born after the October Revolution. Gorbachev's policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, removed the constitutional role of the Communist Party in governing the state, and inadvertently led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in 1989, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and the Harvey Prize in 1992, as well as honorary doctorates from various universities.

Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991-1999. Originally a supporter of Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. He vowed to transform Russia's socialist command economy into a free market economy and implemented economic shock therapy, price liberalization and privatization programs. Due to the method of privatization, a good deal of the national wealth fell into the hands of a small group of oligarchs. Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, inflation, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. On 31 December 1999, Yeltsin announced his resignation, leaving the presidency in the hands of his chosen successor, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

A politico-economic union of 28 member states that operates through a system of supranational institutions and intergovernmental-negotiated decisions by the member states. The community and its successors have grown by the accession of new member states and in power by the addition of policy areas to its remit. Developed a single market through a standardized system of laws that apply in all member states. Within the Schengen Area, passport controls have been abolished. EU policies aim to ensure the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital, enact legislation in justice and home affairs, and maintain common policies on trade, agriculture, fisheries, and regional development.

An international organisation serving to unify European countries after World War II. It was formally established by the Treaty of Paris (1951), which was signed by Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The ECSC was the first international organization to be based on the principles of supranationalism, and would ultimately lead the way to the founding of the European Union. The ECSC was first proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman as a way to prevent further war between France and Germany. He declared his aim was to "make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible" which was to be achieved by regional integration, of which the ECSC was the first step. The Treaty would create a common market for coal and steel among its member states which served to neutralize competition between European nations over natural resources, particularly in the Ruhr.

Officially the Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (TEEC), is an international agreement that led to the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) on 1 January 1958. It was signed on 25 March 1957 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. The TEEC proposed the progressive reduction of customs duties and the establishment of a customs union. It proposed to create a common market of goods, workers, services and capital within the EEC's member states. It also proposed the creation of common transport and agriculture policies and a European social fund. It also established the European Commission.

Undertaken to integrate Europe was signed on 7 February 1992 by the members of the European Community in Maastricht, Netherlands. On 9-10 December 1991, the same city hosted the European Council which drafted the treaty. Upon its entry into force on 1 November 1993 during the Delors Commission, it created the European Union and led to the creation of the single European currency, the euro. The Maastricht Treaty has been amended by the treaties of Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon.

An intergovernmental military alliance based on the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed on 4 April 1949. The organization constitutes a system of collective defense whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party. NATO's headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium, one of the 28 member states across North America and Europe, the newest of which, Albania and Croatia, joined in April 2009. An additional 22 countries participate in NATO's Partnership for Peace program, with 15 other countries involved in institutionalized dialogue programmes. The course of the Cold War led to a rivalry with nations of the Warsaw Pact, which formed in 1955.

A document that delegates at the 15th session of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to "take note of" at the final plenary on 18 December 2009. The Accord, drafted by, on the one hand, the United States and on the other, in a united position as the BASIC countries (China, India, South Africa, and Brazil), is not legally binding and does not commit countries to agree to a binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol, whose round ended in 2012.

Czech economist and politician who served as the second President of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013. He also served as the second and last Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, federal subject of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, from July 1992 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in January 1993, and as the first Prime Minister of an independent Czech Republic from 1993 to 1998. Klaus' euroscepticism and possibly also his scepticism about impacts of human activities on climate change are the cornerstones of his policy as President. He claimed that accession to the Union represented a significant reduction of Czech sovereignty and he chose not to give any recommendation before the 2003 accession referendum. Klaus made a speech to the European Parliament where he criticized the European Union's lack of democracy, continuing integration and economic policies

A former Slovak politician who served three times as Prime Minister of Slovakia serving from 1990 to 1991, from 1992 to 1994, and from 1994 to 1998. He is the leader of the People's Party - Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (?S-HZDS). Me?iar led Slovakia to disengagement from the Czech Republic in January 1993 and was one of the leading presidential candidates in Slovakia in 1999 and 2004. He has been criticized by his opponents as well as by Western political organisations for having an autocratic style of administration

Christian democratic and conservative political party in Austria. A successor to the Christian Social Party of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is similar to the Christian Democratic Union of Germany in terms of ideology, with both operating as catch-all parties of the centre-right. The Austrian People's Party was founded immediately following the reestablishment of the Federal Republic of Austria in 1945, and since then has been one of the two largest Austrian political parties with the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ). For most of its existence, the People's Party has explicitly defined itself as Catholic and anti-socialist. For the first election after World War II, ÖVP presented itself as the Austrian Party, was decidedly anti-Marxist and regarded itself as the Party of the Centre. The ÖVP consistently held power - either alone or in so-called Black-Red coalition with the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) - until 1970, when the SPÖ formed a minority government with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). The ÖVP's economic policies during the era generally upheld a social market economy. The ÖVP won a sweeping victory in Austria's first postwar election, in December 1945, winning almost half the popular vote and an absolute majority in the legislature. However, memories of the hyperpartisanship that had plagued the First Republic prompted the ÖVP to maintain the grand coalition that had governed the country since the restoration of independence in early 1945. It remained the senior partner in this coalition until 1966, and governed alone from 1966 to 1970. It reentered the government in 1986, but has never been completely out of power since the restoration of Austrian independence in 1945, due to a longstanding tradition that all major interest groups were to be consulted on policy. After the 1999 election, several months of negotiations ended in early 2000 when the People's Party formed a coalition government with the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria of its then-leader Jörg Haider. Although the FPÖ was the larger of the two, it was considered far too controversial to lead a government, so the ÖVP's Wolfgang Schüssel became chancellor. This caused widespread outrage in Europe, and the European Union imposed informal diplomatic sanctions on Austria, the first time that it imposed sanctions on a member state. Bilateral relations were frozen, including contacts and meetings at an inter-governmental level, and Austrian candidates would not be supported for posts in EU international offices. Austria, in turn, threatened to veto all applications by countries for EU membership until the sanctions were lifted. A few months later, these sanctions were dropped as a result of a fact-finding mission by three former European prime ministers, the so-called "three wise men".

Before adopting the current title in 1991, the SPÖ was named Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria from 1888 to 1945 and, later, Socialist Party of Austria until 1991. Along with the conservative Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), the SPÖ is one of the two major political parties in Austria. The party had moderate success in the 1920s, but its members were persecuted by the right wing in the early 1930s. Both under the Austro-fascist dictatorship (1934-1938) and during the German occupation of Austria between 1938 and 1945, the SDAPÖ was banned and persecuted heavily, but after liberation, the Social Democrats became a major political force in post-war Austria. The traumatic experience under German rule brought a swing in domestic opinion away from Pan-Germanism and towards the idea of Austria as an independent, sovereign and democratic country. The two former enemies, the conservatives and the Socialists, put aside their differences in order to work towards the prosperity and renewed sovereignty of the country. Both sides entered into a grand coalition government that would last for the next 21 years until 1966.

A right-wing populist and far right political party in Austria. Ideologically, the party is a direct descendant of the pan-German and national liberal camp, which dates back to the 1848 revolutions. The FPÖ itself was founded in 1956. In the Austrian political landscape, the FPÖ was from its foundation a third party with only modest support until it entered into government together with the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), following the elections in 1983. In the 1999 legislative election, the FPÖ won its best-ever result in a national election with 26.9% of the vote and defeated the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) by a small margin. This led the ÖVP to agree to form a coalition government with the FPÖ. The coalition was initially subject to sanctions from the European Union, which claimed that the coalition was "legitimis[ing] the extreme right in Europe."

an Austrian diplomat and politician. Waldheim was the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and the ninth President of Austria from 1986 to 1992. While he was running for president in Austria in 1985, his service as an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II raised international controversy.

an Austrian politician. He was Governor of Carinthia on two occasions, the long-time leader of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and later Chairman of the Alliance for the Future of Austria, a breakaway party from the FPÖ. Haider was a controversial figure within Austria and abroad. Several countries imposed mild diplomatic sanctions against his party's participation in government alongside Wolfgang Schüssel's ÖVP, starting from 2000.

power-sharing, although it is technically only one form of power-sharing. Critics point out that consociationalism is dangerous in a system of differing antagonistic ideologies, generally conservatism and communism.[citation needed] They state that specific conditions must exist for three or more groups to develop a multi-party system with strong leaders. This philosophy is dominated by elites, with those masses that are sidelined with the elites having less to lose if war breaks out. Consociationalism cannot be imperially applied. For example, it does not effectively apply to Austria.

Into the Republics of: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and the autonomous regions of Vojvodina and Kosovo.

Serbian and Yugoslav politician who was the President of Serbia (originally the Socialist Republic of Serbia, a constituent republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) from 1989 to 1997 and President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. Among his supporters, Miloševi? was known by the nickname of "Sloba". He also led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990. He rose to power as Serbian President after he and his supporters claimed need to reform the 1974 Constitution of Yugoslavia due to alleged marginalization of Serbia and political incapacity for Serbia to deter Albanian separatist unrest in the province of Kosovo. His presidency of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was marked by several major reforms to Serbia's constitution in the 1980s to the 1990s that reduced the powers of the autonomous provinces in Serbia and in 1990 transitioned Serbia from a Marxist-Leninist single-party system to a multi-party system, attempted reforms to the 1974 Constitution of Yugoslavia, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the outbreak of the subsequent Yugoslav Wars, the founding of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the former SFRY republics of Serbia and Montenegro, negotiating the Dayton Agreement on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs that ended the Bosnian War in 1995, and his overthrow in 2000.

A Communist Party of Yugoslavia official and the President of the Republic of Serbia in the 1980s who was later victim of an assassination.

A former Bosnian Serb politician. During the breakup of Yugoslavia, Karadži?, as President of the Republika Srpska, sought the direct unification of that entity with Serbia. He is detained in the United Nations Detention Unit of Scheveningen, accused of war crimes committed against Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats during the Siege of Sarajevo, as well as ordering the Srebrenica genocide. Educated as a psychiatrist, he co-founded the Serb Democratic Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina and served as the first President of Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996. He was a fugitive from 1996 until July 2008 after having been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The indictment concluded there were reasonable grounds for believing he committed war crimes, including genocide against Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat civilians during the Bosnian War (1992-95).

Croatian politician, historian and major general of the Yugoslav Army. Following the country's independence from Yugoslavia he became the first President of Croatia. Founded the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in 1989. HDZ won the first Croatian parliamentary elections in 1990, and Tu?man became the President of the Presidency of SR Croatia. As president he pressed for the creation of an independent Croatia. On 19 May 1991 an independence referendum was held, which was approved by 93 percent of voters, and on 25 June 1991 Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Tu?man led Croatia during its War of Independence that ended in 1995 and was one of the signatories of Dayton Agreement that put an end to the Bosnian War. He was re-elected president in 1992 and 1997 and remained in power until his death in 1999.

A conservative political party and the main center-right political party in Croatia. It is one of the two major contemporary political parties in Croatia, along with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SDP). It is currently the second-largest party in the Croatian Parliament with 41 seats. HDZ ruled Croatia from 1990 to 2000 and, in coalition with junior partners, from 2003 to 2011. The party is a member of the European People's Party (EPP).

A town in the Šibenik-Knin County of Croatia, located in the Dalmatian hinterland near the source of the river Krka, an important traffic junction on the rail and road routes between Zagreb and Split. Knin rose to prominence twice in history, as a one-time capital of both the medieval Kingdom of Croatia and briefly of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina at the end of the 20th century. From October 1990, eight months before Croatia declared independence (June 25, 1991) from Yugoslavia, Knin became the main stronghold for the Serbs in the Knin region, eventually becoming the capital city of the internationally unrecognised Republic of Serbian Krajina in 1991. Serbs held the town until Croatian forces captured it during Operation Storm on August 5, 1995. The majority of the population had already fled by the time the Croatian Army took control of Knin. There were, however, Serbian civilian deaths caused by the shelling of Knin by the Croatian Army during Operation Storm.

Although Dubrovnik was demilitarised in the 1970s to protect it from war, in 1991, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, it was besieged by the Serb and Montenegrin soldiers gathered in still called Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) for seven months and suffered significant damage from shelling.

The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the peace agreement reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, United States, in November 1995, and formally signed in Paris on 14 December 1995. These accords put an end to the 3 1?2-year-long Bosnian War, one of the Yugoslav Wars.

a Soviet politician. Zhdanov was appointed by Joseph Stalin to direct the Soviet Union's cultural policy in 1946. His first action (in December 1946) was to censor Russian writers . He formulated what became known as the Zhdanov Doctrine ("The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best"). During 1946-1947, Zhdanov was Chairman of the Soviet of the Union. In 1947, he organized the Cominform, designed to coordinate the communist parties of Europe. In February 1948, he initiated purges among musicians, widely known as a struggle against formalism. Originating in 1946 and lasting until the late 1950s, Zhdanov's ideological code, known as the Zhdanov doctrine, Zhdanovism or zhdanovshchina, defined cultural production in the Soviet Union. Zhdanov intended to create a new philosophy of artistic creation valid for the entire world. His method reduced all of culture to a sort of chart, wherein a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral value. Zhdanov and his associates further sought to eliminate foreign influence from Soviet art, proclaiming that "incorrect art" was an ideological diversion. This doctrine suggested that the world was split into two opposing camps, namely, the "imperialistic"-led by the United States and the "democratic"-led by the Soviet Union, using Cold War terminology that also began in 1946.

First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. Khrushchev's party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary. He supported Joseph Stalin's purges, and approved thousands of arrests. In 1939, Stalin sent him to govern Ukraine, and he continued the purges there. Khrushchev was present at the bloody defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took great pride in throughout his life. In late 1937, Stalin appointed Khrushchev as head of the Communist Party in Ukraine. Ukraine had been the site of extensive purges. The high ranks of the Party were not immune; the Central Committee of Ukraine was so devastated that it could not convene a quorum. After Khrushchev's arrival, the pace of arrests accelerated. Almost all government officials and Red Army commanders were replaced. During the first few months after Khrushchev's arrival, almost everyone arrested received the death penalty. Western Ukraine became a part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) on November 1, 1939. Clumsy actions by the Soviets, such as staffing Western Ukrainian organizations with Eastern Ukrainians, and giving confiscated land to collective farms rather than to peasants, soon alienated Western Ukrainians damaging Khrushchev's efforts to achieve unity. Almost all of Ukraine had been occupied by the Germans, and Khrushchev returned to his domain in late 1943 to find devastation. Ukraine's industry had been destroyed, and agriculture faced critical shortages. Even though millions of Ukrainians had been taken to Germany as workers or prisoners of war, there was insufficient housing for those who remained. Khrushchev sought to reconstruct Ukraine, but also desired to complete the interrupted work of imposing the Soviet system on it, though he hoped that the purges of the 1930s would not recur. Other Ukrainians joined partisan forces, seeking an independent Ukraine. Khrushchev rushed from district to district through Ukraine, urging the depleted labor force to greater efforts. He made a short visit to his birthplace of Kalinovka, finding a starving population, with only a third of the men who had joined the Red Army having returned. Despite Khrushchev's efforts, in 1945, Ukrainian industry was at only a quarter of pre-war levels, and the harvest actually dropped from that of 1944, when the entire territory of Ukraine had not yet been retaken. In an effort to increase agricultural production, the collective farms (kolkhoz) were empowered to expel residents who were not pulling their weight. Kolkhoz leaders used this as an excuse to expel their personal enemies, invalids, and the elderly, and nearly 12,000 people were sent to the eastern parts of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev viewed this policy as very effective, and recommended its adoption elsewhere to Stalin. He also worked to impose collectivization on Western Ukraine. While Khrushchev hoped to accomplish this by 1947, lack of resources and armed resistance by partisans slowed the process. The partisans, many of whom fought as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA), were gradually defeated, as Soviet police and military reported killing and capturing between 1944 and 1946. The war years of 1944 and 1945 had seen poor harvests, and 1946 saw intense drought strike Ukraine and Western Russia. The Soviet government sought to collect as much grain as possible in order to supply communist allies in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev set the quotas at a high level, leading Stalin to expect an unrealistically large quantity of grain from Ukraine. Food was rationed — but non-agricultural rural workers throughout the USSR were given no ration cards. The inevitable starvation was largely confined to remote rural regions, and was little noticed outside the USSR. Khrushchev, realizing the desperate situation in late 1946, repeatedly appealed to Stalin for aid, to be met with anger and resistance on the part of the leader. When letters to Stalin had no effect, Khrushchev flew to Moscow and made his case in person. Stalin finally gave Ukraine limited food aid, and money to set up free soup kitchens. The following month, the Ukrainian Central Committee removed Khrushchev as party leader in favor of Kaganovich, while retaining him as premier. Khrushchev's final years in Ukraine were generally peaceful, with industry recovering, Soviet forces overcoming the partisans, and 1947 and 1948 seeing better-than-expected harvests. Collectivization advanced in Western Ukraine, and Khrushchev implemented more policies that encouraged collectivization and discouraged private farms.

A Ukrainian literary critic, social activist, dissident, Hero of Ukraine, academic of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the second Minister of Culture of Ukraine (1992—1994). Wrote an essay "Internationalism or Russification?" dealing with the problems threatening national relations in socialist society, he was sentenced to 5 years in prison and 5 years in exile. Dziuba argued that during Joseph Stalin's rule the CPSU had moved to the positions of Russian chauvinism. His argumentation the author built largely on quotations from the works of Vladimir Lenin and party documents of the 1920s. He believed that the policy of the CPSU, particularly in Ukraine, contradicts with the fundamental interests of the Ukrainian people and contended that the solution is in returning to Lenin's principles of national policy.

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First Secretary of the Communist party in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, between 1963 and 1972. During his tenure and due to his cautious encouragement, there was a brief yet noticeable resurgence of the Ukrainian regional culture. In 1973 he was forced into retirement by Leonid Brezhnev.

A catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (then officially the Ukrainian SSR), which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities of the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe. Politically, the accident gave great significance to the new Soviet policy of glasnost, and helped forge closer Soviet-US relations at the end of the Cold War, through bioscientific cooperation. But the disaster also became a key factor in the Union's eventual 1991 dissolution, and a major influence in shaping the new Eastern Europe. Both Ukraine and Belarus, in their first months of independence, lowered legal radiation thresholds from the Soviet Union's previous, elevated thresholds (from 35 rems per lifetime under the USSR to 7 rems per lifetime in Ukraine and 0.1 rems per year in Belarus). This required an expansion of territories that were considered contaminated.

The People's Movement of Ukraine is a Ukrainian centre-right political party. Often it is simply referred to as the Movement. The party is an observer member of the European People's Party (EPP). The Party gathers most of its voters and support from Western Ukraine. Initially organized as the People's Movement of Ukraine for Reconstruction (i.e. for Perestroika), Rukh was founded in 1989 as a civil-political movement as there were no other political parties allowed in the Soviet Union but the Communist Party. The founding of Rukh was made possible due to Gorbachev's Glasnost policies. The program and statutes of the movement were proposed by the Writers Association of Ukraine and were published in the journal Literary Ukraine on February 16, 1989. The organization was accepting various other politically oriented members from liberal communists to integralist nationalists. During March - September 1989 numerous constituent party conferences took place across Ukraine. The first Constituent Congress of the "People's Movement of Ukraine for Reconstruction" took place on September 8-10, 1989 in Kiev. At first the movement aimed at supporting Gorbachev's reforms, later People's Movement of Ukraine was instrumental in conducting an independence referendum in the Ukrainian SSR. This was partially due to the Russification policies of the Soviet Union when the USSR Supreme Soviet officially announced the Russian language as the singular official state language of the country in 1989.

A former Ukrainian politician and the first President of Ukraine, who served from December 5, 1991, until his resignation on July 19, 1994. He is also a former Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and People's Deputy of Ukraine serving in the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united) faction. After a political crisis involving the President and the Prime Minister, Kravchuk resigned from the Presidency, but ran for a second term as President in 1994. He was defeated by his former Prime Minister, Leonid Kuchma, who served as President for two terms. After Kravchuk's presidency, he was active in Ukrainian politics, serving as a People's Deputy of Ukraine in the Verkhovna Rada and the leader of Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (united)'s parliamentary group (from 2002 to 2006). He is currently politically inactive. After becoming president of independent Ukraine, Kravchuk achieved and strengthened formal sovereignty of the country and developed its relations with the West. The Kravchuka administration walked a tight rope between escalation of Ukrainian-Russian tensions and a policy of cooperation with Moscow. Brinkmanship with Russia in matters of post-Soviet settlement (most notably the fate of nuclear weapons and the Black Sea fleet) was often accompanied by speculation about Ukraine'si mminent departure from the Commonwealth of Independent States. He refused to retain the common armed forces and currency inside the Commonwealth of Independent States. Rather than NATO expansion, Kravchuk wanted Ukraine's participation on an equal footing with the Central European countries, Russia and NATO in building a new, inclusive security architecture for Europe. According to the 'Guidelines for Ukraine's Foreign Policy', approved by parliament on 2 July 1993, 'Ukraine advocates the creation of an all-embracing international system of universal and all-European security and considers participation [therein] a basic component of its national security'.

the second President of independent Ukraine from 19 July 1994 to 23 January 2005. Kuchma took office after winning the 1994 presidential election against his rival, incumbent Leonid Kravchuk. Kuchma won re-election for an additional five-year term in 1999. His presidency was surrounded by numerous corruption scandals and the lessening of media freedoms. Corruption accelerated after Kuchma's election in 1994, but in 2000-2001, his power began to weaken in the face of exposures in the media. On his watch the Ukrainian economy continued to decline until 1999, whereas growth was recorded since 2000, bringing relative prosperity to some segments of urban residents. During his presidency, Ukrainian-Russian ties began to improve. In 2002 Kuchma stated that Ukraine wanted to sign an association agreement with the European Union (EU) by 2003-2004 and that Ukraine would meet all EU membership requirements by 2007-2011. He also hoped for a free-trade treaty with the EU. Kuchma signed a "Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership" with Russia, and endorsed a round of talks with the CIS. Additionally, he referred to Russian as "an official language". He signed a special partnership agreement with NATO and raised the possibility of membership of the alliance. After Kuchma's popularity at home and abroad sank as he became mired in corruption scandals, he turned to Russia as his new ally. He said that Ukraine needed a "multivector" foreign policy that balanced eastern and western interests.

Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet. On 12 June 1991 he was elected by popular vote to the newly created post of President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), at that time one of the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Upon the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev and the final dissolution of the Soviet Union on 25 December 1991, Yeltsin remained in office as the President of the Russian Federation, the USSR's successor state. Yeltsin was reelected in the 1996 election, where critics widely claimed pervasive corruption; in the second round he defeated Gennady Zyuganov from the revived Communist Party by a margin of 13%. However, Yeltsin never recovered his early popularity after a series of economic and political crises in Russia in the 1990s. He vowed to transform Russia's socialist command economy into a free market economy and implemented economic shock therapy, price liberalization and privatization programs. Due to the method of privatization, a good deal of the national wealth fell into the hands of a small group of oligarchs. While the few billionaire oligarchs likened themselves to the American "robber barons" of the nineteenth century, no real comparison can be drawn. Rather than creating new enterprises, they played the role of old state trading monopolies, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. In early December 1991, Ukraine voted for independence from the Soviet Union. A week later, on 8 December, Yeltsin met Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and the leader of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha. In the Belavezha Accords, the three presidents announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of a voluntary Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place.

Ukrainian politician and businesswoman. She co-led the Orange Revolution and was the first woman appointed Prime Minister of Ukraine, serving from 24 January to 8 September 2005, and again from 18 December 2007 to 4 March 2010. After the 2010 presidential election, a number of criminal cases were brought against her. On 11 October 2011 she was convicted of embezzlement and abuse of power, and sentenced to seven years in prison and ordered to pay the state $188 million. The prosecution and conviction were viewed by many governments - most prominently the European Union, who repeatedly called for release of Yulia Tymoshenko as the primary condition for signing the EU Association Agreement, and the USA - and international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as politically biased. She was released on 22 February 2014, in the concluding days of the Euromaidan revolution, following a revision of the Ukrainian criminal code that effectively decriminalized the actions for which she was imprisoned. She was officially rehabilitated on 28 February 2014. Just after Euromaidan revolution, the Ukrainian Supreme Court closed the case and found that "no crime was committed". Tymoshenko strives for Ukraine's integration into the European Union and strongly opposes the membership of Ukraine in the Eurasian Customs Union. Tymoshenko supports NATO membership for Ukraine.

Ukrainian politician who was the third President of Ukraine from 2005 to 2010. As an informal leader of the Ukrainian opposition coalition, he was one of the two main candidates in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election. Yushchenko won the presidency through a repeat runoff election between him and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. The Ukrainian Supreme Court called for the runoff election to be repeated because of widespread electoral fraud in favor of Viktor Yanukovych in the original vote. Yushchenko won in the revote (52% to 44%). Public protests prompted by the electoral fraud played a major role in that presidential election and led to Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Following an assassination attempt in late 2004 during his election campaign, Yushchenko was confirmed to have ingested hazardous amounts of TCDD, the most potent dioxin and a contaminant in Agent Orange. He suffered disfigurement as a result of the poisoning, but has been slowly recovering. Before his election as President, Yushchenko already had a career in Ukrainian politics. In 1993, he became Governor (head) of the National Bank of Ukraine. From 1999 to 2001 he was Prime Minister. After his dismissal as Prime Minister, Yushchenko went into opposition to President Leonid Kuchma and he founded the Our Ukraine bloc, which at the 2002 parliamentary election became Ukraine's most popular political force, with 23.57% of the votes.

Ukrainian politician who served as the fourth President of Ukraine from February 2010 until his removal from power in February 2014. Yanukovych served as the governor of Donetsk Oblast, a province in eastern Ukraine, from 1997 to 2002. He was Prime Minister of Ukraine from 21 November 2002 to 31 December 2004, under President Leonid Kuchma. Yanukovych first ran for president in 2004: he advanced to the runoff election, and initially defeated his opponent. However, the election was fraught with allegations of fraud and voter intimidation. This caused widespread citizen protests and Kiev's Independence Square was occupied in what became known as the Orange Revolution. The Ukrainian Supreme Court nullified the runoff election, and ordered a second runoff. Yanukovych lost this second runoff election to Viktor Yushchenko. Yanukovych served as Prime Minister for a second time from 4 August 2006 to 18 December 2007, under President Yushchenko. Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, defeating Yulia Tymoshenko. November 2013 saw the beginning of a series of events that led to his ousting as president. Yanukovych rejected a pending EU association agreement, choosing instead to pursue a Russian loan bailout and closer ties with Russia. This led to popular protests and the occupation of Kiev's Independence Square, a series of events dubbed the "Euromaidan" by young pro-European Union Ukrainians. In January 2014, this developed into deadly clashes in Independence Square and in other areas across Ukraine, as Ukrainian citizens confronted the Berkut and other special police units. In February 2014, Ukraine appeared to be on the brink of civil war, as violent clashes between protesters and special police forces led to many deaths and injuries. On 21 February 2014, Yanukovych claimed that, after lengthy discussions, he had reached an agreement with the opposition. Later that day, however, he fled the capital for Kharkiv, travelling next to Crimea, and eventually to exile in southern Russia. On 22 February, the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him from his post, on the grounds that he was unable to fulfill his duties. Although the legislative removal by an impeachment procedure would have lacked the number of votes required by Ukraine's then-current constitution, the resolution did not follow the impeachment procedure but instead established that Yanukovych "withdrew from his duties in an unconstitutional manner" and citing "circumstances of extreme urgency", a situation for which there was no stipulation in the then-current Ukrainian constitution. Parliament set 25 May as the date for the special election to select his replacement, and, two days later, issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of "mass killing of civilians." Since his departure, Yanukovych has conducted several press conferences. In one of these, he has declared himself to remain "the legitimate head of the Ukrainian state elected in a free vote by Ukrainian citizens".[22] In an April 2014 poll, only 4.9% of respondents expressed a desire to see Yanukovych return to the presidency. On 3 October 2014, several news agencies reported that according to a Facebook post made by the aide to the Ukrainian Interior Minister, Anton Gerashchenko, Viktor Yanukovych had been granted Russian citizenship by a "secret decree" of Vladimir Putin. On the same day, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that he didn't know anything about this and hadn't seen such a decree. In January 2015 Interpol placed Yanukovych on its wanted list.

A European Union Association Agreement (for short, Association Agreement or AA) is a treaty between the European Union (EU), its Member States and a non-EU country that creates a framework for co-operation between them. Areas frequently covered by such agreements include the development of political, trade, social, cultural and security links. Association Agreements are broad framework agreements between the EU (or its predecessors) and its member states, and an external state which governs their bilateral relations. The provision for an association agreement was included in the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, as a means to enable co-operation of the Community with the United Kingdom, which had retreated from the treaty negotiations at the Messina Conference of 1955.

Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He directed his satire at the press, German culture, and German and Austrian politics. ??

the most recognized Czech-born living writer, and one of the world's best-known authors. He has lived in exile in France since 1975, having become a naturalised citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores." Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His books were banned by the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. He lives virtually incognito and rarely speaks to the media. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions.

a country in Eastern Europe, landlocked between Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east and south. Moldova declared itself an independent state in 1991 as part of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A new constitution was adopted in 1994. A strip of Moldovan territory on the east bank of the river Dniester has been under the de facto control of the breakaway government of Transnistria since 1990. As a result of a decrease in industrial and agricultural output since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the relative size of the service sector in Moldova's economy has grown to dominate its GDP and currently stands at over 60%. Moldova remains, however, the poorest country in Europe.

historical region in Eastern Europe, bounded by the Dniester river on the east and the Prut river on the west. The bulk of Bessarabia is currently part of Moldova, whereas the northernmost regions, as well as the southern regions bordering the Black Sea (Budjak), are part of Ukraine. In 1917, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, the area constituted itself as the Moldavian Democratic Republic, an autonomous republic part of a proposed federative Russian state. Bolshevik agitation in late 1917 and early 1918 resulted in the intervention of the Romanian Army, ostensibly to pacify the region. Soon after, the parliamentary assembly declared independence, and then union with the Kingdom of Romania.[1] The legality of these acts was however disputed, most prominently by the Soviet Union, which regarded the area as a territory occupied by Romania. In 1940, after securing the assent of Nazi Germany through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union pressured Romania into withdrawing from Bessarabia, allowing the Red Army to occupy the region. The area was formally integrated into the Soviet Union: the core joined parts of the Moldavian ASSR to form the Moldavian SSR, while territories inhabited by Slavic majorities in the north and the south of Bessarabia were transferred to the Ukrainian SSR. Axis-aligned Romania briefly recaptured the region in 1941, during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, but lost it in 1944, as the tide of war changed. In 1947, the Soviet-Romanian border along the Prut was internationally recognised by the Paris Treaty that ended World War II. During the process of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Moldavian and Ukrainian SSRs proclaimed their independence in 1991, becoming the modern states of Moldova and Ukraine, while preserving the existing partition of Bessarabia. Following a short war in the early 1990s, Transnistria proclaimed itself the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, separate from the government of the Republic of Moldova, extending its authority also over the municipality of Bender in Bessarabia. Part of the Gagauz-inhabited areas in the southern Bessarabia was organised in 1994 as an autonomous region within Moldova.

a city and the administrative center of Smolensk Oblast, Russia. After the Revolution, for inclusion in its composition as claimed Smolensk Belarusian People's Republic and the Byelorussian SSR. Since April 1918 Smolensk was the center of the Western Region, which is based on January 1, 1919, Byelorussian SSR was formed. January 7 BSSR government moved from Minsk and Smolensk already January 16, 1919 decision of the Central Committee of the RCP Smolensk region was transferred to the RSFSR. In 1920 was held the new provincial census, according to which the Russian population prevailed over Belarus, but the Belarusian party leadership until 1926 leaves no hope for the inclusion of Smolensk in the Belorussian SSR. In 1940, 18 km (11 mi) from Smolensk, the Katyn Massacre occurred. During World War II, Smolensk once again saw wide-scale fighting during the first Battle of Smolensk when the city was captured by the Germans on July 16, 1941. The first Soviet counteroffensive against the German army was launched in August 1941 but failed. However, the limited Soviet victories outside the city halted the German advance for a crucial two months, granting time to Moscow's defenders to prepare in earnest. Camp 126 was situated close to Smolensk and at this time Boris Menshagin was mayor of Smolensk, with his deputy Boris Bazilevsky. Both of them would be key witnesses in the Nuremberg Trials over the Katyn massacre.[13] Over 93% of the city was destroyed during the fighting; the ancient icon of Our Lady of Smolensk was lost. Nevertheless, it escaped total destruction. In late 1943, Göring had ordered Gotthard Heinrici to destroy Smolensk in accordance with the Nazi "scorched earth" policy. He refused and was punished for it. The city was finally liberated on September 25, 1943. The rare title of Hero City was bestowed on Smolensk after the war. After the Germans captured the city in 1941, they found the intact archives of Smolensk Oblast Committee of the Communist Party, the so-called Smolensk Archive. The archive was moved to Germany, and a significant part of it eventually ended up in the United States, providing Western scholars and intelligence specialists with unique information on the local workings of the Soviet government during its first two decades. The archives were returned to Russia by the United States in 2002.[14][15] On April 10, 2010, a Tu-154 military jet carrying Polish president Lech Kaczy?ski, his wife, and many notable political and military figures crashed in a wooded area near Smolensk while approaching the local military airport. All ninety-six passengers died immediately on impact. The purpose of the visit was to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, in which some 22,000 Polish POWs were murdered by the NKVD. In 2013, archaeologists of the Russian Academy of Sciences discovered and unearthed in the ancient temples in Smolensk dated to middle to second half of the 12th century, built on the left bank at the time the city was the capital of Smolensk principality. From unique object preserved walls in some places low, in othersthe height of human growth.[16] In September 2013, Smolensk widely celebrated the 1,150th anniversary with funds spent on different construction and renovation projects in the city.[17] In celebration Central Bank of Russia issued commemorative coins made of precious metals.

President of Belarus, having assumed the post on 20 July 1994. When he first entered politics, he was seen as a champion against corruption and was the only deputy to vote against the independence of Belarus from the Soviet Union. Lukashenko opposed Western-backed "shock therapy" during the post-Soviet transition. He has retained Soviet-era policies, such as continued state ownership of key industries, despite objections from Western governments. Observers also contend that Lukashenko presides over a regime steeped in Soviet nostalgia. He responds that his policies are the only alternative to instability, and have spared Belarus from the poverty and oligarchy seen elsewhere in the former Soviet Republics. Belarus has been called "Europe's last dictatorship", on account of Lukashenko's self-described authoritarian style of government. Lukashenko and other Belarusian officials are also the subject of sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States for alleged human rights violations off and on since 2006.

The Fidesz - Hungarian Civic Alliance is a major national conservative political party in Hungary. On a joint list with the Christian Democratic People's Party, Fidesz won two historic supermajorities in the National Assembly in both the 2010 and 2014 elections. Fidesz is, by far, the most popular party in Hungary, with majorities in all county legislatures (19 of 19), almost all (20 of 23) urban counties and in the Budapest city council too, based on the 2014 local elections. It has been described as a big tent party. Fidesz is a member of the European People's Party (EPP).

Ukrainian journalist, MP and public figure of Afghan origin. Formerly he was a reporter for the newspaper "Kommersant Ukraine", the TVi channel, and the internet newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda. He also participates in Ukrainian journalists' anti-censorship movement, "Stop the censorship!" (Ukrainian: ???? ???????!, Stop tsenzuri!), and Hromadske.TV. On the parliamentary elections on October 26, 2014 he was elected to the Ukrainian parliament on the list of Petro Poroshenko Bloc. In 2009, Nayyem received national attention following Ukrayina TV channel's live discussion with then-presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych. During the discussion, he questioned Yanukovych about the latter's acquisition of the Mezhyhirya Residence. In 2010, Nayem was briefly detained by police officers, reportedly as a result of racial profiling for "persons of Caucasian appearance" (a common local term for people from the Caucasus). The following day, Nayem wrote an article in which described the events that led to his detention. He stated, "Xenophobia should not become the face of Ukrainian nationality" and requested the firing of one of the officers responsible. Nayyem frequently contributes news and articles to Ukrayinska Pravda. From September 2011 to late April 2013, he worked for the Ukrainian television channel TVi. After resigning due to a conflict with the channel's new management, he started a web project together with colleagues who also left the channel. Their project was named Hromadske.TV. Using Facebook, Nayem was one of the first activists to urge Ukrainians to gather on Independence Square in Kiev to protest Viktor Yanukovych's decision to "pause" preparations for signing an association agreement with the European Union. His summons to rally on Facebook on November 21, 2013 were the start of the Euromaidan protests which led to the overthrow of the Yanukovych government. Nayyem was included in the electoral list of Petro Poroshenko Bloc and elected to the Verkhovna Rada on the parliamentary elections of October 26, 2014. He is one of dozens of Euromaidan activists who are trying to pivot from street politics into politics, where they hope to spearhead reform and turn Ukraine into a prosperous European state. Nayyem is a member of the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada on issues of European integration in the 8th convocation of parliament.

The fifth and current President of Ukraine, in office since 2014. He served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2010, and as the Minister of Trade and Economic Development in 2012. From 2007 until 2012, Poroshenko headed the Council of Ukraine's National Bank. Outside government, Poroshenko has been a prominent man with a lucrative career in acquiring business assets. He owns, along with a number of other companies, a large-scale confectionery business, which has earned him the nickname of 'Chocolate King'. He was elected president on 25 May 2014, capturing more than 54% of the vote in the first round, thereby winning outright and avoiding a run-off. During the Euromaidan protests, between November 2013 and February 2014, Poroshenko actively supported the protest, including with financial support. This led to an upsurge of his popularity. He did not participate in negotiations between then President Yanukovych and the Euromaidan Maidan parliamentary opposition parties Batkivshchyna, Svoboda and UDAR. Poroshenko refused to join the Yatsenyuk Government (although he introduced his colleague Volodymyr Groysman, the mayor of Vinnitsa, into it), and nor did he join any of the two newly created parliamentary factions Economic Development and Sovereign European Ukraine. During the 2014 Crimean crisis Poroshenko visited Simferopol, in Crimea, prior to its annexation by Russia; "We have to find a compromise," Poroshenko told a crowd gathered in front of the Crimean parliament, but his appeal was drowned by shouts of "Russia, Russia." Following the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and the resulting removal of Viktor Yanukovych from the office of President of Ukraine, new presidential elections were scheduled to take place on 25 May 2014. In pre-election polls from March 2014, Poroshenko garnered the most support of all the prospective candidates, with one poll conducted by SOCIS giving him a rating of over 40%. On 29 March he stated that he would run for president; at the same time Vitali Klitschko left the presidential contest, choosing to support Poroshenko's bid. On 2 April Poroshenko stated, "If I am elected, I will be honest and sell the Roshen Concern." He also said in early April that the level of popular support for the idea of Ukraine's joining NATO was too small to put on the agenda "so as not to ruin the country." He also vowed not to sell his 5 Kanal television channel. On 14 April, Poroshenko publicly endorsed the campaign of Jaros?aw Gowin's party Poland Together of neighbouring Poland in this year's elections to the European Parliament, thanking Gowin's party colleague Pawe? Kowal for supporting Ukraine.

has been the President of Russia since 7 May 2012. Putin previously served as President from 2000 to 2008, and as Prime Minister of Russia from 1999 to 2000 and again from 2008 to 2012. During his last term as Prime Minister, he was also the Chairman of United Russia, the ruling party. Many of Putin's actions are regarded by the domestic opposition and foreign observers as undemocratic. The 2011 Democracy Index stated that Russia was in "a long process of regression [that] culminated in a move from a hybrid to an authoritarian regime" in view of Putin's candidacy and flawed parliamentary elections. In 2014, Russia was temporarily suspended from the G8 group as a result of its annexation of Crimea. In the wake of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, exiled Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych put into writing his request that Putin initiate Russia's use of military forces "to establish legitimacy, peace, law and order, stability and defending the people of Ukraine". On the same day, Putin requested and received authorization from the Russian Parliament to deploy Russian troops to Ukraine in response to the crisis. Russian troops accordingly mobilized throughout Crimea and the southeast of Ukraine. By 2 March, Russian troops had complete control over Crimea. Then a 16 March Crimean status referendum was held in which an majority of 93 percent of voters voted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia; Western leaders had declared the referendum illegal and vowed to punish Russia with economic sanctions. This vow led to the first sanctions issued against Russia; more followed after pro-Russian unrest spread to the south and east of Ukraine. Although Putin at the time stated that no Russian troops were active in Crimea but only "local forces of self defence" on 17 April 2014 he stated "Of course our troops stood behind Crimea's self-defence forces". Putin outlined his Crimean views on 18 March in his so-called "Crimean speech". In this speech he claimed that the ousting of Yanukovych was "coup" perpetrated by "nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites". In the speech he also referred to the (then new) Yatsenyuk Government and the (then) acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov as "so-called Ukrainian authorities" who had "introduced a scandalous law on the revision of the language policy, which directly violated the rights of the national minorities". In the speech he also claimed that Russia and Ukraine were "one nation" and that Russia would always protect the millions of Russian speakers in Ukraine but that Ukrainians should "not believe those who want you to fear Russia, shouting that other regions will follow Crimea". Also on 18 March Putin and the new leadership of Crimea signed a bill that lead to the annexation of Crimea by Russia. Following the Crimean referendum unrest increased in eastern Ukraine apart from Crimea. On 17 April 2014 Putin stated he hoped not to send Russian troops into Ukraine but didn't rule it out, accusing the Kiev government of committing 'a serious crime' by using the military to quell unrest. Putin added that he reserves the right to use armed force to protect ethnic Russians in "Novorossiya". On 7 May 2014, after discussions with Switzerland's President Didier Burkhalter in an attempt to de-escalate mounting tensions of Russian troop massing on the border of southeast Ukraine during and following the Crimean intervention, Putin announced a pullback of these forces. In a reference to 25 May 2014 presidential elections in Ukraine, Putin indicated that the Ukrainian elections were a step in the right direction. The same day he also expressed that the Ukrainian separatists that had self-proclaimed the Donetsk People's Republic and Lugansk People's Republic (in eastern Ukraine) should wait to hold their 11 May 2014 referendum on independence "in order to create proper conditions for this dialogue".(The referendum was held as scheduled on 11 May 2014; the separatists claimed nearly 90% voted in favour of independence.) Putin pledged to respect the result the 25 May 2014 Ukrainian presidential election and also maintained that Russia wanted to continue negotiations with the West over Ukraine, but that Russia's offer to do so was turned down by the West.[142] Putin's main concern expressed in St Petersburg on 23 May 2014 was with Ukraine's failure for pay its large financial debts to Russia, with Putin referring to the $3 billion loaned to Ukraine by Russia before Yanokovych was ousted. On 14 August 2014, on a visit to Crimea, Putin called for calm and efforts to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine. "We must calmly, with dignity and effectively, build up our country, not fence it off from the outside world," he told Russian ministers and Crimean parliamentarians. On 26 August 2014 Putin met with Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko in Minsk where he expressed a willingness to discuss the situation while calling on Ukraine not to escalate its offensive. Poroshenko responded by demanding Russia halt its supplying of arms to separatist fighters. He said his country wanted a political compromise and promised the interests of Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine would be considered. On 10 September 2014 Putin said he had lit candles at a Russian Orthodox church in Moscow for "those who suffered and who gave their lives defending the people in Novorossiya". In a mid-November ARD interview Putin indicated Russia would not allow a military defeat of the pro-Russian side in the War in Donbass when he stated that Russia would not allow "Ukraine to destroy all their political opponents" what, according to Putin, "the west the central authorities in Ukraine want". Putin also once again called the Euromaidan Revolution a political coup and claimed that by supporting President Poroshenko and his Yatsenyuk Government western governments were supporting Russophobes. In the interview Putin again admitted that during the 2014 Crimean crisis "Our armed forces blocked literally the Ukrainian forces located in Crimea, but it was not in attempt to force anyone to vote, it's impossible to do so. It was done in order to prevent the bloodshed". In his annual speech on 4 December 2014 Putin stated that the March 2014 annexation of Crimean was a "historic event" that would not be reversed because Crimea is Russia's spiritual ground "the same as Temple Mount in Jerusalem for those who confess Islam and Judaism. And this is exactly how we will treat it from here for ever". In the speech Putin also stated "Every nation has an inalienable, sovereign right to its own path of development ... Russia always has and always will respect that. This applies fully to Ukraine, the brotherly Ukrainian nation". He again called the 2014 Ukrainian revolution a "coup", a "forcible seizure of power in Kiev in February" and "lawlessness". According to Putin the War in Donbass was armed forces suppressing "the people in the southeast who did not agree with this lawlessness". He also stated "the tragedy in the southeast fully confirms that our position is right".

is the administrative center of Luhansk Oblast in easternmost Ukraine. The city was occupied by Nazi Germany between July 14, 1942 and February 14, 1943. On November 5, 1935, the city was renamed Voroshilovgrad in honour of Soviet military commander and politician Kliment Voroshilov. On March 5, 1958, with the call of Khrushchev not to give names of living people to cities, the old name was reinstated. On January 5, 1970, after the death of Voroshilov on December 2, 1969, the name changed again to Voroshilovgrad. Finally, on May 4, 1990, a decree of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR gave the city back its original name. During the 2014 protests in Eastern Ukraine, separatists seized governmental buildings in the region proclaiming the Luhansk People's Republic. An independence referendum was held on May 11, 2014. The legitimacy of the referendums was not recognized by most governments. However, the Luhansk People's Republic was recognized by South Ossetia. Ukraine does not recognize the referendum, while the EU and US said the polls were illegal. On 25 June 2014, Luhansk was officially pronounced as the capital of the Luhansk People's Republic by the government of the Luhansk People's Republic. In August 2014, Ukrainian government forces completely surrounded rebel-held Luhansk. Heavy shelling caused civilian casualties in Lugansk. On August 17, Ukrainian soldiers entered rebel-controlled Luhansk and gained control over a police station. After the Ilovaisk counteroffensive, LPR forces regained Lutuhyne and other Luhansk suburbs. Ukrainian forces withdrew from the Luhansk International Airport on 1 September after heavy fighting.

an industrial city in Ukraine on the Kalmius River. Since April 2014, the city is the administrative centre of and effectively administered by the Donetsk People's Republic. Administratively, it has been the centre of Donetsk Oblast, while historically, it is the unofficial capital and largest city of the larger economic and cultural Donets Basin (Donbas) region. Donetsk is adjacent to another major city of Makiivka and along with other surrounding cities forms a major urban sprawl and conurbation in the region. Donetsk has been a major economic, industrial and scientific centre of Ukraine with a high concentration of companies and a skilled workforce. The original settlement in the south of the European part of the Russian Empire was first mentioned as Aleksandrovka in 1779, under the Russian Empress Catherine the Great. In 1869, British businessman, John Hughes, built a steel plant and several coal mines in the region; the town was named Yuzovka (??????) in recognition of his role ("Yuz" being a Russian-language approximation of Hughes). During Soviet times, the city's steel industry was expanded. In 1924, it was renamed Stalino, and in 1932 the city became the centre of the Donetsk region. Renamed Donetsk in 1961, the city today remains the centre for coal mining and steel industry. Since April 2014, Donetsk and its surrounding areas have been one of the major sites of fighting in the War in Donbass.