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Left to right, top to bottom: Memorial to the deportation in Eupatoria; candle-lighting ceremony in Kyiv; memorial rally in Taras Shevchenko park; cattlecar similar to the type used in the deportation; maps comparing the demographics of Crimea in 1939 and 2001.
Officially, the Soviet government presented the deportation as a policy of collective punishment, based on its claim that some Crimean Tatars collaborated with Nazi Germany, but several modern scholars believe that the Soviet government carried out the deportation as a part of its plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey, where the Turkic ethnic kin of the Tatars lived, or remove minorities from the Soviet Union's border regions. This was despite the fact that twice as many Crimean Tatars served in the Red Army, 40,000, than had collaborated with the Axis powers, 20,000. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, and tens of thousands of other Crimean Tatars subsequently perished due to the harsh living conditions which they were forced to live under during their exile. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars resulted in the abandonment of 80,000 houses and it also resulted in the abandonment of 360,000 acres of land. (Full article...)
... that the proposals for a new Crimean flag after the collapse of the Soviet Union included a white flag with seven rainbow colors at the top and a blue-white-red tricolor design , which was officially adopted in 1999?
Image 3Residents of Leningrad leave their homes destroyed by German bombing. About 1 million civilians died during the 871-day Siege of Leningrad, mostly from starvation. (from Soviet Union)
Image 4U.S. Lend Lease shipments to the USSR. During the war the USSR provided an unknown number of shipments of rare minerals to the US Treasury as a form of cashless repayment of Lend-Lease. (from Soviet Union)
Image 5Revolutionaries attacking the tsarist police in the early days of the February Revolution (from Russian Revolution)
Image 22A revolutionary meeting of Russian soldiers in March 1917 in Dalkarby of Jomala, Åland (from Russian Revolution)
Image 23Anniversary of October Revolution in Riga, Soviet Union in 1988 (from October Revolution)
Image 24Map showing greatest territorial extent of the Soviet Union and the states that it dominated politically, economically and militarily in 1960, after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but before the official Sino-Soviet split of 1961 (total area: c. 35,000,000 km2) (from Soviet Union)
Image 36Country emblems of the Soviet Republics before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (fifth in the second row) no longer exists as a political entity of any kind and the emblem is unofficial.) (from Soviet Union)
... that development of the British UB.109Tcruise missile was given "super-priority" in 1951 to ward off an expected attack by the Soviet Union, only to be cancelled after the attack never came?
... that Estonian minister of war Paul Lill resigned in 1939, citing the unacceptable conditions of the Bases Treaty with the Soviet Union?
... that economist and anti-apartheid activist Vella Pillay arranged for South African revolutionaries to receive military training in the Soviet Union and China?
... that a 1955 satirical comedy play by Kasymaly Jantöshev was one of the first signs of the relaxation of Soviet literary restrictions after the death of Joseph Stalin?
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