Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.
The Katyn massacre, carried out by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, was only one of many unspeakable crimes committed by Stalin's ruthless executioners over three decades. The mass murder of thousands of Polish officers was part of a relentless purge, the secrets and details of which have only recently been partially revealed.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky was a Russian revolutionary, politician, journalist and political theorist. He was a central figure in the establishment of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union. Ideologically a Marxist, Trotsky's writings and thought inspired a major school of the ideology known as Trotskyism. Description above from the Wikipedia article Leon Trotsky, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.