In addition to the anti-pornographic law, such smuggling was prohibited by legal provisions giving the Soviet state the exclusive right to conduct foreign economic trade.
Leon Trotsky (Russian: Лeв Давидович Трóцкий) was a Ukrainian-born ethnically-Jewish Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist, and Lenin's strongest collaborator.
After Lenin's death, he led the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s, leading to his exile and eventual assassination.
Lev Kamenev, two men over on Lenin's right, was another of Stalin's opponents, and below the boy in front of Trotsky, another bearded figure, Artemic Khalatov, the one time head of the state publishing, was also edited out.
Kamenev was charged separately in early 1935 in connection with the Kremlin Plot and, although he refused to confess, was sentenced to ten years in prison.
On November 7, 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin led his leftist revolutionaries in a revolt against the ineffective Provisional Government (Russia was still using the Julian Calendar at the time, so it is still called the October Revolution).
This picture, taken in February 1897, records a meeting of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.
The members received various punishments, with Lenin being arrested, held by authorities for fourteen months and then released and exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia, where he mingled with such notable Marxists as Georgy Plekhanov, who had introduced socialism to Russia.
He moved to Moscow, where he worked as a senior engineer in various state departments before in 1929 being arrested, wrongfully accused of being a "wrecker" and executed on November 18, 1930.
[7] As Berlin fell in the closing days of the World War in Europe, Red Army photographer Yevgeny Khaldei gathered some soldiers and posed a shot of them hoisting the flag (called the Victory Banner) on the roof of the Reichstag building.
The photo represented a historic moment, the defeat of Germany in a war that cost the Soviet Union tens of millions of lives.