query: conflict kazimierz cichowski
supports: The Great Purge or the Great Terror was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants and the Red Army leadership, and widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 19371938, is called Yezhovshchina (literally, "Yezhov phenomenon", commonly translated as "times of Yezhov" or "doings of Yezhov"), after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD. It has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. Secret police (sometimes called political police) are intelligence services or police and law enforcement agencies which operate in secrecy. Therefore, they have little to no transparency, accountability or oversight. A secret police organization is often used beyond the law by totalitarian states to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian (autocratic) political regime. The Free City of Danzig was a semi-autonomous city-state that existed between 1920 and 1939, consisting of the Baltic Sea port of Danzig (now Gdask, Poland) and nearly 200 towns in the surrounding areas. It was created on 15 November 1920 in accordance with the terms of Article 100 (Section XI of Part III) of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles after the end of World War I. The Second Polish Republic, also known as the Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland, refers to the country of Poland between the First and Second World Wars (19181939). Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland, the Polish state was recreated in 1918, in the aftermath of World War I. When, after several regional conflicts, the borders of the state were fixed in 1922, Poland's neighbours were Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Free City of Danzig, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and the Soviet Union. It had access to the Baltic Sea via a short strip of coastline either side of the city of Gdynia. Between March and August 1939, Poland also shared a border with the then-Hungarian governorate of Subcarpathia. Despite internal and external pressures, it continued to exist until 1939, when Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the Slovak Republic, marking the beginning of World War II in Europe. The Second Republic was significantly different in territory to the current Polish state. It included substantially more territory in the east and less in the west. The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International (19191943), was an international communist organization that advocated world communism. The International intended to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State." Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov (; May 1, 1895  February 4, 1940) was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin. He was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the most deadly period of Stalin's Great Purge. His time in office is known as the ""Yezhovshchina"", a term coined during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s. After presiding over mass arrests and executions during the Great Purge, Yezhov became a victim of it himself. He was arrested, confessed under torture to a range of anti-Soviet activity, and was executed in 1940. By the beginning of World War II, his status within the Soviet Union became that of a political unperson. The Spanish Civil War, widely known in Spain simply as The Civil War or The War, took place from 1936 to 1939 and was fought between the Republicans, who were loyal to the democratic, left-leaning and a relatively urban Second Spanish Republic in an alliance of convenience with the Anarchists, versus the Nationalists, a falangist, Carlist and a largely aristocratic conservative group led by General Francisco Franco. Although the war is often portrayed as a struggle between democracy and fascism, some historians consider it more accurately described as a struggle between leftist revolution and rightist counterrevolution. Ultimately, the Nationalists won, and Franco then ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from April 1939 until his death in November 1975. World War I also had the effect of bringing political transformation to most of the principal parties involved in the conflict, transforming them into electoral democracies by bringing near-universal suffrage for the first time in history, such as Germany (German federal election, 1919), the United Kingdom (United Kingdom general election, 1918), and Turkey (Turkish general election, 1923). Nazi Germany is the common English name for the period in German history from 1933 to 1945, when Germany was governed by a dictatorship under the control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP). Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a fascist state in which the Nazi Party took totalitarian control over nearly all aspects of life. The official name of the state was "Deutsches Reich" from 1933 to 1943 and "Großdeutsches Reich" ("Greater German Reich") from 1943 to 1945. The period is also known under the names the Third Reich and the National Socialist Period (abbreviated as "NS-Zeit"). The Nazi regime came to an end after the Allied Powers defeated Germany in May 1945, ending World War II in Europe. Kielce Voivodeship is a former unit of administrative division and the local government in Poland. It was originally formed during Poland's return to independence in the aftermath of World War One, and recreated within the new Polish borders after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War Two. The Second Spanish Republic (in Spanish: "Segunda República Española") was the republican regime that existed in Spain from 1931 to 1939, preceded by the Restoration and followed by Francoist Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Kazimierz Cichowski ( Russian : Kazimir Tsikhovsky ,    ) ( 7 December 1887 , Ostrowiec witokrzyski - 29 October 1937 ) was a Polish - Soviet communist activist and politician . Cichowski joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in 1907 . During the Russian Revolution , he joined the Bolshevik party and from November 1917 he was the deputy Commissar for Polish affairs of the Central Executive Committee of the Lithuanian -- Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic ( LitBel ) , where he soon advanced to more prominent positions ( Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets ) . After the end of the Polish - Soviet War in 1921 , which saw the dissolution of LitBel , he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine , operating in the Second Polish Republic . In 1923 - 1925 , Cichowski was imprisoned by the Polish authorities ; after release , he joined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Poland , becoming a member of its Secretariat and the Political Bureau . In September 1932 , he went to the USSR where he began working in the Comintern ( ECCI ) . Around January -- July 1937 , he was in Spain where he was head of the Cadres Department of the International Brigades headquarters . In August 1937 , Cichowski was recalled to Moscow , arrested in October during the Great Purge , convicted and shot . Ostrowiec witokrzyski is a town in south-central Poland (historic province of Lesser Poland) with 74,211 inhabitants (2006). 
  The main industry is metallurgy. Ostrowiec is the capital city of Ostrowiec witokrzyski County, part of witokrzyskie Voivodeship (since 1999), previously it belonged to Kielce Voivodeship (19751998). It received town charter in 1613. The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (: RKKA, frequently shortened in Russian to ; KA, in English: Red Army also in critical literature and folklore of that epoch - Red Horde, Army of Work) was the army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and after 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution (Red October or Bolshevik Revolution). The Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations (especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army) of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. Beginning in February 1946, the Red Army, along with the Soviet Navy, embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces; taking the official name of "Soviet Army", until its dissolution in December 1991. The International Brigades were paramilitary units set up by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. The organisation existed for two years, from 1936 until 1938. It is estimated that during the entire war, between 32,000 and 35,000 members served in the International Brigades, including 15,000 who died in combat; however there was never more than 20,000 brigade members present on the front line at one time. 
candidates: russian civil war secrecy soviet republic spanish civil war world war world war i world war ii
answer: spanish civil war