Zinaida Volkova
Zinaida Lvovna Volkova was a Russian Marxist. She was Leon Trotsky's first daughter by Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, she was raised by sister of Trotsky, after their parents divorced. Her younger sister, Niña, stayed with her mother, she married twice, had a daughter by her first husband and a son by her second. Both husbands died during the Great Purges. In January 1931, Volkova was allowed to leave Russia to visit her father in his exile in Turkey, taking only her younger child, her son, she left her daughter in the care of her first husband. Suffering from tuberculosis and depression, prevented from returning to the Soviet Union, Volkova committed suicide in Berlin in January 1933. Bronstein was born in Siberia, her sister Nina was born the next year. As a child and her younger sister Nina were raised by her paternal grandparents and Anna Bronstein; the girls' parents parted ways in 1902 and as revolutionaries, were traveling or living in hiding. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Bronstein married Zakhar Borisovich Moglin.
They had Alexandra Moglina. They divorced in the mid-20s. Moglin died during the Great Purges, Alexandra was exiled to Kazakhstan from 1949-56. Soon after her divorce, she married her second husband, Platon Ivanovich Volkov, a member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition; the couple had a son, Vsevolod, in 1926. Volkov was exiled to Siberia in 1928, but returned in January 1931. Volkova was about to leave Russia for Turkey with their son by that time, to visit her father in his Turkey exile. Volkov was re-arrested in 1935 during the Great Purges and disappeared in the Gulag in 1936. For three months in 1928, Volkova had taken care of her younger sister Nina, while the latter was dying of tuberculosis incurable. Nina had married a man with the surname of Nevelson. In January 1931, Joseph Stalin allowed Volkova to leave the Soviet Union to join her father, Leon Trotsky, in exile, she was allowed to take one family member with her, she took her son Vsevolod with her, leaving her daughter Alexandra in Russia with the girl's father.
On 20 February 1932, the Soviet citizenship of Volkova and Vsevolod was revoked by Stalin, preventing their return to the Soviet Union. The Soviet citizenship of Trotsky, Natalia Sedova and Lev Sedov, were revoked on the same day. Suffering from TB and depression, Volkova committed suicide in Berlin on 5 January 1933, she had been under the care of a noted Berlin psychotherapist. She saw Alexandra Ramm-Pfemfert, she was married to Franz Pfemfert, the founder of Die Aktion, a journal of expressionism, translator of books by Trotsky. Volkova's daughter Alexandra remained in the USSR and lived for a year with her father, Zakhar Moglin. After Moglin was exiled in 1932, she was cared for by her maternal grandmother, Alexandra Sokolovskaya; the latter was died in the labor camps. As an adult, Alexandra was exiled, to Kazakhstan, she survived. She died of cancer in 1989. Not long before she died, her brother Esteban met his sister again after travelling to the Soviet Union from Mexico, but in tragic circumstances where Alexandra was dying of cancer and couldn't communicate with her brother, as Esteban had forgotten his Russian and Alexandra spoke no Spanish, English or French.
From January to November 1931, Volkova and her son, Vsevolod Volkov lived with Leon Trotsky and Trotsky's second wife, Natalia Sedova, in Turkey. In November 1931, Volkova obtained permission to go to Germany for treatment for TB, accompanied by her half-brother, Lev Sedov. Volkova's son stayed behind in Turkey at first. After the removal of the Soviet citizenship of Volkova and Vsevolod on 20 February 1932, the difficulties of Vsevolod being able to move to Germany were multiplied hugely, he was only able to join his mother in Germany in late December 1932. In the early days of January 1933, Stalin's agents and Kurt von Schleicher's police decided to expel Volkova from Berlin; as Volkova needed treatment for TB, this added to her stress to the point where she committed suicide on 5 January 1933. After Volkova's death in January 1933, the news of her death was kept from her 6-7 year old son for nearly a year. Within a month of Volkova's death, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, causing Lev and Vsevolod to flee to Austria, where they lived until the Austrian Civil War of February 1934.
After leaving Austria, they moved to France in 1934, finally moved to the French capital, Paris, in 1935. After Sedov died in 1938, Sedov's girlfriend, Jeanne Martin, wanted to keep the 12-year-old boy Vsevolod. Trotsky sued for custody and won the case, but Martin went into hiding with Vsevolod. Trotsky's friends found Martin and Vsevolod, Vsevolod was sent to Coyoacán, Mexico to live with Trotsky and Natalia Sedova. Vsevolod arrived in Mexico on 8 August 1939, where Trotsky had been living in exile since January 1937. On 24 May 1940, a failed assassination attempt on Trotsky's life by Stalinist agents, led by David Alfaro Siqueiros, saw Vsevolod shot in the foot. On 20 August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated by Ramón Mercader. Trotsky died 21 August 1940, in hospital. After Trotsky's death, the 14-year-old Vsevolod remained in Mexico living with his grandfather's widow, Natalia Sedova. Vsevolod took the first name of Esteban (the Spanish equivalent of his Russ
Mykolaiv
Mykolaiv known as Nikolaev or Nikolayev, is a city in southern Ukraine, the administrative center of the Mykolaiv Oblast. Mykolaiv is arguably the main shipbuilding center of the Black Sea. Aside from three shipyards within the city, there are a number of research centers specializing in shipbuilding such as the State Research and Design Shipbuilding Center, Zoria-Mashproekt and others; the city has a population of 494,763 . The city is an important transportation hub of Ukraine. Mykolaiv's orderly layout reflects the fact that its development has been well planned from the founding of the city, its main streets, including the three main east–west Avenues, are wide and tree-lined. A significant part of Mykolaiv's land area consists of beautiful parks. Park Peremohy is a large park on the peninsula just north of the city center of Mykolaiv, on the north side of the Inhul river; the city has two names and Russian. The Ukrainian name of the city is transliterated as Mykolaiv, or Mykolayiv; the Russian name, Никола́ев, transliterates as Nikolayev.
The city's founding was made possible by the Russian conquests during the Second Russo-Turkish War of 1787-1792. Founded by Prince Grigory Potemkin, Nikolaev was the last of the many cities. On 27 August 1789, Potemkin ordered its naming near the wharf at the mouth of the Ingul river, on a high and breezy spot where the Ingul river meets the Southern Bug river. To build the city he brought in peasants and Turkish prisoners; the shipyards were built first. Potemkin named the city after Saint Nicholas, the patron of seafarers, on whose day he had obtained victory at the siege of Ochakov in 1788; the name Nikolaev is known from the legal order Number 1065 by Prince Potemkin to Mikhail Faleev dated 27 August 1789. In 1920, after the establishment of Soviet power, the Odessa provincial council petitioned the then-Soviet Ukrainian government—the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee —to rename the city of Nikolaev to Vernoleninsk; as the city of Nikolaev was a district center of the Odessan province the petition would have been initiated by the Odessa city council, but documentary evidence of this so far has not been identified.
On 15 April 1924 the Plenum of the Central Administrative-Territorial Commission of the VUTSIK considered and rejected the petition of the Odessan executive committee. The members of the Soviet-Ukraine government thought that the name sounded too obsequious. Information regarding the alleged renaming of Nikolaev was disseminated by German maps of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as in German encyclopedic publications in 1927 and 1932, which show Vernoleninsk on the USSR part of the European maps; the city was designated as Nikolaev in publications of the same map in other languages. To distinguish Mykolaiv from the much smaller west Ukraine city of Mykolaiv in Lviv Oblast, the latter is sometimes called "Mykolaiv on Dniester" after the major river that it is situated on, while the former is located on the Southern Bug, another major river, may be called "Mykolaiv on Bug". Mykolaiv is the administrative center of Mykolaiv Oblast, as well as that of both Mykolaiv and Vitovka raions within the oblast.
It is administratively incorporated as a city of oblast significance, does not belong to any of the two raions. Mykolaiv is located on a peninsula in Ukraine's steppe region 65 kilometers from the Black Sea along the estuary of the Southern Bug river. Both the Inhul River and the Southern Bug River follow winding courses just before they join at the northeast corner of Mykolaiv; this has created several long and narrow peninsulas just north of Mykolaiv, the main part of Mykolaiv is itself on a peninsula at a 180-degree bend in the Southern Bug River. Mykolaiv is in a flat terrain area; the nearest mountains to Mykolaiv are 300 kilometres south, at the southern end of the Crimean Peninsula. The lack of any mountain barriers north of Mykolaiv means that cold Arctic winds can blow south, unimpeded by any terrain elevation, to Mykolaiv in winter; the area of the city is 260 square kilometres. Mykolaiv is in the second time zone. Mykolaiv's environmental issues are typical for many cities in Ukraine: pollution of water, the air, groundwater.
One of Mykolaiv's most urgent problems is the disposal of solid household waste. The city has 18 preserved sites, totaling about 12 square kilometres: The Mykolaiv Zoo; the city's climate is moderately continental with hot summers. Mykolaiv's average temperature is 10 °C; the lowest average temperature is in January −3.1 °C, the highest in July 22.3 °C. Mykolaiv has an average of 472 mm of precipitation per year, with the lowest precip
Kolyma
Kolyma is a region located in the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south; the region gets its name from the Kolyma River and mountain range, parts of which were not discovered until 1926. Today the region consists of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and the Magadan Oblast; the area, part of, within the Arctic Circle, has a subarctic climate with cold winters lasting up to six months of the year. Permafrost and tundra cover a large part of the region. Average winter temperatures range from −19 °C to −38 °C, average summer temperatures, from +3 °C to +16 °C. There are rich reserves of gold, tin, mercury, antimony, coal and peat. Twenty-nine zones of possible oil and gas accumulation have been identified in the Sea of Okhotsk shelf. Total reserves are estimated at 3.5 billion tons of equivalent fuel, including 1.2 billion tons of oil and 1.5 billion m3 of gas. The principal town Magadan has nearly 100,000 inhabitants and is the largest port in north-eastern Russia.
It remains open year-round thanks to icebreakers. Magadan is served by the nearby Sokol Airport. There are many private farming enterprises. Gold mines and sausage factories, fishing companies, a distillery form the city's industrial base. During archaeological investigations of Paleolithic sites on the Angara, in 1936 the unique Stone Age site of Buret’ was discovered which yielded an anthropomorphic sculpture, skulls of rhinoceroses, surface and semisubterranean dwellings; the houses were analogous, on one hand, to Paleolithic European houses and, on the other, to ethnographically studied houses of the Eskimos and Koryaks. The indigenous peoples of this region include the Evens, Yupiks, Orochs and Itelmens, who traditionally lived from fishing along the Sea of Okhotsk coast or from reindeer herding in the River Kolyma valley. Under Joseph Stalin's rule, Kolyma became the most notorious region for the Gulag labor camps. Tens of thousands or more people may have died en route to the area or in the Kolyma's series of gold mining, road building and construction camps between 1932 and 1954.
It was Kolyma's reputation that caused Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, to characterize it as the "pole of cold and cruelty" in the Gulag system. The Mask of Sorrow monument in Magadan commemorates all those who died in the Kolyma forced-labour camps and the dedicated Church of the Nativity remembers the victims in its icons and Stations of the Camps. Gold and platinum were discovered in the region in the early 20th century. During the time of the USSR's industrialization the need for capital to finance economic development was great; the abundant gold resources of the area seemed tailor-made to provide this capital. A government agency Dalstroy was formed to organize the exploitation of the area. Prisoners were being drawn into the Soviet penal system in large numbers during the initial period of Kolyma's development, most notably from the so-called anti-Kulak campaign and the government's internal war to force collectivization on the USSR's peasantry; these prisoners formed a available workforce.
The initial efforts to develop the region began in 1932, with the building of the town of Magadan by forced labor. After a gruelling train ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway prisoners were disembarked at one of several transit camps and transported across the Sea of Okhotsk to the natural harbor chosen for Magadan's construction. Conditions aboard the ships were harsh. According to a 1987 article in Time Magazine: "During the 1930s the only way to reach Magadan was by ship from Khabarovsk, which created an island psychology and the term Gulag archipelago. Within the crowded prison ships thousands died during transportation. One survivor's memoir recounts that the prison ship Dzhurma was caught in the autumn ice in 1933 while trying to get to the mouth of the Kolyma River; when it reached port the following spring, it guards. All 12,000 prisoners were missing, left dead on the ice." It turns out that this incident reported since it was first mentioned in a book published in 1947, could not have happened as the ship Dzhurma was not in Soviet hands until mid 1935.
In 1932 expeditions pushed their way into the interior of the Kolyma, embarking on the construction of the Kolyma Highway, to become known as the Road of Bones. About 80 different camps dotted the region of the uninhabited taiga; the original director of the Kolyma camps was a Cheka officer. Berzin was removed and shot during the period of the Great Purges in the USSR. At the height of the Purges, around 1937, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's account quotes camp commander Naftaly Frenkel as establishing the new law of the Archipelago: "We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months—after that we don't need him anymore." The system of hard labor and minimal or no food reduced most prisoners to helpless "goners". Conditions varied depending on the state of the country. Many of the prisoners in Kolyma were intellectuals, they included Mikhail Kravchuk, a Ukrainian mathematician who by the early 1930s had received considerable acclaim in the West. After a summary trial for reluctance to take part in the accusations of some of his colle
Adolph Joffe
Adolph Abramovich Joffe was a Communist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and a Soviet diplomat of Karaite descent. Adolf Abramovich Joffe was born in Simferopol, Russian Empire in a wealthy Karaite family, he became a social democrat in 1900 while still in high school, formally joining the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903. In 1904 Joffe was sent to Baku, he was sent to Moscow, but had to flee again, this time abroad. After the events of Bloody Sunday on January 9, 1905, Joffe returned to Russia and took an active part in the Russian Revolution of 1905. In early 1906 he was forced to emigrate and lived in Berlin until his expulsion from Germany in May 1906. In Russia, Joffe was close to the Menshevik faction within the Russian Social Democratic Party. However, after moving to Vienna in May 1906, he became close to Leon Trotsky's position and helped Trotsky edit Pravda from 1908 to 1912 while studying medicine and with Alfred Adler, psychoanalysis, he used his family's fortune to support Pravda financially.
During the course of his underground revolutionary activity Joffe adopted the party name "V. Krymsky," the surname meaning "The Crimean."In 1912 Joffe was arrested while visiting Odessa, imprisoned for 10 months and exiled to Siberia. In 1917, freed from the Siberian exile by the February Revolution, returned to the Crimea. Crimean social democrats sent him to the capital, Petrograd, to represent them, but he soon moved to an internationalist revolutionary position, which made it impossible for him to remain in an organization dominated by less radical Mensheviks. Instead, he joined forces with Trotsky. In May 1917, Joffe and Trotsky temporarily joined Mezhraiontsy who merged with the Bolsheviks at the VIth Bolshevik Party Congress held between 26 July and 3 August 1917. At the Congress, Joffe was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee, but two days on August 5, the Central Committee, some of whose members were in prison, in hiding or lived far from Petrograd and couldn't attend its meetings, made Joffe a member of its permanent bureau.
On August 6, Joffe was made an alternate member of the Central Committee Secretariat and on August 20 made a member of the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, temporarily called Proletary for legal reasons. Joffe headed the Bolshevik faction in the Petrograd Duma in the fall of 1917 and was one of the Duma's delegates to the Democratic Conference between September 14 and 22. Although Joffe, along with Lenin and Trotsky, opposed the Bolsheviks' participation in the consultative Pre-parliament created by the Democratic Conference, the motion was carried by the majority of Bolshevik deputies at the Democratic Conference and Joffe was made a Bolshevik member of the Pre-parliament. Two weeks on October 7, once the more radical Bolshevik faction gained the upper hand and other Bolsheviks walked out of the Pre-parliament. In October 1917, Joffe supported Lenin's and Trotsky's revolutionary position against Grigory Zinoviev's and Lev Kamenev's more moderate position, demanding that the latter be expelled from the Central Committee after an apparent breach of party discipline.
Joffe served as the Chairman of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee which overthrew the Russian Provisional Government on October 25–26, 1917. After the revolution, he supported Lenin and Trotsky against Zinoviev, Alexei Rykov and other Bolshevik Central Committee members who would have shared power with other socialist parties. From November 30, 1917, until January 1918, Joffe was the head of the Soviet delegation, sent to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate an end to the hostilities with Germany. On December 22, 1917, Joffe announced the following Bolshevik pre-conditions for a peace treaty: No forcible annexation of territories seized in the war Restore national independence where it was terminated during war National groups independent before the war should be allowed by referendum to decide question of independence Multi-cultural regions should be administered so as to allow all possible cultural independence and self-regulation No indemnities. Personal losses should be compensated out of international fund Colonial question should be decided according to points 1–4Although Joffe had signed a ceasefire agreement with the Central Powers on December 2, 1917, he supported Trotsky in the latter's refusal to sign a permanent peace treaty in February.
Once the Bolshevik Central Committee decided to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on February 23, 1918, Joffe remained a member of the Soviet delegation only under protest and in a purely consultative capacity. Grigori Yakovlovich Sokolnikov, leader of the signatory team, signed on behalf of Russia. Remembering Joffe's presence with the Bolshevik delegation at Brest-Litovsk, Count Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarians' representative would write: The leader of the Russian delegation is a Jew, named Joffe, released from Siberia after the meal I had a first conversation with Mr. Joffe, his whole theory is based on the universal application of the right of self-governance of nations in the broadest form. The thus liberated nations have to be brought to love each other I advised him that we would not attempt to imitate the Russian example and that we would not tolerate a meddling in our internal affairs. If he continued to hold on his utopic viewpoints the peace would not be possible and he would be well advised just
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1922 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration and the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism. Born to a moderately prosperous middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree, he became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Encouraging insurrection during Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which as a Marxist he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime. Lenin's Bolshevik government shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry, it withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty with the Central Powers and promoted world revolution through the Communist International.
Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the market-oriented New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations secured independence after 1917, but three re-united with Russia through the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922. In poor health, Lenin died at his dacha in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government. Considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, he became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement.
A controversial and divisive individual, Lenin is viewed by supporters as a champion of socialism and the working class, while critics on both the left and right emphasize his role as founder and leader of an authoritarian regime responsible for political repression and mass killings. Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was from a family of serfs. Despite this lower-class background he had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University before teaching at the Penza Institute for the Nobility. Ilya married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. Well educated and from a prosperous background, she was the daughter of a wealthy German–Swedish Lutheran mother, a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician, it is that Lenin was unaware of his mother's half-Jewish ancestry, only discovered by his sister Anna after his death. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later.
Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. His dedication to education earned him the Order of St. Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman. Lenin was baptised six days later, he was one of eight children, having two older siblings and Alexander. They were followed by three more children, Olga and Maria. Two siblings died in infancy. Ilya was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although Maria—a Lutheran by upbringing—was indifferent to Christianity, a view that influenced her children. Both parents were monarchists and liberal conservatives, being committed to the emancipation reform of 1861 introduced by the reformist Tsar Alexander II; every summer they holidayed at a rural manor in Kokushkino. Among his siblings, Lenin was closest to his sister Olga, whom he bossed around.
Paris
Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an area of 105 square kilometres and an official estimated population of 2,140,526 residents as of 1 January 2019. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, commerce, fashion and the arts; the City of Paris is the centre and seat of government of the Île-de-France, or Paris Region, which has an estimated official 2019 population of 12,213,364, or about 18 percent of the population of France. The Paris Region had a GDP of €681 billion in 2016, accounting for 31 percent of the GDP of France, was the 5th largest region by GDP in the world. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Worldwide Cost of Living Survey in 2018, Paris was the second most expensive city in the world, after Singapore, ahead of Zurich, Hong Kong and Geneva. Another source ranked Paris as most expensive, on a par with Singapore and Hong-Kong, in 2018; the city is a major rail and air-transport hub served by two international airports: Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly.
Opened in 1900, the city's subway system, the Paris Métro, serves 5.23 million passengers daily, is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro. Gare du Nord is the 24th busiest railway station in the world, the first located outside Japan, with 262 million passengers in 2015. Paris is known for its museums and architectural landmarks: the Louvre was the most visited art museum in the world in 2018, with 10.2 million visitors. The Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l'Orangerie are noted for their collections of French Impressionist art, the Pompidou Centre Musée National d'Art Moderne has the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe; the historical district along the Seine in the city centre is classified as a UNESCO Heritage Site. Popular landmarks in the centre of the city include the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and the Gothic royal chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, both on the Île de la Cité. Paris received 23 million visitors in 2017, measured by hotel stays, with the largest numbers of foreign visitors coming from the United States, the UK, Germany and China.
It was ranked as the third most visited travel destination in the world in 2017, after Bangkok and London. The football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris; the 80,000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros. Paris will host the 2024 Summer Olympics; the 1938 and 1998 FIFA World Cups, the 2007 Rugby World Cup, the 1960, 1984, 2016 UEFA European Championships were held in the city and, every July, the Tour de France bicycle race finishes there. The name "Paris" is derived from the Celtic Parisii tribe; the city's name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. Paris is referred to as the City of Light, both because of its leading role during the Age of Enlightenment and more because Paris was one of the first large European cities to use gas street lighting on a grand scale on its boulevards and monuments.
Gas lights were installed on the Place du Carousel, Rue de Rivoli and Place Vendome in 1829. By 1857, the Grand boulevards were lit. By the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps. Since the late 19th century, Paris has been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in French as Parisiens, they are pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the area's major north–south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité; the Parisii minted their own coins for that purpose. The Romans began their settlement on Paris' Left Bank; the Roman town was called Lutetia. It became a prosperous city with a forum, temples, an amphitheatre. By the end of the Western Roman Empire, the town was known as Parisius, a Latin name that would become Paris in French. Christianity was introduced in the middle of the 3rd century AD by Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris: according to legend, when he refused to renounce his faith before the Roman occupiers, he was beheaded on the hill which became known as Mons Martyrum "Montmartre", from where he walked headless to the north of the city.
Clovis the Frank, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made the city his capital from 508. As the Frankish domination of Gaul began, there was a gradual immigration by the Franks to Paris and the Parisian Francien dialects were born. Fortification of the Île-de-la-Citie failed to avert sacking by Vikings in 845, but Paris' strategic importance—with its bridges prevent
Ukraine
Ukraine, sometimes called the Ukraine, is a country in Eastern Europe. Excluding Crimea, Ukraine has a population of about 42.5 million, making it the 32nd most populous country in the world. Its capital and largest city is Kiev. Ukrainian is the official language and its alphabet is Cyrillic; the dominant religions in the country are Greek Catholicism. Ukraine is in a territorial dispute with Russia over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014. Including Crimea, Ukraine has an area of 603,628 km2, making it the largest country within Europe and the 46th largest country in the world; the territory of modern Ukraine has been inhabited since 32,000 BC. During the Middle Ages, the area was a key centre of East Slavic culture, with the powerful state of Kievan Rus' forming the basis of Ukrainian identity. Following its fragmentation in the 13th century, the territory was contested and divided by a variety of powers, including Lithuania, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. A Cossack republic emerged and prospered during the 17th and 18th centuries, but its territory was split between Poland and the Russian Empire, merged into the Russian-dominated Soviet Union in the late 1940s as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In 1991 Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its dissolution at the end of the Cold War. Before its independence, Ukraine was referred to in English as "The Ukraine", but most sources have since moved to drop "the" from the name of Ukraine in all uses. Following its independence, Ukraine declared itself a neutral state. In 2013, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovych had decided to suspend the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement and seek closer economic ties with Russia, a several-months-long wave of demonstrations and protests known as the Euromaidan began, which escalated into the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that led to the overthrow of Yanukovych and the establishment of a new government; these events formed the background for the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, the War in Donbass in April 2014. On 1 January 2016, Ukraine applied the economic component of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the European Union.
Ukraine is ranks 88th on the Human Development Index. As of 2018, Ukraine has the second lowest GDP per capita in Europe. At US$40, it has the lowest median wealth per adult in the world, it suffers from a high poverty rate and severe corruption. However, because of its extensive fertile farmlands, Ukraine is one of the world's largest grain exporters. Ukraine maintains the second-largest military in Europe after that of Russia; the country is home to a multi-ethnic population, 77.8 percent of whom are Ukrainians, followed by a large Russian minority, as well as Georgians, Belarusians, Crimean Tatars, Jews and Hungarians. Ukraine is a unitary republic under a semi-presidential system with separate powers: legislative and judicial branches; the country is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, the GUAM organization, one of the founding states of the Commonwealth of Independent States. There are different hypotheses as to the etymology of the name Ukraine. According to the older widespread hypothesis, it means "borderland", while some more recent linguistic studies claim a different meaning: "homeland" or "region, country"."The Ukraine" used to be the usual form in English, but since the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, "the Ukraine" has become less common in the English-speaking world, style-guides recommend not using the definite article.
"The Ukraine" now implies disregard for the country's sovereignty, according to U. S. ambassador William Taylor. The Ukrainian position is that the usage of "'The Ukraine' is incorrect both grammatically and politically." Neanderthal settlement in Ukraine is seen in the Molodova archaeological sites which include a mammoth bone dwelling. The territory is considered to be the location for the human domestication of the horse. Modern human settlement in Ukraine and its vicinity dates back to 32,000 BC, with evidence of the Gravettian culture in the Crimean Mountains. By 4,500 BC, the Neolithic Cucuteni–Trypillia culture flourished in wide areas of modern Ukraine including Trypillia and the entire Dnieper-Dniester region. During the Iron Age, the land was inhabited by Cimmerians and Sarmatians. Between 700 BC and 200 BC it was Scythia. Beginning in the sixth century BC, colonies of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and the Byzantine Empire, such as Tyras and Chersonesus, were founded on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea.
These colonies thrived well into the 6th century AD. The Goths stayed in the area but came under the sway of the Huns from the 370s AD. In the 7th century AD, the territory of eastern Ukraine was the centre of Old Great Bulgaria. At the end of the century, the majority of Bulgar tribes migrated in different directions, the Khazars took over much of the land. In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Antes were located in the territory of; the Antes were the ancestors of Ukrainians: White Croats, Polans, Dulebes and Tiverians. Migrations from Ukraine throughout the Balkans established many Southern Slavic nations. Northern migrations, reaching to the Ilmen l
