1.
Propaganda in the Soviet Union
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Communist propaganda in the Soviet Union was extensively based on the Marxism-Leninism ideology to promote the Communist Party line. In societies with pervasive censorship, propaganda was omnipresent and vigorously enforced, with truths repressed, falsehoods in every field were incessantly rubbed in print, at endless meetings, in school, in mass demonstrations, on the radio. The main Soviet censorship body, Glavlit, was employed not only to eliminate any undesirable printed materials, in the Stalin Era, deviation from the dictates of official propaganda was punished by execution and labor camps. In the post-Stalin era, these measures were replaced by punitive psychiatry, prison, denial of work. Today a man only talks freely to his wife – at night, with the pulled over his head. According to historian Peter Kenez, the Russian socialists have contributed nothing to the discussion of the techniques of mass persuasion. The Bolsheviks never looked for and did not find devilishly clever methods to influence peoples minds and this lack of interest, says Kenez, followed from their notion of propaganda. They thought of propaganda as part of education, an important goal of Communist propaganda was to create a new man. The idea that the upbringing of children was the concern of their parents was explicitly rejected, one schooling theorist stated, We must make the young into a generation of Communists. Children, like soft wax, are very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists and we must rescue children from the harmful influence of the family. From the earliest days of their lives, they must find themselves under the beneficent influence of Communist schools. To oblige the mother to give her child to the Soviet state – that is our task and those born after the Revolution were explicitly told that they were to build a utopia of brotherhood and justice, and to not be like their parents, but completely Red. Lenins corners, political shrines for the display of propaganda about the founder of the Soviet state have been established in all schools. Schools conducted marches, songs and pledges of allegiance to Soviet leadership, one of purposes was to instill in children the idea that they are involved in the World revolution, which is more important than any family ties. Pavlik Morozov, who betrayed his father to the secret police NKVD, was promoted as a positive example. Teachers in economic and social sciences were responsible for inculcating unshakable Marxist-Leninist views. Children of socially alien elements were often the target of abuse or expelled, early in the regime, many teachers were drawn into Communist plans for schooling because of a passion for literacy and numeracy, which the Communists were attempting to spread. Young Pioneers, the group, was an important factor in the indoctrination of children
2.
Moscow
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Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits and 17.8 million within the urban area. Moscow has the status of a Russian federal city, Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city entirely on the European continent. Moscow is the northernmost and coldest megacity and metropolis on Earth and it is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe, the Federation Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and the Moscow International Business Center. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, the city is well known for its architecture, particularly its historic buildings such as Saint Basils Cathedral with its brightly colored domes. Moscow is the seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are also one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament also sit in the city and it is recognized as one of the citys landmarks due to the rich architecture of its 200 stations. In old Russian the word also meant a church administrative district. The demonym for a Moscow resident is москвич for male or москвичка for female, the name of the city is thought to be derived from the name of the Moskva River. There have been proposed several theories of the origin of the name of the river and its cognates include Russian, музга, muzga pool, puddle, Lithuanian, mazgoti and Latvian, mazgāt to wash, Sanskrit, majjati to drown, Latin, mergō to dip, immerse. There exist as well similar place names in Poland like Mozgawa, the original Old Russian form of the name is reconstructed as *Москы, *Mosky, hence it was one of a few Slavic ū-stem nouns. From the latter forms came the modern Russian name Москва, Moskva, in a similar manner the Latin name Moscovia has been formed, later it became a colloquial name for Russia used in Western Europe in the 16th–17th centuries. From it as well came English Muscovy, various other theories, having little or no scientific ground, are now largely rejected by contemporary linguists. The surface similarity of the name Russia with Rosh, an obscure biblical tribe or country, the oldest evidence of humans on the territory of Moscow dates from the Neolithic. Within the modern bounds of the city other late evidence was discovered, on the territory of the Kremlin, Sparrow Hills, Setun River and Kuntsevskiy forest park, etc. The earliest East Slavic tribes recorded as having expanded to the upper Volga in the 9th to 10th centuries are the Vyatichi and Krivichi, the Moskva River was incorporated as part of Rostov-Suzdal into the Kievan Rus in the 11th century. By AD1100, a settlement had appeared on the mouth of the Neglinnaya River. The first known reference to Moscow dates from 1147 as a place of Yuri Dolgoruky. At the time it was a town on the western border of Vladimir-Suzdal Principality
3.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
4.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
5.
Joseph Stalin
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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials. Stalins invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, as it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence agreed with the Axis, Germany ended the pact when Hitler launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow, after defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States, Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea. On February 9,1946, Stalin delivered a public speech in which he explained the fundamental incompatibility of communism and capitalism. He stressed that the system needed war for raw materials. The Second World War was but the latest in a chain of conflicts which could be broken only when the economy made the transformation into communism. Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War, Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed, the exact number of deaths caused by Stalins regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions. Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Ioseb was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia and his father was Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, while his mother was Ekaterine Keke Geladze, a housemaid. As a child, Ioseb was plagued with health issues
6.
New Economic Policy
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The New Economic Policy was an economic policy of Soviet Russia proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who described it as a progression towards state capitalism within the workers state of the USSR. ”The NEP represented a more capitalism-oriented economic policy, deemed necessary after the Russian Civil War of 1917 to 1922, to foster the economy of the country, which was almost ruined. In addition, the NEP abolished prodrazvyorstka and introduced prodnalog, a tax on farmers, other policies included the monetary reform and the attraction of foreign capital. The NEP policy created a new category of people called NEPmen, Joseph Stalin abolished the New Economic Policy in 1928. In November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized control of most of Russia and this led to the Russian Civil War, pitting the Bolsheviks against the Whites and other counter-revolutionary forces. During this period, the Bolsheviks attempted to administer Russias economy purely by decree, farmers and factory workers were ordered to produce, and food and goods were seized and issued by decree. While this policy enabled the Bolshevik regime to overcome some difficulties, it soon caused disruptions. Producers who were not directly compensated for their labor often stopped working, leading to widespread shortages, combined with the devastation of the war, these were major hardships for the Russian people and diminished popular support for the Bolsheviks. At the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks controlled cities, although the fighting was nearly all outside urban areas, urban populations decreased substantially. The war disrupted transportation, and basic public services, shipments of food and fuel by railroad and water dramatically decreased. City residents first experienced a shortage of heating oil, then coal, populations in northern towns declined an average of 24%. Northern towns were more deprived of food than towns in the agricultural south, petrograd alone lost 850,000 people, half of the urban population decline during the Civil War. Hunger and poor conditions drove residents out of cities, workers migrated south to get peasants surpluses. Recent migrants to cities left because they still had ties to villages, urban workers formed the Bolshevik base of support, so the exodus posed a serious problem. Factory production severely slowed or halted, factories lacked 30,000 workers in 1919. To survive, city dwellers sold personal valuables, made artisan craft goods for sale or barter, the acute need for food drove them to obtain 50%–60% of food through illegal trading. The shortage of cash caused the market to use a barter system. Drought and frost led to the Russian famine of 1921, in which millions starved to death, especially in the Volga region, when no bread arrived in Moscow in 1921, workers became hungry and disillusioned. They organised demonstrations against the Partys policy of privileged rations, in which the Red Army, Party members, the Kronstadt rebellion of soldiers and sailors broke out in March 1921, fueled by anarchism and populism
7.
Kolkhoz
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A kolkhoz was a form of collective farm in the Soviet Union. Kolkhozes existed along with state farms or sovkhoz, the 1920s were characterized by spontaneous emergence of collective farms, under influence of traveling propaganda workers. Initially a collective farm resembled a version of the traditional Russian commune, the generic farming association, the association for joint cultivation of land. This gradual shift to farming in the first 15 years after the October Revolution was turned into a violent stampede during the forced collectivization campaign that began in 1928. The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, suggesting collective ownership, on the other hand, sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство, suggesting state ownership. As a collective farm, a kolkhoz was legally organized as a production cooperative, the Standard Charter of a kolkhoz, which since the early 1930s had the force of law in the USSR, is a model of cooperative principles in print. It speaks of the kolkhoz as a form of agricultural cooperative of peasants that voluntarily unite for the purpose of joint agricultural production based on collective labor. Importantly, remuneration had always been in proportion to labor and not from residual profits, implying that members were treated as employees and they imposed detailed work programs and nominated their preferred managerial candidates. Since the mid-1930s, the kolkhozes had been in effect an offshoot of the state sector, nevertheless, in locations with particularly good land or if it happened to have capable management, some kolkhozes accumulated substantial sums of money in their bank accounts. Subsequently, numerous kolkhozes were formally nationalized by changing their status to sovkhozes, essentially, his administration recognized their status as hired hands rather than authentic cooperative members. The guaranteed wage provision was incorporated in the 1969 version of the Standard Charter, the question of internal organization was important in the new kolkhozes. The most basic measure was to divide the workforce into a number of groups, generally known as brigades, by July 1929 it was already normal practice for the large kolkhoz of 200-400 households to be divided into temporary or permanent work units of 15-30 households. The brigade was headed by a brigade leader and this was usually a local man. After the kolkhoz amalgamations of 1950 the territorial successor of the old village kolkhoz was the complex brigade, brigades could be subdivided into smaller units called zvenos for carrying out some or all of their tasks. See collectivisation in the USSR and agriculture in the Soviet Union for general discussion of Soviet agriculture. In a kolkhoz, a member, called a kolkhoznik, received a share of the product and profit according to the number of days worked. In practice, most kolkhozy did not pay their members in cash at all. In 1946,30 percent of kolkhozy paid no cash for labor at all,10.6 paid no grain, in addition the kolkhoz was required to sell its grain crop and other products to the State at fixed prices
8.
Collective farming
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Collective farming and communal farming are various types of agricultural production in which multiple farmers run their holdings as a joint enterprise. This type of collective is often an agricultural cooperative in which member-owners engage jointly in farming activities, the process by which farmland is aggregated is called collectivization. In some countries, there have been state-run and cooperative-run variants, for example, the Soviet Union had both kolkhozy and sovkhozy, often denoted in English as collective farms and state farms, respectively. In general, collective farming is contrasted with family farming and with arrangements in which land was owned by landlords or aristocrats. Notable examples of collective farming include the kolkhozy that dominated Soviet agriculture between 1930 and 1991 and the Israeli kibbutzim, both are collective farms based on common ownership of resources and on pooling of labour and income in accordance with the theoretical principles of cooperative organizations. They differ radically, however, in the application of the cooperative principles relative to freedom of choice, a small group of farming or herding families living together on a jointly-managed piece of land is surely one of the most common living arrangements in all of human history. This has co-existed with, and competed with, more forms of ownership. Private ownership came to predominate in much of the Western world, the process by which Western Europes communal land became private is a fundamental question behind views of property, is it the legacy of historical injustices and crimes. Karl Marx believed that what he called primitive communism was ended by exploitative means he called primitive accumulation, by contrast Libertarian thinkers say that by the homestead principle, whoever is first to work on the land is the rightful owner. A calpulli consisted of a number of extended families with a presumed common ancestor. Each calpulli owned the land and granted the individual families the right to farm parts of it, the Huron had an essentially communal system of land ownership. The French Catholic missionary Gabriel Sagard described the fundamentals, the Huron had as much land as they need. As a result, the Huron could give families their own land, any Huron was free to clear the land and farm on the basis of usufruct. He maintained possession of the land as long as he continued to actively cultivate, once he abandoned the land, it reverted to communal ownership, and anyone could take it up for themselves. The Iroquois had a communal system of land distribution. The tribe owned all lands but gave out tracts to the different clans for further distribution among households for cultivation, the land would be redistributed among the households every few years, and a clan could request a redistribution of tracts when the Clan Mothers Council gathered. Those clans that abused their allocated land or otherwise did not take care of it would be warned, land property was really only the concern of the women, since it was the womens job to cultivate food and not the mens. The Clan Mothers Council also reserved certain areas of land to be worked by the women of all the different clans, food from such lands, called kěndiǔgwǎge hodiyěntho, would be used at festivals and large council gatherings
9.
Collectivization in the Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union enforced the collectivization of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940 during the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan, the policy aimed to consolidate individual landholdings and labour into collective farms, mainly kolkhozy and sovkhozy. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution that had developed from 1927 and this problem became more acute as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program. In the early 1930s over 91% of agricultural land became collectivized as rural households entered collective farms with their land, livestock, the sweeping collectivization often involved tremendous human and social costs. After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, peasants gained control of half of the land they had previously cultivated. The Stolypin agricultural reforms between 1905 and 1914 gave incentives for the creation of large farms, but these ended during World War I, the Russian Provisional Government accomplished little during the difficult World War I months, though Russian leaders continued to promise redistribution. Peasants began to turn against the Provisional Government and organized themselves into land committees, when the Russian Civil War ended, the economy changed with the New Economic Policy and specifically, the policy of prodnalog or food tax. This new policy was designed to re-build morale among embittered farmers, the pre-existing communes, which periodically redistributed land, did little to encourage improvement in technique, and formed a source of power beyond the control of the Soviet government. Although the income gap between wealthy and poor farmers did grow under the NEP, it remained small. Clearly identifying this group was difficult, though, since only about 1% of the peasantry employed laborers, the small shares of most of the peasants resulted in food shortages in the cities. Although grain had nearly returned to production levels, the large estates which had produced it for urban markets had been divided up. Not interested in acquiring money to purchase overpriced manufactured goods, the peasants chose to consume their produce rather than sell it, as a result, city dwellers only saw half the grain that had been available before the war. Before the revolution, peasants controlled only 2,100,000 km² divided into 16 million holdings, producing 50% of the food grown in Russia and consuming 60% of total food production. After the revolution, the peasants controlled 3,140,000 km² divided into 25 million holdings, producing 85% of the food, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had never been happy with private agriculture and saw collectivization as the best remedy for the problem. Lenin claimed Small-scale production gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force and this demand for more grain resulted in the reintroduction of requisitioning which was resisted in rural areas. In 1928 there was a 2-million-ton shortfall in grains purchased by the Soviet Union from neighbouring markets, Stalin claimed the grain had been produced but was being hoarded by kulaks. Instead of raising the price, the Politburo adopted a measure to requisition 2.5 million tons of grain. In 1929, especially after the introduction of the Ural-Siberian Method of grain procurement, also, massive hoarding and illegal transfers of grain took place
10.
Dekulakization
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Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929–1932. The richer peasants were labeled kulaks and considered class enemies, more than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931. The stated purpose of the campaign was to fight the counter-revolution and this policy was accomplished simultaneously with collectivization in the USSR and effectively brought all agriculture and peasants in Soviet Russia under state control. The liquidation of the kulaks as a class was announced by Joseph Stalin on 27 December 1929, the decision was formalized in a resolution On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization on 30 January 1930. OGPU secret police chief Efim Georgievich Evdokimov organized and supervised the roundup of peasants, the results were soon known outside the Soviet Union. In 1941, the American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker wrote It is an estimate to say that some 5,000,000. Died at once, or within a few years, red Terror Decossackization Population transfer in the Soviet Union Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union Collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
11.
North Caucasus
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The North Caucasus or Ciscaucasus is the northern part of the Caucasus region between the Sea of Azov and Black Sea on the west and the Caspian Sea on the east, within European Russia. Geopolitically, the Northern Caucasus includes the Russian republics and krais of the North Caucasus, the outer border of the Soviet Unions North Caucasus Krai was the same as that of present-day North Caucasus Economic Region which includes an oblast, two krais, and seven republics. The former North Caucasus Military District also included Astrakhan Oblast, Volgograd Oblast, and its administrative center was Rostov-on-Don until 10 January 1934, Pyatigorsk until January 1936, then Ordzhonikidze and, from 15 December 1936, Voroshilovsk. Geographically, the term North Caucasus also refers to the slope and western extremity of the Caucasus Major mountain range. The Forecaucasus steppe area is also encompassed under the notion of Ciscaucasus, thus the northern boundary of the Forecaucasus steppe is generally considered to be the Manych River. Ciscaucasus was historically covered by the Pontic steppe, mostly on fertile calcareous chernozyom soils and it is bounded by the Sea of Azov on the west, and the Caspian Sea on the east. According to the Concise Atlas of the World, Second Edition, shaw, Institute of British Geographers Media related to North Caucasus at Wikimedia Commons North Caucasus travel guide from Wikivoyage Relations between The North and South Caucasus. Articles in the Caucasus Analytical Digest No.27
12.
Machine and tractor station
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The machine and tractor station was a state enterprise for ownership and maintenance of agricultural machinery that were used in kolkhozy. The first ever MTS was organized in the Odessa Oblast, MTSs were introduced in 1928 as a shared resource of scarce agricultural machinery and technical personnel. William Taubman, Khrushchevs biographer, describes them as follows, As the name implies and they were set up in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the kolkhozy were too weak and disorganized to manage their own equipment. Ideologically, collective farms were a form of property, hence it would not do to have them own part of the means of production. Politically, the new collective farms, into which so many peasants were dragooned, were unreliable, so the MTS also served as a party stronghold in the countryside. The main units of an MTS were tractor brigades and automobile brigades and it was paid with the share of the agricultural product called natural payment. Over time, MTSs became an instrument of transferring the production from kolkhozy to the sovkhozy of the state. 75,000 tractors had been supplied by MTSs to Soviet collective farms by 1932, in 1972 they were further renamed into Regional Association Selkhoztekhnika. In post-Soviet Russia some economists expressed ideas about the revival of MTSs to help small independent farmers
13.
Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic
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Initially, on 7 August 1921, it was established as the Turkmen Oblast of the Turkestan ASSR before being made, on 13 May 1925, a separate republic of the USSR as the Turkmen SSR. Since then the borders of the Turkmenia were unchanged, on 22 August 1990, Turkmenia declared its sovereignty over Soviet laws. On 27 October 1991, it became independent and Turkmen SSR was renamed to Turkmenistan, geographically, Turkmenia was bordered between Iran, Afghanistan to the south, Caspian Sea to the west, Kazakhstan to the north and Uzbekistan to the east. Russian attempts to encroach upon Turkmen territory began in earnest in the part of the nineteenth century. Of all the Central Asian peoples, the Turkmen put up the stiffest resistance against Russian expansion, in 1869 the Russian Empire established a foothold in present-day Turkmenistan with the foundation of the Caspian Sea port of Krasnovodsk. From there and other points, they marched on and subdued the Khiva Khanate in 1873, in 1881 the Russians under General Mikhail Skobelev besieged and captured Geok Tepe, one of the last Turkmen strongholds, northwest of Ashgabat. With the Turkmen defeat, the annexation of what is present-day Turkmenistan met with only weak resistance, later the same year, the Russians signed an agreement with the Persians and established what essentially remains the current border between Turkmenistan and Iran. In 1897 a similar agreement was signed between the Russians and Afghans, in the 1880s, a railroad was built from Krasnovodsk to Ashgabat and later extended to Tashkent. Urban areas began to develop along the railway, because the Turkmen generally were indifferent to the advent of Soviet rule in 1917, little revolutionary activity occurred in the region in the years that followed. Their armed resistance to Soviet rule was part of the larger Basmachi Revolt throughout Central Asia from the 1920s into the early 1930s, which included most of the future USSR dependencies. Although Soviet sources describe this struggle as a chapter in the republics history, it is clear that opposition was fierce. Significant numbers of Russians and other Slavs, as well as groups from various nationalities mainly from the Caucasus, modest industrial capabilities were developed, and limited exploitation of Turkmenistans natural resources was initiated. Under Soviet rule, all religious beliefs were attacked by the communist authorities as superstition, most religious schooling and religious observance were banned, and the vast majority of mosques were closed. An official Muslim Board of Central Asia with a headquarters in Tashkent was established during World War II to supervise the Islam faith in Central Asia, for the most part, the Muslim Board functioned as an instrument of propaganda whose activities did little to enhance the Muslim cause. Atheist indoctrination stifled religious development and contributed to the isolation of the Turkmen from the international Muslim community, beginning in the 1930s, Moscow kept the republic under firm control. The nationalities policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fostered the development of a Turkmen political elite, Slavs, both in Moscow and Turkmenia, closely supervised the national cadre of government officials and bureaucrats, generally, the Turkmen leadership staunchly supported Soviet policies. Foreigners and even most Soviet citizens couldnt visit the area, most Turkmen couldnt leave the republic either. The republic found itself rather unprepared for the dissolution of the Soviet Union, by a unanimous vote of its Supreme Soviet, Turkmenistan declared its sovereignty in August 1990
14.
Great Britain
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Great Britain, also known as Britain, is a large island in the north Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of 209,331 km2, Great Britain is the largest European island, in 2011 the island had a population of about 61 million people, making it the worlds third-most populous island after Java in Indonesia and Honshu in Japan. The island of Ireland is situated to the west of it, the island is dominated by a maritime climate with quite narrow temperature differences between seasons. Politically, the island is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island. The term Great Britain often extends to surrounding islands that form part of England, Scotland, and Wales. A single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the union of the Kingdom of England, the archipelago has been referred to by a single name for over 2000 years, the term British Isles derives from terms used by classical geographers to describe this island group. By 50 BC Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a name for the British Isles. However, with the Roman conquest of Britain the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain, the oldest mention of terms related to Great Britain was by Aristotle, or possibly by Pseudo-Aristotle, in his text On the Universe, Vol. III. To quote his works, There are two large islands in it, called the British Isles, Albion and Ierne. The name Britain descends from the Latin name for Britain, Britannia or Brittānia, Old French Bretaigne and Middle English Bretayne, Breteyne. The French form replaced the Old English Breoton, Breoten, Bryten, Breten, Britannia was used by the Romans from the 1st century BC for the British Isles taken together. It is derived from the writings of the Pytheas around 320 BC. Marcian of Heraclea, in his Periplus maris exteri, described the group as αἱ Πρεττανικαὶ νῆσοι. The peoples of these islands of Prettanike were called the Πρεττανοί, Priteni is the source of the Welsh language term Prydain, Britain, which has the same source as the Goidelic term Cruithne used to refer to the early Brythonic-speaking inhabitants of Ireland. The latter were later called Picts or Caledonians by the Romans, the Greco-Egyptian scientist Ptolemy referred to the larger island as great Britain and to Ireland as little Britain in his work Almagest. The name Albion appears to have out of use sometime after the Roman conquest of Britain. After the Anglo-Saxon period, Britain was used as a term only. It was used again in 1604, when King James VI and I styled himself King of Great Brittaine, France, Great Britain refers geographically to the island of Great Britain, politically to England, Scotland and Wales in combination
15.
Russian Civil War
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The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war in the former Russian Empire immediately after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as many factions vied to determine Russias political future. In addition, rival militant socialists and nonideological Green armies fought against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, eight foreign nations intervened against the Red Army, notably the Allied Forces and the pro-German armies. The Red Army defeated the White Armed Forces of South Russia in Ukraine, the remains of the White forces commanded by Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel were beaten in Crimea and evacuated in late 1920. Lesser battles of the war continued on the periphery for two years, and minor skirmishes with the remnants of the White forces in the Far East continued well into 1923. Armed national resistance in Central Asia was not completely crushed until 1934, there were an estimated 7,000, 000–12,000,000 casualties during the war, mostly civilians. The Russian Civil War has been described by some as the greatest national catastrophe that Europe had yet seen, many pro-independence movements emerged after the break-up of the Russian Empire and fought in the war. Several parts of the former Russian Empire—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the rest of the former Russian Empire was consolidated into the Soviet Union shortly afterwards. After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the Russian Provisional Government was established during the February Revolution of 1917, Political commissars were appointed to each unit of the army to maintain morale and ensure loyalty. In June 1918, when it became apparent that an army composed solely of workers would be far too small. Former Tsarist officers were utilized as military specialists, sometimes their families were taken hostage in order to ensure their loyalty, at the start of the war three-quarters of the Red Army officer corps was composed of former Tsarist officers. By its end, 83% of all Red Army divisional and corps commanders were ex-Tsarist soldiers, a Ukrainian nationalist movement was active in Ukraine during the war. More significant was the emergence of an anarchist political and military movement known as the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine or the Anarchist Black Army led by Nestor Makhno, some of the military forces were set up on the basis of clandestine officers organizations in the cities. The Czechoslovak Legions had been part of the Russian army and numbered around 30,000 troops by October 1917 and they had an agreement with the new Bolshevik government to be evacuated from the Eastern Front via the port of Vladivostok to France. The transport from the Eastern Front to Vladivostok slowed down in the chaos, under pressure from the Central Powers, Trotsky ordered the disarming and arrest of the legionaries, which created tensions with the Bolsheviks. The Western Allies armed and supported opponents of the Bolsheviks, hence, many of these countries expressed their support for the Whites, including the provision of troops and supplies. Winston Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be strangled in its cradle, the British and French had supported Russia during World War I on a massive scale with war materials. After the treaty, it looked like much of material would fall into the hands of the Germans. Under this pretext began allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with the United Kingdom, there were violent clashes with troops loyal to the Bolsheviks
16.
Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
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The Allied intervention was a multi-national military expedition launched during the Russian Civil War in 1918. The initial goals were to help the Czechoslovak Legion, secure supplies of munitions and armaments in Russian ports, after winning World War I, the Allies militarily backed the anti-Bolshevik White forces in Russia. Allied efforts were hampered by divided objectives, war-weariness after they just finished greater conflict, in 1917, Russia was in a state of political strife, public support for war and the Tsar was dwindling. The country was on the brink of revolution, the Provisional Government pledged to continue fighting the Germans on the Eastern Front. The Allies had been shipping supplies to Russia since the beginning of the war in 1914 through the ports of Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, in 1917, the United States entered the war on the Allied side. US President Woodrow Wilson dropped his reservations about joining the war with a monarch as an ally, the war became unpopular with the Russian populace. Political and social unrest increased, with the revolutionary Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin gaining widespread support, large numbers of common soldiers either mutinied or deserted the Imperial Russian Army. During the June 18 offensive, the Russian Army was defeated by the German and Austro-Hungarian forces as a result of a counter-attack and this led to the collapse of the Eastern Front. The demoralised Russian Army was on the verge of mutiny and most soldiers had deserted the front lines, Kerensky replaced Aleksei Brusilov with Lavr Kornilov as Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Kornilov attempted to set up a dictatorship by staging a coup in late August 1917. He had the support of the British military attaché, Brigadier-General Alfred Knox, Kerensky also claimed Lord Milner wrote him a letter expressing support for Kornilov. A British armoured car squadron commanded by Oliver Locker-Lampson and dressed in Russian uniforms participated in the failed coup, in 1917, the October Revolution led to the overthrow of Kerenskys provisional government, and the Bolsheviks assuming power. Five months later, on March 3, the newly formed Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany and this still however did not permit the redeployment of German soldiers to the Western Front, where the British and French armies were awaiting American reinforcements. The Czechoslovak Legion was at times in control of most of the Trans-Siberian railway, the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ensured that prisoners-of-war would be transferred to and from each country. Austro-Hungarian prisoners were of a number of nationalities, some Czechoslovak POWs deserted to the Russian Army. Czechoslovaks had long desired to create their own independent state, the Czechoslovak Legions travelled via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok. However, fighting between the Legions and the Bolsheviks erupted in May 1918, other concerns regarded the potential destruction of the Czechoslovak Legions and the threat of Bolshevism, the nature of which worried many Allied governments. Meanwhile, Allied matériel in transit quickly accumulated in the warehouses in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, Estonia had established a national army with the support of Finnish volunteers and were defending against the 7th Red Armys attack
17.
Industrialisation
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As industrial workers incomes rise, markets for consumer goods and services of all kinds tend to expand and provide a further stimulus to industrial investment and economic growth. Later commentators have called this the First Industrial Revolution, the invention of the assembly line gave this phase a boost. Coal mines, steelworks, and textile factories replaced homes as the place of work, by the end of the 20th century, East Asia had become one of the most recently industrialised regions of the world. The BRICS states are undergoing the process of industrialisation, there is considerable literature on the factors facilitating industrial modernisation and enterprise development. The concentration of labour into factories has increased urbanisation and the size of settlements, to serve, workers have to either leave their families or bring them along in order to work in the towns and cities where these industries are found. The family structure changes with industrialisation, the sociologist Talcott Parsons noted that in pre-industrial societies there is an extended family structure spanning many generations who probably remained in the same location for generations. In industrialised societies the nuclear family, consisting of parents and their growing children. Families and children reaching adulthood are more mobile and tend to relocate to where jobs exist, extended family bonds become more tenuous. Currently the international development community endorses development policies like water purification or primary education and Co-Operation amongst third world communities, the relationships among economic growth, employment, and poverty reduction are complex. Higher productivity is argued to be leading to lower employment, division of labour Newly industrialised country Idea of Progress Chandler Jr. Alfred D. The Visible Hand, The Management Revolution in American Business, belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hewitt, T. Johnson, H. and Wield, D. industrialisation and Development, Oxford University Press, hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Revolution. Kemp, Tom Historical Patterns of Industrialisation, Longman, London, ISBN 0-582-09547-6 Kiely, R industrialisation and Development, A comparative analysis, UCL Press, London. The Unbound Prometheus, Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Cambridge, New York, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. Pomeranz, Ken The Great Divergence, China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Tilly, industrialization as an Historical Process, European History Online, Mainz, Institute of European History,2010, retrieved,29 February 2011
18.
Serfdom in Russia
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The term serf, in the sense of an unfree peasant of the Russian Empire, is the usual translation of krepostnoi krestyanin. The origins of serfdom in Russia are traced to Kievan Rus in the 11th century, Legal documents of the epoch, such as Russkaya Pravda, distinguished several degrees of feudal dependency of peasants. Serfdom became the dominant form of relation between peasants and nobility in the 17th century, Serfdom only existed in central and southern areas of the Russian Empire. It was never established in the north, the Urals or Siberia, Tsar Alexander I wanted to reform the system but was stymied. New laws allowed all classes to own land, a privilege that was confined to the nobility. Russian serfdom was abolished in the emancipation reform of 1861 by Tsar Alexander II. The term muzhik, or moujik means Russian peasant when it is used in English, the origins of serfdom in Russia may be traced to the 11th century, however, the most complete form of feudal exploitation enveloped only certain categories of rural population. In the 12th century, the exploitation of the so-called zakups on arable lands, according to the Russkaya Pravda, a princely smerd had limited property and personal rights. His escheat was given to the prince and his life was equated with that of the kholop, in the 13th to 15th centuries, feudal dependency applied to a significant number of peasants, but serfdom as we know it was still not a widespread phenomenon. In the mid-15th century the right of certain categories of peasants in some votchinas to leave their master was limited to a period of one week before and after the so-called Yuris Day. The Sudebnik of 1497 officially confirmed this time limit as universal for everybody, the legal code of Ivan III of Russia, Sudebnik, strengthened the dependency of peasants, statewide, and restricted their mobility. The Russians persistently battled against the states of the Golden Horde. The Sudebnik of 1550 increased the amount of pozhiloye and introduced a tax called za povoz. These also defined the so-called fixed years, or the 5-year time frame for search of the runaway peasants. In 1607, a new ukase defined sanctions for hiding and keeping the runaways, the Sobornoye Ulozhenie of 1649 gave serfs to estates, and in 1658, flight was made a criminal offense. Russian landowners eventually gained almost unlimited ownership over Russian serfs, the landowner could transfer the serf without land to another landowner while keeping the serfs personal property and family, however, the landowner had no right to kill the serf. About four-fifths of Russian peasants were serfs according to the censuses of 1678 and 1719, free peasants remained only in the North, most of the dvoryane were content with the long time frame for search of the runaway peasants. During the first half of the 17th century the dvoryane sent their collective petitions to the authorities, in 1642, the Russian government established a 10-year limit for search of the runaways and 15-year limit for search for peasants taken away by their new owners
19.
Gustavs Klucis
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Gustav Klutsis was a pioneering Latvian photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century. He is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda he produced with his wife, born in Ķoņi parish, near Rūjiena, Klucis began his artistic training in Riga in 1912. In 1915 he was drafted into the Russian Army, serving in a Latvian riflemen detachment and he would continue to be associated with VKhUTEMAS as a professor of color theory from 1924 until the school closed in 1930. Klucis taught, wrote, and produced art for the Soviet state for the rest of his life. As the political background degraded through the 1920s and 1930s, Klutsis and Kulagina came under increasing pressure to limit their subject matter, once joyful, revolutionary and utopian, by 1935 their art was devoted to furthering Joseph Stalins cult of personality. Despite his active and loyal service to the party, Klucis was arrested in Moscow on January 17,1938, Kulagina agonized for months, then years, over his disappearance. In 1989 it was found that he had executed by Stalins order soon after his arrest. Klutsis worked in a variety of experimental media and he liked to use propaganda as a sign or revolutionary background image. Like other Constructivists he worked in sculpture, produced exhibition installations, illustrations, but Klutsis and Kulagina are primarily known for their photo montages. For economy they often posed for, and inserted themselves into and their dynamic compositions, distortions of scale and space, angled viewpoints and colliding perspectives make them perpetually modern. Klutsis is one of four artists with a claim to having invented the subgenre of political photo montage in 1918 and he worked alongside Lissitzky on the Pressa International exhibition in Cologne
20.
Vladimir Lenin
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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924, under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party socialist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism, born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brothers execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empires Tsarist regime and he moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. 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 party theorist through his publications. In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP ideological split, Lenins government was led by the Bolsheviks—now renamed the Communist Party—with some powers initially also held by elected soviets. It redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry, opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign orchestrated by the state security services, tens of thousands were killed and others interned in concentration camps. Anti-Bolshevik armies, established by both right and left-wing groups, were defeated in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922, responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin promoted economic growth through a mixed economic system. Seeking to promote world revolution, Lenins government created the Communist International, waged the Polish–Soviet War, in increasingly poor health, Lenin expressed opposition to the growing power of his successor, Joseph Stalin, before dying at his Gorki mansion. He became a figurehead behind Marxism-Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement. Lenins father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was from a family of serfs, his origins remain unclear, with suggestions being made that he was Russian, Chuvash, Mordvin. 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 German–Swedish woman. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, 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 governments plans for modernisation. His dedication to education earned him the Order of St. Vladimir, the couple had two children, Anna and Alexander, before Lenin—who would gain the childhood nickname of Volodya—was born in Simbirsk on 10 April 1870, and baptised several days later. They were followed by three children, Olga, Dmitry, and Maria. Two later siblings died in infancy, Ilya was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although Maria – a Lutheran – was largely indifferent to Christianity, a view that influenced her children. Every summer they holidayed at a manor in Kokushkino
21.
Bolsheviks
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The RSDLP was a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898 in Minsk in Belarus to unite the various revolutionary organisations of the Russian Empire into one party. In the Second Party Congress vote, the Bolsheviks won on the majority of important issues and they ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks or Reds came to power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, with the Reds defeating the Whites, and others during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, the RSFSR became the chief constituent of the Soviet Union in December 1922. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism, in the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, held in Brussels and London during August 1903, Lenin and Julius Martov disagreed over the membership rules. Lenin wanted members who recognise the Party Programme and support it by material means, Julius Martov suggested by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the partys organisations. Lenin advocated limiting party membership to a core of active members. A main source of the factions could be attributed to Lenin’s steadfast opinion. It was obvious at early stages in Lenin’s revolutionary practices that he would not be willing to concede on any party policy that conflicted with his own predetermined ideas and it was the loyalty that he had to his own self-envisioned utopia that caused the party split. He was seen even by fellow party members as being so narrow minded that he believed there were only two types of people, Friend and enemy—those who followed him, and all the rest. Leon Trotsky, one of Lenins fellow revolutionaries, compared Lenin in 1904 to the French revolutionary Robespierre, Lenins view of politics as verbal and ideological warfare and his inability to accept criticism even if it came from his own dedicated followers was the reason behind this accusation. The root of the split was a book titled What is to be Done. that Lenin wrote while serving a sentence of exile, in Germany, the book was published in 1902, in Russia, strict censorship outlawed its publication and distribution. One of the points of Lenin’s writing was that a revolution can only be achieved by the strong leadership of one person over the masses. After the proposed revolution had overthrown the government, this individual leader must release power. Lenin also wrote that revolutionary leaders must dedicate their lives to the cause in order for it to be successful. Lenins view of a socialist intelligentsia showed that he was not a supporter of Marxist theory. For example, Lenin agreed with the Marxist idea of eliminating social classes, most party members considered unequal treatment of workers immoral, and were loyal to the idea of a completely classless society, so Lenin’s variations caused the party internal dissonance. Although the party split of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks would not become official until 1903, as discussed in What is to be Done. Lenin firmly believed that a political structure was needed to effectively initiate a formal revolution
22.
Volgograd Tractor Plant
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The Volgograd Tractor Plant, formerly the Dzerzhinskiy Tractor Factory or the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, is a heavy equipment factory located in Volgograd, Russia. It was a site of fighting during World War IIs Battle of Stalingrad. Until 1961, the Volgograd Tractor Plant was called the Stalingrad Tractor Plant named for Dzerzhinsky (Russian, the plant was built in one of the first industrial sites that were built according to the plans of rapid industrialization of the USSR, adopted in the late 1920s. The construction of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant was carried out with the assistance of Western countries, the plant produces tractors and military equipment. During World War II, the plant was retooled to produce equipment for the Red Army and it became world-famous during the Battle of Stalingrad for being the site of fierce fighting. As an incorporated entity the plant was recognised as bankrupt in 2005, is the successor of the plant Tractor Company VgTZ, which is a concern Tractor Plants. The Soviet Problem with Two Unknowns, How an American Architect, IA, The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology
23.
Magnitogorsk
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Magnitogorsk is an industrial city in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, located on the eastern side of the extreme southern extent of the Ural Mountains by the Ural River. It was named after the Magnitnaya Mountain and it is the second largest city in Russia that is not the administrative center of any federal subject or district. Here the largest iron and steel works in the country is situated, Magnitnaya was founded in 1743 as part of the Orenburg Line of forts built during the reign of the Empress Elizabeth. By 1747, the settlement had been large enough to guide the building of a small wooden chapel named subsequently The Church of the Holy Trinity. Iron ore mining in this region back to 1752, when two entrepreneurs named Tverdysh and Myasnikov decided to check on the feasibility of mining in the area that became famous later. They managed to take advantage of the fact that the Magnitnaya mountain did not belong to anyone at that time. So, they secured it for themselves by way of petition to Empress Elizabeth, in 1759, the petition was eventually accepted, and they launched iron ore production. At this time, hundreds of foreign experts kept coming here in order to implement and direct the work. In 1928, a Soviet delegation arrived in Cleveland, Ohio to discuss with American consulting company Arthur G. McKee a plan to set up in Magnitogorsk a copy of the US Steel steel mill in Gary. The contract was four times increased and eventually the new plant had a capacity of four million tons annually. It was a showpiece of Soviet achievement, huge reserves of iron ore in the area made it a prime location to build a steel plant capable of challenging its Western rivals. However, a proportion of the workforce, as ex-peasants, typically had few industrial skills. To solve these issues, several hundred foreign specialists arrived to direct the work, however, by the time that May completed his plans for Magnitogorsk construction of both factory and housing had already started. The sprawling factory and enormous cleansing lakes had left little room available for development and this modification resulted in a city being more rope-like than linear. The book Behind the Urals, by John Scott, documents the development of Magnitogorsk during the 1930s. Scott discusses the fast-paced industrial and social developments during Stalins first five-year plan, in 1937, foreigners were told to exit and Magnitogorsk was declared a closed city. There is not much information about events and development of the city during the closed period. During perestroika the closed city status was removed and foreigners were allowed to visit the city again, with the depletion of the substantial local iron-ore reserves, Magnitogorsk has to import raw materials from Sokolvsko-Sarbaisky deposit in northern Kazakhstan
24.
Dnieper
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It is the longest river of Ukraine and Belarus and the fourth longest river in Europe. The total length ranges between 2,145 km and 2,201 km with a basin of 504,000 square kilometres. The river is noted for its dams and hydroelectric stations, the Dnieper is an important navigable waterway for the economy of Ukraine and is connected via the Dnieper–Bug Canal to other waterways in Europe. In antiquity, the river was known to the Greeks as the Borysthenes and was part of the Amber Road, Arheimar, a capital of the Goths, was located on the Dnieper, according to the Hervarar saga. The name Dnieper is derived from Sarmatian Dānu apara the river on the far side, according to V. Abaev the name Dnieper derives from Scythian Dānu apr deep river, while the name Dniester is combination of Scythian Dānu and Thracian Ister, the old name of Dniester. In the three countries through which it flows it has essentially the name, albeit pronounced differently, Russian, Днепр, Belarusian, Дняпро or Днепр, Ukrainian. The late Greek and Roman authors called it Δάναπρις - Danapris and Danaper respectively - and its Old East Slavic name used at the time of Kievan Rus was Slavuta or Slavutych, the Huns called it Var, and Bulgars - Buri-Chai. The name in Crimean Tatar, Özü, the total length of the river is 2,145 kilometres, of which 485 km are within Russia,700 km are within Belarus, and 1,095 km are within Ukraine. Its basin covers 504,000 square kilometres, of which 289,000 km2 are within Ukraine,118,360 km2 are within Belarus, the source of the Dnieper is the sedge bogs of the Valdai Hills in central Russia, at an elevation of 220 m. For 115 km of its length, it serves as the border between Belarus and Ukraine and its estuary, or liman, used to be defended by the strong fortress of Ochakiv. On the Dnepr River to the south of Komarin urban-type settlement, Braghin District, the Dnieper has many tributaries with 89 being rivers of 100+ km. The water resources of the Dnieper basin compose around 80% out of all Ukraine, Dnieper Rapids were part of trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks, first mentioned in the Kiev Chronicle. The route was established in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. On the Dnieper the Varangians had to portage their ships round seven rapids, after Dnieper Hydroelectric Station was built in 1932, they were inundated by Dnieper Reservoir. The river is part of the Quagga mussels native range, the mussel has been accidentally introduced around the world where it has become an invasive species. From the mouth of the Prypiat River to the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Station, there are six sets of dams and hydroelectric stations, the first constructed was the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station near Zaporizhia, built in 1927–1932 with an output of 558 MW. It was destroyed during World War II, but was rebuilt in 1948 with an output of 750 MW, the Dnieper River in different regions Major cities, over 100,000 in population, are in bold script. Cities and towns located on the Dnieper are listed in order from the source to its mouth, Arheimar
25.
Nizhny Novgorod
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Nizhny Novgorod, colloquially shortened to Nizhny, is a city in the administrative center of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast and Volga Federal District in Russia. From 1932 to 1990, it was known as Gorky, after the writer Maxim Gorky, the city is an important economic, transportation, scientific, educational and cultural center in Russia and the vast Volga-Vyatka economic region, and is the main center of river tourism in Russia. In the historical part of the city there are a number of universities, theaters, museums. Nizhny Novgorod is located about 400 km east of Moscow, where the Oka empties into the Volga, the city was founded in 1221 by Prince Yuri II of Vladimir. In 1612 Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky organized an army for the liberation of Moscow from the Poles, in 1817 Nizhny Novgorod became a great trade center of the Russian Empire. In 1896 at a fair, an All-Russia Exhibition was organized, during the Soviet period, the city turned into an important industrial center. In particular, the Gorky Automobile Plant was constructed in this period, then the city was given the nickname Russian Detroit. During the World War II Gorky became the biggest provider of equipment to the front. Due to this, the Luftwaffe constantly bombed the city from the air, the majority of the German bombs fell in the area of the Gorky Automobile Plant. Although almost all the sites of plant were completely destroyed. After the war, Gorky became a city and remained one until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990. At that time the city was renamed Nizhny Novgorod once again, in 1985 the metro was opened. In 2016 Vladimir Putin opened the new 70th Anniversary of Victory Plant which is part of the Almaz-Antey Air, the Kremlin – the main center of the city – contains the main government agencies of the city and the Volga Federal District. Originally the name was just Novgorod, but to distinguish it from the other, older and well-known Novgorod to the west and this land was named lower because it is situated downstream, especially from the point of view of other Russian cities such as Moscow, Vladimir and Murom. Later it was transformed into the name of the city that literally means Lower Newtown. Later a major stronghold for border protection, Nizhny Novgorod fortress took advantage of a moat formed by the two rivers. With the agreement of the Mongol Khan, Nizhny Novgorod was incorporated into the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality in 1264, after 86 years its importance further increased when the seat of the powerful Suzdal Principality was moved here from Gorodets in 1350. Grand Duke Dmitry Konstantinovich sought to make his capital a rival worthy of Moscow, he built a stone citadel, the earliest extant manuscript of the Russian Primary Chronicle, the Laurentian Codex, was written for him by the local monk Laurentius in 1377
26.
Great Depression
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The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place during the 1930s. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, in most countries it started in 1929 and it was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how far the economy can decline. The depression originated in the United States, after a fall in stock prices that began around September 4,1929. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide GDP fell by an estimated 15%, by comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s, however, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II. The Great Depression had devastating effects in both rich and poor. Personal income, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%, unemployment in the U. S. rose to 25% and in some countries rose as high as 33%. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries, farming communities and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by about 60%. Facing plummeting demand with few sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as mining and logging suffered the most. Even after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 optimism persisted for some time, john D. Rockefeller said These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come, prosperity has always returned and will again. The stock market turned upward in early 1930, returning to early 1929 levels by April and this was still almost 30% below the peak of September 1929. Together, government and business spent more in the first half of 1930 than in the period of the previous year. On the other hand, consumers, many of whom had suffered losses in the stock market the previous year. In addition, beginning in the mid-1930s, a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland of the U. S, by mid-1930, interest rates had dropped to low levels, but expected deflation and the continuing reluctance of people to borrow meant that consumer spending and investment were depressed. By May 1930, automobile sales had declined to below the levels of 1928, prices in general began to decline, although wages held steady in 1930
27.
John Scott (writer)
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John Scott was an American writer and author of Behind the Urals, An American Worker in Russias City of Steel who worked in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. The OSS was the organization to the Central Intelligence Agency. Scott was born in 1912 and was the son of Scott Nearing, after leaving the University of Wisconsin in 1931 Scott migrated to the Soviet Union September 1932 at the age of 20. He worked for 5 years in the new industrial city Magnitogorsk at an iron, in 1938, with regret, he left the mills to escape arrest by the NKVD only after lengthy council with a confidant who concluded, Better leave. This is no place for foreigners now, the next day his wife Mariya Ivanovna Dikareva applied for permission to go to the United States to live, which took four years to come through, and in 1942 the two moved to America. Scott contributed to the construction of Magnitogorsk as a welder working in treacherous conditions, in Behind the Urals Scott recalls many examples of the danger workers faced in Magnitogorsk, I was just going to start welding when I heard someone sing out, and something swished down past me. It was a rigger who had working on the very top. He bounced off the pipe, which probably saved his life. Instead of falling all the way to the ground, he landed on the platform about fifteen foot below me. By the time I got down to him, blood was coming out of his mouth in gushes and he tried to yell, but could not. According to Scott, Stalin chose to industrialize Magnitogorsk for several reasons, first, Stalin began to emphasize industrial modernization in favor of agriculture by the mid-1930s. Second, Magnitogorsk was rich in ore and other minerals. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Magnitogorsk lies far from any borders and was vulnerable to enemy attack. These are the things that it takes to fight a modern war and these experiences, however, did not disillusion Scott with Soviet communism which he believed was the source of initiative and energy which drove work forward. Scott expressed a sense of pride for his contributions as a welder in Magnitogorsk and was sympathetic to many Soviet ideologies. After leaving Magnitogorsk in 1938, Scott spent the four years in Moscow as a self-proclaimed observer. In early 1938 Scott contributed information which appeared in three dispatches from the United States Embassy in Moscow to the State Department, in 1942 Scott moved back to the United States with his wife and two children. Amongst nearly 1,300 messages sent between New York and Moscow in 1942, just twenty-three were successfully decrypted and translated by the National Security Agencys Venona Project
28.
Great Purge
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The Great Purge or the Great Terror was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which occurred from 1936 to 1938. In Russian historiography, the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is called Yezhovshchina, after Nikolai Yezhov and it has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge. In the Western world, Robert Conquests 1968 book The Great Terror popularized that phrase, Conquests title was in turn an allusion to the period called the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The term repression was used to describe the prosecution of people considered counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people by the leadership of the Soviet Union. The purge was motivated by the desire to remove dissenters from the Communist Party, most public attention was focused on the purge of the leadership of the Communist Party, as well as of government bureaucrats and leaders of the armed forces, most of whom were Party members. The campaigns also affected many other categories of the society, intelligentsia, peasants and especially those branded as too rich for a peasant, a series of NKVD operations affected a number of national minorities, accused of being fifth column communities. Due legal process, as defined by Soviet law in force at the time, was largely replaced with summary proceedings by NKVD troikas. Hundreds of thousands of victims were accused of political crimes, they were quickly executed by shooting. Many died at the labor camps of starvation, disease, exposure. Other methods of dispatching victims were used on an experimental basis, one secret policeman, for example, gassed people to death in batches in the back of a specially adapted airtight van. The campaigns were carried out according to the line, and often by direct orders. The threat of war heightened Stalins perception of marginal and politically suspect populations as the source of an uprising in case of invasion. He began to plan for the elimination of such potential recruits for a mythical fifth column of wreckers, terrorists. The term purge in Soviet political slang was an abbreviation of the purge of the Party ranks. In 1933, for example, the Party expelled some 400,000 people, but from 1936 until 1953, the term changed its meaning, because being expelled from the Party came to mean almost certain arrest, imprisonment, and often execution. Stalins opponents on both sides of the political spectrum chided him as undemocratic and lax on bureaucratic corruption and these tendencies may have accumulated substantial support among the working class by attacking the privileges and luxuries the state offered to its high-paid elite. The Ryutin Affair seemed to vindicate Stalins suspicions and he enforced a ban on party factions and banned those party members who had opposed him, effectively ending democratic centralism. In the new form of Party organization, the Politburo, and this required the elimination of all Marxists with different views, especially those among the prestigious old guard of revolutionaries
29.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
30.
The New York Times
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The New York Times is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since September 18,1851, by The New York Times Company. The New York Times has won 119 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper, the papers print version in 2013 had the second-largest circulation, behind The Wall Street Journal, and the largest circulation among the metropolitan newspapers in the US. The New York Times is ranked 18th in the world by circulation, following industry trends, its weekday circulation had fallen in 2009 to fewer than one million. Nicknamed The Gray Lady, The New York Times has long been regarded within the industry as a newspaper of record. The New York Times international version, formerly the International Herald Tribune, is now called the New York Times International Edition, the papers motto, All the News Thats Fit to Print, appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page. On Sunday, The New York Times is supplemented by the Sunday Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine and T, some other early investors of the company were Edwin B. Morgan and Edward B. We do not believe that everything in Society is either right or exactly wrong, —what is good we desire to preserve and improve, —what is evil, to exterminate. In 1852, the started a western division, The Times of California that arrived whenever a mail boat got to California. However, when local California newspapers came into prominence, the effort failed, the newspaper shortened its name to The New-York Times in 1857. It dropped the hyphen in the city name in the 1890s, One of the earliest public controversies it was involved with was the Mortara Affair, the subject of twenty editorials it published alone. At Newspaper Row, across from City Hall, Henry Raymond, owner and editor of The New York Times, averted the rioters with Gatling guns, in 1869, Raymond died, and George Jones took over as publisher. Tweed offered The New York Times five million dollars to not publish the story, in the 1880s, The New York Times transitioned gradually from editorially supporting Republican Party candidates to becoming more politically independent and analytical. In 1884, the paper supported Democrat Grover Cleveland in his first presidential campaign, while this move cost The New York Times readership among its more progressive and Republican readers, the paper eventually regained most of its lost ground within a few years. However, the newspaper was financially crippled by the Panic of 1893, the paper slowly acquired a reputation for even-handedness and accurate modern reporting, especially by the 1890s under the guidance of Ochs. Under Ochs guidance, continuing and expanding upon the Henry Raymond tradition, The New York Times achieved international scope, circulation, in 1910, the first air delivery of The New York Times to Philadelphia began. The New York Times first trans-Atlantic delivery by air to London occurred in 1919 by dirigible, airplane Edition was sent by plane to Chicago so it could be in the hands of Republican convention delegates by evening. In the 1940s, the extended its breadth and reach. The crossword began appearing regularly in 1942, and the section in 1946
31.
Walter Duranty
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Walter Duranty was a Liverpool-born, Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times for fourteen years following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War. In 1932 Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union,11 of them published in June 1931 and he was criticized then and later for his denial of widespread famine in the USSR, most particularly the mass starvation in Ukraine. Duranty was born in a middle-class Liverpool family, the son of Emmeline and he studied at Harrow, one of Britains most prestigious public schools, but a sudden collapse in his fathers business led to a transfer to Bedford College. Nevertheless, he gained a scholarship to study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After completing his education, Duranty moved to Paris, during the Great War, he first worked as a reporter for The New York Times. A story Duranty filed about the Paris Peace Conference,1919 gained him notice as a journalist. He then moved to Riga to cover events in the newly independent Baltic States, Duranty moved to the Soviet Union in 1921. On holiday in France in 1924, Durantys left leg was injured in a train wreck, after the operation, the surgeon discovered gangrene, and the leg was removed. Once he had recovered, Duranty resumed his career as a journalist in the Soviet Union, during the New Economic Policy with its mixed economy, Durantys articles from Moscow did not draw wide attention. It was after the advent of the First Five-Year Plan, which aimed to transform Soviet industry and agriculture, in 1929, he was granted an exclusive interview with Joseph Stalin that greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. Duranty was to remain in Moscow for twelve years, settling in the United States in 1934, thereafter, he remained on retainer for The New York Times, which required him to spend several months a year in Moscow. It was in this capacity that Duranty reported on the trials of Stalins political opponents in 1936–1938. Failed attempts, since the time of Peter the Great, to apply Western ideals in Russia were a form of European colonialism, he wrote, vladimir Lenin and his New Economic Policy were both failures tainted by Western thought. Duranty felt that Stalin scrapped the New Economic Policy because he had no political competition, Stalin succeeded in doing what Lenin could only attempt to do, i. e. he “re-established a dictator of the imperial idea and put himself in charge” by means of intimidation. “Stalin didn’t look upon himself as a dictator, but as a ‘guardian of a sacred flame’ that he called Stalinism for lack of a better name. ”Stalin’s five-year plan was an attempt to effect a new way of life for the Russian people. Duranty argued that the Soviet Union’s mentality in 1931 greatly differed from the created by Karl Marxs ideas. In one of the articles submitted for the Pulitzer Prize Duranty gives his views of the Soviet actions in the countryside that eventually led to the famine. Here, when you get right down to it, is the supreme justification from the Bolshevik angle of the cruel, however, he also said that, for those who could not accept the system, the final fate of such enemies is death
32.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt, commonly known as FDR, was an American statesman and political leader who served as the 32nd President of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. A Democrat, he won a record four presidential elections and emerged as a figure in world events during the mid-20th century. He directed the United States government during most of the Great Depression and he is often rated by scholars as one of the three greatest U. S. Presidents, along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Roosevelt was born in 1882 to an old, prominent Dutch family from Dutchess County and he attended the elite educational institutions of Groton School, Harvard College, and Columbia Law School. At age 23 in 1905, he married Eleanor Roosevelt, and he entered politics in 1910, serving in the New York State Senate, and then as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson. In 1920, Roosevelt was presidential candidate James M. Coxs running mate and he was in office from 1929 to 1933 and served as a reform governor, promoting the enactment of programs to combat the depression besetting the United States at the time. In the 1932 presidential election, Roosevelt defeated incumbent Republican president Herbert Hoover in a landslide to win the presidency, Roosevelt took office while in the United States was in the midst of the worst economic crisis in its history. Energized by his victory over polio, FDR relied on his persistent optimism and activism to renew the national spirit. He created numerous programs to support the unemployed and farmers, and to labor union growth while more closely regulating business. His support for the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 added to his popularity, the economy improved rapidly from 1933–37, but then relapsed into a deep recession in 1937–38. The bipartisan Conservative Coalition that formed in 1937 prevented his packing the Supreme Court, when the war began and unemployment ended, conservatives in Congress repealed the two major relief programs, the WPA and CCC. However, they kept most of the regulations on business, along with several smaller programs, major surviving programs include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wagner Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Social Security. His goal was to make America the Arsenal of Democracy, which would supply munitions to the Allies, in March 1941, Roosevelt, with Congressional approval, provided Lend-Lease aid to Britain and China. He supervised the mobilization of the U. S. economy to support the war effort, as an active military leader, Roosevelt implemented a war strategy on two fronts that ended in the defeat of the Axis Powers and initiate the development of the worlds first atomic bomb. His work also influenced the creation of the United Nations. Roosevelts physical health declined during the war years, and he died 11 weeks into his fourth term. One of the oldest Dutch families in New York State, the Roosevelts distinguished themselves in other than politics. One ancestor, Isaac Roosevelt, had served with the New York militia during the American Revolution, Roosevelt attended events of the New York society Sons of the American Revolution, and joined the organization while he was president
33.
Adolf Hitler
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Adolf Hitler was a German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party, Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Führer of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. As dictator of the German Reich, he initiated World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and was central to the Holocaust, Hitler was born in Austria, then part of Austria-Hungary, and raised near Linz. He moved to Germany in 1913 and was decorated during his service in the German Army in World War I and he joined the German Workers Party, the precursor of the NSDAP, in 1919 and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923 he attempted a coup in Munich to seize power, the failed coup resulted in Hitlers imprisonment, during which he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf. Hitler frequently denounced international capitalism and communism as being part of a Jewish conspiracy, by 1933, the Nazi Party was the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, which led to Hitlers appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain, Hitler sought Lebensraum for the German people in Eastern Europe. His aggressive foreign policy is considered to be the cause of the outbreak of World War II in Europe. He directed large-scale rearmament and on 1 September 1939 invaded Poland, resulting in British, in June 1941, Hitler ordered an invasion of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941 German forces and the European Axis powers occupied most of Europe, failure to defeat the Soviets and the entry of the United States into the war forced Germany onto the defensive and it suffered a series of escalating defeats. In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time lover, on 30 April 1945, less than two days later, the two killed themselves to avoid capture by the Red Army, and their corpses were burned. Hitler and the Nazi regime were also responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians, in addition,29 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European Theatre of World War II. The number of civilians killed during the Second World War was unprecedented in warfare, Hitlers father Alois Hitler Sr. was the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. The baptismal register did not show the name of his father, in 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Aloiss mother Maria Anna. Alois was brought up in the family of Hiedlers brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, in 1876, Alois was legitimated and the baptismal register changed by a priest to register Johann Georg Hiedler as Aloiss father. Alois then assumed the surname Hitler, also spelled Hiedler, Hüttler, the Hitler surname is probably based on one who lives in a hut. Nazi official Hans Frank suggested that Aloiss mother had been employed as a housekeeper by a Jewish family in Graz, and that the familys 19-year-old son Leopold Frankenberger had fathered Alois. No Frankenberger was registered in Graz during that period, and no record has been produced of Leopold Frankenbergers existence, Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary, close to the border with the German Empire. He was one of six born to Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl
34.
Operation Barbarossa
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Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, which was launched on Sunday 22 June 1941. In the two leading up to the invasion, the two countries signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Nevertheless, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940, over the course of the operation, about four million Axis personnel invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2, 900-kilometer front, the largest invasion force in the history of warfare. In addition to troops, the Wehrmacht employed some 600,000 motor vehicles, the offensive marked an escalation of the war, both geographically and in the formation of the Allied coalition. Despite their successes, the German offensive stalled in the Battle of Moscow and was pushed back by the Soviet winter counteroffensive. The Red Army repelled the Wehrmachts strongest blows and forced the unprepared Germans into a war of attrition, the Wehrmacht would never again mount a simultaneous offensive along the entire strategic Soviet–Axis front. The failure of the operation drove Hitler to demand further operations of limited scope inside the Soviet Union, such as Case Blue. The failure of Operation Barbarossa proved a point in the fortunes of the Third Reich. Most importantly, the operation opened up the Eastern Front, in more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in world history. The German armies captured 5,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were not granted protections stipulated in the Geneva Conventions, a majority of them never returned alive. The Nazis deliberately starved 3.1 million of the prisoners to death as part of a Hunger Plan that aimed to reduce the population of Eastern Europe, over a million Soviet Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppen death squads and gassing as part of the Holocaust. On 10 February 1939, Hitler told his commanders that the next war would be purely a war of Weltanschauungen. Totally a peoples war, a racial war, on 23 November, once World War II had already started, Hitler declared that racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, and with it, the world. The racial policy of Nazi Germany viewed the Soviet Union as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen, Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germanys destiny was to turn to the East as it did six hundred years ago. Accordingly, it was stated Nazi policy to kill, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations and repopulate the land with Germanic peoples, under the Generalplan Ost. Likening the Soviets to the forces of Genghis Khan, Hitler told Croatian military leader Slavko Kvaternik that the Mongolian race threatened Europe. Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as Jewish Bolshevik subhumans, the Mongol hordes, the Asiatic flood, German army commanders cast the Jews as the major cause behind the partisan struggle. The main guideline policy for German troops was Where theres a partisan, theres a Jew, many German troops viewed the war in Nazi terms and regarded their Soviet enemies as sub-human
35.
Chelyabinsk
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During Pugachevs Rebellion, the fortress withstood a siege by the rebel forces in 1774, but was eventually captured for several months in 1775. In 1782, as a part of Ufa Viceroyalty that was reformed into Orenburg Governorate, Chelyabinsk became a seat of a its own uyezd and finally was granted town status. Until the late 19th century, Chelyabinsk was a provincial town. In 1892, the Samara-Zlatoust Railway was completed which connected it with Moscow, also in 1892, construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway from Chelyabinsk started and in 1896 the city was linked to Ekaterinburg. Chelyabinsk became the hub for relocation to Siberia, for fifteen years more than fifteen million people - a tenth of Russia - passed through Chelyabinsk. Some of them remained in Chelyabinsk, which contributed to its rapid growth, soon Chelyabinsk started turning into a major trade center, its population reached 20,000 inhabitants by 1897,45,000 by 1913, and 70,000 by 1917. For rapid growth at the turn of the 20th century, similar to American cities, during the first Five-Year Plans of the 1930s, Chelyabinsk experienced rapid industrial growth. Several establishments, including the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant and the Chelyabinsk Metallurgical Plant, were built at this time, during World War II, Joseph Stalin decided to move a large part of Soviet factory production to places out of the way of the advancing German armies in late 1941. This brought new industries and thousands of workers to Chelyabinsk, facilities for the production of T-34 tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers existed in Chelyabinsk. During World War II, it produced 18,000 tanks, in the press of the time Chelyabinsk was informally called Tankograd or Tank City. Kirov Factory no.185 moved here from Leningrad to produce heavy tanks, fragments fell in and around Chelyabinsk. Interior Ministry spokesman Vadim Kolesnikov said 1,100 people had called for medical assistance following the incident, one woman suffered a broken spine. Kolesnikov also said about 600 square meters of a roof at a factory had collapsed. The size has been estimated at 17 meters diameter with a mass of 10,000 or 11,000 metric tons, the power of the explosion was about 500 kilotons of TNT, which is 20–30 times more energy than was released from the atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima. Luckily, thanks to the altitude of the explosion the city managed to avoid large casualties. Chelyabinsk is the center of the oblast. Within the framework of administrative divisions, it is incorporated as the City of Chelyabinsk—an administrative unit with the equal to that of the districts. As a municipal division, the City of Chelyabinsk is incorporated as Chelyabinsky Urban Okrug, in June 2014, Chelyabinsks seven city districts were granted municipal status
36.
Volgograd
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Volgograd, formerly Tsaritsyn, 1589–1925, and Stalingrad, 1925–1961, is an important industrial city and the administrative center of Volgograd Oblast, Russia. It is 80 kilometers long, north to south and is situated on the bank of the Volga River, after which the city was named. The city became famous for its resistance during the Battle of Stalingrad against the German Army in World War II and it is often regarded as the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Although the city may have originated in 1555, documented evidence of Tsaritsyn located at the confluence of the Tsaritsa, grigori Zasekin established the fortress Sary Su as part of the defences of the unstable southern border of the Tsardom of Russia. The structure stood slightly above the mouth of the Tsaritsa River on the right bank and it soon became the nucleus of a trading settlement. In 1607 the fortress garrison rebelled against the troops of Tsar Vasili Shuisky for six months, in 1608 the city acquired its first stone church, St. John the Baptist. At the beginning of the 17th century, the garrison consisted of 350 to 400 people, in 1670 troops of Stepan Razin captured the fortress, they left after a month. In 1708 the insurgent Cossack Kondraty Bulavin held the fortress, in 1717 in the Kuban pogrom, raiders from the Kuban under the command of the Crimean Tatar Bakhti Gerai blockaded the town and enslaved thousands in the area. In August 1774 Yemelyan Pugachev unsuccessfully attempted to storm the city, in 1708 Tsaritsyn was assigned to the Kazan Governorate, in 1719 to the Astrakhan Governorate. According to the census in 1720, the city had a population of 408 people, in 1773 the city became the provincial and district town. From 1779 it belonged to the Saratov Viceroyalty, in 1780 the city came under the newly established Saratov Governorate. In the 19th century Tsaritsyn became an important river-port and commercial center, the population expanded rapidly, increasing from fewer than 3,000 people in 1807 to about 84,000 in 1900. The first railroad reached the town in 1862, the first theatre opened in 1872, the first cinema in 1907. In 1913 Tsaritsyn got its first tram-line, and the citys first electric lights were installed in the city center, during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923, Tsaritsyn came under Soviet control from November 1917. In 1918 White troops under the Ataman of the Don Cossack Host, Pyotr Krasnov, the Reds repulsed three assaults by the Whites. However, in June 1919 the White Armed Forces of South Russia under the command of General Denikin captured Tsaritsyn, the fighting from July 1918 to January 1920 became known as the Battle for Tsaritsyn. The city was renamed Stalingrad after Joseph Stalin on April 10,1925 and this was officially to recognize the citys and Stalins role in its defense against the Whites between 1918 and 1920. In 1931, the German settlement-colony Old Sarepta became a district of Stalingrad, renamed Krasnoarmeysky Rayon, it became the largest area of the city
37.
Yekaterinburg
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At the 2010 Census, it had a population of 1,349,772. Yekaterinburg is the industrial and cultural centre of the Ural Federal District. Between 1924 and 1991, the city was named Sverdlovsk after the Communist party leader Yakov Sverdlov, Vasily Tatishchev and Georg Wilhelm de Gennin founded Yekaterinburg in 1723 and named it after the wife of Tsar Peter the Great, Yekaterina, who later became empress regnant Catherine I. The official date of the foundation is November 18,1723. It was granted town status in 1796, the city was one of Russias first industrial cities, prompted at the start of the eighteenth century by decrees from the Tsar requiring the development in Yekaterinburg of metal-working businesses. The city was built, with use of iron, to a regular square plan with iron works. These were surrounded by fortified walls, so that Yekaterinburg was at the time both a manufacturing centre and a fortress at the frontier between Europe and Asia. It therefore found itself at the heart of Russias strategy for development of the entire Ural region. With the growth in trade and the administrative importance, the ironworks became less critical. Small manufacturing and trading businesses proliferated, following the October Revolution, the family of deposed Tsar Nicholas II were sent to internal exile in Yekaterinburg where they were imprisoned in the Ipatiev House in the city. Other members of the Romanov family were killed at Alapayevsk later the same day, on July 16,1918, the Czechoslovak legions were closing on Yekaterinburg. The Bolsheviks executed the deposed imperial family, believing that the Czechoslovaks were on a mission to rescue them, the Legions arrived less than a week later and captured the city. In 1977, the Ipatiev House was demolished by order of Boris Yeltsin, Yeltsin later became the first President of Russia and represented the people at the funeral of the former Tsar in 1998. On August 24,2007, the BBC reported that Russian archaeologists had found the remains of two children of Russias last Tsar, the discoveries in 2007 are thought to be those of Tsarevich Alexei and Grand Duchess Maria. Archaeologist Sergei Pogorelov said bullets found at the site indicate the children had been shot. He told Russian television the newly unearthed bones belonged to two people, a young male aged roughly 10–13 and a young woman about 18–23. The Tsars remains were given a funeral in July 1998. During the 1930s, Yekaterinburg was one of several developed by the Soviet government as a centre of heavy industry
38.
Economy of the Soviet Union
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The economy of the Soviet Union was based on a system of state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, industrial manufacturing and centralized administrative planning. The economy was characterised by control of investment, public ownership of industrial assets, macroeconomic stability, negligible unemployment. Beginning in 1928, the course of the economy was guided by a series of Five-Year Plans. By the 1950s, the Soviet Union had, during the few decades. Impressive growth rates during the first three Five-Year Plans are particularly notable given that this period is nearly congruent with the Great Depression, during this period the Soviet Union encountered a rapid industrial growth while other regions were suffering from crisis. Nevertheless, the base upon which the Five-Year Plans sought to build meant that, at the commencement of Operation Barbarossa. The major strength of the Soviet economy was its enormous supply of oil and gas, as Daniel Yergin notes, the Soviet economy in its final decades was heavily dependent on vast natural resources–oil and gas in particular. However, Yergin goes on, world oil prices collapsed in 1986, after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he began a process of economic liberalisation towards a mixed economy. The complex demands of the economy and inflexible administration overwhelmed and constrained the central planners. Corruption and data fiddling became common practice among the bureaucracy by reporting fulfilled targets and quotas, from the Stalin-era to the early Brezhnev-era, the Soviet economy grew much slower than Japan and slightly faster than the United States. GDP levels in 1950 were 510 in the USSR,161 in Japan and 1456 in the US, by 1965 the corresponding values were 1011,587, and 2607. The USSRs relatively small consumer sector accounted for just under 60% of the countrys GDP in 1990, while the industrial and agricultural sectors contributed 22%, agriculture was the predominant occupation in the USSR before the massive industrialization under Joseph Stalin. The service sector was of low importance in the USSR, with the majority of the force employed in the industrial sector. The labor force totaled 152.3 million people, major industrial products included petroleum, steel, motor vehicles, aerospace, telecommunications, chemicals, electronics, food processing, lumber, mining, and defense industry. Based on a system of ownership, the Soviet economy was managed through Gosplan, Gosbank. Beginning in 1928, the economy was directed by a series of five-year plans, for every enterprise, planning ministries defined the mix of economic inputs, a schedule for completion, all wholesale prices and almost all retail prices. The planning process was based around material balances—balancing economic inputs with planned output targets for the planning period, from 1930 until the late 1950s, the range of mathematics used to assist economic decision-making was, for ideological reasons, extremely restricted. Industry was long concentrated after 1928 on the production of goods through metallurgy, machine manufacture
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