1905 Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire, some of, directed at the government. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, military mutinies, it led to Constitutional Reform including the establishment of the State Duma, the multi-party system, the Russian Constitution of 1906. The 1905 revolution was spurred by the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese war, but by the growing realisation of the people of the need for reform, after politicians such as Sergei Witte failed to accomplish this. While the Tsar managed to keep his rule, the events foreshadowed those of the Russian revolution in 1917. At that time, rebellion after the Russian defeat in World War I resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy, execution of the royal family, creation of the Soviet Union by the Bolsheviks; some historians contend that the 1905 revolution set the stage for the 1917 Russian Revolutions, allowed for Bolshevism to emerge as a distinct political movement in Russia, although it was still a minority.
Lenin, as head of the USSR on, called it "The Great Dress rehearsal," without which the "victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible". According to Sidney Harcave, author of The Russian Revolution of 1905, four problems in Russian society contributed to the revolution. Newly emancipated peasants earned too little and were not allowed to sell or mortgage their allotted land. Ethnic minorities resented the government because of its "Russification", discrimination and repression, such as banning them from voting, serving in the Imperial Guard or Navy, limiting their attendance in schools. A nascent industrial working class resented the government for doing too little to protect them, as it banned strikes and labor unions. Radical ideas fomented and spread after a relaxing of discipline in universities allowed a new consciousness to grow among students. Taken individually, these issues might not have affected the course of Russian history, but together they created the conditions for a potential revolution.
"At the turn of the century, discontent with the Tsar’s dictatorship was manifested not only through the growth of political parties dedicated to the overthrow of the monarchy but through industrial strikes for better wages and working conditions and riots among peasants, university demonstrations, the assassination of government officials done by Socialist Revolutionaries." Because the Russian economy was tied to European finances, the contraction of Western money markets in 1899–1900 plunged Russian industry into a deep and prolonged crisis. This setback aggravated social unrest during the five years preceding the revolution of 1905; the government recognized these problems, albeit in a shortsighted and narrow-minded way. The minister of interior Plehve said in 1903 that, after the agrarian problem, the most serious issues plaguing the country were those of the Jews, the schools, the workers, in that order. One of the major contributing factors that changed Russia from a country in unrest to a country in revolt was "Bloody Sunday".
Loyalty to the tsar Nicholas II was lost when his soldiers fired upon people led by Georgy Gapon on January 2, 1905, who were attempting to present a petition to the tsar. Every year, thousands of nobles in debt mortgaged their estates to the noble land bank or sold them to municipalities, merchants, or peasants. By the time of the revolution, the nobility had sold off one-third of its land and mortgaged another third; the government hoped to make peasants—freed by the Emancipation reform of 1861—a politically conservative, land-holding class by enacting laws to enable them to buy land from nobility and pay small installments over many decades. The land, known as "allotment land", would not be owned by individual peasants, but by the community of peasants. A peasant could not sell or mortgage his land, so in practice he could not renounce his rights to his land and thus he would be required to pay his share of redemption dues to the village commune; this plan was meant to prevent proletarianisation of the peasants.
However, the peasants were not given enough land to provide for their needs. "Their earnings were so small that they could neither buy the food they needed nor keep up the payment of taxes and redemption dues they owed the government for their land allotments. By 1903 their total arrears in payments of taxes and dues was 118 million rubles." The situation became worse. Masses of hungry peasants roamed the countryside looking for work and sometimes walked hundreds of kilometres to find it. Desperate peasants proved capable of violence. "In the provinces of Kharkov and Poltava in 1902, thousands of them, ignoring restraints and authority, burst out in a rebellious fury that led to extensive destruction of property and looting of noble homes before troops could be brought to subdue and punish them."These violent outbreaks caught the attention of the government, so it created many committees to investigate their causes. The committees concluded. Although cultivated acreage had increased in the last half century, the increase had not been proportionate to the growth of peasant populations, which had doubled.
"There was general agreement at the turn of the century that Russia faced a grave and intensifying agrarian crisis due to rural overpopulation with an annual excess of fifteen to eighteen live births ov
Spoil tip
A spoil tip is a pile built of accumulated spoil – the overburden or other waste rock removed during coal and ore mining. These waste materials are composed of shale, as well as smaller quantities of carboniferous sandstone and various other residues. Spoil tips are not formed of slag; the term "spoil" is used to refer to material removed when digging a foundation, tunnel, or other large excavation. Such material may be ordinary soil and rocks, or may be contaminated with chemical waste, determining how it may be disposed of. Clean spoil may be used for land reclamation. Spoil is distinct from tailings, the processed material that remains after the valuable components have been extracted from ore; the phrase originates from the French word espoilelier, a verb conveying the meaning: to seize by violence, to plunder, to take by force. Spoil tips may be conical in shape, can appear as conspicuous features of the landscape, or they may be much flatter and eroded if vegetation has established itself.
In Loos-en-Gohelle, in the former mining area of Pas-de-Calais, are a series of five perfect cones, of which two rise 100 metres from the plain. Most the term is used for the piles of waste earth materials removed during an excavation process. In surface mining for coal or other underground deposits, earth materials removed to expose the targeted deposit are piled up alongside the excavation site in spoil banks. A dredge in placer mining is used to dig up volumes of gravel and other earth materials which are sent through sluices to remove gold or other minerals, the remaining earth materials are deposited behind the dredge in spoil banks. In hydraulic mining high-pressure jets of water dislodge earth materials which are put through sluices to sort out gold or other minerals, the residuary earth materials are left in spoil banks; the excavation of ditches and canals results in spoil banks being left along the side of the canal or ditch. Spoil banks can refer to refuse heaps formed from removal of excess surface materials.
For example, alongside livestock lots spoil banks are formed of manure and other slurry periodically removed from the surface of the livestock lot areas. Spoil tips sometimes grew to millions of tons, having been abandoned, remain as huge piles today, they trap solar heat, making it difficult for vegetation to take root. Existing techniques for regreening spoil tips include the use of geotextiles to control erosion as the site is resoiled and simple vegetation such as grass is seeded on the slope; the piles create acid rock drainage, which pollutes streams and rivers. Environmental problems have included surface runoff of silt, leaching of noxious chemical compounds from spoil banks exposed to weathering; these cause contamination of ground water, other problems. Today in the United States forward-looking state and federal mining regulations require that the earth materials from excavations be removed in such a fashion that they can be replaced after the mining operations cease in a process called mine reclamation, with oversight of mining corporations, including requiring adequate reserves of monetary bonds to guarantee a completion of the reclamation process when mining becomes unprofitable or stops.
As some spoil tips resulting from industries such as coal or oil shale production can contain a high proportion of hydrocarbons or coal dust, they can commence spontaneous subterranean combustion, which can be followed by surface fires. In some coal mining districts, such fires were considered normal and no attempt was made to extinguish them; such fires can follow slow combustion of residual hydrocarbons. Their extinction can require complete encasement, which can prove impossible for technical and financial reasons. Sprinkling is ineffective and injecting water under pressure counter-productive, because it carries oxygen, bringing the risk of explosion; the perceived weak environmental and public health impact of these fires leads to waiting for their natural extinction, which can take a number of decades. With spoil tips there is a danger of landslip; the best-known example is the Aberfan disaster in Wales of 1966, killing 144. Water from heavy rainfall had built up inside the tip, weakening the structure, until it collapsed onto the school below.
In February 2013, a spoil tip was the cause of a landslip which caused the temporary closure of the Scunthorpe to Doncaster railway line in England. Several techniques of re-utilising the spoil tips exist including either geotechnics or recycling. Most old spoil tips are revegetated to provide valuable green spaces since they are inappropriate for building purposes. At Nœux-les-Mines, an artificial ski slope has been constructed on the tip. If spoil tips are considered to contain sufficient amounts of residual material, various methods are employed to remove the spoil from the site for subsequent processing; the oldest coal-based spoil tips may still contain enough coal to begin spontaneous slow combustion. This results in a form of vitrification of the shale, which acquires sufficient mechanical strength to be of use in road construction; some can therefore have a new life in being thus exploited. Conversely, others are painstakingly preserved on account of their ec
Moldovans
Moldovans or Moldavians are the largest ethnic group of the Republic of Moldova, a significant minority in Ukraine and Russia. Under the variant Moldavians, the term may be used to refer to all inhabitants of the territory of historical Principality of Moldavia divided among Romania and Ukraine, regardless of ethnic identity; this article refers to the Moldovan/Romanian language-speaking population native to the Republic of Moldova, the historical Bessarabia and diaspora originating from these regions, self-identified as Moldovans. According to Miron Costin, a prominent chronicler from the 17th century Moldavia, the inhabitants of the Principality of Moldavia spoke Romanian and called themselves "Moldovans", but "Romanians" which, he notes, comes from "romanus"; the Slavic neighbours called Moldovans "Vlachs" or "Volokhs", a term used to refer to all native Romance speakers from Eastern Europe and the Balkan peninsula. As the ethnonym "Romanian" was gaining more and more popularity throughout Western Moldavia and Bukovina during the 19th century, its dissemination in Bessarabia, a more backward and rural province of the Russian Empire at the time, was welcomed by the Romanian-oriented intellectuals, while the majority of the rural population continued to use the old self-identification "Moldovans".
Until the 1920s, historians considered Moldovans as a subgroup of the Romanian ethnos. After 1924, within the newly created Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet authorities supported the creation of a different standardized language in order to prove that Moldovans form a separate ethnic group. In the past, the term "Moldovan" has been used to refer to the population of the historical Principality of Moldavia. However, for the inhabitants of Bessarabia living under the Russian rule, the term gained an ethnic connotation by the beginning of the 20th century: in May 1917, at a congress of Bessarabian teachers, a dispute arose over the identification of the native population. In 1918, Bessarabia joined the Kingdom of Romania, following a vote of Sfatul Ţării; the circumstance of the vote was itself complex, since the Romanian troops were present in Bessarabia at the request of the Sfatul Ţării as it was facing exterior threats and anarchy. By the time of the union, the illiterate Romanian-speaking peasants of Bessarabia did not consider themselves part of a larger Romanian nation, there was no mass nationalist movement as in other regions, such as in Transylvania.
The unified Romanian state promoted a common identity for all its Romanian-speaking inhabitants. Owing to its relative underdevelopment compared to other regions of Greater Romania, as well as to the low competence and corruption of the new Romanian administration in this province, the integration process of Bessarabia in the unified Romanian state was less successful than in other regions and was soon to be disrupted by the Soviet occupation. In 1940, during World War II, Romania agreed to an ultimatum and ceded the region to the Soviet Union, which organized it into the Moldavian SSR; the Soviets began a campaign to strengthen the Moldovan identity different from that of the rest of Romanian speakers, taking advantage of the incomplete integration of the Bessarabia into the interwar Romania. The official Soviet policy stated that Romanian and Moldovan were two different languages and, to emphasize this distinction, Moldovan had to be written in a new Cyrillic alphabet based on the Russian Cyrillic, rather than the older Romanian Cyrillic that ceased to be used in the 19th century in the Romanian Old Kingdom and 1917 in Bessarabia.
A poll conducted in the Republic of Moldova by IMAS-Inc Chișinău in October 2009 presented a detailed picture. The respondents were asked to rate the relationship between the identity of Moldovans and that of Romanians on a scale between 1 to 5; the poll showed that 26% of the entire sample, which included all ethnic groups, claimed the two identities were the same or similar, whereas 47% claimed they were different or different. The results varied among different categories of subjects. For instance, while 33% of the young respondents chose the same or similar and 44% different or different, among the senior respondents the corresponding figures were 18.5% and 53%. The proportion of those who chose the same or similar identity was higher than the average among the native speakers of Romanian/Moldovan, among the urban dwellers, among those with higher education, among the residents of the capital city. According to a study conducted in the Republic of Moldova in May 1998, when the self-declared Moldovans were asked to relate the Romanian and Moldovan identities, 55% considered them somewhat different, 26% different and less than 5% identical.
A survey carried out in the Republic of Moldova in 1992 showed that 87% of the Romanian/Moldovan speakers chose to identify themselves as "Moldovans", rather than "Romanians". The major Moldovan political forces have diverging opinions regarding the identity of Moldovans; this contradiction is reflected in their stance towards the national history that should be taught in schools. Governing forces such
Pyotr Gorlov
Pyotr Nikolayevich Gorlov was a geologist and engineer who explored coal deposits in the Donets Basin, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Ussuri Krai. He founded the city of Horlivka. Article with picture of the monument
Armenians
Armenians are an ethnic group native to the Armenian Highlands of Western Asia. Armenians constitute the de facto independent Artsakh. There is a wide-ranging diaspora of around 5 million people of full or partial Armenian ancestry living outside modern Armenia; the largest Armenian populations today exist in Russia, the United States, Georgia, Germany, Lebanon and Syria. With the exceptions of Iran and the former Soviet states, the present-day Armenian diaspora was formed as a result of the Armenian Genocide. Most Armenians adhere to the Armenian Apostolic Church, a non-Chalcedonian church, the world's oldest national church. Christianity began to spread in Armenia soon after Jesus' death, due to the efforts of two of his apostles, St. Thaddeus and St. Bartholomew. In the early 4th century, the Kingdom of Armenia became the first state to adopt Christianity as a state religion. Armenian is an Indo-European language, it has two mutually intelligible and written forms: Eastern Armenian, today spoken in Armenia, Artsakh and the former Soviet republics.
The unique Armenian alphabet was invented in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots. The name Armenian has come to internationally designate this group of people, it was first used by neighbouring countries of ancient Armenia. The earliest attestations of the exonym Armenia date around the 6th century BC. In his trilingual Behistun Inscription dated to 517 BC, Darius I the Great of Persia refers to Urashtu as Armina (in Old Persian. In Greek, Αρμένιοι "Armenians" is attested from about the same time the earliest reference being a fragment attributed to Hecataeus of Miletus. Xenophon, a Greek general serving in some of the Persian expeditions, describes many aspects of Armenian village life and hospitality in around 401 BC, he relates that the people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like the language of the Persians. Armenians call themselves Hay; the name has traditionally been derived from Hayk, the legendary patriarch of the Armenians and a great-great-grandson of Noah, according to Moses of Chorene, defeated the Babylonian king Bel in 2492 BC and established his nation in the Ararat region.
It is further postulated that the name Hay comes from one of the two confederated, Hittite vassal states—the Ḫayaša-Azzi. Movses Khorenatsi, the important early medieval Armenian historian, wrote that the word Armenian originated from the name Armenak or Aram; the Armenian Highland is the area surrounding the highest peak of the region. A controversial hypothesis put forward by some scholars, such as T. Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov, has proposed that the Indo-European homeland was around the Armenian Highland; the modern Armenian language is grouped with Greek and Ancient Macedonian in the Pontic Indo-European subgroup of Indo-European languages by Eric P. Hamp in his 2012 Indo-European family tree, groups. There are two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive, for a common origin of the Armenian and Greek languages. Ancient Greek scholars, such as Herodotus, suggest that the Phrygians of western Anatolia, who spoke an Indo-European language, had made a contribution to the ethnogenesis of the Armenians: "the Armenians were equipped like Phrygians, being Phrygian colonists".
This appears to imply that some Phrygians migrated eastward to Armenia following the destruction of Phrygia by a Cimmerian invasion in the late 7th century BC. Greek scholars believed that the Phrygians had originated in the Balkans, in an area adjoining Macedonia, from where they had emigrated to Anatolia many centuries earlier. In Hamp's view the homeland of the proposed Greco-Armenian subgroup is the northeast coast of the Black Sea and its hinterlands, he assumes that they migrated from there southeast through the Caucasus with the Armenians remaining after Batumi while the pre-Greeks proceeded westwards along the southern coast of the Black Sea. Some genetics studies explain Armenian diversity by several mixtures of Eurasian populations that occurred between ~3,000 and ~2,000 BC, but genetic signals of population mixture cease after ~1,200 BC when Bronze Age civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean world and violently collapsed. Armenians have since remained isolated and genetic structure within the population developed ~500 years ago when Armenia was divided between the Ottomans and the Safavid Empire in Iran.
In the Bronze Age, several states flourished in the area of Greater Armenia, including the Hittite Empire and Hayasa-Azzi. Soon after Hayasa-Azzi came Arme-Shupria, the Nairi and the Kingdom of Urartu, who successively established their sovereignty over the Armenian Highland; each of the aforementioned nations and tribes participated in the ethnogenesis of the Armenian people. Under Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian empire reached the Caucasus Mountains. Yerevan, the modern capital of Armenia, was founded in 782 BC by king Argishti I; the first geographical entity, called Armenia by neighboring peoples was established in the late 6th century BC u
Azerbaijanis
Azerbaijanis or Azeris known as Azerbaijani Turks, are a Turkic people living in the Iranian region of Azerbaijan and the sovereign Republic of Azerbaijan. They are the second-most numerous ethnic group among the Turkic peoples after Anatolian Turks, they are predominantly Shi'i Muslims. They comprise the largest ethnic group in the Republic of Azerbaijan and the second-largest ethnic group in neighboring Iran and Georgia; the world's largest number of ethnic Azerbaijanis live in Iran, followed by the Republic of Azerbaijan. In spite of being speakers of a Turkic language, Iranian Azerbaijanis are believed to be descended from the earlier Iranian speakers of the region as historical research and genetic tests have proven, they are the possible descendants of the Medes, an Ancient Iranian ethnic group which inhabited the current region. Close genetics with the Kurds, an Iranian ethnic group, have supported this idea. Thus, due to their historical and cultural ties to the Iranians, Iranian Azerbaijanis are often associated with the Iranian peoples.
Genetic studies observed that they are genetically related to the Iranian peoples. The Azerbaijanis of the Republic of Azerbaijan are of Caucasian and Iranian origin and are said to be the descendants of inhabitants of Caucasian Albania. There is evidence that, despite repeated invasions and migrations, aboriginal Caucasians may have been culturally assimilated, first by Iranians, such as the Alans, Ancient Persians and by the Oghuz Turks. Considerable information has been learned about the Caucasian Albanians including their language, early conversion to Christianity, close ties to the Armenians. Many academics believe that the Udi language, still spoken in Azerbaijan, is a remnant of the Albanians' language. Genetic testing has proven that the region has a mixed population with relationships, in order of greatest similarity, with the Caucasus and Near Easterners and Turkmen. Following the Russo-Persian Wars of 1813 and 1828, the territories of the Sublime State of Iran in the Caucasus were ceded to the Russian Empire and the treaties of Gulistan in 1813 and Turkmenchay in 1828 finalized the borders between Russia and Qajar Iran.
The formation of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918 established the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Differences in the Azerbaijani language have arisen after centuries of separation from Iran with there being significant differences in the grammatical and lexical structures of the language. Additionally and Azeri are mutually intelligible to a high enough degree that their speakers can have simple conversation without prior knowledge of the other, which prompted some Turkic linguists to classify their relationship as a Western Oghuz dialect continuum. Azerbaijan is believed to be named after Atropates, a Persian satrap who ruled in Atropatene circa 321 BC; the name Atropates is the Hellenistic form of Aturpat which means'guardian of fire'. Present-day name Azerbaijan is the Arabicized form of Azarbaigān; the latter is derived from Ādurbādagān, itself from Āturpātakān meaning'the land associated with Aturpat'. The modern ethnonym "Azerbaijani" or "Azeri" refers to the Turkic peoples of Iranian Azerbaijan and Republic of Azerbaijan.
They called themselves or were referred to by others as Muslims, Turkmens, Persians, or Ajams –, to say that religious identification prevailed over ethnic identification. When the Southern Caucasus became part of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, the Russian authorities, who traditionally referred to all Turkic people as Tatars, defined Tatars living in the Transcaucasus region as Caucasian or Aderbeijanskie Tatars in order to distinguish them from other Turkic groups; the Russian Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, written in the 1890s referred to Tatars in Azerbaijan as Aderbeijans, but noted that the term had not been adopted. This ethnonym was used by Joseph Deniker: grouping coincide with the somatological grouping: thus the Aderbeijani of the Caucasus and Persia, who speak a Turkic language, have the same physical type as the Hadjemi-Persians, who speak an Iranian tongue. In Azerbaijani language publications, the expression "Azerbaijani nation" referring to those who were known as Tatars of the Caucasus first appeared in the newspaper Kashkul in 1880.
Ancient residents of the area spoke Old Azeri from the Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. In the 11th century AD with Seljukid conquests, Oghuz Turkic tribes started moving across the Iranian plateau into the Caucasus and Anatolia; the influx of the Oghuz and other Turkmen tribes was further accentuated by the Mongol invasion. Here, the Oghuz tribes divided into various smaller groups, some of whom – Sunni – moved to Anatolia and became settled, while others remained in the Caucasus region and – due to the influence of the Safaviyya – converted to the Shia branch of Islam; the latter were to keep the name "Turkmen" or "Turcoman" for a long t
Revolutions of 1989
The Revolutions of 1989 formed part of a revolutionary wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. The period is sometimes called the Fall of Nations or the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term Spring of Nations, sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848; the events of the full-blown revolution first began in Poland in 1989 and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria and Romania. One feature common to most of these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance, demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one-party rule and contributing to the pressure for change. Romania was the only Eastern Bloc country. Protests in Tiananmen Square failed to stimulate major political changes in China, but influential images of courageous defiance during that protest helped to precipitate events in other parts of the globe. On 4 June 1989, the trade union Solidarity won an overwhelming victory in a free election in Poland, leading to the peaceful fall of Communism in that country in the summer of 1989.
In June 1989, Hungary began dismantling its section of the physical Iron Curtain, leading to an exodus of East Germans through Hungary, which destabilised East Germany. This led to mass demonstrations in cities such as Leipzig and subsequently to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990; the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, resulting in eleven new countries, which had declared their independence from the Soviet Union in the course of the year, while the Baltic states regained their independence in September 1991. The rest of the Soviet Union, which constituted the bulk of the area, became the Russian Federation in December 1991. Albania and Yugoslavia abandoned Communism between 1990 and 1992. By 1992, Yugoslavia had split into five successor states, namely Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, renamed Serbia and Montenegro in 2003 and split in 2006 into two states and Montenegro.
Serbia was further split with the breakaway of the recognised state of Kosovo in 2008. Czechoslovakia dissolved three years after the end of Communist rule, splitting peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992; the impact of these events was felt in many Socialist countries. Communism was abandoned in countries such as Cambodia, Ethiopia and South Yemen. During the adoption of varying forms of market economy, there was a general decline in living standards for many former Communist countries. Political reforms were varied, but in only four countries were Communist parties able to retain a monopoly on power, namely China, Cuba and Vietnam. Many communist and socialist organisations in the West turned their guiding principles over to social democracy and democratic socialism. Communist parties in Italy and San Marino suffered and the reformation of the Italian political class took place in the early 1990s. In South America, the Pink tide swept through the early 2000s; the European political landscape changed drastically, with several former Eastern Bloc countries joining NATO and the European Union, resulting in stronger economic and social integration with Western Europe and the United States.
Socialism had been gaining momentum among working class citizens of the world since the 19th century. These culminated in the early 20th century when several states and colonies formed their own communist parties. Many of the countries involved had hierarchical structures with monarchic governments and aristocratic social structures with an established nobility. Socialism was undesirable within the circles of the ruling classes in the late 19th/early 20th century states, its champions suffered persecution. This had been the practice in states which identified as exercising a multi-party system; the Russian Revolution of 1917 saw the first communist state in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government. During the period between the world wars, communism had been on the rise in many parts of the world in towns and cities; this led to a series of purges in many countries to stifle the movement. Violent resistance to this repression led to an increase in support for communism in Central and Eastern Europe.
In the early stages of World War II, both Nazi Germany and the USSR invaded and occupied the countries of Eastern Europe after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Germany turned against and invaded the USSR: the battles of this Eastern Front were the largest in history; the USSR joined with the Allies and in conferences at Tehran and Yalta, the Allies agreed that Central and Eastern Europe would be in the "Soviet sphere of political influence.". The USSR fought the Germans to a standstill and began driving them back, reaching Berlin before the end of the war. Nazi ideology was violently anti-communist, the Nazis brutally suppressed communist movements in the countries it occupied. Communists played a large part in the resist
Ukraine
Donetsk Oblast
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Barnsley,[32] United Kingdom, since 1987
Pensacola, United States
