Soviet Union
The Soviet Union the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were centralized; the country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Minsk, Alma-Ata, Novosibirsk, it spanned over 10,000 kilometres east to west across 11 time zones, over 7,200 kilometres north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, steppes and mountains; the Soviet Union had its roots in the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government which had replaced Tsar Nicholas II during World War I. In 1922, the Soviet Union was formed by a treaty which legalized the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian and Byelorussian republics that had occurred from 1918. Following Lenin's death in 1924 and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s.
Stalin committed the state's ideology to Marxism–Leninism and constructed a command economy which led to a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization. During his rule, political paranoia fermented and the Great Purge removed Stalin's opponents within and outside of the party via arbitrary arrests and persecutions of many people, resulting in at least 600,000 deaths. In 1933, a major famine struck the country. Before the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviets signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, after which the USSR invaded Poland on 17 September 1939. In June 1941, Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theatre 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 intense battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk; the territories overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Soviet Union.
The post-war division of Europe into capitalist and communist halves would lead to increased tensions with the United States-led Western Bloc, known as the Cold War. Stalin died in 1953 and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin and began the de-Stalinization; the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred during Khrushchev's rule, among the many factors that led to his downfall in 1964. In the early 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed with the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. In 1985, the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost and perestroika, which caused political instability. In 1989, Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist governments; as part of an attempt to prevent the country's dissolution due to rising nationalist and separatist movements, a referendum was held in March 1991, boycotted by some republics, that resulted in a majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the union as a renewed federation.
Gorbachev's power was diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin's high-profile role in facing down a coup d'état attempted by Communist Party hardliners. In late 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union met and formally dissolved the Soviet Union; the remaining 12 constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states, with the Russian Federation—formerly the Russian SFSR—assuming the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and being recognized as the successor state. The Soviet Union was a powerhouse of many significant technological achievements and innovations of the 20th century, including the world's first human-made satellite, the first humans in space and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus; the country had the largest standing military in the world. The Soviet Union was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states and possessed the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, it was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Federation of Trade Unions and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.
The word "Soviet" is derived from a Russian word сове́т meaning council, advice, harmony and all deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of vět-iti, related to Slavic věst, English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or", or the Dutch weten. The word sovietnik means "councillor". A number of organizations in Russian history were called "council". For example, in the Russian Empire the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905. During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union, which he named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. Stalin resisted the proposal, but accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name of the newly proposed sta
Nadezhda Krupskaya
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and the wife of Vladimir Lenin from 1898 until his death in 1924. She served as the Soviet Union's Deputy Minister of Education from 1929 until her death in 1939. Nadezhda Krupskaya was born to an impoverished family, her father, Konstantin Ignat'evich Krupski, was a Russian military officer and a nobleman of the Russian Empire, orphaned in 1847 at the age of nine. He was given a commission as an infantry officer in the Russian Army. Just before leaving for his assignment in Poland, he married Krupskaya's mother. After six years of service, Krupski lost favour with his supervisors and was charged with "un-Russian activities." He may have been suspected of being involved with revolutionaries. Following this time he wherever he could find work. Just before his death, he was recommissioned as an officer. Krupskaya's mother, Elizaveta Vasilyevna Tistrova, was the daughter of landless Russian nobles. Elizaveta's parents died when she was young and she was enrolled in the Bestuzhev Courses, the highest formal education available to women in Russia at the time.
After earning her degree, Elizaveta worked as a governess for noble families until she married Krupski. Having parents who were well educated and of aristocratic descent, combined with first-hand experience of lower-class working conditions led to the formation of many of Krupskaya's ideological beliefs. "From her childhood Krupskaya was inspired with the spirit of protest against the ugly life around her."One of Krupskaya's friends from gymnasium, Ariadne Tyrkova, described her as "a tall, quiet girl, who did not flirt with the boys and thought with deliberation, had formed strong convictions... She was one of those who are forever committed, once they have been possessed by their thoughts and feelings..." She attended two different secondary schools before finding the perfect fit with Prince A. A. Obolensky's Female Gymnasium, "a distinguished private girls' secondary school in Petersburg." This education was more liberal than most other gymnasiums since it was noted that some of the staff were former revolutionaries.
After her father's death and her mother gave lessons as a source of income. Krupskaya had expressed an interest in entering the education field from a young age, she was drawn to Leo Tolstoy's theories on education, which were fluid instead of structured. They focused on the personal development of each individual student and centred on the importance of the teacher–student relationship; this led Krupskaya to study many including his theories of reformation. These were peaceful, law-abiding ideas, which focused on people abstaining from unneeded luxuries and being self-dependent instead of hiring someone else to tend their house, etc. Tolstoy made a lasting impression on Krupskaya, she was always modest in dress, as were her furnishings in her office. As a devoted, lifelong student, Krupskaya began to participate in several discussion circles; these groups were formed to study and discuss particular topics for the benefit of everyone involved. It was in one of these circles, that Krupskaya was first introduced to the theories of Marx.
This piqued her interest as a potential way of making life better for her people and she began an in-depth study of Marxist philosophy. This was difficult since books on the subject had been banned by the Russian government, meaning that revolutionaries collected them and kept them in underground libraries. Krupskaya first met Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1894 at a similar discussion group, she was impressed by his speeches but not his personality, at least not at first. It is hard to know much of the courtship between Lenin and Krupskaya as neither party spoke of personal matters. In October 1896, several months after Lenin was arrested, Krupskaya was arrested. After some time, Lenin was sentenced to exile in Siberia, they had little communication while in prison but before leaving for Siberia, Lenin wrote a "secret note" to Krupskaya, delivered by her mother. It suggested that she could be permitted to join him in Siberia if she told people she was his fiancée. At that time, Krupskaya was still awaiting sentencing in Siberia.
In 1898, Krupskaya was permitted to accompany Lenin but only if they were married as soon as she arrived. In her memoirs, Krupskaya notes "with him such a job as translation was a labour of love", her relationship with Lenin was more professional than marital, but she remained loyal, never once considering divorce. It is believed Krupskaya suffered from Graves' disease, an illness affecting the thyroid gland in the neck which causes the eyes to bulge and the neck to tighten, it can disrupt the menstrual cycle, which may explain why Lenin and Krupskaya never had children. Upon his release, Lenin settled in Munich. Upon her release Krupskaya joined him. After she had arrived the couple moved to London. Krupskaya's political life was active: she was anything but a mere functionary of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from 1903. Leon Trotsky, working with Lenin and Krupskaya from 1902–1903, writes in his autobiography of the central importance of Krupskaya in the day-to-day work of the RSDLP and its newspaper, Iskra.
"The secretary of the editorial board was wife She was at the ver
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is Russia's second-largest city after Moscow, with 5 million inhabitants in 2012, part of the Saint Petersburg agglomeration with a population of 6.2 million. An important Russian port on the Baltic Sea, it has a status of a federal subject. Situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on 27 May 1703. During the periods 1713–1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of Imperial Russia. In 1918, the central government bodies moved to Moscow, about 625 km to the south-east. Saint Petersburg is one of the most modern cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital; the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. Many foreign consulates, international corporations and businesses have offices in Saint Petersburg. An admirer of everything German, Peter the Great named the city, Sankt-Peterburg.
On 1 September 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the Imperial government renamed the city Petrograd, meaning "Peter's city", in order to expunge the German name Sankt and Burg. On 26 January 1924, shortly after the death of Vladimir Lenin, it was renamed to Leningrad, meaning "Lenin's City". On 6 September 1991, Sankt-Peterburg, was returned. Today, in English the city is known as "Saint Petersburg". Local residents refer to the city by its shortened nickname, Piter; the city's traditional nicknames among Russians are the Window to Europe. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in what was called Ingermanland, inhabited by Finnic tribe of Ingrians; the small town of Nyen grew up around it. At the end of the 17th century, Peter the Great, interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, wanted Russia to gain a seaport in order to trade with the rest of Europe, he needed a better seaport than the country's main one at the time, on the White Sea in the far north and closed to shipping during the winter.
On 12 May 1703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans and soon replaced the fortress. On 27 May 1703, closer to the estuary 5 km inland from the gulf), on Zayachy Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city; the city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia. Tens of thousands of serfs died building the city; the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate. Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712, 9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the right bank of the Neva, near the Peter and Paul Fortress. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan. By 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals; the project is evident in the layout of the streets.
In 1716, Peter the Great appointed Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. The style of Petrine Baroque, developed by Trezzini and other architects and exemplified by such buildings as the Menshikov Palace, Kunstkamera and Paul Cathedral, Twelve Collegia, became prominent in the city architecture of the early 18th century. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great. In 1725, Peter died at the age of fifty-two, his endeavours to modernize Russia had met with opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life and a treason case involving his son. In 1728, Peter II of Russia moved his seat back to Moscow, but four years in 1732, under Empress Anna of Russia, Saint Petersburg was again designated as the capital of the Russian Empire. It remained the seat of the Romanov dynasty and the Imperial Court of the Russian Tsars, as well as the seat of the Russian government, for another 186 years until the communist revolution of 1917.
In 1736–1737 the city suffered from catastrophic fires. To rebuild the damaged boroughs, a committee under Burkhard Christoph von Münnich commissioned a new plan in 1737; the city was divided into five boroughs, the city centre was moved to the Admiralty borough, situated on the east bank between the Neva and Fontanka. It developed along three radial streets, which meet at the Admiralty building and are now one street known as Nevsky Prospekt, Gorokhovaya Street and Voznesensky Prospekt. Baroque architecture became dominant in the city during the first sixty years, culminating in the Elizabethan Baroque, represented most notably by Italian Bartolomeo Rastrelli with such buildings as the Winter Palace. In the 1760s, Baroque architecture was succeeded by neoclassical architecture. Established in 1762, the Commission of Stone Buildings of Moscow and Saint Petersburg ruled that no structure in the
Dr. Seuss
Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American children's author, political cartoonist, animator. He is known for his work writing and illustrating more than 60 books under the pen name Doctor Seuss, his work includes many of the most popular children's books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages by the time of his death. Geisel adopted the name "Dr. Seuss" as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College and as a graduate student at Lincoln College, Oxford, he left Oxford in 1927 to begin his career as an illustrator and cartoonist for Vanity Fair and various other publications. He worked as an illustrator for advertising campaigns, most notably for FLIT and Standard Oil, as a political cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM, he published his first children's book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street in 1937. During World War II, he took a brief hiatus from children's literature to illustrate political cartoons, he worked in the animation and film department of the United States Army where he wrote, produced or animated many productions – both live-action and animated – including Design for Death, which won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
After the war, Geisel returned to writing children's books, writing classics like If I Ran the Zoo, Horton Hears a Who!, If I Ran the Circus, The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Green Eggs and Ham. He published over 60 books during his career, which have spawned numerous adaptations, including 11 television specials, five feature films, a Broadway musical, four television series. Geisel won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958 for Horton Hatches the Egg and again in 1961 for And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. Geisel's birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association. Geisel was born and raised in Springfield, the son of Henrietta and Theodor Robert Geisel, his father managed the family brewery and was appointed to supervise Springfield's public park system by Mayor John A. Denison after the brewery closed because of Prohibition. Mulberry Street in Springfield, made famous in his first children's book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, is near his boyhood home on Fairfield Street.
The family was of German descent, Geisel and his sister Marnie experienced anti-German prejudice from other children following the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Geisel attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1925. At Dartmouth, he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and the humor magazine Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern rising to the rank of editor-in-chief. While at Dartmouth, he was caught drinking gin with nine friends in his room. At the time, the possession and consumption of alcohol was illegal under Prohibition laws, which remained in place between 1920 and 1933; as a result of this infraction, Dean Craven Laycock insisted that Geisel resign from all extracurricular activities, including the Jack-O-Lantern. To continue working on the magazine without the administration's knowledge, Geisel began signing his work with the pen name "Seuss", he was encouraged in his writing by professor of rhetoric W. Benfield Pressey, whom he described as his "big inspiration for writing" at Dartmouth. Upon graduating from Dartmouth, he entered Lincoln College, intending to earn a D.
Phil. in English literature. At Oxford, he met Helen Palmer, who encouraged him to give up becoming an English teacher in favor of pursuing drawing as a career, she recalled that "Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him. Geisel left Oxford without earning a degree and returned to the United States in February 1927, where he began submitting writings and drawings to magazines, book publishers, advertising agencies. Making use of his time in Europe, he pitched a series of cartoons called Eminent Europeans to Life magazine, but the magazine passed on it, his first nationally published cartoon appeared in the July 16, 1927, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. This single $25 sale encouraged Geisel to move from Springfield to New York City; that year, Geisel accepted a job as writer and illustrator at the humor magazine Judge, he felt financially stable enough to marry Helen. His first cartoon for Judge appeared on October 22, 1927, the Geisels were married on November 29.
Geisel's first work signed "Dr. Seuss" was published in Judge about six months after he started working there. In early 1928, one of Geisel's cartoons for Judge mentioned Flit, a common bug spray at the time manufactured by Standard Oil of New Jersey. According to Geisel, the wife of an advertising executive in charge of advertising Flit saw Geisel's cartoon at a hairdresser's and urged her husband to sign him. Geisel's first Flit ad appeared on May 31, 1928, the campaign continued sporadically until 1941; the campaign's catchphrase "Quick, the Flit!" became a part of popular culture. It was used as a punch line for comedians such as Fred Allen and Jack Benny; as Geisel gained notoriety for the Flit campaign, his work was in demand and began to appear in magazines such as Life and Vanity Fair. The money Geisel earned from his advertising work and magazine submissions made him wealthier than his most successful Dartmouth classmates; the increased income allowed the Geisels to move to better quarters and to socialize in higher social circles.
They became friends with the wealthy
Mother Goose
The figure of Mother Goose is the imaginary author of a collection of French fairy tales and of English nursery rhymes. As a character, she appeared in a song, the first stanza of which functions now as a nursery rhyme. This, was dependent on a Christmas pantomime, a successor to, still performed in the United Kingdom; the term's appearance in English dates back to the early 18th century, when Charles Perrault’s fairy tale collection, Contes de ma Mère l'Oye, was first translated into English as Tales of My Mother Goose. A compilation of English nursery rhymes, titled Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle, helped perpetuate the name both in Britain and the United States. Mother Goose's name was identified with English collections of stories and nursery rhymes popularised in the 17th century. English readers would have been familiar with Mother Hubbard, a stock figure when Edmund Spenser published the satire Mother Hubberd's Tale in 1590, as well as with similar fairy tales told by "Mother Bunch" in the 1690s.
An early mention appears in an aside in a versified French chronicle of weekly events, Jean Loret's La Muse Historique, collected in 1650. His remark, comme un conte de la Mère Oye shows that the term was understood. Additional 17th-century Mother Goose/Mere l'Oye references appear in French literature in the 1620s and 1630s. In the 20th century, Katherine Elwes-Thomas theorised that the image and name "Mother Goose" or "Mère l'Oye" might be based upon ancient legends of the wife of King Robert II of France, known as "Berthe la fileuse" or Berthe pied d'oie described as spinning incredible tales that enraptured children. Other scholars have pointed out that Charlemagne's mother, Bertrada of Laon, came to be known as the goose-foot queen. There are sources that trace Mother Goose's origin back to the biblical Queen of Sheba. Despite evidence to the contrary, it has been claimed in America that the original Mother Goose was the Bostonian wife of Isaac Goose, either named Elizabeth Foster Goose or Mary Goose.
Alternatively, the original Mother Goose lived in Boston in the 1660s as the second wife of Isaac Goose, who brought to the marriage six children of her own to add to Isaac's ten. After Isaac died, Elizabeth went to live with her eldest daughter, who had married Thomas Fleet, a publisher who lived on Pudding Lane. According to Early, "Mother Goose" used to sing songs and ditties to her grandchildren all day, other children swarmed to hear them, her son-in-law gathered her jingles together and printed them, though no evidence of such prints has been found. Iona and Peter Opie, leading authorities on nursery lore, give no credence to either the Elwes-Thomas or the Boston suppositions, it is accepted that the term does not refer to any particular person. Charles Perrault, one of the initiators of the literary fairy tale genre, published a collection of such tales in 1695 called Histoires ou contes du temps passés, avec des moralités under the name of his son, which became better known under its subtitle of Contes de ma mère l'Oye or Tales of My Mother Goose.
Perrault's publication marks the first authenticated starting-point for Mother Goose stories. In 1729, an English translation appeared of Perrault's collection, Robert Samber's Histories or Tales of Past Times, Told by Mother Goose, which introduced Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots and other Perrault tales to English-speaking audiences; the first public appearance of the Mother Goose stories in America was in Worcester, where printer Isaiah Thomas reprinted Samber's volume under the same title in 1786. Maurice Ravel ‘s Ma mère l'oye suite is dependent on Perrault’s collection. Starting with five pieces for piano duet in 1908-10, he orchestrated them for a ballet in which two of the episodes were named after the fairy tale characters Sleeping Beauty and Tom Thumb; the ballet was first performed in Paris in 1912 and that year in Chicago. John Newbery was once believed to have published a compilation of English nursery rhymes titled Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the cradle some time in the 1760s, but the first edition was published in 1780 or 1781 by Thomas Carnan, one of Newbery's successors.
This edition was registered with the Stationers' Company, London in 1780. However, no copy has been traced, the earliest surviving edition is dated 1784; the name "Mother Goose" has been associated in the English-speaking world with children's poetry since. In 1834, John Bellenden Ker Gawler published a book deriving the origin of the Mother Goose rhymes as arising from political disaffection expressed in a invented Flemish language, an effort described by the Opies as "the most extraordinary example of misdirected labour in the history of English letters". In addition to being the purported author of nursery rhymes, Mother Goose is herself the title character in one recorded by the Opies, only the first verse of which figures in editions of their book. Titled "Old Mother Goose and the Golden Egg", this verse prefaced a 15-stanza poem that rambled through a variety of adventures involving not only the egg but Mother Goose's son Jack. There exists an illustrated chapbook omitting their opening stanza that dates from the 1820s and another version was recorded by J. O. Halliwell in his The Nursery Rhymes of England.
Other shorter versions were recorded later. All of them, were dependent on a successful pantomime first performed
Ukraine
Ukraine, sometimes called the Ukraine, is a country in Eastern Europe. Excluding Crimea, Ukraine has a population of about 42.5 million, making it the 32nd most populous country in the world. Its capital and largest city is Kiev. Ukrainian is the official language and its alphabet is Cyrillic; the dominant religions in the country are Greek Catholicism. Ukraine is in a territorial dispute with Russia over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014. Including Crimea, Ukraine has an area of 603,628 km2, making it the largest country within Europe and the 46th largest country in the world; the territory of modern Ukraine has been inhabited since 32,000 BC. During the Middle Ages, the area was a key centre of East Slavic culture, with the powerful state of Kievan Rus' forming the basis of Ukrainian identity. Following its fragmentation in the 13th century, the territory was contested and divided by a variety of powers, including Lithuania, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. A Cossack republic emerged and prospered during the 17th and 18th centuries, but its territory was split between Poland and the Russian Empire, merged into the Russian-dominated Soviet Union in the late 1940s as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In 1991 Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its dissolution at the end of the Cold War. Before its independence, Ukraine was referred to in English as "The Ukraine", but most sources have since moved to drop "the" from the name of Ukraine in all uses. Following its independence, Ukraine declared itself a neutral state. In 2013, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovych had decided to suspend the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement and seek closer economic ties with Russia, a several-months-long wave of demonstrations and protests known as the Euromaidan began, which escalated into the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that led to the overthrow of Yanukovych and the establishment of a new government; these events formed the background for the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, the War in Donbass in April 2014. On 1 January 2016, Ukraine applied the economic component of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the European Union.
Ukraine is ranks 88th on the Human Development Index. As of 2018, Ukraine has the second lowest GDP per capita in Europe. At US$40, it has the lowest median wealth per adult in the world, it suffers from a high poverty rate and severe corruption. However, because of its extensive fertile farmlands, Ukraine is one of the world's largest grain exporters. Ukraine maintains the second-largest military in Europe after that of Russia; the country is home to a multi-ethnic population, 77.8 percent of whom are Ukrainians, followed by a large Russian minority, as well as Georgians, Belarusians, Crimean Tatars, Jews and Hungarians. Ukraine is a unitary republic under a semi-presidential system with separate powers: legislative and judicial branches; the country is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, the GUAM organization, one of the founding states of the Commonwealth of Independent States. There are different hypotheses as to the etymology of the name Ukraine. According to the older widespread hypothesis, it means "borderland", while some more recent linguistic studies claim a different meaning: "homeland" or "region, country"."The Ukraine" used to be the usual form in English, but since the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, "the Ukraine" has become less common in the English-speaking world, style-guides recommend not using the definite article.
"The Ukraine" now implies disregard for the country's sovereignty, according to U. S. ambassador William Taylor. The Ukrainian position is that the usage of "'The Ukraine' is incorrect both grammatically and politically." Neanderthal settlement in Ukraine is seen in the Molodova archaeological sites which include a mammoth bone dwelling. The territory is considered to be the location for the human domestication of the horse. Modern human settlement in Ukraine and its vicinity dates back to 32,000 BC, with evidence of the Gravettian culture in the Crimean Mountains. By 4,500 BC, the Neolithic Cucuteni–Trypillia culture flourished in wide areas of modern Ukraine including Trypillia and the entire Dnieper-Dniester region. During the Iron Age, the land was inhabited by Cimmerians and Sarmatians. Between 700 BC and 200 BC it was Scythia. Beginning in the sixth century BC, colonies of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and the Byzantine Empire, such as Tyras and Chersonesus, were founded on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea.
These colonies thrived well into the 6th century AD. The Goths stayed in the area but came under the sway of the Huns from the 370s AD. In the 7th century AD, the territory of eastern Ukraine was the centre of Old Great Bulgaria. At the end of the century, the majority of Bulgar tribes migrated in different directions, the Khazars took over much of the land. In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Antes were located in the territory of; the Antes were the ancestors of Ukrainians: White Croats, Polans, Dulebes and Tiverians. Migrations from Ukraine throughout the Balkans established many Southern Slavic nations. Northern migrations, reaching to the Ilmen l
Ballet
Ballet is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread technical form of dance with its own vocabulary based on French terminology, it has been globally influential and has defined the foundational techniques used in many other dance genres and cultures. Ballet has been taught in various schools around the world, which have incorporated their own cultures and as a result, the art has evolved in a number of distinct ways. See glossary of ballet. A ballet, a work, consists of the music for a ballet production. Ballets are performed by trained ballet dancers. Traditional classical ballets are performed with classical music accompaniment and use elaborate costumes and staging, whereas modern ballets, such as the neoclassical works of American choreographer George Balanchine are performed in simple costumes and without the use of elaborate sets or scenery.
Ballet is a French word which had its origin in Italian balletto, a diminutive of ballo which comes from Latin ballo, meaning "to dance", which in turn comes from the Greek "βαλλίζω", "to dance, to jump about". The word came into English usage from the French around 1630. Ballet originated in the Italian Renaissance courts of the sixteenth centuries. Under Catherine de' Medici's influence as Queen, it spread to France, where it developed further; the dancers in these early court ballets were noble amateurs. Ornamented costumes were meant to impress viewers, but they restricted performers' freedom of movement; the ballets were performed in large chambers with viewers on three sides. The implementation of the proscenium arch from 1618 on distanced performers from audience members, who could better view and appreciate the technical feats of the professional dancers in the productions. French court ballet reached its height under the reign of King Louis XIV. Louis founded the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661 to establish standards and certify dance instructors.
In 1672, Louis XIV made Jean-Baptiste Lully the director of the Académie Royale de Musique from which the first professional ballet company, the Paris Opera Ballet, arose. Pierre Beauchamp served as Lully's ballet-master. Together their partnership would drastically influence the development of ballet, as evidenced by the credit given to them for the creation of the five major positions of the feet. By 1681, the first "ballerinas" took the stage following years of training at the Académie. Ballet started to decline in France after 1830, but it continued to develop in Denmark and Russia; the arrival in Europe of the Ballets Russes led by Sergei Diaghilev on the eve of the First World War revived interest in the ballet and started the modern era. In the twentieth century, ballet had a wide influence on other dance genres, Also in the twentieth century, ballet took a turn dividing it from classical ballet to the introduction of modern dance, leading to modernist movements in several countries. Famous dancers of the twentieth century include Anna Pavlova, Galina Ulanova, Rudolf Nureyev, Maya Plisetskaya, Margot Fonteyn, Rosella Hightower, Maria Tall Chief, Erik Bruhn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Suzanne Farrell, Gelsey Kirkland, Natalia Makarova, Arthur Mitchell.
Stylistic variations and subgenres have evolved over time. Early, classical variations are associated with geographic origin. Examples of this are Russian ballet, French ballet, Italian ballet. Variations, such as contemporary ballet and neoclassical ballet, incorporate both classical ballet and non-traditional technique and movement; the most known and performed ballet style is late Romantic ballet. Classical ballet is based on vocabulary. Different styles have emerged in different countries, such as French ballet, Italian ballet, English ballet, Russian ballet. Several of the classical ballet styles are associated with specific training methods named after their creators; the Royal Academy of Dance method is a ballet technique and training system, founded by a diverse group of ballet dancers. They merged their respective dance methods to create a new style of ballet, unique to the organization and is recognized internationally as the English style of ballet; some examples of classical ballet productions are: the Nutcracker.
Romantic ballet was an artistic movement of classical ballet and several productions remain in the classical repertoire today. The Romantic era was marked by the emergence of pointe work, the dominance of female dancers, longer, flowy tutus that attempt to exemplify softness and a delicate aura; this movement occurred during the early to mid-nineteenth century and featured themes that emphasized intense emotion as a source of aesthetic experience. The plots of many romantic ballets revolved around spirit women who enslaved the hearts and senses of mortal men; the 1827 ballet La Sylphide is considered to be the first, the 1870 ballet Coppélia is considered to be the last. Famous ballet dancers of the Romantic era include Marie Taglioni, Fanny Elssler, Jules Perrot. Jules Perrot is known for his choreography that of Giselle considered to be the most celebrated romantic ballet. Neoclassical ballet is abstract, with no clear plot, costumes or scenery. Music choice can be diverse and will include music, neoclassical.
Tim Schol
listen); 31 March NS 1882 – 28 October 1969) was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His catchy rhythms, inventive rhymes and absurd characters have invited comparisons with the American children's author Dr. Seuss.[1] Chukovsky's poems Tarakanishche ("The Monster Cockroach"), Krokodil ("The Crocodile"), Telefon ("The Telephone") and Moydodyr ("Wash-'em-Clean") have been favourites with many generations of Russophone children. Lines from his poems, in particular Telefon, have become universal catch-phrases in the Russian media and everyday conversation, he adapted the Doctor Dolittle stories into a book-length Russian poem as Doctor Aybolit ("Dr. Ow-It-Hurts"), and translated a substantial portion of the Mother Goose canon into Russian as Angliyskiye Narodnyye Pesenki ("English Folk Rhymes"), he was also an influential literary critic and essayist.
