Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Shevchenko University or the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, colloquially known in Ukrainian as KNU is located in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. KNU is ranked within top 500 Universities in the world, it is the third oldest university in Ukraine after the University of University of Kharkiv. Its structure consists of fifteen faculties and five institutes, it was founded in 1834 as the Kiev Imperial University of Saint Vladimir, since it has changed its name several times. During the Soviet Union era, Taras Shevchenko University was one of the top-three universities in the USSR, along with Moscow State University and Leningrad State University, it is ranked as the best university in Ukraine in many rankings. Throughout history, the university has produced many famous alumni including Nikolay Bunge, Mykhailo Drahomanov, Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, Nikolai Berdyaev, Mikhail Bulgakov, Viacheslav Chornovil, Leonid Kravchuk, many others. Taras Shevchenko himself, banned from educational activities for political reasons, worked for the Kyiv University as a field researcher.
Taras Shevchenko University is named after Taras Shevchenko, a major figure in Ukrainian literature and art. It is an institution of higher education that trains specialists in many fields of knowledge and carries out research, it is considered the most prestigious university in Ukraine and a major centre of advanced learning and progressive thinking. It consists of more faculties and departments, trains specialists in a greater number of academic fields, than any other Ukrainian educational institution. Nowadays, as it has done throughout its history, the University retains its role of a major center of learning and research as well as an important cultural center, its academics and students follow the long-standing traditions of the highest academic standards and democratic ideals. At present, the student body of Taras Shevchenko University totals about <30,000 students. As training qualified specialists has always been the main goal, the faculties and departments revise their curricula and introduce new programs.
A number of faculties offer 4-year Bachelor's and 2-year master's degree programs, together with traditional 5-year Specialist Degree programs. The stress is on student's ability to work independently and meet employer's requirements, thus practical experience in the field being of foremost importance; the curricula of all Taras Shevchenko University faculties are based on the combination of academic instruction with student's research work and the combination of thorough theoretical knowledge with specific skills. Having acquired theoretical knowledge in the first and the second year, in their third year undergraduates choose an area to specialize in. At the same time they choose a field for their independent study; the University was founded in 1834, when the Emperor Nicholas I of Russia signed the Charter about the creation of the University named after Saint Vladimir, the ruler who Christianized the Kievan Rus'. This name was chosen by the authorities of the Russian Empire, where the role of Orthodox Christianity was immense, may have reflected the ongoing importance of Kiev as the cradle of Eastern Christianity for the entire Empire.
The university benefited from assets transferred from Vilnius University, closed in the aftermath of the November Uprising of 1831. The first 62 students started their studies at the university in 1834, in its one faculty, the Faculty of Philosophy, which had two Departments: The Department of History and Philology and The Department of Physics and Mathematics. There were new additions to the original department in 1835 and 1847: the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Medicine. On, the original Faculty of Philosophy was divided into two separate units: the Faculty of History and Philology and the Faculty of Natural Sciences. There were no more additions to the number of departments until the 1920s; the walls of the main building are painted in red while the tops and bottoms of its columns are painted black. Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych's Shchedryk was premiered at the Kyiv University on December 26, 1916 by the university's choir directed by Oleksandr Koshyts. In 1920, Saint Vladimir University was renamed as Mykhailo Drahomanov University.
In 1939, Saint Vladimir University was renamed after Taras Shevchenko. Since 1960, when the first international students were admitted, over 20,000 qualified specialists have been trained at Taras Shevchenko University for 120 countries; the first foreign students of the Taras Shevchenko University came from Cuba, Indonesia, Togo, Cameroon, Zanzibar, Yemen and Afghanistan. They continued on to become doctors, agriculturists, diplomats and statesmen in their respective countries. During the Soviet period, the Taras Shevchenko University received one Order of Lenin and one Order of the October Revolution. Additionally, in 2002 the asteroid 4868 Knushevia was named in honour of K
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic known as the Russian Soviet Republic and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, as well as being unofficially known as the Russian Federation, Soviet Russia, or Russia, was an independent state from 1917 to 1922, afterwards the largest, most populous and most economically developed of the 15 Soviet socialist republics of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1990 a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, during the last two years of the existence of the USSR. The Russian Republic comprised sixteen smaller constituent units of autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group; the capital of the Russian SFSR was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara. The economy of Russia became industrialized, accounting for about two-thirds of the electricity produced in the USSR.
By 1961, it was the third largest producer of petroleum due to new discoveries in the Volga-Urals region and Siberia, trailing in production to only the United States and Saudi Arabia. In 1974, there were 475 institutes of higher education in the republic providing education in 47 languages to some 23,941,000 students. A network of territorially organized public-health services provided health care. After 1985, the "perestroika" restructuring policies of the Gorbachev administration liberalised the economy, which had become stagnant since the late 1970s under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, with the introduction of non-state owned enterprises such as cooperatives; the Russian Soviet Republic was proclaimed on 7 November 1917 as a sovereign state and the world's first constitutionally socialist state with the ideology of Communism. The first Constitution was adopted in 1918. In 1922, the Russian SFSR signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR setting up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The 1977 Soviet Constitution stated that "Union Republic is a sovereign state that has united in the Union" and "each Union Republic shall retain the right to secede from the USSR". On 12 June 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, established separation of powers, established citizenship of Russia and stated that the RSFSR shall retain the right of free secession from the USSR. On 12 June 1991, Boris Yeltsin, supported by the Democratic Russia pro-reform movement, was elected the first and only President of the RSFSR, a post that would become the presidency of the Russian Federation; the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt with the temporary brief internment of President Mikhail Gorbachev destabilised the Soviet Union. On 8 December 1991, the heads of Russia and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords; the agreement declared dissolution of the USSR by its original founding states and established the Commonwealth of Independent States as a loose confederation.
On 12 December, the agreement was ratified by the Supreme Soviet. On 25 December 1991, following the resignation of Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union, the Russian SFSR was renamed the Russian Federation, with President Yeltsin re-establishing the sovereign and independent state. With the lowering at 12 midnight of the red flag with hammer and sickle design of the now former USSR from the towers of the Kremlin in Moscow on 26 December 1991, the USSR was self-dissolved by the Soviet of the Republics, which by that time was the only functioning chamber of the parliamentary Supreme Soviet. After dissolution of the USSR, Russia declared that it assumed the rights and obligations of the dissolved central Soviet government, including UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, but excluding foreign debt and foreign assets of the USSR; the 1978 RSFSR Constitution was amended several times to reflect the transition to democracy, private property and market economy. The new Russian Constitution, coming into effect on 25 December 1993 after a constitutional crisis abolished the Soviet form of government and replaced it with a semi-presidential system.
Under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik communists established the Soviet state on 7 November 1917 after the interim Russian Provisional Government, most led by opposing democratic socialist Alexander Kerensky, which governed the new Russian Republic after the overthrow of the Russian Empire government of the Romanov imperial dynasty of Czar Nicholas II the previous March, was now itself overthrown during the following October Revolution, the second of t
Icebreaker
An icebreaker is a special-purpose ship or boat designed to move and navigate through ice-covered waters, provide safe waterways for other boats and ships. Although the term refers to ice-breaking ships, it may refer to smaller vessels, such as the icebreaking boats that were once used on the canals of the United Kingdom. For a ship to be considered an icebreaker, it requires three traits most normal ships lack: a strengthened hull, an ice-clearing shape, the power to push through sea ice. Icebreakers clear paths by pushing straight into frozen-over pack ice; the bending strength of sea ice is low enough that the ice breaks without noticeable change in the vessel's trim. In cases of thick ice, an icebreaker can drive its bow onto the ice to break it under the weight of the ship. A buildup of broken ice in front of a ship can slow it down much more than the breaking of the ice itself, so icebreakers have a specially designed hull to direct the broken ice around or under the vessel; the external components of the ship's propulsion system are at greater risk of damage than the vessel's hull, so the ability of an icebreaker to propel itself onto the ice, break it, clear the debris from its path is essential for its safety.
Ice-strengthened ships were used in the earliest days of polar exploration. These were wooden and based on existing designs, but reinforced around the waterline with double planking to the hull and strengthening cross members inside the ship. Bands of iron were wrapped around the outside. Sometimes metal sheeting was placed at the bows, at the stern, along the keel; such strengthening was designed to help the ship push through ice and to protect the ship in case it was "nipped" by the ice. Nipping occurs when ice floes around a ship are pushed against the ship, trapping it as if in a vise and causing damage; this vise-like action is caused by the force of tides on ice formations. The first boats to be used in the polar waters were those of the indigenous Arctic people, their kayaks are small human-powered boats with a covered deck, one or more cockpits, each seating one paddler who strokes a single or double-bladed paddle. Such boats, of course, have no icebreaking capabilities, but they are light and well fit to carry over the ice.
In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Viking expansion reached the North Atlantic, Greenland and Svalbard in the Arctic. Vikings, operated their ships in the waters that were ice-free for most of the year, in the conditions of the Medieval Warm Period. In the 11th century, in North-Russia started settling the coasts of the White Sea, named so for being ice-covered for over half of a year; the mixed ethnic group of the Karelians and the Russians in the North-Russia that lived on the shores of the Arctic Ocean became known as Pomors. They developed a special type of small one- or two-mast wooden sailing ships, used for voyages in the ice conditions of the Arctic seas and on Siberian rivers; these earliest icebreakers were called kochi. The koch's hull was protected by a belt of ice-floe resistant flush skin-planking along the variable water-line, had a false keel for on-ice portage. If a koch became squeezed by the ice-fields, its rounded bodylines below the water-line would allow for the ship to be pushed up out of the water and onto the ice with no damage.
In the 19th century, similar protective measures were adopted to modern steam-powered icebreakers. Some notable sailing ships in the end of the Age of Sail featured the egg-shaped form like that of Pomor boats, for example the'Fram, used by Fridtjof Nansen and other great Norwegian Polar explorers. Fram was the wooden ship to have sailed farthest north and farthest south, one of the strongest wooden ship built. An early ship designed to operate in icy conditions was a 51-metre wooden paddle steamer, City Ice Boat No. 1, built for the city of Philadelphia by Vandusen & Birelyn in 1837. The ship was powered by two 250-horsepower steam engines and its wooden paddles were reinforced with iron coverings. With its rounded shape and strong metal hull, the Russian Pilot of 1864 was an important predecessor of modern icebreakers with propellers; the ship was built on the orders of shipbuilder Mikhail Britnev. It had the bow altered to achieve an ice-clearing capability; this allowed Pilot to push herself on the top of the ice and break it.
Britnev fashioned the bow of his ship after the shape of old Pomor boats, navigating icy waters of the White Sea and Barents Sea for centuries. Pilot was used between 1864–1890 for navigation in the Gulf of Finland between Kronstadt and Oranienbaum thus extending the summer navigation season by several weeks. Inspired by the success of Pilot, Mikhail Britnev built a second similar vessel Boy in 1875 and a third Booy in 1889; the cold winter of 1870–1871 caused the Elbe River and the port of Hamburg to freeze over, causing a prolonged halt to navigation and huge commercial losses. Carl Ferdinand Steinhaus resused the altered bow Pilot's design from Britnev to make his own icebreaker, Eisbrecher I; the first true modern sea-going icebreaker was built at the turn of the 20th century. Icebreaker Yermak, was built in 1897 at the Armstrong Whitworth naval yard in England under contract from the Imperial Russian Navy; the ship borrowed the main principles from Pilot and applied them to the creation of the first polar icebreaker, able to run over and crush pack ice.
The ship displaced 5,000 tons, its steam-reciprocating engines delivered 10,000 horsepower. The ship was deco
Mikhail Nesterov
Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov was a Russian and Soviet painter. He was one of the first exponents of Symbolist art in Russia, he was born to a patriarchal merchant family. His father was haberdasher, but always had a strong interest in history and literature; as a result, he was sympathetic to his son's desire to be an artist, but insisted that he acquire practical skills first and, in 1874, he was sent to Moscow where he enrolled at the Voskresensky Realschule. In 1877, his counselors suggested that he transfer to the Moscow School of Painting and Architecture, where he studied with Pavel Sorokin, Illarion Pryanishnikov and Vasily Perov, his favorite teacher. In 1879, he began to participate in the school's exhibitions. Two years he entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, where he worked with Pavel Chistyakov, he was disappointed at the teaching there and returned to Moscow, only to find Perov on his deathbed, so he took lessons from Alexei Savrasov. After a brief stay in Ufa, where he met his future wife, Maria, he returned to Moscow and studied with Vladimir Makovsky.
While creating a series of historical paintings, he supported himself doing illustrations for magazines and books published by Alexei Stupin, including a collection of fairy tales by Pushkin. In 1885, he was married, against his parent's wishes; the following year, his wife died after giving birth to Olga. Several of his works from this period feature his wife's image, his first major success came with his painting, "The Hermit", shown at the seventeenth exhibition of the Peredvizhniki in 1889. It was purchased by Pavel Tretyakov and the money enabled Nesterov to take an extended trip to Austria, Germany and Italy. Upon returning, his painting, "The Vision to the Youth Bartholomew", the first in a series of works on the life of Saint Sergius, was shown at the eighteenth Peredvizhniki exhibition and purchased by Tretyakov; this series would include fifteen large canvases and occupy him for fifty years. In 1890, Adrian Prakhov, overseeing work at St Volodymyr's Cathedral, became familiar with Nesterov's paintings and invited him to participate in creating murals and icons there.
After some hesitation, he agreed travelled to Rome and Istanbul to acquaint himself with Byzantine art. This project would take twenty-two years to complete. Although it brought him great popularity, he came to feel that the images required were too clichéd and beneath his dignity as an artist, so he introduced some minor innovations, such as setting portraits of saints in a recognizable landscape. Despite this, he undertook other religious commissions. In 1898, Grand Duke George Alexandrovich asked him to work at the Alexander Nevsky church in Abastumani, he spent six years there, off and on, creating 50 small murals and the iconostasis, but was dissatisfied with the results. He was much more pleased with work at the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent, he refused to work on the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, because he did not approve of building an Orthodox cathedral in a predominantly Catholic city. In 1901, he wanted to deepen his spiritual appreciation of the monastic life, so he spent some time at the Solovetsky Monastery on the coast of the White Sea.
He painted numerous works there and the influence of his visit could be seen in his canvases for many years after. He was inspired by the novels of Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, dealing with the lives of the Old Believers in the Volga Region. In 1902, he married Ekaterina Vasilyeva. In 1905, after the Revolution began, he joined the Union of the Russian People, an extreme right-wing nationalist party that supported the Tsar; as a result, he was in some danger after the October Revolution. In 1918, he moved to Armavir, where he was unable to work, he returned to Moscow in 1920 and was forced to give up religious painting, although he continued to work on his Saint Sergius series in private. From until his death, he painted portraits. In 1938, toward the end of the Great Purge, his son-in-law, Vladimir Schroeter, a prominent lawyer, was accused of being a spy and shot, his daughter was sent to a prison camp in Zhambyl, where she was brutally interrogated before being released. He was arrested and held for two weeks at Butyrka Prison.
In 1941, he was awarded the Stalin Prize for his portrait of Pavlov. It was one of the first given to an artist. Shortly after, he received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour; as the war progressed, his health and financial situation deteriorated rapidly. He had a stroke while died at Botkin Hospital, his unfinished memoirs, which he had begun in 1926, were published that year under the title "Bygone Days". In 1962, he was honored with a postage stamp. In 1996, his likeness appeared on the 50 Ural franc banknote and, in 2015, a monument to him was unveiled at the Bashkir Nesterov art museum in Ufa. Art Masters # 157: Mikhail Nesterov, Kipepeo Publishing, 2016 ISBN 978-1-52321-093-0 Art Masters # 158: Mikhail Nesterov 2, Kipepeo Publishing, 2016 ISBN 978-1-52321-176-0 Sergei Nikolayevich Durylin, Нестеров-портретист. Искусство, 1949 Alexei Ivanovich Mikhailov, М. В. Нестеров. Жизнь и творчество, Советский художник 1958. Anna Alexandrovna Rusakova, Михаил Нестеров, Аврора, 1990 ISBN 5-7300-0015-4 Ekaterina Malinina, Михаил Нестеров, Masters of Art
October Revolution
The October Revolution known in Soviet historiography as the Great October Socialist Revolution and referred to as the October Uprising, the October Coup, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Bolshevik Coup or the Red October, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin, instrumental in the larger Russian Revolution of 1917. It took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd on 7 November 1917, it followed and capitalized on the February Revolution of the same year, which overthrew the Tsarist autocracy and resulted in a provisional government after a transfer of power proclaimed by Grand Duke Michael, the younger brother of Tsar Nicholas II, who declined to take power after the Tsar stepped down. During this time, urban workers began to organize into councils wherein revolutionaries criticized the provisional government and its actions. After the Congress of Soviets, now the governing body, had its second session, it elected members of the Bolsheviks and other leftist groups such as the Left Socialist Revolutionaries to important positions within the new state of affairs.
This initiated the establishment of the Russian Soviet Republic. On 17 July 1918, his family were executed; the revolution was led by the Bolsheviks, who used their influence in the Petrograd Soviet to organize the armed forces. Bolshevik Red Guards forces under the Military Revolutionary Committee began the occupation of government buildings on 7 November 1917; the following day, the Winter Palace was captured. The long-awaited Constituent Assembly elections were held on 12 November 1917. In contrast to their majority in the Soviets, the Bolsheviks only won 175 seats in the 715-seat legislative body, coming in second behind the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which won 370 seats, although the SR Party no longer existed as a whole party by that time, as the Left SRs had gone into coalition with the Bolsheviks from October 1917 to March 1918; the Constituent Assembly was to first meet on 28 November 1917, but its convocation was delayed until 5 January 1918 by the Bolsheviks. On its first and only day in session, the Constituent Assembly came into conflict with the Soviets, it rejected Soviet decrees on peace and land, resulting in the Constituent Assembly being dissolved the next day by order of the Congress of Soviets.
As the revolution was not universally recognized, there followed the struggles of the Russian Civil War and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. At first, the event was referred to as the October coup or the Uprising of 3rd, as seen in contemporary documents. In Russian, however, "переворот" has a similar meaning to "revolution" and means "upheaval" or "overturn", so "coup" is not the correct translation. With time, the term October Revolution came into use, it is known as the "November Revolution" having occurred in November according to the Gregorian Calendar. The February Revolution had toppled Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, replaced his government with the Russian Provisional Government. However, the provisional government was riven by internal dissension, it continued to wage World War I, which became unpopular. A nationwide crisis developed in Russia, affecting social and political relations. Disorder in industry and transport had intensified, difficulties in obtaining provisions had increased.
Gross industrial production in 1917 had decreased by over 36% from what it had been in 1914. In the autumn, as much as 50% of all enterprises were closed down in the Urals, the Donbas, other industrial centers, leading to mass unemployment. At the same time, the cost of living increased sharply. Real wages fell about 50% from what they had been in 1913. Russia's national debt in October 1917 had risen to 50 billion rubles. Of this, debts to foreign governments constituted more than 11 billion rubles; the country faced the threat of financial bankruptcy. Throughout June and August 1917, it was common to hear working-class Russians speak about their lack of confidence and misgivings with those in power in the Provisional Government. Factory workers around Russia felt unhappy with the growing shortages of food and other materials, they blamed their own managers or foremen and would attack them in the factories. The workers blamed many rich and influential individuals, such as elites in positions of power, for the overall shortage of food and poor living conditions.
Workers labelled these rich and powerful individuals as opponents of the Revolution, called them words such as "bourgeois and imperialist."In September and October 1917, there were mass strike actions by the Moscow and Petrograd workers, miners in Donbas, metalworkers in the Urals, oil workers in Baku, textile workers in the Central Industrial Region, railroad workers on 44 railway lines. In these months alone, more than a million workers took part in strikes. Workers established control over production and distribution in many factories and plants in a social revolution. Workers were able to organize these strikes through factory committees; the factory committees represented the workers and were able to negotiate better working conditions and hours. Though workplace conditions may have been increasing in quality, the overall quality of life for workers was not improving. There were still shortages of food and the increased wages workers had obtained did little to provide for their families.
By October 1917, peasant uprisings were common. By autumn the peasant movement ag
Germans
Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe, who share a common German ancestry and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans; the English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Since the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, German society has been characterized by a Catholic-Protestant divide. Of 100 million native speakers of German in the world 80 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry in the United States, Argentina, South Africa, the post-Soviet states, France, each accounting for at least 1 million. Thus, the total number of Germans lies somewhere between 100 and more than 150 million, depending on the criteria applied. Today, people from countries with German-speaking majorities most subscribe to their own national identities and may or may not self-identify as ethnically German.
The German term Deutsche originates from the Old High German word diutisc, referring to the Germanic "language of the people". It is not clear how if at all, the word was used as an ethnonym in Old High German. Used as a noun, ein diutscher in the sense of "a German" emerges in Middle High German, attested from the second half of the 12th century; the Old French term alemans is taken from the name of the Alamanni. It was loaned into Middle English as almains in the early 14th century; the word Dutch is attested in English from the 14th century, denoting continental West Germanic dialects and their speakers. While in most Romance languages the Germans have been named from the Alamanni, the Old Norse and Estonian names for the Germans were taken from that of the Saxons. In Slavic languages, the Germans were given the name of němьci with a meaning "foreigner, one who does not speak "; the English term Germans is only attested from the mid-16th century, based on the classical Latin term Germani used by Julius Caesar and Tacitus.
It replaced Dutch and Almains, the latter becoming obsolete by the early 18th century. The Germans are a Germanic people. Part of the Holy Roman Empire, around 300 independent German states emerged during its decline after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years War; these states formed into modern Germany in the 19th century. The concept of a German ethnicity is linked to Germanic tribes of antiquity in central Europe; the early Germans originated on the North German Plain as well as southern Scandinavia. By the 2nd century BC, the number of Germans was increasing and they began expanding into eastern Europe and southward into Celtic territory. During antiquity these Germanic tribes remained separate from each other and did not have writing systems at that time. In the European Iron Age the area, now Germany was divided into the La Tène horizon in Southern Germany and the Jastorf culture in Northern Germany. By 55 BC, the Germans had reached the Danube river and had either assimilated or otherwise driven out the Celts who had lived there, had spread west into what is now Belgium and France.
Conflict between the Germanic tribes and the forces of Rome under Julius Caesar forced major Germanic tribes to retreat to the east bank of the Rhine. Roman emperor Augustus in 12 BC ordered the conquest of the Germans, but the catastrophic Roman defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest resulted in the Roman Empire abandoning its plans to conquer Germania. Germanic peoples in Roman territory were culturally Romanized, although much of Germania remained free of direct Roman rule, Rome influenced the development of German society the adoption of Christianity by the Germans who obtained it from the Romans. In Roman-held territories with Germanic populations, the Germanic and Roman peoples intermarried, Roman and Christian traditions intermingled; the adoption of Christianity would become a major influence in the development of a common German identity. The first major public figure to speak of a German people in general, was the Roman figure Tacitus in his work Germania around 100 AD; however an actual united German identity and ethnicity did not exist and it would take centuries of development of German culture until the concept of a German ethnicity began to become a popular identity.
The Germanic peoples during the Migrations Period came into contact with other peoples. The Limes Germanicus was breached in AD 260. Migrating Germanic tribes commingled with the local Gallo-Roman populations in what is now Swabia and Bavaria; the arrival of the Huns in Europe resulted in Hun conquest of large parts of Eastern Europe, the Huns were allies of the Roman Empire who fought against Germanic tribes, but the Huns cooperated with the Germanic tribe of the Ostrogoths, large numbers of Germans lived within the lands of the Hunnic Empire of
Severnaya Zemlya
Severnaya Zemlya is a 37,000-square-kilometre archipelago in the Russian high Arctic. It lies off Siberia's Taymyr Peninsula, separated from the mainland by the Vilkitsky Strait; this archipelago separates two marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean, the Kara Sea in the west and the Laptev Sea in the east. Severnaya Zemlya was first noted in 1913 and first charted in 1930–32, making it the last sizeable archipelago on Earth to be explored. Administratively, the islands form part of Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai federal subject. In Soviet times there were a number of research stations in different locations, but there are no human inhabitants in Severnaya Zemlya except for the Prima Polar Station near Cape Baranov; the largest glacier in the Russian Federation, the Academy of Sciences Glacier, is located in Severnaya Zemlya. The archipelago is notable as well in connection with the ongoing multiyear Arctic sea ice decline; until ice joined the islands to Eurasia at its smallest extent during the late summer melt season, blocking the Northeast Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
By the late summer of 2012, the permanent ice had reached a record low extent and open water appeared to the north of the archipelago. Although located not far off the northern coast of Russia, nested among Arctic ice-locked waters, the archipelago, now known as Severnaya Zemlya was not formally recorded until the 20th century. Earlier explorers deemed that there was a land mass in the general area of the archipelago, such as in the report by Matvei Gedenschtrom and Yakov Sannikov made in 1810 at the time of their exploration of the New Siberian Islands. In the 19th century Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld during the Vega Expedition sailed close to this land in 1878 but did not notice it. In 1882, Danish Arctic explorer and naval officer Andreas Peter Hovgaard, leader of the Arctic survey Dijmphna Expedition, set himself the goal of discovering land north of Cape Chelyuskin and explore the unknown northeastern limits of the Kara Sea. However, Hovgaard was prevented from accomplishing his objectives after having become trapped in thick ice and his expedition was unable to reach the Taymyr Peninsula's shores.
At the end of the 19th century both Nansen's Fram expedition of 1895, as well Eduard Toll's Russian polar expedition of 1900–02 on ship Zarya failed to note any traces of land to the north of the 55 kilometres wide strait between the Kara Sea and the Laptev Sea that they navigated. The archipelago was not put on the map until the 1913–1915 Arctic Ocean Hydrographic Expedition of icebreakers Taimyr and Vaigach; the chief organiser and first captain of the Vaygach was officer Aleksandr Vasiliyevich Kolchak of the Imperial Russian Navy. The expedition was financed and was launched in 1910, being led by Boris Vilkitsky on behalf of the Russian Hydrographic Service; this venture accomplished its goal of exploring the uncharted areas of the continental side of the Northern Sea Route in what was seen as the culmination of the Great Northern Expedition, an ambitious enterprise conceived by emperor Peter I the Great in order to map the whole of the northern coast of Russia to the east. On 3 September 1913, members of Vilkitsky's expedition landed on what is now known as Cape Berg on October Revolution Island.
They raised the Russian flag on the shore and named the new territory Tayvay Land, after the first syllable of their icebreakers' names. During the days that followed Vilkitsky's expedition charted parts of the Laptev Sea coast of what they believed to be a single island. Six months in early 1914, by order of the Secretary of the Imperial Navy, the new discovery was renamed Emperor Nicholas II Land, after ruling Emperor Nicholas II of Russia. In 1926 the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR renamed the still not explored land Severnaya Zemlya. In May 1928, an attempt was made by Umberto Nobile and his crew in the Airship Italia to overfly the islands, but adverse weather conditions forced them to turn southward when only an hour or two from viewing the archipelago's coastline. In the spring of 1931 Georgy Ushakov, accompanied by the geologist Nikolay Urvantsev, the veteran surveyor Sergei Zhuravlev, the radio operator Vasily Khodov surveyed Severnaya Zemlya during a two-year expedition to the archipelago.
Ushakov and his team established a small base at Golomyanny – the western end of Sredniy Island, off October Revolution Island's western coast. From there they made multiple surveying trips into the interior and the coastlines of the larger islands; the first detailed map drawn by the expedition's cartographers showed Severnaya Zemlya to be divided into four main islands. Geographic features of the territory were named after communist organisations and personalities. About Severnaya Zemlya Ushakov wrote: I have seen God-forsaken Chukotka Peninsula, blizzard-ridden Wrangel Island, twice visited fog-enshrouded Novaya Zemlya, I have seen Franz Josef Land with its enamel sky and proud cliffs garbed in blue, hardened glacial streams, but nowhere did I witness such grimness or such depressing, lifeless relief... The Graf Zeppelin flew over the area during its polar flight of July 1931 and took some cartographic and meteorological data. Though German communists had endured great suffering under the Third Reich, following the anti-German sentiment caused by the 1941–1945 Great Patriotic War i
