Mayakovskaya (Moscow Metro)
Mayakovskaya, is a Moscow Metro station on the Zamoskvoretskaya Line, in the Tverskoy District of central Moscow. The name as well as the design is a reference to Futurism and its prominent Russian exponent Vladimir Mayakovsky. Considered to be one of the most beautiful in the system, it is a fine example of pre-World War II Stalinist Architecture and one of the most famous Metro stations in the world, it is most well known for its 34 ceiling mosaics depicting "24 Hours in the Land of the Soviets." During World War II, it was used as a command post for Moscow's anti-aircraft regiment. The station was built as part of the second stage of the Moscow Metro expansion, opening on 11 September 1938. If the first stage was more focused on the building of the system itself, both architecturally and when it comes to the engineering, the stations appear modest in comparison to those that the second stage brought to the system. For the first time in the world, instead of having the traditional three-neath pylon station layout, the engineers were able to overlap the vault space and support it with two sets of colonnades on each side.
This gave birth to a new Deep column station type design, Mayakovskaya was the first station to show this. Located 33 meters beneath the surface, the station became famous during World War II when an air raid shelter was located in the station. On the anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1941, Joseph Stalin addressed a mass assembly of party leaders and ordinary Muscovites in the central hall of the station. During World War II, Stalin took residence in this place. Alexey Dushkin's Art Deco architecture was based on a Soviet future as envisioned by the poet Mayakovsky; the station features streamlined columns faced with stainless steel and pink rhodonite, white Ufaley and grey Diorite marble walls, a flooring pattern of white and pink marble, 35 niches, one for each vault. Surrounded by filament lights there are a total of 34 ceiling mosaics by Alexander Deyneka with the theme "24-Hour Soviet Sky." In 2005 a new second north exit was built, along with a new vestibule. Passengers leaving the station first descend on a short escalator ride into an underground vestibule, ascend the long way to the surface.
The new exit allows access to the 35th mosaic, hidden behind the service section. Other mosaic works were designed from scratch, accompanied by ample use of marble and stainless steel sculpturing; the bust of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was moved to the new surface vestibule, whose ceiling was decorated with a mosaic composition from Mayakovsky's poem "Moscow Sky"
Russia
Russia the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres, Russia is by far or by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, the ninth most populous, with about 146.77 million people as of 2019, including Crimea. About 77 % of the population live in the European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, China and North Korea, it shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U. S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.
The East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval state of Rus arose in the 9th century. In 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus' disintegrated into a number of smaller states; the Grand Duchy of Moscow reunified the surrounding Russian principalities and achieved independence from the Golden Horde. By the 18th century, the nation had expanded through conquest and exploration to become the Russian Empire, the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east. Following the Russian Revolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the largest and leading constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world's first constitutionally socialist state; the Soviet Union played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II, emerged as a recognized superpower and rival to the United States during the Cold War.
The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the world's first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the world's second largest economy, largest standing military in the world and the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, twelve independent republics emerged from the USSR: Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and the Baltic states regained independence: Estonia, Lithuania, it is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic. Russia's economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2018. Russia's extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the leading producers of oil and natural gas globally; the country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and an active global partner of ASEAN, as well as a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the G20, the Council of Europe, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Trade Organization, as well as being the leading member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and one of the five members of the Eurasian Economic Union, along with Armenia, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan; the name Russia is derived from Rus', a medieval state populated by the East Slavs. However, this proper name became more prominent in the history, the country was called by its inhabitants "Русская Земля", which can be translated as "Russian Land" or "Land of Rus'". In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus' by modern historiography.
The name Rus itself comes from the early medieval Rus' people, Swedish merchants and warriors who relocated from across the Baltic Sea and founded a state centered on Novgorod that became Kievan Rus. An old Latin version of the name Rus' was Ruthenia applied to the western and southern regions of Rus' that were adjacent to Catholic Europe; the current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Rus', Ρωσσία Rossía—spelled Ρωσία in Modern Greek. The standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are commonly
Garden Ring
The Garden Ring known as the "B" Ring, is a circular ring road avenue around central Moscow, its course corresponding to what used to be the city ramparts surrounding Zemlyanoy Gorod in the 17th century. The Ring consists of seventeen individually named fifteen squares, it has a circumference of sixteen kilometres. At its narrowest point, Krymsky Bridge, the Ring has six lanes. After finishing the reconstruction, all sections of the Ring will have not more than 10 lanes. In 2018, more than 50 % of sections of the Garden Ring are reconstructed, including Zubovskaya square, the widest section, there were about 18 lanes before; the Ring emerged in the 1820s, replacing fortifications, in the form of ramparts, that were no longer of military value. Garden Ring is a direct descendant of the Skorodom and Earth Rampart fortifications, erected in the reign of Feodor I of Russia after a disastrous raid by Ğazı II Giray. Although Boris Godunov, de facto regent of Russia, prevented Crimean Tatars from taking the city north of Moskva River, he anticipated future raids and arranged construction of another defence ring.
When the Time of troubles ended, instead of rebuilding Skorodom, Mikhail Romanov government replaced it with a new, taller rampart known as Zemlyanoy Val, completed in 1630-1638. Its name survives in present-day Zemlyanoy Val Street in the south-eastern segment of Garden Ring. Instead of towers, the Rampart had 34 gates for passage; as a defense measure, Streltsy slobodas were located next to these gates in southern Yakimanka and Zamoskvorechye Districts. Effective against Tatar raiders, Streltsy were politically unstable. After Streltsy Uprising of 1698, Peter I arranged mass executions of Streltsy on the Earth Rampart, hanging 36 soldiers at each of Zamoskoverchye gates and 56 at Taganka gates. In 1683-1718, the Rampart served. Peter I lifted this taxation in 1722, but it resumed in the 1730s at the new city border, Kamer-Kollezhsky Val; the rampart lost its military value in the 18th century. In the same 1775, local authorities entertained the idea of restoring the rampart but were set back by the number of state institutions that had to be demolished.
The Fire of Moscow destroyed these properties, so nothing stood in the way of city development plans. Instead of rebuilding the useless rampart, the city levelled it; the new free land was developed according to local social status: upper-class western segment of the Ring acquired central boulevards, flanged by side streets. Present-day streets in this segments are still called Boulevards. Elsewhere, Garden Ring was set as a 10-20 sazhen wide street; these streets have a name beginning with Sadovaya–, e.g. Sadovo–Triumphalnaya Street. By 1850, all buildings in this street were hidden from view by foliage. In south-eastern segment, the Ring was not as wide, thus Zemlyanoy Val. Largest square - a combination of two market squares - was created at Red Gates in the north-eastern segment. In the 1830s-1862, Novinsky Boulevard has become a popular amusement park with cheap theaters and carousels. In 1841, local entrepreneurs set up a short railroad with a real Mercury tank engine - a pleasure ride for the party crowds.
Rails for horsecars were installed in Moscow since 1872, the first lines were built on radial streets. The first electrical tram was launched in 1899, but Garden Ring was electrified in 1907-1910. Circular line traversing the Ring was known as the "B" route. New rental housing of 4-5-6 storey buildings replaced old two-story blocks. 1935 Joseph Stalin's master plan of Moscow provided for expansion of Garden Ring to at least 30-40 meter width, demolition of buildings set at the ends of Garden Ring boulevards to create wide open squares. Grand Stalinist buildings, envisioned on all the ring, were planned only for major squares like Kursky Rail Terminal Square and Triumphalnaya Square. However, one end-of-boulevard block survives on Triumphalnaya Square, atop the six-lane tunnel; the same plan required removal of tram tracks in line with Moscow Metro construction. In fact, removal of tram tracks proceeded well in advance of subway construction. Stalinist construction proceeded after World War II, notably the three skyscrapers.
However, no part of the Ring was rebuilt in Stalinist style. Any street of the Ring is a mixture of d
Gentrification
Gentrification is a process of renovating deteriorated urban neighborhoods by means of the influx of more affluent residents. This is a common and controversial topic in urban planning. Gentrification can improve the material quality of a neighborhood, while potentially forcing relocation of current, established residents and businesses, causing them to move from a gentrified area, seeking lower cost housing and stores. Gentrification shifts a neighborhood's racial/ethnic composition and average household income by developing new, more expensive housing and improved resources. Conversations about gentrification have evolved, as many in the social-scientific community have questioned the negative connotations associated with the word gentrification. One example is that gentrification can lead to community displacement for lower-income families in gentrifying neighborhoods, as property values and rental costs rise; the gentrification process is the result of increasing attraction to an area by people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring cities, towns, or neighborhoods.
Further steps are increased investments in a community and the related infrastructure by real estate development businesses, local government, or community activists and resulting economic development, increased attraction of business, lower crime rates. In addition to these potential benefits, gentrification can lead to population migration and displacement. However, some view the fear of displacement, dominating the debate about gentrification, as hindering discussion about genuine progressive approaches to distribute the benefits of urban redevelopment strategies; the term gentrification has come to refer to a multi-faceted phenomenon that can be defined in different ways. Gentrification is "a complex process involving physical improvement of the housing stock, housing tenure change from renting to owning, price rises and the displacement or replacement of the working-class population by the new middle class. Historians say that gentrification took place in ancient Rome and in Roman Britain, where large villas were replacing small shops by the 3rd century, AD.
The word gentrification derives from gentry—which comes from the Old French word genterise, "of gentle birth" and "people of gentle birth". In England, Landed gentry denoted the social class. Although the term was used in English in the 1950s - for instance by Sidney Perutz and by William Xenophon Weed and Oscar Le Roy Warren, British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term "gentrification" in 1964 to describe the influx of middle-class people displacing lower-class worker residents in urban neighborhoods. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, have become elegant, expensive residences... Once this process of'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on until all or most of the original working-class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report Health Effects of Gentrification defines the real estate concept of gentrification as "the transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value.
This change has the potential to cause displacement of long-time residents and businesses... when long-time or original neighborhood residents move from a gentrified area because of higher rents and property taxes. Gentrification is a housing and health issue that affects a community's history and culture and reduces social capital, it shifts a neighborhood's characteristics, e.g. racial-ethnic composition and household income, by adding new stores and resources in run-down neighborhoods."Scholars and pundits have applied a variety of definitions to gentrification since 1964, some oriented around gentrifiers, others oriented around the displaced, some a combination of both. The first category include Hackworth's definition "the production of space for progressively more affluent users"; the second category include Kasman's definition "the reduction of residential and retail space affordable to low-income residents". The final category includes Rose, who describes gentrification as a process "in which members of the'new middle class' move into and physically and culturally reshape working-class inner city neighbourhoods".
In the Brookings Institution report Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices, Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard say that "the term'gentrification' is both imprecise and quite politically charged", suggesting its redefinition as "the process by which higher income households displace lower income residents of a neighborhood, changing the essential character and flavour of that neighborhood", so distinguishing it from the different socio-economic process of "neighborhood revitalization", although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. German geographers have a more distanced view on gentrification. Actual gentrification is seen as a mere symbolic issue happening in a low number of places and blocks, the symbolic value and visibility in public discourse being higher than actual migration trends. E.g. Gerhard Hard assumes that urban flight is still more im
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
Sloboda
A sloboda was a kind of settlement in the history of Russia and Ukraine. The name is derived from the early Slavic word for "freedom" and may be loosely translated as "free settlement". In modern Russia, the term is used to denote a type of a rural locality and is used in Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov, Ryazan and Voronezh Oblasts. A sloboda was a colonization-type settlement in sparsely populated lands by Cossacks in Cossack Hetmanate, see "Sloboda Ukraine"; the settlers of such sloboda were freed from various taxes and levies for various reasons, hence the name. Freedom from taxes was an incentive for colonization. By the first half of the 18th century, this privilege was abolished, slobodas became ordinary villages, townlets, suburbs; some slobodas were suburban settlements, right behind the city wall. Many of them were subsequently incorporated into cities, the corresponding toponyms indicate their origin, such as Ogorodnaya Sloboda Lane, Moscow; the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary writes that by the end of the 19th century a sloboda was a large village with more than one church, a marketplace, volost administration, or a village-type settlement of industrial character, where the peasants have little involvement in agriculture.
The term is preserved in names of various settlements and city quarters. Some settlements were named just thus: "Sloboda", "Slobodka", "Slabodka", "Slobidka". Similar settlements existed in Wallachia and Moldavia, called slobozie or slobozia; the latter term is the name of the capital city of Ialomiţa County in modern Romania, located in the historical region of Wallachia. Wola, a similar concept in Polish history Lhota, a similar concept in Czech history
The Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita is a novel by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1940 during Stalin's regime. A censored version was published in Moscow magazine in 1966–1967, after the writer's death; the manuscript was not published as a book until 1967, first in Paris. A samizdat version circulated that included parts cut out by official censors, these were incorporated in a 1969 version published in Frankfurt; the novel has since been published in several editions. The story concerns a visit by the devil to the atheistic Soviet Union; the Master and Margarita combines supernatural elements with satirical dark comedy and Christian philosophy, defying a singular genre. Many critics consider it to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, as well as the foremost of Soviet satires. Mikhail Bulgakov was a author, he started writing the novel in 1928, but burned the first manuscript in 1930, as he could not see a future as a writer in the Soviet Union at a time of widespread political repression.
He restarted the novel in 1931. In the early 1920s Bulgakov had visited an editorial meeting of an atheistic-propaganda journal, he is believed to have drawn from this to create the Walpurgis Night ball of the novel. He completed his second draft in 1936, by which point he had devised the major plot lines of the final version, he wrote another four versions. When Bulgakov stopped writing four weeks before his death in 1940, the novel had some unfinished sentences and loose ends. A censored version, with about 12 percent of the text removed and more changed, was first published in Moskva magazine. A manuscript was taken out of the Soviet Union to Paris, where the YMCA Press, celebrated for publishing the banned work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published the first book edition in 1967; the text, as published in the magazine Moskva, was swiftly translated into Estonian, remaining for decades the only printed in book form edition of the novel in Soviet Union, published in 1968. The original text of all the omitted and changed parts, with indications of the places of modification, was printed and distributed by hand in the Soviet Union.
In 1969, the publisher Posev printed a version produced with the aid of these inserts. In the Soviet Union, the novel was first published in book form in Estonian in 1968 with some passages edited out; the first complete version, prepared by Anna Sahakyants, was published in Russian by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura in 1973. This was based on Bulgakov's last 1940 version, as proofread by the publisher; this version remained the canonical edition until 1989. The last version, based on all available manuscripts, was prepared by Lidiya Yanovskaya; the novel alternates between two settings. The first is Moscow during the 1930s, where Satan appears at the Patriarch Ponds in the guise of "Professor Woland", a mysterious gentleman and "magician" of uncertain origin, he arrives with a retinue. They wreak havoc by targeting the literary elite and their trade union MASSOLIT, its privileged HQ is Griboyedov's house. The association is made up of corrupt social climbers and their women, profiteers, more skeptics of the human spirit.
The second setting is the Jerusalem of Pontius Pilate, described by Woland in his conversations with Berlioz and reflected in the Master's novel. This part of the novel concerns Pontius Pilate's trial of Yeshua Ha-Notsri, his recognition of an affinity with, spiritual need for and his reluctant but resigned submission to Yeshua's execution. Part one of the novel opens with a direct confrontation between Berlioz, the atheistic head of the literary bureaucracy, an urbane foreign gentleman, who defends belief and reveals his prophetic powers in a deadpan prediction that Berlioz will die that evening. Berlioz brushes off the prophecy of his death as the ravings of a madman, but dies pages in the novel, in the exact manner described by Professor Woland; the fulfillment of the death prophecy is witnessed by Ivan Ponyrev, a young and enthusiastically modern poet. He writes poems under the alias Bezdomny, his futile attempts to capture the "gang", while warning of their evil and mysterious nature, lands Ponyrev in a lunatic asylum.
There, he's introduced to an embittered author. The rejection of his historical novel about Pontius Pilate and Christ has led the Master to such despair, that he burned his manuscript and turned his back on the world, including his devoted lover, Margarita. Major episodes in the novel's first half include a satirical portrait of both the Massolit and their Griboyedov house. Part two of the novel introduces the Master's mistress, she refuses to despair over his work. She is invited to the Devil's midnight ball, where Woland offers her the chance to become a witch with supernatural powers; this takes place the night of Good Friday. This is the time of the spring full moon, as it was traditionally when Christ's fate was affirmed by Pontius Pilate, sending him to be crucified in Jerusalem; the Master's novel covers this ev
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