1.
Saint Petersburg
–
Saint Petersburg is Russias second-largest city after Moscow, with five million inhabitants in 2012, and an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea. It is politically incorporated as 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 May 271703. In 1914, the name was changed from Saint Petersburg to Petrograd, in 1924 to Leningrad, between 1713 and 1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia. In 1918, the government bodies moved to Moscow. Saint Petersburg is one of the 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. A large number of consulates, international corporations, banks. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress, at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in a then called Ingermanland. A small town called Nyen grew up around it, Peter the Great was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, and he intended to have Russia gain a seaport in order to be able to trade with other maritime nations. He needed a better seaport than Arkhangelsk, which was on the White Sea to the north, on May 1703121703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans, and soon replaced the fortress. On May 271703, 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. Later, 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, he referred to Saint Petersburg as the capital as early as 1704. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the bank of the Neva, near the Peter. 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 was not completed, but is evident in the layout of the streets, in 1716, Peter the Great appointed French Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences, University 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 opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life
2.
Russia
–
Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, 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, 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 ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. 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. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly 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 Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
3.
Oceanography
–
Oceanography, also known as oceanology, is the study of the physical and the biological aspects of the ocean. Paleoceanography studies the history of the oceans in the geologic past, humans first acquired knowledge of the waves and currents of the seas and oceans in pre-historic times. Observations on tides were recorded by Aristotle and Strabo, early exploration of the oceans was primarily for cartography and mainly limited to its surfaces and of the animals that fishermen brought up in nets, though depth soundings by lead line were taken. Although Juan Ponce de León in 1513 first identified the Gulf Stream, Franklin measured water temperatures during several Atlantic crossings and correctly explained the Gulf Streams cause. Franklin and Timothy Folger printed the first map of the Gulf Stream in 1769-1770, information on the currents of the Pacific Ocean was gathered by explorers of the late 18th century, including James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville. James Rennell wrote the first scientific textbooks on oceanography, detailing the current flows of the Atlantic, during a voyage around the Cape of Good Hope in 1777, he mapped the banks and currents at the Lagullas. He was also the first to understand the nature of the intermittent current near the Isles of Scilly, Robert FitzRoy published a four-volume report of the Beagles three voyages. In 1841–1842 Edward Forbes undertook dredging in the Aegean Sea that founded marine ecology, the first superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory, Matthew Fontaine Maury devoted his time to the study of marine meteorology, navigation, and charting prevailing winds and currents. His 1855 textbook Physical Geography of the Sea was one of the first comprehensive oceanography studies, many nations sent oceanographic observations to Maury at the Naval Observatory, where he and his colleagues evaluated the information and distributed the results worldwide. Despite all this, human knowledge of the oceans remained confined to the topmost few fathoms of the water, almost nothing was known of the ocean depths. The Royal Navys efforts to all of the worlds coastlines in the mid-19th century reinforced the vague idea that most of the ocean was very deep. As exploration ignited both popular and scientific interest in the regions and Africa, so too did the mysteries of the unexplored oceans. The seminal event in the founding of the science of oceanography was the 1872-76 Challenger expedition. As the first true oceanographic cruise, this laid the groundwork for an entire academic. In response to a recommendation from the Royal Society, The British Government announced in 1871 an expedition to explore worlds oceans, charles Wyville Thompson and Sir John Murray launched the Challenger expedition. The Challenger, leased from the Royal Navy, was modified for scientific work, under the scientific supervision of Thomson, Challenger travelled nearly 70,000 nautical miles surveying and exploring. On her journey circumnavigating the globe,492 deep sea soundings,133 bottom dredges,151 open water trawls and 263 serial water temperature observations were taken, around 4,700 new species of marine life were discovered. The result was the Report Of The Scientific Results of the Exploring Voyage of H. M. S, Murray, who supervised the publication, described the report as the greatest advance in the knowledge of our planet since the celebrated discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
4.
Ethnography
–
Ethnography is the systematic study of people and cultures. It is designed to explore cultural phenomena where the researcher observes society from the point of view of the subject of the study, an ethnography is a means to represent graphically and in writing the culture of a group. The word can thus be said to have a double meaning, the resulting field study or a case report reflects the knowledge and the system of meanings in the lives of a cultural group. The typical ethnography is a study and so includes a brief history, and an analysis of the terrain, the climate. In all cases it should be reflexive, make a contribution toward the understanding of the social life of humans, have an aesthetic impact on the reader. An ethnography records all observed behavior and describes all symbol-meaning relations, the word ethnography is derived from the Greek ἔθνος, meaning a company, later a people, nation and -graphy meaning field of study. Ethnographic studies focus on large groups of people who interact over time. Ethnography is a design, where the researcher explains about shared learnt patterns of values, behaviour, beliefs. The field of anthropology originated from Europe and England designed in late 19th century and it spread its roots to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Some of the main contributors like EB Tylor from Britain and Lewis H Morgan, franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, were a group of researchers from United States who contributed the idea of cultural relativism to the literature. He gives the point of the native and this became the origin of field work. Since Malinowski was very firm with his approach he applied it practically and he was interested in learning the language of the islanders and stayed there for a long time doing his field work. The field of ethnography became very popular in the late 19th century, again, in the latter part of the 19th century, the field of anthropology became a good support for scientific formation. Though the field was flourishing it had a lot of threat to encounter, post colonialism, the research climate shifted towards post-modernism and feminism. Therefore, the field of anthropology moved into discipline of social science, gerhard Friedrich Müller developed the concept of ethnography as a separate discipline whilst participating in the Second Kamchatka Expedition as a professor of history and geography. Whilst involved in the expedition, he differentiated Völker-Beschreibung as an area of study. This became known as ethnography, following the introduction of the Greek neologism ethnographia by Johann Friedrich Schöpperlin, there are different forms of ethnography, confessional ethnography, life history, feminist ethnography etc. Two popular forms of ethnography are realist ethnography and critical ethnography, realist ethnography, is a traditional approach used by cultural anthropologists
5.
Russian Revolution
–
The Russian Revolution was a pair of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which dismantled the Tsarist autocracy and led to the eventual rise of the Soviet Union. The Russian Empire collapsed with the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II, in the second revolution that October, the Provisional Government was removed and replaced with a communist state. The February Revolution was a revolution focused around Petrograd, then capital of Russia, in the chaos, members of the Imperial parliament assumed control of the country, forming the Russian Provisional Government. The army leadership felt they did not have the means to suppress the revolution, the February Revolution took place in the context of heavy military setbacks during the First World War, which left much of the Russian Army in a state of mutiny. During this chaotic period there were frequent mutinies, protests and many strikes, when the Provisional Government chose to continue fighting the war with Germany, the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions campaigned for stopping the conflict. The Bolsheviks turned workers militias under their control into the Red Guards over which they exerted substantial control, the Bolsheviks appointed themselves as leaders of various government ministries and seized control of the countryside, establishing the Cheka to quash dissent. To end Russia’s participation in the First World War, the Bolshevik leaders signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918, soon after, civil war erupted among the Reds, the Whites, the independence movements and the non-Bolshevik socialists. It continued for years, during which the Bolsheviks defeated both the Whites and all rival socialists. In this way, the Revolution paved the way for the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, the Russian Revolution of 1905 was said to be a major factor to the February Revolutions of 1917. The events of Bloody Sunday triggered a line of protests, a council of workers called the St. Petersburg Soviet was created in all this chaos, and the beginning of a communist political protest had begun. World War I prompted a Russian outcry directed at Tsar Nicholas II and it was another major factor contributing to the retaliation of the Russian Communists against their royal opponents. However, the problems were merely administrative, and not industrial as Germany was producing great amounts of munitions whilst constantly fighting on two major battlefronts, the war also developed a weariness in the city, owing to a lack of food in response to the disruption of agriculture. Food scarcity had become a problem in Russia, but the cause of this did not lie in any failure of the harvests. As a result, they tended to hoard their grain and to revert to subsistence farming, thus the cities were constantly short of food. At the same time rising prices led to demands for wages in the factories. The outcome of all this, however, was a criticism of the government rather than any war-weariness. The original fever of excitement, which had caused the name of St. Heavy losses during the war also strengthened thoughts that Tsar Nicholas II was unfit to rule, the Liberals were now better placed to voice their complaints, since they were participating more fully through a variety of voluntary organizations
6.
Friedrich Wilhelm Rembert von Berg
–
Count Friedrich Wilhelm Rembert von Berg was a Russian Field Marshal, and the Governor-General of Finland from 1855 to 1861. He was born in the Sangaste Castle, Livonia into a Baltic German noble family and he studied at the University of Dorpat and joined the Imperial Russian Army in 1812. He was also the last Namestnik of the Kingdom of Poland and he was crucial in crushing the Polish January Uprising and carrying out repressions and russification policies afterwards. Polish insurgents carried out an assassination attempt on him on 19 September 1863. He was made a count in the Finnish House of Nobility in 1857, along with his adopted sons, warsaw 1872 – Autobiography Berg, Fredrik Wilhelm Rembert
7.
Karl Ernst von Baer
–
Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer, Edler von Huthorn was an Estonian scientist and explorer. Baer is also known in Russia as Karl Maksimovich Baer, Baer was a naturalist, biologist, geologist, meteorologist, geographer, and a founding father of embryology. He was an explorer of European Russia and Scandinavia, Karl Ernst von Baer was born into a Baltic German noble family in the Piep estate, Kreis Jerwen, Governorate of Estonia, as a knight by birthright. He spent his childhood at Lasila manor, Estonia. Many of his ancestors had come from Westphalia and he was educated at the Knight and Cathedral School in Reval and the Imperial University of Dorpat, each of which he found lacking in quality education. In 1812, during his tenure at the university, he was sent to Riga to aid the city after Napoleons armies had laid siege to it. In his autobiography, his discontent with his education at Dorpat inspired him to write a lengthy appraisal of education in general, after leaving Tartu, he continued his education in Berlin, Vienna, and Würzburg, where Ignaz Döllinger introduced him to the new field of embryology. In 1817, he became a professor at Königsberg University and full professor of zoology in 1821, in 1829, he taught briefly in St Petersburg, but returned to Königsberg. In 1834, Baer moved back to St Petersburg and joined the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, first in zoology and then in comparative anatomy and his interests while there were anatomy, ichthyology, ethnography, anthropology, and geography. While embryology had kept his attention in Königsberg, then in Russia von Baer engaged in a deal of field research. The last years of his life were spent in Dorpat, where he became a critic of Charles Darwin. Von Baer studied the development of animals, discovering the blastula stage of development. In 1826, Baer discovered the mammalian ovum, the human ovum was first described by Edgar Allen in 1928. In 1827, he completed research Ovi Mammalium et Hominis genesi for St Petersburgs Academy of Science, in 1827 von Baer became the first person to observe human ova. Only in 1876 did Oscar Hertwig prove that fertilization is due to fusion of an egg, Von Baer formulated what became known as Baers laws of embryology, General characteristics of the group to which an embryo belongs develop before special characteristics. General structural relations are formed before the most specific appear. The form of any given embryo does not converge upon other definite forms, the embryo of a higher animal form never resembles the adult of another animal form, such as one less evolved, but only its embryo. From his studies of embryology, Baer had believed in the transmutation of species
8.
Ferdinand von Wrangel
–
He is best known as chief manager of the Russian-American Company, in fact governor of the Russian settlements in present-day Alaska. In English texts, Wrangel is sometimes spelled Vrangel, a transliteration from Russian, Wrangel was born in Pskov, into the noble Baltic German Wrangel family. He graduated from the Naval Cadets College in 1815 and he took part in Vasily Golovnins world cruise on the ship Kamchatka in 1817–1819. He was appointed in 1820 to command the Kolymskaya expedition to explore the Russian polar seas, sailing from St. Petersburg, he arrived at Nizhnekolymsk on 2 November 1820, and early in 1821 journeyed to Cape Shelagskiy on sledges drawn by dogs. He sailed afterward up Kolyma River, advancing about 125 miles into the interior, on 10 March 1822, he resumed his journey northward, and traveled 46 days on the ice, reaching 72°2 north latitude. He left Nizhnekolymsk on 1 November 1823, and returned to St. Petersburg on 15 August 1824 and he established that north of the Kolyma River and Cape Shelagsky there was an open sea, not dry land, as people thought. Together with Fyodor Matyushkin and P. Kuzmin, Wrangel described the Siberian coastline from the Indigirka River to the Kolyuchinskaya Bay in the Chukchi Sea. His expedition made a research in glaciology, geomagnetics, and climatology and also collected data about natural resources. Having been promoted to commander, Wrangel led the Russian world voyage on the ship Krotky in 1825–1827 and he was appointed chief manager of the Russian-American Company in 1829, effectively governor of its settlements in North America. Prior to his departure for Russia’s American colonies, he was married to Elisabeth Teodora Natalia Karolina de Rossillon and he traveled to his post early in 1829, by way of Siberia and Kamchatka. He promoted investment, and sent out missionaries and he began a survey of the country, opened roads, built bridges and government buildings. He made geographical and ethnographical observations, which he embodied in a memoir to the navy department, recalled in 1834, he returned by way of the Isthmus of Panama and the United States, where he visited several cities. Wrangel was promoted admiral in 1837, and made director of the ship-timber department in the navy office. He became vice-admiral in 1847, but resigned in 1849, Wrangel had been a member of the board of directors of the Russian-American Company from 1840 to 1849. In 1854 he re-entered active service and was chief director of the hydrographical department of the navy. He was the Minister of the Navy 1855–1857 and he opposed the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Wrangel wrote the book Journey along the coastline of Siberia. He lived in his last years in Roela in the part of Estonia
9.
Vladimir Dal
–
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was one of the greatest Russian language lexicographers. He was a member of the Russian Geographical Society. He knew at least six languages including Turkic and is considered to be one of the early Turkologists, during his lifetime he compiled and documented the oral history of the region that was later published in Russian and became part of modern folklore. His father was a Danish physician named Johan Christian von Dahl and he was a linguist versed in German, English, French, Russian, Yiddish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew languages. His mother, Maria Freitag, was of German and French descent and she spoke at least five languages and came from a family of scholars. The prospective lexicographer was born in the town of Lugansky Zavod, in Novorossiya under the jurisdiction of Yekaterinoslav Governorate, part of Russian Empire, which is now Luhansk, Ukraine. On the outskirts, the composition varied and included such nationalities as Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Tatars. Dal grew up under the influence of various ethnic mixture of people. Dal served in the Russian Navy from 1814 to 1826, graduating from the St Petersburg Naval Cadet School in 1819, in 1826, he began studying medicine at Dorpat University and took part as a military doctor in the Russo-Turkish War and the campaign against Poland in 1831–1832. Dal was interested in language and folklore from his early years and he started traveling by foot through the countryside, collecting sayings and fairy tales in various Slavic languages from the region. He published his first collection of fairy-tales in 1832 in Russian language, some others, yet unpublished, were put in verse by his friend Alexander Pushkin and have become some of the most familiar texts in the Russian language. After Pushkins fatal duel, Dal was summoned to his deathbed and looked after the poet during the last hours of his life. In 1838, Dal was elected to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, in the following decade, Dal adopted the pen name Kazak Lugansky and published several realistic essays in the manner of Nikolai Gogol. He continued his studies and extensive travels throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Having no time to edit his collection of tales, he asked Alexander Afanasyev to prepare them for publication. Joachim T. Baer wrote, While Dal was an observer, he lacked talent in developing a story. He was interested in the wealth of the Russian language, later he collected and recorded fairy tales, folk songs, birch bark woodcuts, and accounts of superstitions, beliefs, and prejudices of the Russian people. His industry in the sphere of collecting was prodigious and his magnum opus, Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian language, was published in four huge volumes in 1863–1866
