History of Bulgaria
The history of Bulgaria can be traced from the first settlements on the lands of modern Bulgaria to its formation as a nation-state and includes the history of the Bulgarian people and their origin. The earliest evidence of hominid occupation discovered on what is today Bulgaria date from at least 1.4 million years ago. Around 5000 BC, a sophisticated civilization existed and produced some of the first pottery and jewelry in the world. After 3000 BC, the Thracians appeared on the Balkan peninsula. In the late 6th century BC, most of what is nowadays Bulgaria came under the Persian Empire. In the 470s BC, the Thracians formed the powerful Odrysian Kingdom after the Persian defeat in Greece, which subsequently declined and Thracian tribes fell under Macedonian and Roman domination; this mixture of ancient peoples was assimilated by the Slavs, who permanently settled on the peninsula after 500 AD. Meanwhile, in 632 the Bulgars formed an independent state north of the Black sea that became known as Great Bulgaria under the leadership of Kubrat.
Pressure from the Khazars led to the disintegration of Great Bulgaria in the second half of the 7th century. One of the Kubrat's successors, migrated with some of the Bulgar tribes to the area around the Danube delta, subsequently conquered Scythia Minor and Moesia Inferior from the Byzantine Empire, expanding his new kingdom further into the Balkan Peninsula. A peace treaty with Byzantium in 681 and the establishment of a permanent Bulgarian capital at Pliska south of the Danube mark the beginning of the First Bulgarian Empire; the new state brought together Thracian remnants and Slavs under Bulgar rule, a slow process of mutual assimilation began. In the following centuries Bulgaria established itself as a powerful empire, dominating the Balkans through its aggressive military traditions, which led to development of distinct ethnic identity, its ethnically and culturally diverse people united under a common religion and alphabet which formed and preserved the Bulgarian national consciousness despite foreign invasions and influences.
In the 11th century, the First Bulgarian Empire collapsed under Rus' and Byzantine attacks, became part of the Byzantine Empire until 1185. A major uprising led by two brothers - Asen and Peter of the Asen dynasty, restored the Bulgarian state to form the Second Bulgarian Empire. After reaching its apogee in the 1230s, Bulgaria started to decline due to a number of factors, most notably its geographic position which rendered it vulnerable to simultaneous attacks and invasions from many sides. A peasant rebellion, one of the few successful such in history, established the swineherd Ivaylo as a Tsar, his short reign was essential in recovering - at least - the integrity of the Bulgarian state. A thriving period followed after 1300, but ended in 1371, when factional divisions caused Bulgaria to split into three small Tsardoms. By 1396, they were subjugated by the Ottoman Empire; the Turks eliminated the Bulgarian system of nobility and ruling clergy, Bulgaria remained an integral Turkish territory for the next 500 years.
With the decline of the Ottoman Empire after 1700, signs of revival started to emerge. The Bulgarian nobility had vanished, leaving an egalitarian peasant society with a small but growing urban middle class. By the 19th century, the Bulgarian National Revival became a key component of the struggle for independence, which would culminate in the failed April uprising in 1876, which prompted the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and the subsequent Liberation of Bulgaria; the initial Treaty of San Stefano was rejected by the Western Great Powers, the following Treaty of Berlin limited Bulgaria's territories to Moesia and the region of Sofia. This left many ethnic Bulgarians out of the borders of the new state, which defined Bulgaria's militaristic approach to regional affairs and its allegiance to Germany in both World Wars. After World War II, Bulgaria became a Communist state, dominated by Todor Zhivkov for a period of 35 years. Bulgaria's economic advancement during the era came to an end in the 1980s, the collapse of the Communist system in Eastern Europe marked a turning point for the country's development.
A series of crises in the 1990s left much of Bulgaria's industry and agriculture in shambles, although a period of relative stabilization began with the election of Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as prime minister in 2001. Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007; the earliest human remains found in Bulgaria have been excavated in the Kozarnika cave, with an approximate age of 1,6 million BP. This cave keeps the earliest evidence of human symbolic behaviour found. Human remains found in Bacho Kiro cave that are 44,000 years old consist of a pair of fragmented human jaws, but it is disputed whether these early humans were in fact Homo Sapiens or Neanderthals; the earliest dwellings in Bulgaria - the Stara Zagora Neolithic dwellings - date from 6,000 BC and are amongst the oldest man-made structures yet discovered. By the end of the neolithic, the Hamangia and Vinča culture developed on what is today Bulgaria, southern Romania and eastern Serbia; the earliest known town in Europe, was located in present-day Bulgaria.
The Durankulak lake settlement in Bulgaria commenced on a small island 7000 BC and around 4700/4600 BC the stone architecture was in general use and became a characteristic phenomenon, unique in Europe. The eneolithic Varna culture represents the first civilization with a sophisticated social hierarchy in Europe; the centerpiece of this culture is the Varna Necropolis, discovered in the early 1970s. It serves as a tool in understanding how the earliest European societies functioned, principally through well-preserved ritual
Polish literature
Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages used in Poland over the centuries have contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Latin, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Esperanto. According to Czesław Miłosz, for centuries Polish literature focused more on drama and poetic self-expression than on fiction; the reasons were manifold, but rested on historical circumstances of the nation. Polish writers have had a more profound range of choices to motivate them to write, including historical cataclysms of extraordinary violence that swept Poland; the period of Polish Enlightenment began in the 1730s–40s and peaked in the second half of the 18th century. One of the leading Polish Enlightenment authors included Jan Potocki. Polish Romanticism, unlike Romanticism elsewhere in Europe, was a movement for independence against the foreign occupation. Early Polish Romantics were influenced by other European Romantics.
Notable writers included Seweryn Goszczyński, Tomasz Zan and Maurycy Mochnacki. In the second period, many Polish Romantics worked abroad. Influential poets included Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński. In the aftermath of the failed January Uprising, the new period of Polish Positivism began to advocate skepticism and the exercise of reason; the modernist period known as the Young Poland movement in visual arts and music, came into being around 1890, concluded with the Poland's return to independence. Notable authors included Stanisław Przybyszewski and Jan Kasprowicz; the neo-Romantic era was exemplified by the works of Stefan Żeromski, Władysław Reymont, Gabriela Zapolska, Stanisław Wyspiański. In 1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz received a Nobel Prize in literature for his patriotic Trilogy inspiring a new sense of hope. Literature of the Second Polish Republic encompasses a short, though exceptionally dynamic period in Polish literary consciousness; the socio-political reality has changed radically with Poland's return to independence.
New avant-garde writers included Tuwim, Gombrowicz, Miłosz, Dąbrowska and Nałkowska. In the years of German and Soviet occupation of Poland, all artistic life was compromised. Cultural institutions were lost. Out of 1,500 clandestine publications in Poland, about 200 were devoted to literature. Much of Polish literature written during the Occupation of Poland appeared in print only after the conclusion of World War II, including books by Nałkowska, Rudnicki and others; the situation began to worsen around 1949–1950 with the introduction of the Stalinist doctrine by minister Sokorski. Poland had three Nobel Prize winning authors in the 20th century: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska. Nothing remains of Polish literature prior to the country's Christianization in 966. Poland's pagan inhabitants possessed an oral literature extending to Slavic songs and beliefs, but early Christian writers did not deem it worthy of mention in the obligatory Latin, so it has perished. Within the Polish literary tradition, it is customary to include works that have dealt with Poland if not written by ethnic Poles.
This is the case with Gallus Anonymus, the first historian to have described Poland in his work entitled Cronicae et gesta ducum sive principum Polonorum, composed in sophisticated Latin. Gallus was a foreign monk who accompanied King Bolesław III Wrymouth in his return from Hungary to Poland; the important tradition of Polish historiography was continued by Wincenty Kadłubek, a thirteenth-century Bishop of Kraków, as well as Jan Długosz, a Polish priest and secretary to Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki. The first recorded sentence in the Polish language reads: "Day ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai" — a paraphrase of the Latin "Sine, ut ego etiam molam." The work, in which this phrase appeared, reflects the culture of early Poland. The sentence was written within the Latin language chronicle Liber fundationis from between 1269 and 1273, a history of the Cistercian monastery in Henryków, Silesia, it was recorded by an abbot known as Piotr, referring to an event a hundred years earlier. The sentence was uttered by a Bohemian settler, Bogwal, a subject of Bolesław the Tall, expressing compassion for his own wife who "very stood grinding by the quern-stone."
Most notable early medieval Polish works in Latin and the Old Polish language include the oldest extant manuscript of fine prose in the Polish language entitled the Holy Cross Sermons, as well as the earliest Polish-language Bible of Queen Zofia and the Chronicle of Janko of Czarnków from the 14th century, not to mention the Puławy Psalter. Most early texts in Polish vernacular were influenced by the Latin sacred literature, they include Bogurodzica, a hymn in praise of the Virgin Mary written down in the 15th century, though popular at least a century earlier. Bogurodzica served as a national anthem, it was one of the first texts reproduced in Polish on a printing press. In the early 1470s, one of the first printing houses in Poland was set up by Kasper Straube in Kraków. In 1475 Kasper Elyan of Glogau set u
History of Poland
The history of Poland has its roots in the migrations of Slavs, who established permanent settlements in the Polish lands during the Early Middle Ages. The first ruling dynasty, the Piasts, emerged by the 10th century AD. Duke Mieszko I is considered the de facto creator of the Polish state and is recognized for the adoption of Western Christianity that followed his baptism in 966. Mieszko's duchy of Poland was formally reconstituted as a medieval kingdom in 1025 by his son Bolesław I the Brave, known for military expansion under his rule; the most successful of the Piast kings was the last one, Casimir III the Great, who presided over a brilliant period of economic prosperity and territorial aggrandizement before his death in 1370 without male heirs. The period of the Jagiellonian dynasty in the 14th–16th centuries brought close ties with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a cultural Renaissance in Poland and continued territorial expansion that culminated in the establishment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569.
In its early phases, the Commonwealth was able to sustain the levels of prosperity achieved during the Jagiellonian period, while its political system matured as a unique noble democracy. From the mid-17th century, the huge state entered a period of decline caused by devastating wars and the deterioration of its political system. Significant internal reforms were introduced during the part of the 18th century in the Constitution of 3 May 1791, but neighboring powers did not allow the reform process to advance; the independent existence of the Commonwealth ended in 1795 after a series of invasions and partitions of Polish territory carried out by the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy. From 1795 until 1918, no independent Polish state existed, although strong Polish resistance movements operated. After the failure of the last military uprising against the Russian Empire, the January Uprising of 1863, the nation preserved its identity through educational initiatives and a program of "organic work" intended to modernize the economy and society.
The opportunity to regain independence only materialized after World War I, when the three partitioning imperial powers were fatally weakened in the wake of war and revolution. The Second Polish Republic, established in 1918, existed as an independent state until 1939, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union destroyed it in their invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II. Millions of Polish citizens perished in the course of the Nazi occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945 as Germany classified ethnic Poles and other Slavs and Romani as subhuman. Nazi authorities targeted the last two groups for extermination in the short term, deferring the extermination and/or enslavement of the Slavs as part of the Generalplan Ost conceived by the Nazi régime. A Polish government-in-exile nonetheless functioned throughout the war and the Poles contributed to the Allied victory through participation in military campaigns on both the eastern and western fronts; the westward advances of the Soviet Red Army in 1944 and 1945 compelled Nazi Germany's forces to retreat from Poland, which led to the establishment of a communist satellite state of the Soviet Union, known from 1952 as the Polish People's Republic.
As a result of territorial adjustments mandated by the victorious Allies at the end of World War II in 1945, Poland's geographic centre of gravity shifted towards the west and the re-defined Polish lands lost their historic multi-ethnic character through the extermination and migration of various ethnic groups during and after the war. By the late 1980s, the Polish reform movement Solidarity became crucial in bringing about a peaceful transition from a communist state to a capitalist economic system and a liberal parliamentary democracy; this process resulted in the creation of the modern Polish state: the Third Polish Republic, founded in 1989. In prehistoric and protohistoric times, over a period of at least 500,000 years, the area of present-day Poland was intermittently inhabited by members of the Homo genus, it went through the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age stages of development, along with the nearby regions. The Neolithic period ushered in the Linear Pottery culture, whose founders migrated from the Danube River area beginning about 5,500 BC.
This culture was distinguished by the establishment of the first settled agricultural communities in modern Polish territory. Between about 4,400 and 2,000 BC, the native post-Mesolithic populations would adopt and further develop the agricultural way of life. Poland's Early Bronze Age began around 2300–2400 BC, whereas its Iron Age commenced c. 700–750 BC. One of the many cultures that have been uncovered, the Lusatian culture, spanned the Bronze and Iron Ages and left notable settlement sites. Around 400 BC, Poland was settled by Celts of the La Tène culture, they were soon followed by emerging cultures with a strong Germanic component, influenced first by the Celts and by the Roman Empire. The Germanic peoples migrated out of the area by about 500 AD during the great Migration Period of the European Dark Ages. Wooded regions to the north and east were settled by Balts. According to mainstream archaeological research, Slavs have resided in modern Polish territories for over 1500 years. Recent genetic studies, determined that people who live in the current territory of Poland include the descendants of people who inhabited the area for thousands of years, beginning in the early Neolithic period.
Slavs on the territory of Poland were organized into tribal units, of which the larger ones were known as the Polish tribes.
Dictionary
A dictionary, sometimes known as a wordbook, is a collection of words in one or more specific languages arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, etymologies, translation, etc. or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, sometimes known as a lexicon. It is a lexicographical reference. A broad distinction is made between specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a complete range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionaries are supposed to be semasiological, mapping word to definition, while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological, first identifying concepts and establishing the terms used to designate them. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types.
There are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms, rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary is understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary. There is a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries. Stylistic indications in many modern dictionaries are considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive. Although the first recorded dictionaries date back to Sumerian times, the systematic study of dictionaries as objects of scientific interest themselves is a 20th-century enterprise, called lexicography, initiated by Ladislav Zgusta; the birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of "astonishing" lack of method and critical-self reflection. The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian Empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla and dated 2300 BCE.
The early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. A Chinese dictionary, the c. 3rd century BCE Erya, was the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary. Philitas of Cos wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words, words from local dialects, technical terms. Apollonius the Sophist wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon; the first Sanskrit dictionary, the Amarakośa, was written by Amara Sinha c. 4th century CE. Written in verse, it listed around 10,000 words. According to the Nihon Shoki, the first Japanese dictionary was the long-lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters; the oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the c. 835 CE Tenrei Banshō Meigi, was a glossary of written Chinese. In Frahang-i Pahlavig, Aramaic heterograms are listed together with their translation in Middle Persian language and phonetic transcription in Pazand alphabet. A 9th-century CE Irish dictionary, Sanas Cormaic, contained etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words.
In India around 1320, Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari which dealt with Hindustani and Persian words. Arabic dictionaries were compiled between the 8th and 14th centuries CE, organizing words in rhyme order, by alphabetical order of the radicals, or according to the alphabetical order of the first letter; the modern system was used in specialist dictionaries, such as those of terms from the Qur'an and hadith, while most general use dictionaries, such as the Lisan al-`Arab and al-Qamus al-Muhit listed words in the alphabetical order of the radicals. The Qamus al-Muhit is the first handy dictionary in Arabic, which includes only words and their definitions, eliminating the supporting examples used in such dictionaries as the Lisan and the Oxford English Dictionary. In medieval Europe, glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use; the Catholicon by Johannes Balbus, a large grammatical work with an alphabetical lexicon, was adopted. It served as the basis for several bilingual dictionaries and was one of the earliest books to be printed.
In 1502 Ambrogio Calepino's Dictionarium was published a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary. In 1532 Robert Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae latinae and in 1572 his son Henri Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae graecae, which served up to the 19th century as the basis of Greek lexicography; the first monolingual dictionary written in Europe was the Spanish, written by Sebastián Covarrubias' Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, published in 1611 in Madrid, Spain. In 1612 the first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, for Italian, was published, it served as the model for similar works in English. In 1690 in Rotterdam was published, the Dictionnaire Universel by
Josef Dobrovský
Josef Dobrovský, Hungarian: Dobrowsky József was a Czech philologist and historian, one of the most important figures of the Czech National Revival along with Josef Jungmann. Dobrovský was born at Balassagyarmat, Nógrád County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, when his father Jakub Doubravský (1701, Royal Bohemia – 1764, Bischofteinitz was temporarily stationed as a soldier there, his mother was Magdalena Dobrovská. He received his first education in the German school at Horšovský Týn in Plzeň district, made his first acquaintance with the Czech language and soon made himself fluent in it at the Německý Brod gymnasium, studied for some time under the Jesuits at Klatovy. In 1769 he began to study philosophy at the University of Prague. In 1772 he was admitted among the Jesuits at Brno and was preparing for a Christian mission in India. However, the entire order was dissolved in the Czech lands in 1773 and Dobrovský thus returned to Prague to study theology. After holding for some time the office of tutor to Count Nostitz, he obtained an appointment first as vice-rector, as rector, in the general seminary at Hradisko.
At this time, he wrote some of the most important works in Slavic studies and philology. In 1792 he was commissioned by the Bohemian Academy of Sciences to visit Stockholm, Saint Petersburg and Moscow in search of the manuscripts, scattered by the Thirty Years' War, on his return he accompanied Count Nostitz to Switzerland and Italy. In the 1780s Dobrovský participated in the academic life of Prague. In 1784, he helped to set up the Royal Czech Society of Sciences, in 1818 the National Museum of what was to become Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. However, his reason began to give way in 1795, in 1801 he had to be confined in a lunatic asylum, but by 1803 he had recovered; the rest of his life was spent either in Prague or at the country seats of his friends Counts Nostitz and Czernin, but his death occurred in Brno, where he had gone in 1828 to study in the local libraries. While his fame rests chiefly on his labours in Slavonic philology his botanical studies are not without value in the history of the science.
Between 1948 and 1968 Czech poet Vladimír Holan lived in the so-called "Dobrovský House" on Kampa saying that the Blue Abbé would sometimes visit him. Fragmentum Pragense evangelii S. Marci, vulgo autographi a periodical for Bohemian and Moravian literature Scriptores rerum Bohemicarum Geschichte der böhm. Sprache und alten Literatur Die Bildsamkeit der slaw. Sprache a Deutsch-böhm. Wörterbuch compiled in collaboration with Leschk and Hanka Entwurf eines Pflanzensystems nach Zahlen und Verhältnissen Glagolitica Lehrgebäude der böhmischen Sprache Institutiones linguae slavicae dialecti veteris Entwurf zu einem allgemeinen Etymologikon der slaw. Sprachen Slowanka zur Kenntnis der slaw. Literatur a critical edition of Jordanes, De rebus Geticis, for Pertz's Monumenta Germaniae HistoricaSee Palacký, J. Dobrowskys Leben und gelehrtes Wirken. List of Jesuit scientists Josef Dobrovský Monument This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. "Dobrowsky, Joseph".
Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press
Cold War
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states, the United States with its allies after World War II. A common historiography of the conflict begins between 1946, the year U. S. diplomat George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow cemented a U. S. foreign policy of containment of Soviet expansionism threatening strategically vital regions, the Truman Doctrine of 1947, ending between the Revolutions of 1989, which ended communism in Eastern Europe, the 1991 collapse of the USSR, when nations of the Soviet Union abolished communism and restored their independence. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars; the conflict split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany and its allies, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. The capitalist West was led by the United States, a federal republic with a two-party presidential system, as well as the other First World nations of the Western Bloc that were liberal democratic with a free press and independent organizations, but were economically and politically entwined with a network of banana republics and other authoritarian regimes, most of which were the Western Bloc's former colonies.
Some major Cold War frontlines such as Indochina and the Congo were still Western colonies in 1947. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was a self-proclaimed Marxist–Leninist state led by its Communist Party, which in turn was dominated by a totalitarian leader with different titles over time, a small committee called the Politburo; the Party controlled the state, the press, the military, the economy, many organizations throughout the Second World, including the Warsaw Pact and other satellites, funded communist parties around the world, sometimes in competition with communist China following the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s. The two worlds were fighting for dominance in low-developed regions known as the Third World. In time, a neutral bloc arose in these regions with the Non-Aligned Movement, which sought good relations with both sides. Notwithstanding isolated incidents of air-to-air dogfights and shoot-downs, the two superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat. However, both were armed in preparation for a possible all-out nuclear world war.
Each side had a nuclear strategy that discouraged an attack by the other side, on the basis that such an attack would lead to the total destruction of the attacker—the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Aside from the development of the two sides' nuclear arsenals, their deployment of conventional military forces, the struggle for dominance was expressed via proxy wars around the globe, psychological warfare, massive propaganda campaigns and espionage, far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at sports events, technological competitions such as the Space Race; the first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR consolidated its control over the states of the Eastern Bloc, while the United States began a strategy of global containment to challenge Soviet power, extending military and financial aid to the countries of Western Europe and creating the NATO alliance; the Berlin Blockade was the first major crisis of the Cold War. With the victory of the Communist side in the Chinese Civil War and the outbreak of the Korean War, the conflict expanded.
The USSR and the US competed for influence in Latin America and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia. The Soviets suppressed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; the expansion and escalation sparked more crises, such as the Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the closest the two sides came to nuclear war. Meanwhile, an international peace movement took root and grew among citizens around the world, first in Japan from 1954, when people became concerned about nuclear weapons testing, but soon in Europe and the US; the peace movement, in particular the anti-nuclear movement, gained pace and popularity from the late 1950s and early 1960s, continued to grow through the'70s and'80s with large protest marches and various non-parliamentary activism opposing war and calling for global nuclear disarmament. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new phase began that saw the Sino-Soviet split complicate relations within the Communist sphere, while US allies France, demonstrated greater independence of action.
The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization program in Czechoslovakia, while the US experienced internal turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, which ended with the defeat of the US-backed Republic of Vietnam, prompting further adjustments. By the 1970s, both sides had become interested in making allowances in order to create a more stable and predictable international system, ushering in a period of détente that saw Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the US opening relations with the People's Republic of China as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union. Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979; the early 1980s were another period of elevated tension, with the Soviet downing of KAL Flight 007 and the "Able Archer" NATO military exercises, both in 1983. The United States increased diplomatic and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was suffering from economic stag
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
