1.
Moscow
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Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits and 17.8 million within the urban area. Moscow has the status of a Russian federal city, Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city entirely on the European continent. Moscow is the northernmost and coldest megacity and metropolis on Earth and it is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe, the Federation Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and the Moscow International Business Center. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, the city is well known for its architecture, particularly its historic buildings such as Saint Basils Cathedral with its brightly colored domes. Moscow is the seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are also one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament also sit in the city and it is recognized as one of the citys landmarks due to the rich architecture of its 200 stations. In old Russian the word also meant a church administrative district. The demonym for a Moscow resident is москвич for male or москвичка for female, the name of the city is thought to be derived from the name of the Moskva River. There have been proposed several theories of the origin of the name of the river and its cognates include Russian, музга, muzga pool, puddle, Lithuanian, mazgoti and Latvian, mazgāt to wash, Sanskrit, majjati to drown, Latin, mergō to dip, immerse. There exist as well similar place names in Poland like Mozgawa, the original Old Russian form of the name is reconstructed as *Москы, *Mosky, hence it was one of a few Slavic ū-stem nouns. From the latter forms came the modern Russian name Москва, Moskva, in a similar manner the Latin name Moscovia has been formed, later it became a colloquial name for Russia used in Western Europe in the 16th–17th centuries. From it as well came English Muscovy, various other theories, having little or no scientific ground, are now largely rejected by contemporary linguists. The surface similarity of the name Russia with Rosh, an obscure biblical tribe or country, the oldest evidence of humans on the territory of Moscow dates from the Neolithic. Within the modern bounds of the city other late evidence was discovered, on the territory of the Kremlin, Sparrow Hills, Setun River and Kuntsevskiy forest park, etc. The earliest East Slavic tribes recorded as having expanded to the upper Volga in the 9th to 10th centuries are the Vyatichi and Krivichi, the Moskva River was incorporated as part of Rostov-Suzdal into the Kievan Rus in the 11th century. By AD1100, a settlement had appeared on the mouth of the Neglinnaya River. The first known reference to Moscow dates from 1147 as a place of Yuri Dolgoruky. At the time it was a town on the western border of Vladimir-Suzdal Principality
2.
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
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The Republic comprised sixteen 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, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara. The Russian Soviet Republic was proclaimed on November 7,1917 as a sovereign state, the first Constitution was adopted in 1918. In 1922 the Russian SFSR signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR, the economy of Russia became heavily industrialized, accounting for about two-thirds of the electricity produced in the USSR. It was, by 1961, the third largest producer of petroleum due to new discoveries in the Volga-Urals region and Siberia, trailing only the United States and Saudi Arabia. In 1974, there were 475 institutes of 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, the effects of market policies led to the failure of many enterprises and total instability by 1990. On June 12,1990, the Congress of Peoples Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, on June 12,1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected the first President. On December 8,1991, heads of Russia, Ukraine, the agreement declared dissolution of the USSR by its founder states and established the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 12, the agreement was ratified by the Russian Parliament, therefore Russian SFSR denounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and de facto declared Russias independence from the USSR. On December 25,1991, following the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as president of the Soviet Union, on December 26,1991, the USSR was self-dissolved by the Soviet of Nationalities, which by that time was the only functioning house of the Supreme Soviet. After dissolution of the USSR, Russia declared that it assumed the rights and obligations of the dissolved central Soviet government, the new Russian constitution, adopted on December 12,1993 after a constitutional crisis, abolished the Soviet system of government in its entirety. Initially, the state did not have a name and wasnt recognized by neighboring countries for five months. Meanwhile, anti-Bolsheviks coined the mocking label Sovdepia for the nascent state of the Soviets of Workers, on January 25,1918 the third meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets renamed the unrecognized state the Soviet Russian Republic. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3,1918, on July 10,1918, the Russian Constitution of 1918 renamed the country the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. By 1918, during the Russian Civil War, several states within the former Russian Empire seceded, internationally, in 1920, the RSFSR was recognized as an independent state only by Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania in the Treaty of Tartu and by the short-lived Irish Republic. On December 30,1922, with the creation of the Soviet Union, the final Soviet name for the republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, was adopted in the Soviet Constitution of 1936. By that time, Soviet Russia had gained roughly the same borders of the old Tsardom of Russia before the Great Northern War of 1700
3.
Larisa Bogoraz
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Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz was a dissident in the Soviet Union. Her marriage to Daniel would ultimately lead to her becoming involved in activism, in 1965, Daniel and a friend of his, Andrei Sinyavsky, were arrested for a number of writings that they had had published overseas under pseudonyms. The trial of the two men was the beginning of a crackdown on dissent under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and they were both sent to terms in forced labor camps. After their detention, Bogoraz wrote to Brezhnev in protest, despite knowing that such an act could land her in prison, as all participants, Bogoraz was arrested, tried and sentenced to four years of exile in Siberia, which she spent in a woodworking plant. Daniel was released in 1970, while Bogoraz was still in Siberia and their marriage did not survive much longer, and they soon divorced. However, soon after her release, Bogoraz resumed her resistance of the Soviet regime and she signed many public appeals to the authorities. She co-wrote an underground book, Memory, which detailed Stalins terror and was published overseas. She also contributed to the underground publication A Chronicle of Current Events, in 1975, she wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov, who was the head of the KGB at the time, requesting that he open the organizations archives. Bogoraz later married Anatoly Marchenko, another prominent dissident, together, they co-wrote a number of appeals. Marchenko was arrested in 1980, and unlike Daniel, did not survive his sentence, Bogoraz launched a campaign in 1986 to have all political prisoners freed. The campaign was successful, as the year, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev began releasing them. This came too late for Marchenko, who died as a result of a hunger strike shortly before the initial release, in 1987, she tried to initiate a campaign for amnesty for political prisoners. In 1989, Bogoraz joined, and subsequently became chairwoman of and she acted as a bridge between the old guard of dissidents, and the new generation that were arising as the Soviet Union dissolved. After the demise of the Soviet Union, Bogoraz continued her activism, visiting prisoners and she also became chairwoman of the Seminar on Human Rights, a joint Russian-American nongovernmental organization. She resigned from the latter in 1996, but continued to influence in human rights circles up until her death. Not long before her death, she issued a letter condemning both the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the 2003 Iraq War. She died on April 6,2004, aged 74, after a series of strokes Bogoraz is mentioned in the song Ilyich by Yuliy Kim, available at several sites. Obituary, Larisa Bogoraz, The Independent, April 10,2004 Obituary, Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz, http, Bogoraz, Larissa Iosifovna http, //eng. kavkaz. memo. ru/printperson/engperson/id/656175. html Vaissié, Cécile
4.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
5.
Political prisoner
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A political prisoner is someone imprisoned because they have opposed or criticized the government responsible for their imprisonment. The term is used by persons or groups challenging the legitimacy of the detention of a prisoner, supporters of the term define a political prisoner as someone who is imprisoned for his or her participation in political activity. If a political offense was not the reason for the prisoners detention. Some understand the political prisoner narrowly, equating it with the term prisoner of conscience. Amnesty International campaigns for the release of prisoners of conscience, which include political prisoners as well as those imprisoned for their religious or philosophical beliefs. To reduce controversy, and as a matter of principle, the organizations policy applies only to prisoners who have not committed or advocated violence, thus, there are political prisoners who do not fit the narrower criteria for POCs. The organisation defines the differences as follows, AI uses the political prisoner broadly. It does not use it, as others do, to imply that all such prisoners have a special status or should be released. It uses the only to define a category of prisoners for whom AI demands a fair. Governments often say they have no political prisoners, only prisoners held under the criminal law. AI however describes cases like the examples given above as political, for instance, French anarchist groups typically call the former members of Action Directe held in France political prisoners. While the French government deemed Action Directe illegal, the group fashioned itself as a guerilla movement. In this sense, political prisoner can be used to describe any politically active prisoner who is held in custody for a violent action which supporters deem ethically justified, some libertarians also include all convicted for treason and some convicted of espionage in the category of political prisoners. Currently, there is much controversy and debate around how to define this term. Political prisoners can also be imprisoned with no legal veneer by extrajudicial processes, some political prisoners need not be imprisoned at all. Supporters of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima in the 11th Panchen Lama controversy have called him a political prisoner and he is held under secluded house arrest. This is common in situations which may otherwise be decried nationally and internationally as a human rights violation or suppression of a political dissident, particularly in this latter situation, whether an individual is regarded as a political prisoner may depend upon subjective political perspective or interpretation of the evidence. In the Soviet Union, dubious psychiatric diagnoses were sometimes used to political prisoners in the so-called psikhushkas
6.
Pseudonym
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A pseudonym or alias is a name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which can differ from their original or true name. Historically, they have taken the form of anagrams, Graecisms. Pseudonyms should not be confused with new names that replace old ones, actors, musicians, and other performers sometimes use stage names, for example, to mask their ethnic backgrounds. A collective name or collective pseudonym is one shared by two or more persons, for example the co-authors of a work, such as Ellery Queen, the term is derived from the Greek ψευδώνυμον, literally false name, from ψεῦδος, lie, falsehood and ὄνομα, name. A pseudonym is distinct from an allonym, which is the name of another person and this may occur when someone is ghostwriting a book or play, or in parody, or when using a front name, such as by screenwriters blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s. See also pseudepigraph, for falsely attributed authorship, sometimes people change their name in such a manner that the new name becomes permanent and is used by all who know the person. This is not an alias or pseudonym, but in fact a new name, in many countries, including common law countries, a name change can be ratified by a court and become a persons new legal name. He then changed his name again to Malik El-Shabazz when he converted to Islam, likewise some Jews adopted Hebrew family names upon immigrating to Israel, dropping surnames that had been in their families for generations. The politician David Ben-Gurion, for example, was born David Grün in Poland and he adopted his Hebrew name in 1910, when he published his first article in a Zionist journal in Jerusalem. Criminals may use aliases, fictitious business names, and dummy corporations to hide their identity, a pen name, or nom de plume, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. Some female authors used male pen names, in particular in the 19th century, the Brontë family used pen names for their early work, so as not to reveal their gender and so that local residents would not know that the books related to people of the neighbourhood. The Brontës used their neighbours as inspiration for characters in many of their books, anne Brontë published The Tenant of Wildfell Hall under the name Acton Bell. Charlotte Brontë published Shirley and Jane Eyre under the name Currer Bell, emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights as Ellis Bell. A well-known example of the former is Mary Ann Evans, who wrote as George Eliot, Another example is Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, a 19th-century French writer who used the pen name George Sand. In contrast, some twentieth and twenty first century male romance novelists have used pen names. A few examples of male authors using female pseudonyms include Brindle Chase, Peter ODonnell and Christopher Wood. A pen name may be used if a real name is likely to be confused with the name of another writer or notable individual. Authors who write both fiction and non-fiction, or in different genres, may use different pen names to avoid confusing their readers, in some cases, an author may become better known by his pen name than his real name
7.
Yiddish
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Yiddish is the historical language of the Ashkenazi Jews. Yiddish is written with a fully vocalized alphabet based on the Hebrew script, the earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language לשון־אַשכּנז or טײַטש, a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for Middle High German. Colloquially, the language is sometimes called מאַמע־לשון, distinguishing it from לשון־קדש, the term Yiddish, short for Yiddish-Teitsch, did not become the most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century the language was commonly called Jewish, especially in non-Jewish contexts. Modern Yiddish has two major forms, Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern, Mideastern, and Northeastern dialects, Eastern Yiddish differs from Western both by its far greater size and by the extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish is divided into Southwestern, Midwestern, and Northwestern dialects, the term Yiddish is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with Jewish, to designate attributes of Ashkenazi culture. Prior to the Holocaust, there were over 10 million speakers of Yiddish, 85% of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, assimilation following World War II further decreased the use of Yiddish both among survivors and Yiddish-speakers from other countries. However, the number of speakers is increasing in global Hasidic communities, the established view is that, as with other Jewish languages, Jews speaking distinct languages learned new co-territorial vernaculars, which they then Judaized. Exactly what German base lies behind the earliest form of Yiddish is disputed, both Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum developed this model further in the mid-1950s. In Weinreichs view, this Old Yiddish substrate later bifurcated into two versions of the language, Western and Eastern Yiddish. They retained the Semitic vocabulary needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, recent linguistic research has finessed, contested, or challenged the Weinreich model, providing alternative approaches to the origins of Yiddish. Some theorists argue that the fusion occurred with a Bavarian dialect base, the two main candidates for the germinal matrix of Yiddish, the Rhineland and Bavaria, are not necessarily incompatible. There may have been developments in the two regions, seeding the Western and Eastern dialects of Modern Yiddish. Dovid Katz proposes that Yiddish emerged from contact between speakers of High German and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East, wexlers model has met with little academic support, and strong critical challenges, especially among historical linguists. Alternative theories recognize the extent of Yiddishs Germanic vocabulary. Ashkenaz was centered on the Rhineland and the Palatinate, in what is now the westernmost part of Germany and its geographic extent did not coincide with the German principalities of the time, and it included northern France. Ashkenaz bordered on the inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardim or Spanish Jews
8.
Eastern Front (World War II)
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The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres. The Eastern Front, as the site of nearly all extermination camps, death marches, ghettos, of the estimated 70 million deaths attributed to World War II, over 30 million, many of them civilian, occurred on the Eastern Front. The Eastern Front was decisive in determining the outcome of the European portion of World War II and it resulted in the destruction of the Third Reich, the partition of Germany for nearly half a century and the rise of the Soviet Union as a military and industrial superpower. The two principal belligerent powers were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies. Though never engaged in action in the Eastern Front, the United Kingdom. The joint German–Finnish operations across the northernmost Finnish–Soviet border and in the Murmansk region are considered part of the Eastern Front, in addition, the Soviet–Finnish Continuation War may also be considered the northern flank of the Eastern Front. Despite their ideological antipathy, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union shared a dislike for the outcome of World War I. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in August 1939 was an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It contained a secret protocol aiming to return Central Europe to the pre–World War I status quo by dividing it between Germany and the Soviet Union, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would return to Soviet control, while Poland and Romania would be divided. I need the Ukraine so that they cant starve us out, the two powers invaded and partitioned Poland in 1939. The annexations were never recognized by most Western states, the annexed Romanian territory was divided between the Ukrainian and Moldavian Soviet republics. Adolf Hitler had argued in his autobiography Mein Kampf for the necessity of Lebensraum, acquiring new territory for Germans in Eastern Europe, Wehrmacht officers told their troops to target people who were described as Jewish Bolshevik subhumans, the Mongol hordes, the Asiatic flood and the red beast. The vast majority of German soldiers viewed the war in Nazi terms, Hitler referred to the war in unique terms, calling it a war of annihilation which was both an ideological and racial war. In addition, the Nazis also sought to wipe out the large Jewish population of Central, after Germanys initial success at the Battle of Kiev in 1941, Hitler saw the Soviet Union as militarily weak and ripe for immediate conquest. On 3 October 1941, he announced, We have only to kick in the door, thus, Germany expected another short Blitzkrieg and made no serious preparations for prolonged warfare. Throughout the 1930s the Soviet Union underwent massive industrialization and economic growth under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, Stalins central tenet, Socialism in one country, manifested itself as a series of nationwide centralized Five-Year Plans from 1929 onwards. It served as a testing ground for both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army to experiment with equipment and tactics that they would later employ on a wider scale in the Second World War
9.
Kaluga
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Kaluga is a city and the administrative center of Kaluga Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River 150 kilometers southwest of Moscow. In the Middle Ages Kaluga was a minor settlement owned by the Princes Vorotynsky, the ancestral home of these princes lies southwest of the modern city. On 19 January 1777 the Kaluga drama theatre opened its first theatrical season, Kaluga is connected to Moscow by a railway line and by the ancient roadway, the Kaluga Road. This road offered Napoleon his favored escape route from the Moscow trap in the fall of 1812, Kaluga was briefly occupied by the German army in Operation Barbarossa during the climactic Battle of Moscow. It was occupied from October 12,1941 to December 30,1941, Kaluga is the administrative center of the oblast. As a municipal division, the City of Kaluga, together with one rural locality in Ferzikovsky District, is incorporated as Kaluga Urban Okrug. In Kaluga, Kaluga Turbine Plant is located, is part of the company Power Machines, Kaluga Machine Works, in recent years Kaluga has become one of the centers of the Russian automotive industry, with a number of foreign companies opening assembly plants in the area. On November 28,2007, Volkswagen Group opened a new plant in Kaluga. The investment has reached more than 500 million Euro, the plant currently assembles the Volkswagen Passat, Škoda Fabia and Škoda Rapid. On October 15,2007, the Volvo Group broke ground on a new assembly plant. The plant has a capacity of 10,000 Volvo and 5,000 Renault trucks. On December 12,2007, PSA Peugeot Citroën announced its decision to build a new plant in Kaluga. By March 2010 the plant was operational, building Peugeot 308s for the Russian market and would also produce Citroën, to ensure the production cars were built factories companies Continental AG, Magna International, Benteler International, Visteon. The city is served by the Grabtsevo Airport, since 1899, there is a railway connection between Kaluga and Moscow. Public transportation is represented by the trolleybuses, buses, and marshrutkas, Kaluga has a humid temperate continental, with warm and humid summers, and long, cold and snowy winters. Kaluga is known for its most famous resident, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a rocket science pioneer who worked here as a school teacher
10.
Andrei Sinyavsky
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Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was a Russian writer, dissident, political prisoner, emigrant, Professor of Sorbonne University, magazine founder and publisher. He frequently wrote under the pseudonym Абрам Терц, during a time of extreme censorship in the Soviet Union, Sinyavsky published his novels in the West under a pseudonym. During his last stay in jail Donat Sinyavsky became ill and after his release, Andrei Sinyavsky described his fathers experiences in the novel Goodnight. Sinyavskys mother was of a Russian peasant background, a protégé of Boris Pasternak, Sinyavsky described the realities of Soviet life in short fiction stories. In 1965, he was arrested, along with fellow-writer and friend Yuli Daniel, on 14 February 1966, Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years on charges of anti-Soviet activity for the opinions of his fictional characters. The affair was accompanied by harsh propaganda campaigns in the Soviet media and was perceived as a sign of demise of the Khrushchev Thaw, as historian Fred Coleman writes, Historians now have no difficulty pinpointing the birth of the modern Soviet dissident movement. It began in February 1966 with the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, little did they realize at the time that they were starting a movement that would help end Communist rule. Sinyavsky was released in 1971 and allowed to emigrate in 1973 to France and they had a son, Iegor Gran. He actively contributed to Radio Liberty and he died in 1997 in Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris. Volokhonsky, who was born and raised in Leningrad, first visited the United States in the early 1970s, at the time, Pevear believed Sinyavsky was still in a Russian prison, Volokhonsky had just helped him immigrate to Paris. Pevear was surprised and pleased to be mistaken, Larissa had just helped Sinyavsky leave Russia, and she let me know that, while Id said he was still in prison, he was actually in Paris. This work also drew connections between socialist realism and classicism, the Trial Begins is a short novel with characters reacting in different ways to their roles in a totalitarian society, told with elements of the fantastic. The Makepeace Experiment is a novel of Russia where a leader uses non-rational powers to rule. Fantastic Stories is a collection of stories, such as The Icicle. The stories are mostly culled from the 1950s and 1960s and are written in the tradition of Gogol, E. T. A. Hoffmann. A Voice from the Chorus is a collection of scattered thoughts from the gulag and it contains snippets of literary thoughts as well as the comments and conversations of fellow prisoners, most of the criminals or even German war prisoners. Articles Sinyavsky, Andrei, Tikos, Laszlo, Ellert, Frederick, the New York Review of Books. Solzhenitsyn and Russian nationalism, an interview with Andrei Sinyavsky, the New York Review of Books
11.
Samizdat
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Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice to evade official Soviet censorship was fraught with danger, vladimir Bukovsky summarized it as follows, Samizdat, I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself. Etymologically, the word derives from sam and izdat. The Ukrainian language has a term, samvýdav, from sam, self. The Russian poet Nikolai Glazkov coined a version of the term as a pun in the 1940s when he typed copies of his poems, Tamizdat refers to literature published abroad, often from smuggled manuscripts. Samizdat copies of texts, such as Mikhail Bulgakovs novel The Master, the techniques used to reproduce these forbidden texts varied. Samizdat distinguishes itself not only by the ideas and debates which it helped spread to a wider audience, the hand-typed, often blurry and wrinkled pages with numerous typographical errors and nondescript covers helped to separate and elevate Russian samizdat from Western literature. The physical form of samizdat arose from a lack of resources. The form samizdat took gained precedence over the ideas it expressed, in effect, the physical form of samizdat itself elevated the reading of samizdat to a prized clandestine act. Samizdat originated from the dissident movement of the Russian intelligentsia, while circulation of samizdat was relatively low, at around 200,000 readers on average, many of these readers possessed positions of cultural power and authority. The purpose and methods of samizdat may contrast with the purpose of the concept of copyright, self-published and self-distributed literature has a long history in Russia. Samizdat is unique to the post-Stalin USSR and other countries with similar systems, under the grip of censorship of the police state, society turned to underground literature for self-analysis and self-expression. Certain works published legally in the State-controlled media were practically impossible to find in bookshops and libraries, the first full-length book to be distributed as samizdat was Boris Pasternaks 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago. Although the literary magazine Novy Mir had published ten poems from the book in 1954, the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had a similar fate and was widely distributed via samizdat. The editors of magazines were regulars at impromptu public poetry readings in 1958-61 on Mayakovsky square in Moscow. The gatherings did not last long, as soon the authorities began clamping down on them, in the summer of 1961, several meeting regulars were arrested and charged with anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, putting an end to most of the magazines. Not everything published in samizdat had political overtones, in 1963, Joseph Brodsky was charged with social parasitism and convicted for being nothing but a poet. His poems circulated in samizdat, with only four judged as suitable for official Soviet anthologies, in the mid-1960s, the Youngest Society of Geniuses, an unofficial literary group known by the acronym SMOG issued an almanac titled The Sphinxes and collections of prose and poetry
12.
Sinyavsky-Daniel trial
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The Sinyavsky–Daniel trial was a trial against Russian writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel which took place in Moscow in February 1966. Sinyavsky and Daniel were convicted under the offense of anti-Soviet agitation and they were sentenced to seven and five years in strict regime labor camps, respectively. The trial was the first Soviet show trial during which writers were openly convicted solely for their literary work, uncommonly for a political charge in the Soviet Union, the defendants plead not guilty. The Sinyavsky-Daniel case is considered to mark the end of the period of Khruschevs liberalism and was a major starting impulse for the Soviet dissident movement. The prosecution argued that their work was consciously intended to subvert and weaken the Soviet system and amounted to the criminal offense of anti-Soviet agitation. Andrei Sinyavsky, using the pseudonym Abram Tertz, had begun sending his work to be published in the West, initially in Paris and his friend Yuli Daniel, employing the alias Nikolai Arzhak, began publishing in 1961. The publication of Daniels This is Moscow Speaking and Sinyavskys The Trial Begins in the West between 1959 and 1962 caught the attention of the KGB, both were placed under round-the-clock surveillance and their apartments were secretly searched. Information was also gathered from Sinyavsky and Daniels colleagues acting as informants as well as KGB officials posing as neighbors relatives, Andrei Sinyavsky was arrested on September 13,1965. Yuli Daniels arrest followed five days later, initially, the party leaders were hesitant about pressing ahead in the case. Leonid Brezhnev personally consulted with head of the Union of Soviet Writers Konstantin Fedin, Fedin, who had been criticized in an essay by Andrei Sinyavsky, urged him to make an example of the writers. On January 13,1966, Brezhnev made the decision to go ahead with the trial. In November of that year, General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers Alexey Surkov admitted that the writers were in custody, the Soviet public learned of the arrest of the writers in January,1966, when Izvestia published an article about the case. The article, entitled The Turncoats, described Sinyavsky and Daniel as were-wolves and renegades guilty of high treason, referencing foreign criticism, it warned that no leniency would be shown. Soviet law prohibited neither publication abroad nor the use of pseudonyms, instead, Sinyavsky and Daniel were charged, under the recently minted Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, with the offense of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. This was the first time that the article was applied to fiction, the hearings began on February 10,1966 in Moscow City Court under chairman of the court Lev Smirnov. They were not open to the public or foreign observers, citing their works, the prosecution claimed Sinyaysky and Daniel had purposefully attempted to make the Soviet state look corrupt and immoral on the world stage. Sinyavskys and Daniels literary works were presented as evidence. The defendants in turn claimed to be citizens who wanted to strengthen the Soviet Union by eliminating remnants of Stalinist abuses
13.
Hard labor
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Penal labour is a generic term for various kinds of unfree labour which prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context, forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios, labour as a form of punishment, the system used as a means to secure labour. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, large-scale implementations of penal labour include labour camps, prison farms, penal colonies, penal military units, penal transportation, or aboard prison ships. Punitive labour, also known as labour, prison labour. Punitive labour encompasses two types, productive labour, such as work, and intrinsically pointless tasks used as primitive occupational therapy. Sometimes authorities turn prison labour into an industry, as on a farm or in a prison workshop. On the other hand, for example in Victorian prisons, inmates commonly were made to work the treadmill, in some cases, similar punishments included turning the crank machine or carrying cannonballs. Semi-punitive labour also included oakum-picking, teasing apart old tarry rope to make caulking material for sailing vessels, section 1 of the Penal Servitude Act 1891 makes provision for enactments which authorise a sentence of penal servitude but do not specify a maximum duration. It must now be subject to section 1 of the Criminal Justice Act 1948. Sentences of penal servitude were served in prisons and were controlled by the Home Office. After sentencing, convicts would be classified according to the seriousness of the offence of which they were convicted, first time offenders would be classified in the Star class, persons not suitable for the Star class, but without serious convictions would be classified in the intermediate class. Habitual offenders would be classified in the Recidivist class, care was taken to ensure that convicts in one class did not mix with convicts in another. Penal servitude included hard labour as a standard feature, notable recipients of hard labour under British law include Oscar Wilde and John William Gott. In Inveraray Jail from 1839 prisoners worked up to ten hours a day, most male prisoners made herring nets or picked oakum, those with skills were often employed where the skills could be used, such as shoemaking, tailoring or joinery. Female prisoners picked oakum, knitted stockings or sewed, forms of labour for punishment included the treadmill, shot drill, and the crank machine. Prisoners had to six or more hours a day, climbing the equivalent of 5,000 to 14,000 vertical feet. While the purpose was mainly punitive, the mills could have used to grind grain, pump water
14.
Anti-Sovietism
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Anti-Sovietism and Anti-Soviet refer to persons and activities actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union. Three different flavors of the usage of the term may be distinguished, anti-Sovietism in international politics, such as the United States opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Anti-Soviet opponents of Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution and during the Russian Civil War, as applied to Soviet citizens involved in anti-government activities. During the Russian Civil War that followed the October Revolution of 1917, between the wars, some resistance movement, particularly in the 1920s, was cultivated by Polish intelligence in the form of the Promethean project. After Nazi Germanys attack on the USSR, anti-Soviet forces were created and led primarily by Nazi Germany, in the time of the Russian Civil War, whole categories of people, such as clergy, kulaks, former Imperial Russian police, etc. were automatically considered anti-Soviet. More categories are listed in the article Enemy of the people, for many people the major evidence of their guilt was their social status rather than actual deeds. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education and these are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. Later in the Soviet Union, being anti-Soviet was a criminal offense, the epithet antisoviet was synonymous with counter-revolutionary. The noun antisovietism was rarely used and the noun antisovietist was used in a derogatory sense, Anti-Soviet agitation and activities were political crimes handled by the Article 58 and later Article 70 of the RSFSR penal code, and similar articles in other Soviet republics. In February 1930, there was an insurgency in the Kazak Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic village of Sozak. After the end of the Second World War there were Eastern European anti-Communist insurgencies
15.
Andrei Sakharov
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Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Russian nuclear physicist, Soviet dissident, an activist for disarmament, peace and human rights. He became renowned as the designer of the Soviet Unions RDS-37, Sakharov later became an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union, for which he faced state persecution, these efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Sakharov Prize, which is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights, Sakharov was born in Moscow on May 21,1921. His father was Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, a school physics teacher. His father later taught at the Second Moscow State University, andreis grandfather Ivan had been a prominent lawyer in the Russian Empire who had displayed respect for social awareness and humanitarian principles that would later influence his grandson. Sakharovs mother was Yekaterina Alekseyevna Sakharova, a great-granddaughter of the prominent military commander Alexey Semenovich Sofiano, Sakharovs parents and paternal grandmother, Maria Petrovna, largely shaped his personality. Although Sakharovs paternal great-grandfather had been a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, however, he did believe that a guiding principle governed the universe and human life. Sakharov entered Moscow State University in 1938, following evacuation in 1941 during the Great Patriotic War, he graduated in Aşgabat, in todays Turkmenistan. He was then assigned to work in Ulyanovsk. In 1943, he married Klavdia Alekseyevna Vikhireva, with whom he raised two daughters and a son before she died in 1969 and he returned to Moscow in 1945 to study at the Theoretical Department of FIAN. He received his Ph. D. in 1947, after World War II, he researched cosmic rays. In mid-1948 he participated in the Soviet atomic bomb project under Igor Kurchatov, Sakharovs study group at FIAN in 1948 came up with a second concept in August–September 1948. This idea of a layered fission-fusion-fission bomb led Sakharov to call it the sloika, the first Soviet atomic device was tested on August 29,1949. Before his Third Idea, Sakharov tried a layer cake of alternating layers of fission and fusion fuel, the results were disappointing, yielding no more than a typical fission bomb. However the design was seen to be worth pursuing because deuterium is abundant and uranium is scarce, Sakharov was surprised by the size of the explosion and realized that the Americans had harnessed the power of a separate fission explosion to compress the fusion fuel. Sakharov realised that in order to cause the explosion of one side of the fuel to symmetrically compress the fusion fuel, Sakharovs idea was first tested as RDS-37 in 1955. A larger variation of the design which Sakharov worked on was the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba of October 1961. Sakharov saw striking parallels between his fate and those of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller in the USA, in both cases, the reaction would have been the same – avoid the trap and immediately take advantage of the enemys stupidity
16.
Yuri Andropov
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Later in 1982, he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a position he held until his death fifteen months later. Andropov was born in Nagutskaya, Stavropol Region, Russian Empire, Andropov was educated at the Rybinsk Water Transport Technical College and graduated in 1936. Both of his parents died early, leaving Yuri an orphan at the age of thirteen, as a teenager he worked as a loader, a telegraph clerk, and a sailor for the Volga steamship line. At 16, Yuri Andropov, then a member of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, was a worker in the town of Mozdok in the North Ossetian ASSR, during World War II, Andropov took part in partisan guerrilla activities in Finland. From 1944 onwards, he left Komsomol for Communist Party work, between 1946 and 1951, he studied at the university of Petrozavodsk. In 1947, he was elected Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Karelo-Finnish SSR, in 1951 Andropov was transferred, by the decision of the CPSU Central Committee, to its staff. He was appointed an inspector and then the head of a subdepartment of the Committee, in July 1954 he was appointed Soviet Ambassador to Hungary and held this position during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Andropov played a key role in crushing the Hungarian uprising and he convinced a reluctant Nikita Khrushchev that military intervention was necessary. He is known as ‘The Butcher of Budapest’ for his ruthless suppression of the Hungarian uprising, the Hungarian leaders were arrested and Imre Nagy and others executed. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple. In 1957 Andropov returned to Moscow from Budapest in order to head the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers Parties in Socialist Countries, in 1961, he was elected full member of the CPSU Central Committee and was promoted to the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee in 1962. He gained additional powers in 1973, when he was promoted to member of the Politburo. During the Prague Spring events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, Andropov was the proponent of the extreme measures. The KGB whipped up the fear that Czechoslovakia could fall victim to NATO aggression or to a coup, however his message was destroyed because it contradicted the conspiracy theory fabricated by Andropov. Andropov ordered a number of measures, collectively known as operation PROGRESS. After the assassination attempt against Brezhnev in January 1969, Andropov led the interrogation of the captured gunman, Ilyin was pronounced insane and sent to Kazan Psychiatric Hospital. On 3 July 1967, he made a proposal to establish for dealing with the opposition the KGBs Fifth Directorate. At the end of July, the directorate was established and entered in its files cases of all Soviet dissidents including Andrei Sakharov, the proposal by Andropov to use psychiatry for struggle against dissidents was implemented
17.
October Revolution
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It took place with an armed insurrection in Petrograd on 25 October 1917. During this time, urban workers began to organize into councils wherein revolutionaries criticized the provisional government and this immediately initiated the establishment of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the worlds first self-proclaimed socialist state. 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 takeover of government buildings on 24 October 1917. The following day, the Winter Palace, was captured, the long-awaited Constituent Assembly elections were held on 12 November 1917. The Bolsheviks only won 175 seats in the 715-seat legislative body, coming in second behind the Socialist Revolutionary party, 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 body rejected Soviet decrees on peace and land, 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 25th, in Russian, however, переворот has a similar meaning to revolution and also means upheaval or overturn, so coup is not necessarily the correct translation. With time, the term October Revolution came into use and it is also known as the November Revolution having occurred in November according to the Gregorian Calendar. The Great October Socialist Revolution was the name for the October Revolution in the Soviet Union after the 10th anniversary of the Revolution in 1927. The February Revolution had toppled Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, however, the provisional government was weak and riven by internal dissension. It continued to wage World War I, which became increasingly unpopular, a nationwide crisis developed in Russia, affecting social, economic, and political relations. Disorder in industry and transport had intensified, and 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, at the same time, the cost of living increased sharply. Real wages fell about 50% from what they had been in 1913, russias 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. In these months alone, more than a million took part in strikes. Workers established control over production and distribution in many factories and plants in a social revolution, by October 1917, there had been over 4,000 peasant uprisings against landowners. When the Provisional Government sent punitive detachments, it only enraged the peasants
18.
Mordovia
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The Republic of Mordovia, also known in English as Mordvinia, is a federal subject of Russia. Its capital is the city of Saransk, as of the 2010 Census, the population of the republic was 834,755. Ethnic Russians and Mordvins account for the majority of the population, the republic is located in the eastern part of the East European Plain of Russia. The western part of the republic is situated in the Oka-Don Plain, its eastern, major rivers include, Alatyr River Issa River Moksha River Satis River Sivin River Sura River Vad River There are approximately five hundred lakes in the republic. Natural resources include peat, mineral waters, and others, finno-Ugric Mordvins are mentioned in written sources in 6th century. Later, Mordvins were under the influence of both Volga Bulgaria and the Kievan Rus, Mordvin princes sometimes raided Muroma and Volga Bulgaria, and often despoiled each others holdings. The Mongols conquered vast areas of Eastern Europe in the 13th century and they established the khanate of the Golden Horde in 1241, subjugating the area of Mordovia. Mordvins fought against Mongols and later alongside Russians, Mordvin lands territorially belonged to Mukhsha Ulus. The Golden Horde disintegrated in the 1430s, which resulted in some Mordvins becoming subjects of the Khanate of Kazan, when Ivan IV of Russia annexed the Khanate of Kazan in 1552, the Mordvin lands were subjugated to the Russian tsars. The Mordvin elite rapidly adopted Russian language and customs, whereas 1821 saw the publication of the New Testament in Erzya to address the non-elite population, in rural areas, Mordvin culture was preserved. Russians started to convert Mordvins to Orthodox Christianity in the mid-18th century, Mordvins gave up their own shamanist religion only slowly, however, and many of shamanist features were preserved as parts of local culture though the population became nominally Christian. Translations of literature to Mordvin languages were mostly religious books, in the 18th century, the Latin alphabet was used in writing Mordvin, but from the mid-19th century, Cyrillic was used. During the Russian revolution and civil war, Mordovia was held by Bolsheviks from the beginning of the war, when the Bolsheviks prevailed in the war, Mordovia became a part of the Russian SFSR. In 1925, the Soviet government founded autonomous districts and village councils in the area of the Mordvins, during the Soviet era, two written languages were developed, one based on the Erzya dialect in 1922 and one on the Moksha dialect in 1923, both using Cyrillic script. The Mordovian Okrug was founded on July 16,1928, the autonomous oblast was transformed into the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on December 20,1934. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Mordovian ASSR proclaimed itself the Republic of Mordovia in 1990, the Republic of Mordovia in its present form has existed since January 25,1994. The supreme law is the Constitution of the Republic of Mordovia, in a wave of sovereignty common among other former Russian autonomous republics, Mordovia established a presidency in 1991. In that same year, Vasilly Guslyannikov, a physicist by training, was elected in the general election, Guslyannikov had previously been a senior researcher at the Institute of Power Electronics and was the leader of the republican branch of the Democratic Russia political movement
19.
Labor camp
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A labor camp or work camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment under the criminal code. Labor camps have many aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators, some of those camps were dubbed reeducation facilities for political coercion, but most others served as backbone of industry and agriculture for the benefit of the state especially in times of war. Labor camps of forced labor were abolished by Convention no.105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization, albania Allied Forces The Allies of World War II operated a number of work camps after the war. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, it was agreed that German forced labor was to be utilized as reparations, see Forced labor of Germans after World War II. Bulgaria Burma According to the New Statesman, Burmese military government operated, from 1962 to 2011, China The anti-communist Kuomintang operated various camps between 1938 and 1949, including the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp for young activists and students. The Communist Party of China has operated many labor camps for some crimes at least since taking power in 1949, many leaders of China were put into labor camps after purges, including Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. May Seventh Cadre Schools are an example of Cultural Revolution-era labor camps, According to CNN, hundreds — if not thousands — of labor camps and forced-labor prisons still exist in modern-day China, housing political prisoners and dissidents alongside dangerous criminals. Chinese state-run media Xinhua reported in early 2013 that the plans to reform its controversial re-education through labor system this year. Cuba Beginning in November 1965, people classified as against the government were summoned to work camps referred to as Military Units to Aid Production, Czechoslovakia After the communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, many forced labor camps were created. The inmates included political prisoners, clergy, kulaks, Boy Scouts leaders, about half of the prisoners worked in the uranium mines. Also between 1950 and 1954 many men were considered unreliable for compulsory military service, and were conscripted to labour battalions instead. Nazi Germany During World War II the Nazis operated several categories of Arbeitslager for different categories of inmates, the largest number of them held Jewish civilians forcibly abducted in the occupied countries to provide labor in the German war industry, repair bombed railroads and bridges or work on farms. By 1944,19. 9% of all workers were foreigners, the Nazis employed many slave laborers. They also operated concentration camps, some of which provided free forced labor for industrial, a notable example is the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp complex that serviced the production of the V-2 rocket. See List of German concentration camps for more, the Nazi camps played a key role in the extermination of millions. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the overwork, malnutrition, preventable disease. North Korea North Korea is known to six camps with prison-labor colonies in remote mountain valleys
20.
Vladimir Central Prison
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The Vladimir Prison, colloquially known as Vladimirsky Central, is a prison for dangerous criminals in Vladimir, Russia, about 160 kilometres northeast of Moscow. Most are serving a minimum of 10 years, and some are imprisoned for life and this prison is the largest in Russia. Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the served as an infamous prison for political prisoners of the Soviet regime. Francis Gary Powers, a US U2 spy plane shot down on May Day 1960 was imprisoned here until his release in February 1962
21.
Bulat Okudzhava
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Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava was a Soviet poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter of Georgian-Armenian ancestry. He was one of the founders of the Soviet genre called author song, or guitar song, and his songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions and the French chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens. Bulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on May 9,1924 into a family of communists who had come from Tbilisi, the son of a Georgian father, Shalva Okudzhava, and an Armenian mother, Ashkhen Nalbandyan, Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian. Okudzavas mother was the niece of a well-known Armenian poet, Vahan Terian and his father served as a political commissar during the Civil War and as a high-ranking Communist Party member under the protection of Sergo Ordzhonikidze later on. His uncle Vladimir Okudzhava was an anarchist and a terrorist who left The Russian Empire after an attempt to assassinate the Kutaisi governor. He was listed among the passengers of the sealed train that delivered Vladimir Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev. Shalva Okudzhava was arrested in 1937 during the Great Purge, accused of trotskyism and wrecking and executed shortly after and his wife was also arrested in 1939 «for anti-Soviet deeds» and sent to a labor camp of Gulag. Bulat returned to Tbilisi to live with his relatives and his mother was released in 1946, but arrested for the second time in 1949, spending another 5 years in labor camps. She was fully released in 1954 and rehabilitated in 1956, along with her husband. In 1941, at the age of 17, one year before his scheduled graduation, he volunteered for the Red Army infantry. After his discharge from the service in 1944, he returned to Tbilisi where he passed his school graduation exams and enrolled at Tbilisi State University. After graduating, he worked as a teacher, first in a school in the village of Shamordino in Kaluga district. It was then, in the middle of the 1950s, that he began to compose songs and to perform them and his songs were praised by his friends, and amateur recordings were made. These unofficial recordings were widely copied as magnitizdat, and spread across the USSR and Poland, in 1969, his lyrics appeared in the classic Soviet film White Sun of the Desert. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, cited his Sentimental March in the novel Ada or Ardor, Okudzhava, however, regarded himself primarily as a poet and claimed that his musical recordings were insignificant. During the 1980s, he published a great deal of prose. By the 1980s, recordings of Okudzhava performing his songs finally began to be released in the Soviet Union. In 1991, he was awarded the USSR State Prize and he supported the reform movement in the USSR and in October 1993, signed the Letter of Forty-Two
22.
Ghostwriter
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Celebrities, executives, participants in timely news stories, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, memoirs, magazine articles, or other written material. In music, ghostwriters are often used to write songs, lyrics, screenplay authors can also use ghostwriters to either edit or rewrite their scripts to improve them. Usually, there is a confidentiality clause in the contract between the ghostwriter and the author that obligates the former to remain anonymous. Ghostwriting also occurs in other creative fields, ghosting also occurs in popular music. A pop music ghostwriter writes lyrics and a melody in the style of the credited musician, in hip hop music, the increasing use of ghostwriters by high-profile hip-hop stars has led to controversy. In the visual arts, it is not uncommon in either fine art or commercial art such as comics for a number of assistants to do work on a piece that is credited to a single artist. However, when credit is established for the writer, the acknowledgement of their contribution is public domain, a consultant or career-switcher may pay a ghostwriter to write a book on a topic in their professional area, to establish or enhance her credibility as an expert in their field. Public officials and politicians employ correspondence officers to respond to the volume of official correspondence. A number of papal encyclicals have been written by ghostwriters, some university and college students hire ghostwriters from essay mills to write entrance essays, term papers, theses, and dissertations. This is largely considered unethical unless the actual ghostwriting work is just light editing, ghostwriters are hired for numerous reasons. In many cases, celebrities or public figures do not have the time, discipline, or writing skills to write and research a several-hundred page autobiography or how-to book. Even if a celebrity or public figure has the skills to pen a short article, they may not know how to structure and edit a several-hundred page book so that it is captivating. Ghostwriters may have varying degrees of involvement in the production of a finished work, some ghostwriters are hired to edit and clean up a rough draft or partially completed work, while others are hired to do most of the writing based on an outline provided by the credited author. For some projects, such as creating an autobiography for a celebrity, ghostwriters are also hired to write fiction in the style of an existing author, often as a way of increasing the number of books that can be published by a popular author. Ghostwriters will often spend a period from several months to a year researching, writing. Ghostwriters are paid either per page, per each word or via total word count, with a fee, with a percentage of the royalties of the sales. The division of work between the ghostwriter and the credited author varies a great deal, in some cases, the ghostwriter is hired to edit a rough draft of a mostly completed manuscript. In this case, the outline, ideas and much of the language in the book or article are those of the credited author
23.
The Los Angeles Times
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The Los Angeles Times, commonly referred to as the Times or LA Times, is a paid daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008, the Times is owned by tronc. The Times was first published on December 4,1881, as the Los Angeles Daily Times under the direction of Nathan Cole Jr. and it was first printed at the Mirror printing plant, owned by Jesse Yarnell and T. J. Unable to pay the bill, Cole and Gardiner turned the paper over to the Mirror Company. Mathes had joined the firm, and it was at his insistence that the Times continued publication, in July 1882, Harrison Gray Otis moved from Santa Barbara to become the papers editor. Otis made the Times a financial success, in an era where newspapers were driven by party politics, the Times was directed at Republican readers. As was typical of newspapers of the time, the Times would sit on stories for several days, historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment. Otiss editorial policy was based on civic boosterism, extolling the virtues of Los Angeles, the efforts of the Times to fight local unions led to the October 1,1910 bombing of its headquarters, killing twenty-one people. Two union leaders, James and Joseph McNamara, were charged, the American Federation of Labor hired noted trial attorney Clarence Darrow to represent the brothers, who eventually pleaded guilty. Upon Otiss death in 1917, his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, Harry Chandler was succeeded in 1944 by his son, Norman Chandler, who ran the paper during the rapid growth of post-war Los Angeles. Family members are buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Paramount Studios, the site also includes a memorial to the Times Building bombing victims. The fourth generation of family publishers, Otis Chandler, held that position from 1960 to 1980, Otis Chandler sought legitimacy and recognition for his familys paper, often forgotten in the power centers of the Northeastern United States due to its geographic and cultural distance. He sought to remake the paper in the model of the nations most respected newspapers, notably The New York Times, believing that the newsroom was the heartbeat of the business, Otis Chandler increased the size and pay of the reporting staff and expanded its national and international reporting. In 1962, the paper joined with the Washington Post to form the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service to syndicate articles from both papers for news organizations. During the 1960s, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than its previous nine decades combined, eventually the coupon-clipping branches realized that they could make more money investing in something other than newspapers. Under their pressure the companies went public, or split apart, thats the pattern followed over more than a century by the Los Angeles Times under the Chandler family. The papers early history and subsequent transformation was chronicled in an unauthorized history Thinking Big and it has also been the whole or partial subject of nearly thirty dissertations in communications or social science in the past four decades. In 2000, the Tribune Company acquired the Times, placing the paper in co-ownership with then-WB -affiliated KTLA, which Tribune acquired in 1985
24.
Index on Censorship
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Index on Censorship is a campaigning publishing organisation for freedom of expression, which produces a quarterly magazine of the same name from London. The present Chief Executive of Index on Censorship, since May 2014, is Jodie Ginsberg, WSI was created by poet Stephen Spender, Oxford philosopher Stuart Hampshire, the then editor of The Observer David Astor, writer and Soviet Union expert Edward Crankshaw. The founding editor of Index on Censorship was the critic and translator Michael Scammell, the operation is based at 292 Vauxhall Bridge Road in central London. Index on Censorship magazine was founded by Michael Scammel in 1972 and it supports free expression, publishing distinguished writers from around the world, exposing suppressed stories, initiating debate, and providing an international record of censorship. The quarterly editions of the magazine focus on a country or region or a recurring theme in the global free expression debate. Index on Censorship also publishes works of fiction and poetry by notable new writers. Index Index, a round-up of abuses of freedom of expression worldwide, was published in the magazine until December 2008, the magazine has covered other challenges facing free expression, including religious extremism, the rise of nationalism, and Internet censorship. In the first issue of May 1972 Stephen Spender wrote, Obviously there is the risk of a magazine of this kind becoming a bulletin of frustration. However, the material by writers which is censored in Eastern Europe, Greece, South Africa, moreover, the question of censorship has become a matter of impassioned debate, and it is one which does not only concern totalitarian societies. Accordingly, the magazine has sought to shed light on other challenges facing free expression, including religious extremism, the rise of nationalism, and internet censorship. Issues are usually organised by theme, and contain a country-by-country list of recent cases involving censorship, restrictions on freedom of the press, occasionally, Index on Censorship publishes short works of fiction and poetry by notable new writers as well as censored ones. Recent issues under the editorship of Rachael Jolley have covered taboos, there have been special issues on China, reporting from the Middle East, and on internet censorship. The Russia issue won an Amnesty International Media Award 2008 for features by Russian journalists Fatima Tlisova and Sergei Bachinin, since January 2010 it has been published by Sage Publications, an independent for-profit academic publisher. Between 2005 and 2009, the magazine was published and distributed by Routledge, in addition to print and annual subscriptions, Index on Censorship is available on Exact Editions, an application for the iPhone/iPad and Android. It is also a partner with Eurozine, a network of more than 60 European cultural journals, other landmark publications include Ken Saro-Wiwas writings from prison and a translation of the Czechoslovak Charter 77 manifesto drafted by Václav Havel and others. Index published the first English translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyns Nobel Prize acceptance speech, stoppard became a member of the advisory board of Index on Censorship in 1978 and remains connected to the publication as a Patron of Index. Six months later, Index published the Hunger Strike Declaration from four student leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo, Hou Dejian and Gao Xin. Index Index, a round-up of abuses of freedom of expression worldwide, continued to be published in each edition of the magazine until December 2008, when this function was transferred to the website
25.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
26.
Igor Shafarevich
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Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich was a Russian mathematician who contributed to algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. He wrote books and articles that criticize socialism, and was an important dissident during the Soviet regime, Shafarevich died on 19 February 2017 in Moscow, at the age of 93. Shafarevich made fundamental contributions to several parts of mathematics including algebraic number theory, algebraic geometry, in algebraic number theory the Shafarevich–Weil theorem extends the commutative reciprocity map to the case of Galois groups which are extensions of abelian groups by finite groups. Another famous result is Shafarevichs theorem on solvable Galois groups giving the realization of every finite group as a Galois group over the rationals. Another fundamental result is the Golod–Shafarevich theorem on towers of unramified extensions of number fields, Shafarevich and his school greatly contributed to the study of algebraic geometry of surfaces. He introduced the Grothendieck–Ogg–Shafarevich formula and the Néron–Ogg–Shafarevich criterion and he also formulated the Shafarevich conjecture which stated the finiteness of the set of Abelian varieties over a number field having fixed dimension and prescribed set of primes of bad reduction. This conjecture was proved by Gerd Faltings as a step in his proof of the Mordell conjecture, Shafarevich was a student of Boris Delone, and his students included Yuri Manin, A. N. Parshin, I. Kostrikin, Igor A. Kostrikin, S. Y, arakelov, G. V. Belyi, Victor Abrashkin, Andrey N. Tyurin, and V. A. Kolyvagin. He did major work in collaboration with Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro on K3 surfaces and he is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the department of Mathematics, Physics and Earth Sciences. On his 80th birthday, Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed his fundamental research in mathematics, Shafarevich came into conflict with the Soviet authorities in the early 1950s, but was protected by Ivan Petrovsky, the Rector of Moscow University. He belonged to a group of Pochvennichestvo-influenced dissidents who endorsed the Orthodox Christian tradition, Shafarevich published a book, The Socialist Phenomenon, which was cited by Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 address to Harvard University. Shafarevich opposed political interference in universities, the algebraic geometer Miles Reid gives the example of Shafarevich asserting that plagiarism and poor work was being ignored in a doctorate obtained by a Communist Party functionary. From these examples he claimed all the basic principles of socialist ideology derive from the urge to suppress individuality. State Socialism, Describes the socialism of the Incas, the Jesuit state in Paraguay, Mesopotamia, Egypt and he compared Thomas Mores and Campanellas visions with what is known about the Inca Empire, and concluded that there are striking similarities. He claimed that we become persons through our relationship with God and he concluded that we have the choice of either pursuing death or life. Shafarevich adhered to Russian Orthodox Christianity and incorporated the views of Eastern Orthodoxy into his understanding of the relation of mathematics. In his talk to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences upon receiving a prize and he claimed that mathematics growth in itself is not directed or organic. In order to have a unity and direction mathematics needs a goal and this goal can either be set by practical applications or by God as the source of the direction of development
27.
Time (magazine)
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Time is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It was founded in 1923 and for decades was dominated by Henry Luce, a European edition is published in London and also covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong, the South Pacific edition, which covers Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, is based in Sydney, Australia. In December 2008, Time discontinued publishing a Canadian advertiser edition, Time has the worlds largest circulation for a weekly news magazine, and has a readership of 26 million,20 million of which are based in the United States. As of 2012, it had a circulation of 3.3 million making it the eleventh most circulated magazine in the United States reception room circuit, as of 2015, its circulation was 3,036,602. Richard Stengel was the editor from May 2006 to October 2013. Nancy Gibbs has been the editor since October 2013. Time magazine was created in 1923 by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, the two had previously worked together as chairman and managing editor respectively of the Yale Daily News. They first called the proposed magazine Facts and they wanted to emphasize brevity, so that a busy man could read it in an hour. They changed the name to Time and used the slogan Take Time–Its Brief and it set out to tell the news through people, and for many decades the magazines cover depicted a single person. More recently, Time has incorporated People of the Year issues which grew in popularity over the years, notable mentions of them were Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, Matej Turk, etc. The first issue of Time was published on March 3,1923, featuring Joseph G. Cannon, the retired Speaker of the House of Representatives, on its cover, a facsimile reprint of Issue No. 1, including all of the articles and advertisements contained in the original, was included with copies of the February 28,1938 issue as a commemoration of the magazines 15th anniversary. The cover price was 15¢ On Haddens death in 1929, Luce became the dominant man at Time, the Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923–1941. In 1929, Roy Larsen was also named a Time Inc. director, J. P. Morgan retained a certain control through two directorates and a share of stocks, both over Time and Fortune. Other shareholders were Brown Brothers W. A. Harriman & Co. the Intimate History of a Changing Enterprise 1957–1983. According to the September 10,1979 issue of The New York Times, after Time magazine began publishing its weekly issues in March 1923, Roy Larsen was able to increase its circulation by utilizing U. S. radio and movie theaters around the world. It often promoted both Time magazine and U. S. political and corporate interests, Larsen next arranged for a 30-minute radio program, The March of Time, to be broadcast over CBS, beginning on March 6,1931
28.
OCLC
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The Online Computer Library Center is a US-based nonprofit cooperative organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the worlds information and reducing information costs. It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center, OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded mainly by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services, the group first met on July 5,1967 on the campus of the Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization. The group hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, Kilgour wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. The goal of network and database was to bring libraries together to cooperatively keep track of the worlds information in order to best serve researchers and scholars. The first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26,1971 and this was the first occurrence of online cataloging by any library worldwide. Membership in OCLC is based on use of services and contribution of data, between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. In 2002, the structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States. As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside of Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with networks, organizations that provided training, support, by 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on OCLC Members Council, in early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center. OCLC provides bibliographic, abstract and full-text information to anyone, OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog in the world. WorldCat has holding records from public and private libraries worldwide. org, in October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. The Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988, a browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013, it was replaced by the Classify Service. S. The reference management service QuestionPoint provides libraries with tools to communicate with users and this around-the-clock reference service is provided by a cooperative of participating global libraries. OCLC has produced cards for members since 1971 with its shared online catalog. OCLC commercially sells software, e. g. CONTENTdm for managing digital collections, OCLC has been conducting research for the library community for more than 30 years. In accordance with its mission, OCLC makes its research outcomes known through various publications and these publications, including journal articles, reports, newsletters, and presentations, are available through the organizations website. The most recent publications are displayed first, and all archived resources, membership Reports – A number of significant reports on topics ranging from virtual reference in libraries to perceptions about library funding
29.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
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During the Cold War, Radio Free Europe was broadcast to Soviet satellite countries and Radio Liberty targeted the Soviet Union. RFE was founded as an anti-communist propaganda source in 1949 by the National Committee for a Free Europe, RL was founded two years later and the two organizations merged in 1976. Communist governments frequently sent agents to infiltrate RFEs headquarters, Radio transmissions into the Soviet Union were regularly jammed by the KGB. RFE/RL received funds from the Central Intelligence Agency until 1972, RFE/RL was headquartered at Englischer Garten in Munich, Germany, from 1949 to 1995. In 1995, the headquarters were moved to Prague in the Czech Republic, european operations have been significantly reduced since the end of the Cold War. In addition to the headquarters, the service maintains 20 local bureaus in countries throughout their broadcast region, as well as an office in Washington. RFE/RL broadcasts in 28 languages to 21 countries including Armenia, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the committee was composed of an A list of powerful U. S. Radio Free Europe received widespread support from Eisenhowers Crusade for Freedom campaign. In 1950, over 16 million Americans signed Eisenhower’s Freedom Scrolls on a publicity trip to over 20 U. S. cities, the NCFEs mission was to support the refugees and provide them with a useful outlet for their opinions and creativity while increasing exposure to the modern world. The NCFE divided its program into three parts, exile relations, radio, and American contacts, although exile relations were initially its first priority, Radio Free Europe became the NCFEs greatest legacy. The United States funded a long list of projects to counter the Communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe, RFE was developed out of a belief that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means. American policymakers such as George Kennan and John Foster Dulles acknowledged that the Cold War was essentially a war of ideas, the implementation of surrogate radio stations was a key part of the greater psychological war effort. RFE was modeled after Radio in the American Sector a U. S. government-sponsored radio service initially intended for Germans living in the American sector of Berlin, staffed almost entirely by Germans with minimal U. S. supervision, the station provided free media to German listeners. In January 1950 the NCFE obtained a base at Lampertheim, West Germany. In late 1950, RFE began to assemble a full-fledged foreign broadcast staff, teams of journalists were hired for each language service and an elaborate system of intelligence gathering provided up-to-date broadcast material. Most of this came from a network of well-connected émigrés. RFE did not use paid agents inside the Iron Curtain and based its bureaus in regions popular with exiles, RFE also extensively monitored Communist bloc publications and radio services, creating an impressive body of information that would later serve as a resource for organizations across the world. From October 1951 to November 1956, the skies of Central Europe were filled with more than 350,000 balloons carrying over 300 million leaflets, posters, books, the project served as a publicity tool to solidify RFEs reputation as an unbiased broadcaster
30.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
31.
Soviet dissidents
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Soviet dissidents were persons who disagreed with certain features in the embodiment of Soviet ideology and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union in the period following Joseph Stalins death until the fall of communism and it was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose modest challenges to the Soviet regime met protection and encouragement from correspondents. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to sit apart from the regime, as dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents, the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. Political opposition in the USSR was barely visible and, with rare exceptions, instead, an important element of dissident activity in the Soviet Union was informing society about violation of laws and human rights. Over time, the dissident movement created vivid awareness of Soviet Communist abuses, Soviet dissidents who criticized the state faced possible legal sanctions under the Soviet Criminal Code and faced the choice of exile, the mental hospital, or the labor camp. In the 1950s, Soviet dissidents started leaking criticism to the West by sending documents and statements to foreign missions in Moscow. Our history shows that most of the people can be fooled for a long time. But now all this idiocy is coming into clear contradiction with the fact that we have some level of openness, the heyday of the dissenters as a presence in the Western public life was the 1970s. The Helsinki Accords inspired dissidents in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, dissident Russian and East European intellectuals who urged compliance with the Helsinki accords have been subjected to official repression. According to Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch, Moscow has taken advantage of the Helsinki security pact to improve its economy while increasing the suppression of political dissenters,50 members of Soviet Helsinki Groups were imprisoned. US President Jimmy Carter in his address on 20 January 1977 announced that human rights would be central to foreign policy during his administration. In February, Carter sent Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov a letter expressing his support for the stance on human rights. In the wake of Carters letter to Sakharov, the USSR cautioned against attempts to interfere in its affairs under a pretext of defending human rights. The KGB head Yuri Andropov determined, The need has thus emerged to terminate the actions of Orlov, fellow Helsinki monitor Ginzburg and others once and for all, if we accept human rights violations as just their way of doing things, then we are all guilty. On the grounds that political dissenters in the Soviet Union were psychotic and deluded, they were locked away in psychiatric hospitals, confinement of political dissenters in psychiatric institutions had become a common practice. Finally, many persons at that time tended to believe that dissidents were abnormal people whose commitment to mental hospitals was quite justified. Another wave of arrests followed in the early 1980s, Malva Landa, Viktor Nekipelov, Leonard Ternovsky, Feliks Serebrov, Tatiana Osipova, Anatoly Marchenko, Soviet authorities offered some activists the opportunity to emigrate. By 1983 the Ukrainian Helsinki Group had 37 members, of whom 22 were in camps,5 were in exile,6 emigrated to the West,3 were released and were living in Ukraine,1 committed suicide
32.
Moscow Helsinki Group
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Today the Moscow Helsinki Group is one of Russias leading human rights organisations. It was originally set up in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords and it was forced out of existence in the early 1980s, but revived in 1989 and continues to operate in Russia today. In the 1970s Moscow Helsinki Group inspired the formation of groups in other Warsaw Pact countries. Within the Soviet Union Helsinki Watch Groups were founded in Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Armenia, similar initiatives sprung up in countries such as Czechoslovakia with Charter 77. Eventually, the Helsinki monitoring groups inspired by the Moscow Helsinki Group formed the International Helsinki Federation, on 1 August 1975, the Soviet Union became one of the 35 nations to sign the Helsinki Accords during the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki, Finland. Although the Soviet Union had signed the Accords primarily due to policy considerations. The so-called Third Basket of the Accords obliged the signatories to respect rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience. The signatories also confirmed the right of the individual to know and act upon his rights, the Public Group to Promote Fulfillment of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR was the idea of physicist Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov, based on previous one-and-a-half-decade-old experience of dissent. The newly inaugurated Moscow Helsinki Group was to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act. In its founding statement, the Group announced its goal to inform the heads of the states as well as the world public about cases of direct violations of the Helsinki Accords. It announced that it would accept information on violations of these articles from citizens, the members of the Helsinki group also traveled throughout the Soviet Union to conduct research on compliance with the Helsinki Final Act. After verifying the complaint, when possible, the Group would issue reports on the violations they observed, the documents closed with a call for action by the signatory states. The Helsinki Group would then campaign internationally by passing on the reports on the violations for publication abroad, the Groups strategy was to make thirty-five copies of each document and send them by registered mail to the thirty-four Moscow embassies affiliated with the CSCE and directly to Leonid Brezhnev. Moscow Helsinki Group members also met with foreign correspondents to reach audiences beyond the Soviet Union, the CSCE translated all documents it received and forwarded them to other CSCE states and interested groups. The Groups complaints would also be forwarded for review at the international follow-up meetings to Helsinki, including the 1977 Belgrade meeting, in addition, the documents and appeals were circulated via samizdat. Many documents that reached the West were republished in periodicals such as the Cahiers du Samizdat, in the six years of its existence in the Soviet Union, the Moscow Helsinki Group compiled a total of 195 such reports. The Commission was formally linked to and constituted as an offshoot of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the members of the Working Commission were subjected to various terms and types of punishments. Members of the Moscow Helsinki Group were threatened by the KGB, the first arrests of members of the Moscow Helsinki Group were carried out by Soviet authorities in early 1977
33.
Memorial (society)
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Memorial is a Russian historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-Soviet states. It focuses on recording and publicising the Soviet Unions totalitarian past, memorials full name is MEMORIAL, An International Historical, Educational, Human Rights And Charitable Society. This is done, in particular, by keeping a database of the victims of political terror in the USSR. Memorial organizes assistance, both legal and financial, for the victims of the Gulag and it also conducts research into the history of political repression and publicizes the findings in books, articles, exhibitions, museums, and websites of its member organizations. For nine months the memorial sat beside the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as Iron Felix, the efforts of Memorial were behind the Law on Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, which was passed in 1991. In 1991 Memorial also contributed to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR officially making October 30 a Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Political Repression, Memorial also helps individuals to find documents, graves, etc. of politically persecuted relatives. As of 2005, Memorial had a database of over 1,300,000 names of such people, the archives were used by British historian Orlando Figes when he was researching his 2008 book The Whisperers, Private Lives in Stalins Russia. Memorial funds or helps to produce publications and films. The 25 minute film was produced in collaboration with WITNESS, Memorial are trying to build a National Memorial Museum Complex in Kovalevsky Forest to commemorate 4,500 victims of the Red Terror. Memorial discovered the bodies in 2002, the idea suggested creating a monument, a museum, an archive, a library. This led to an informal movement which expanded the original goals. It organized a petition to the 19th Conference of the CPSU, the petition resulted in the conference decreeing the creation of the monument to victims of repressions. A decision of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU was earlier ignored, the Memorial as the historical and educational society was founded at the conference held in the Moscow Aviation Institute January 26–28,1989. In 1991 a Civil Rights Defense Center MEMORIAL was founded, a poll was carried out in Moscow streets of the names of the candidates to the Public Council of the society. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the society became international, with organizations in post-Soviet states, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Georgia, as well as in Italy. In 2004, Memorial was among the four recipients of the Right Livelihood Award, for its work in documenting violations of rights in Russia. In 2008, Memorial won the Hermann Kesten Prize, in 2009, Memorial won the Sakharov Prize, in memory of the murdered Memorial activist Natalya Estemirova. A cash reward, which comes with the prize, of €50,000 is to be awarded to Memorial in December 2009, Memorial was awarded the Victor Gollancz Prize by the Society for Threatened Peoples in 2009
34.
Mikhail Agursky
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Mikhail Samuilovich Agursky, real name Melik Samuilovich Agursky, was a Jewish sovietologist, cybernetic and historian of National Bolshevism. Agursky was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, mikhail Agursky was the pen name of Melik Agursky. Other variations of the name are Melir and Melib and he was the son of a famous revolutionary, a historian and party leader Samuel Haimovich Agursky. In 1955 he married Vera Feodorovna Kondratieva, mikhail Agursky was born as Melik Samuilovich Agursky in Moscow in 1933 to a Jewish family. His father Samuel Agursky was revolutionary and historian, mikhail Agursky received an education in engineering and defended a dissertation on cybernetics. In 1975 he emigrated to Israel, Agursky became a Fellow of the Soviet and East European Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His book The Ideology of National Bolshevism was published in Paris in 1980, on 21 August 1991 Agursky was found dead on in his hotel room in Moscow. Mikhail Agursky - The Ideology of National Bolshevism
35.
Vasily Aksyonov
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Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He is known in the West as the author of The Burn and Generations of Winter, Vasily Aksyonov was born to Pavel Aksyonov and Yevgenia Ginzburg in Kazan, USSR on August 20,1932. His mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a successful journalist and educator and his father, in 1937, however, both were arrested and tried for her alleged connection to Trotskyists. They were both sent to Gulag and then to exile, and each served 18 years, but remarkably survived, later, Yevgenia came to prominence as the author of a famous memoir, Into the Whirlwind, documenting the brutality of Stalinist repression. Aksyonov remained until rescued in 1938 by his uncle, with family he stayed until his mother was released into exile. In 1947, Vasily joined her in exile in the notorious Magadan, Kolyma prison area, vasilys half-brother Alexei died from starvation in besieged Leningrad in 1941. His parents, seeing that doctors had the best chance to survive in the camps and he therefore entered the Kazan University and graduated in 1956 from the First Pavlov State Medical University of St. Peterburg and worked as a doctor for the next 3 years. During his time as a student he came under surveillance by the KGB. It is likely that he would have been arrested had the liberalisation that followed Stalins death in 1953 not intervened, reportedly, during the liberalisation that followed Stalins death in 1953, Aksyonov came into contact with the first Soviet countercultural movement of zoot-suited hipsters called stilyagi. As a result, He fell in love with their slang, fashions, libertine lifestyles, dancing, from this point on began his lifelong romance with jazz. Interest in his new milieu, western music, fashion and literature turned out to be life-changing for Aksyonov and he remained a keen observer of youth, with its ever-changing styles, movements and trends. Like no other Soviet writer, he was attuned to the developments, in 1956, he was discovered and heralded by the Soviet writer Valentin Kataev for his first publication, in the liberal magazine Youth. His first novel, Colleagues, was based on his experiences as a doctor and his second, Ticket to the Stars, depicting the life of Soviet youthful hipsters, made him an overnight celebrity. In the 1960s Aksyonov was a frequent contributor to the popular Yunost magazine and eventually became a staff writer. Aksyonovs characters spoke in a way, using hip lingo, they went to bars and dance halls, had premarital sex, listened to jazz and rocknroll. There was a feeling of freshness and freedom about his writings, similar to the one emanating from black-market recordings of American jazz and it was amazing, We were being brought up robots, but we began to listen to jazz, Aksyonov said in a 2007 documentary about him. Ultimately, however, he shared Mr. Solzhenitsyns fate of exile from the Soviet Union and it was important to have the Aksyonov light, that light of personal freedom and personal self-expression. However, as Mark Yoffe notes in Aksyonovs obituary, his open pro-Americanism, and his involvement in 1979 with an independent magazine, Metropol, led to an open confrontation with the authorities
36.
Lyudmila Alexeyeva
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Alexeyeva was born in Yevpatoria, Crimea. Alexeyeva joined the Communist Party of the USSR in 1952, from 1959–1968, she worked as an editor in the ethnography and archeology section of the publishing house “Science”. Alexeyeva’s worldview was significantly affected by the Khrushchev Thaw that lasted from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s and she belonged to the group of people, mostly intellectuals, who formed the dissident movement in the USSR in the 1960s. In 1966, Alexeyeva campaigned in defense of Daniel and Siniavsky, in the late 1960s she signed petitions in defense of other dissidents who were prosecuted by the Soviet authorities, including Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov. In April 1968, Alexeyeva was expelled from the Communist Party, nonetheless, she continued her activities in defense of human rights. In 1968–1972 she worked clandestinely as a typist for the first underground bulletin The Chronicle of Current Events devoted to human rights violations in the USSR, during 1970–1977 Alexeyeva worked at the Institute of Information on Social Sciences affiliated with the Science Academy of the USSR. Having become completely disillusioned with the Soviet ideology, Alexeyeva decided not to defend her Candidate of Sciences thesis, in early 1976, Alexeyeva became a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. As a member, she signed a number of documents issued by the Group, helped some of them. Her responsibilities also included editing the Group’s documents and hiding copies of them from the authorities, in February 1977 Alexeyeva was forced to emigrate from the USSR. She and her family settled in the United States, where she continued her human rights activities as a representative of the Moscow Helsinki Group. In addition, after moving to the United States, Alexeyeva took up freelance journalism for Radio Liberty. In 1990 she published The Thaw Generation, an autobiography that described the formation of the Soviet dissident movement and was co-written with Paul Goldberg, in 1989 she again joined the Moscow Helsinki Group that was restarted after its dissolution in 1981. In 1993, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she returned to Russia, in 2000, Alexeyeva joined a commission set up to advise President Vladimir Putin on human rights issues, a move that triggered criticism from some other rights activists. Subsequently, she co-founded the All-Russia Civic Network with Satarov, on February 10,2009, Alexeyeva joined the Council for Promoting the Institutions of Civil Society and Human Rights under the President of the Russian Federation. She has also criticized the law enforcers’ conduct in Ingushetia and has warned that violence in the republic may spread to the whole Russian Federation. In 2006, she was accused by the Russian authorities of involvement with British intelligence, since October 31,2009, she has been one of the regular organizers of these rallies. On December 31,2009, during one of these protests, Alexeyeva was detained by the riot police. This event provoked strong reaction in Russia and abroad, jerzy Buzek, the President of the European Parliament, was “deeply disappointed and shocked” at the treatment of Alexeyeva and others by the police
37.
Andrei Amalrik
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Andrei Alekseevich Amalrik, alternatively spelled Andrei or Andrey, was a Russian writer and dissident. Amalrik was best known in the Western world for his essay, Amalrik was born in Moscow, during the time of Joseph Stalins purges. When the Soviet revolution broke out, Andreis father, then a young man, after the war he went into the film industry. Andreis father fought in World War II in the Northern Fleet, in 1942 he was wounded at Stalingrad and invalided out of the service. Andreis fathers hardships explain Andreis decision to become a historian, but as Historian John Keep wrote, Andrei has gone one better by not only writing history but by securing a place in it. Andreis father developed a heart condition which required constant nursing. This care was provided first by his wife, and on her death from cancer in 1959 by his son Andrei and he died when Andrei was in prison. In high school, Andrei Amalrik was a student and truant. He was expelled a year before graduation, despite this, he won admission to the history department at Moscow State University in 1959. Amalrik refused to modify his views and was expelled from Moscow University, without a degree, Amalrik did odd jobs and wrote five unpublished plays but was soon under the gaze of the security police for an attempt to contact a Danish scholar through the Danish Embassy. He also became close to the youth literary group SMOG. Amalriks plays and an interest in modern non-representational art led to Amalriks first arrest in May 1965, a charge of spreading pornography failed because the expert witnesses called by the prosecution refused to give the correct testimony. However, the authorities then accused Amalrik of parasitism, and he was sentenced by a tribunal to banishment in western Siberia for a two-and-a-half-year term. He was freed briefly and then rearrested and sent to exile in a village near Tomsk. Allowed to make a trip to Moscow after the death of his father, Amalrik persuaded Tatar expressionist artist, Gyuzel Makudinova, to marry him. It was this exile he described in Involuntary Journey to Siberia, during the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in February 1966, Amalrik and other dissenters stood outside of the trial to protest. Amalrik often met with foreign correspondents to relay protests, took part in vigils outside courthouses, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, pressure on Russias intellectuals was stepped up by the authorities. Amalriks apartment was searched, in May 1969 and February 1970
listen); 15 November 1925 — 30 December 1988) was a Soviet dissident writer, poet, translator, and political prisoner. He frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Nikolay Arzhak (Russian: Никола́й Аржа́к, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɐrˈʐak] (