1.
President of Georgia
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The President of Georgia is the head of state, supreme commander-in-chief, and holder of the highest office within the Government of Georgia. Executive power is split between the President and the Prime Minister, who is the head of government, the office was first introduced by the Supreme Council of the Republic of Georgia on 14 April 1991, five days after Georgias declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. The President serves a five-year term, the incumbent is Giorgi Margvelashvili, who was sworn in on 17 November 2013. The President of Georgia is Head of State, the President is a guarantor of national independence and unity of the country. He/she ensures the functioning of state bodies in accordance with the Constitution, the President is the representative of Georgia in foreign relations. The President of Georgia is elected on the basis of universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot, the President may not be elected for more than two consecutive terms. Appoints and dismisses military commanders in agreement with the government, the president of Georgia issue decrees, edicts, and ordinances, also orders as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Georgia, to exercise constitutional powers. The President of Georgia also exercises other powers defined in the Constitution, legal acts of the president require countersignature from the Prime Minister. Any legal act of the President that requires countersigning shall be promulgated, in the case of countersignature, the responsibility for legal acts shall rest with the Government. During his/her period in office, he/she may not be arrested, in the event that the President violates the Constitution, betrays the state or commits other crimes, Parliament may remove him/her from office with the approval of the Constitutional Court. Security of the President of Georgia is provided by the Special State Protection Service, copies of the standard are used inside the Presidents office, at the Chancellery Building, other state agencies, and as a car flag on vehicles bearing the President within Georgian territory. In the nationwide elections to this post, on 26 May 1991, Gamsakhurdia won a landslide victory, Gamsakhurdia was ousted in a military coup détat in January 1992. He continued to function as a president-in-exile until his death in a attempt to regain power in December 1993. In the post-coup absence of power, a position of the Head of State was introduced for Georgias new leader Eduard Shevardnadze on 10 March 1992. After the adoption of a new Constitution on 24 August 1995, Shevardnadze was elected to presidency on 5 November 1995, and reelected on 9 April 2000. He resigned under pressure of mass known as Rose Revolution on 23 November 2003. After Nino Burjanadzes brief tenure as an Acting President, Mikheil Saakashvili was elected on 4 January 2004 and he was reelected on 5 January 2008. For leaders before independence, see List of leaders of Georgia Presidential Administration of Georgia Official Site of the President of Georgia
2.
Tbilisi
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Tbilisi, commonly known by its former name Tiflis, is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Kura River with a population of roughly 1.5 million inhabitants. Founded in the 5th century by the monarch of Georgias ancient precursor the Kingdom of Iberia, Tbilisi has since served, with intermissions, as the capital of various Georgian kingdoms and republics. Under Russian rule, from 1801 to 1917 Tiflis was the seat of the Imperial Viceroy governing both sides of the entire Caucasus. Tbilisis varied history is reflected in its architecture, which is a mix of medieval, classical, Middle Eastern, Art Nouveau, historically, Tbilisi has been home to people of diverse cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, though it is overwhelmingly Eastern Orthodox Christian. Archaeological studies of the region have indicated human settlement in the territory of Tbilisi as early as the 4th millennium BC, according to an old legend, the present-day territory of Tbilisi was covered by forests as late as 458. One widely accepted variant of the legend of Tbilisis founding states that King Vakhtang I Gorgasali of Georgia went hunting in the wooded region with a falcon. The Kings falcon allegedly caught or injured a pheasant during the hunt, King Vakhtang became so impressed with the hot springs that he decided to cut down the forest and build a city on the location. The name Tbilisi derives from Old Georgian Tbilisi, and further from Tpili, the name Tbili or Tbilisi was therefore given to the city because of the areas numerous sulphuric hot springs that came out of the ground. King Dachi I Ujarmeli, who was the successor of Vakhtang I Gorgasali, Tbilisi was not the capital of a unified Georgian state at that time and did not include the territory of Colchis. It was, however, the city of Eastern Georgia/Iberia. During his reign, King Dachi I oversaw the construction of the wall that lined the citys new boundaries. From the 6th century, Tbilisi grew at a steady pace due to the favourable and strategic location which placed the city along important trade. Tbilisis favourable and strategic location did not necessarily bode well for its existence as Eastern Georgias/Iberias capital, in the year 627, Tbilisi was sacked by the Byzantine/Khazar armies and later, in 736–738, Arab armies entered the town under Marwan II Ibn-Muhammad. After this point, the Arabs established an emirate centered in Tbilisi, in 764, Tbilisi, still under Arab control was once again sacked by the Khazars. In 853, the armies of Arab leader Bugha Al-Turki invaded Tbilisi in order to enforce its return to Abbasid allegiance, the Arab domination of Tbilisi continued until about 1050. In 1068, the city was again sacked, only this time by the Seljuk Turks under Sultan Alp Arslan. In 1122, after fighting with the Seljuks that involved at least 60,000 Georgians and up to 300,000 Turks. After the battles for Tbilisi concluded, David moved his residence from Kutaisi to Tbilisi, making it the capital of a unified Georgian State, from 12–13th centuries, Tbilisi became a dominant regional power with a thriving economy and a well-established social system/structure
3.
Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic
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Georgia, formally the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, also commonly known as Soviet Georgia was one of the republics of the Soviet Union from its inception in 1922 to its breakup in 1991. From November 18,1989, the Georgian SSR declared its sovereignty over Soviet laws, geographically, the Georgian SSR was bordered by Turkey to the south-west and the Black Sea to the west. Within the Soviet Union it bordered the Russian SFSR to the north, Armenian SSR to the south, on November 28,1917, after the October Revolution in Russia, there was a Transcaucasian Commissariat established in Tiflis. A moderate, multi-party democratic system led by the Social Democratic Party of Georgia operated in the Democratic Republic of Georgia, but in February 1921, the Red Army invaded Georgia. The Socialist Soviet Republic of Georgia was established on February 25,1921, on March 2 of the following year the first constitution of Soviet Georgia was accepted. From March 12,1922 to December 5,1936 it was part of the Transcaucasian SFSR together with the Armenian SSR, in 1936, the TSFSR was dissolved. In 1936, the TSFSR was dissolved and Georgia became the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, lavrentiy Beria became head of the Georgian OGPU and purged Georgia until he was transferred to Moscow in 1938. Reaching the Caucasus oilfields was one of the objectives of Hitlers invasion of the USSR in June 1941. The country contributed almost 700,000 fighters to the Red Army and he abolished their respective autonomous republics. The Georgian SSR was briefly granted some of their territory until 1957, the decentralisation program introduced by Khrushchev in the mid-1950s was soon exploited by Georgian Communist Party officials to build their own regional power base. A thriving pseudo-capitalist shadow economy emerged alongside the official state-owned economy, corruption was at a high level. Among all the republics, Georgia had the highest number of residents with high or special secondary education. Although corruption was hardly unknown in the Soviet Union, it became so widespread, shevardnadze ascended to the post of First Secretary with the blessings of Moscow. He was an effective and able ruler of Georgia from 1972 to 1985, improving the official economy, Soviet power and Georgian nationalism clashed in 1978 when Moscow ordered revision of the constitutional status of the Georgian language as Georgias official state language. Bowing to pressure from street demonstrations on April 14,1978. April 14 was established as a Day of the Georgian Language, on April 9,1989, Soviet troops were used to break up a peaceful demonstration at the government building in Tbilisi. Twenty Georgians were killed and hundreds wounded and poisoned, the event radicalised Georgian politics, prompting many - even some Georgian communists - to conclude that independence was preferable to continued Soviet unity. On October 28,1990, democratic elections were held
4.
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
5.
Georgia (country)
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Georgia is a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. The capital and largest city is Tbilisi, Georgia covers a territory of 69,700 square kilometres, and its 2016 population is about 3.72 million. Georgia is a unitary, semi-presidential republic, with the government elected through a representative democracy, during the classical era, several independent kingdoms became established in what is now Georgia. The kingdoms of Colchis and Iberia adopted Christianity in the early 4th century, a unified Kingdom of Georgia reached the peak of its political and economic strength during the reign of King David IV and Queen Tamar in the 12th and early 13th centuries. Thereafter the kingdom declined and eventually disintegrated under hegemony of various powers, including the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire. Russian rule over Georgia was eventually acknowledged in various treaties with Iran. Since the establishment of the modern Georgian republic in April 1991, post-communist Georgia suffered from civil, the countrys Western orientation soon led to the worsening of relations with Russia, culminating in the brief Russo-Georgian War in August 2008. Georgia is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and it contains two de facto independent regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which gained limited international recognition after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Georgia and a part of the international community consider the regions to be part of Georgias sovereign territory under Russian military occupation. Georgia probably stems from the Persian designation of the Georgians – gurğān, in the 11th and 12th centuries adapted via Syriac gurz-ān/gurz-iyān, starting with the Persian word gurğ/gurğān, the word was later adopted in numerous other languages, including Slavic and West European languages. This term itself might have established through the ancient Iranian appellation of the near-Caspian region. The self-designation used by ethnic Georgians is Kartvelebi, the medieval Georgian Chronicles present an eponymous ancestor of the Kartvelians, Kartlos, a great-grandson of Japheth. However, scholars agree that the word is derived from the Karts, the name Sakartvelo consists of two parts. Its root, kartvel-i, specifies an inhabitant of the core central-eastern Georgian region of Kartli, ancient Greeks and Romans referred to early western Georgians as Colchians and eastern Georgians as Iberians. Today the full, official name of the country is Georgia, before the 1995 constitution came into force the countrys name was the Republic of Georgia. The territory of modern-day Georgia was inhabited by Homo erectus since the Paleolithic Era, the proto-Georgian tribes first appear in written history in the 12th century BC. The earliest evidence of wine to date has found in Georgia. In fact, early metallurgy started in Georgia during the 6th millennium BC, the classical period saw the rise of a number of early Georgian states, the principal of which was Colchis in the west and Iberia in the east
6.
Georgians
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The Georgians or Kartvelians are a nation and ethnic group who constitute a majority of the population in Georgia. Large Georgian communities are present throughout Russia, Turkey, Greece, Iran, Ukraine, United States. Georgians arose from the ancient Colchian and Iberian civilizations, there are also small Georgian Catholic and Muslim communities in Tbilisi and Adjara, as well as a significant number of irreligious Georgians. By the early 11th century they formed a unified Kingdom of Georgia and inaugurated the Georgian Golden Age and this lasted until being weakened by Mongol invasions, as well as internal divisions following the death of George V the Brilliant, the last of the great kings of Georgia. To ensure Georgias survival, in 1783 Heraclius II of Georgia forged an alliance with the Russian Empire, the Russo-Georgian alliance, however, backfired as Russia was unwilling to fulfill the terms of the treaty, proceeding to annex the troubled kingdom in 1801. Georgians briefly reasserted their independence from Russia under the First Georgian Republic from 1918-1921, Georgians call themselves Kartvelebi, their land Sakartvelo, and their language Kartuli. According to The Georgian Chronicles, the ancestor of the Kartvelian people was Kartlos, however, scholars agree that the word is derived from the Karts, the latter being one of the proto-Georgian tribes that emerged as a dominant group in ancient times. Ancient Greeks and Romans referred to western Georgians as Colchians and eastern Georgians as Iberians, the term Georgians is derived from the country of Georgia. Starting with the Persian word gurğ/gurğān, the word was adopted in numerous other languages, including Slavic. This term itself might have established through the ancient Iranian appellation of the near-Caspian region. Scholars usually refer to them as Proto-Kartvelian tribes, the Georgian people in antiquity have been known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as Colchians and Iberians. East Georgian tribes of Tibarenians-Iberians formed their kingdom in 7th century BCE, however, western Georgian tribes established the first Georgian state of Colchis before the foundation of the Iberian Kingdom in the east. According to the scholars of Georgia, the formations of these two early Georgian kingdoms of Colchis and Iberia, resulted in the consolidation and uniformity of the Georgian nation. The ancient Jewish chronicle by Josephus mentions Georgians as Iberes who were also called Thobel, diauehi in Assyrian sources and Taochi in Greek lived in the northeastern part of Anatolia, a region that was part of Georgia. This ancient tribe is considered by scholars as ancestors of the Georgians. Modern Georgians still refer to this region, which now belongs to present-day Turkey, as Tao-Klarjeti, some people there still speak the Georgian language. Colchians in the ancient western Georgian Kingdom of Colchis were another proto-Georgian tribed and they are first mentioned in the Assyrian annals of Tiglath-Pileser I and in the annals of Urartian king Sarduri II, and are also included western Georgian tribe of the Meskhetians. Iberians, also known as Tiberians or Tiberanians, lived in the eastern Georgian Kingdom of Iberia, both Colchians and Iberians played an important role in the ethnic and cultural formation of the modern Georgian nation
7.
Romanization of Georgian
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Romanization of Georgian is the process of transliterating the Georgian language from the Georgian script into the Latin script. The system was already in use, since 1998, on driving licenses and it is also used by BGN and PCGN since 2009. Despite its popularity this system leads to ambiguity. The system is used in social networks, forums, chat rooms. The system is influenced by the common case-sensitive Georgian keyboard layout that ties each key to each letter in the alphabet. ISO9984,1996, Transliteration of Georgian characters into Latin characters, was last reviewed and confirmed in 2010, Transliteration web utility for the National and ISO transliteration of Georgian
8.
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
9.
Romanization of Russian
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Romanization of the Russian alphabet is the process of transliterating the Russian language from the Cyrillic script into the Latin alphabet. Scientific transliteration, also known as the International Scholarly System, is a system that has used in linguistics since the 19th century. It is based on the Czech alphabet and formed the basis of the GOST, OST8483 was the first Soviet standard on romanization of Russian, introduced in 16 October 1935. This standard is an equivalent of GOST 16876-71 and was adopted as a standard of the COMECON. GOST7. 79-2000 System of Standards on Information, Librarianship and it is the official standard of both Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Machine readable passports is an adoption of an ICAO stadards for travel documents and it was used in Russian passports for a short period during 2010–2013. The standard was substituted in 2013 by GOST R ISO/IEC 7501-1-2013, which does not contain romanization, ISO/R9, established in 1954 and updated in 1968, was the adoption of the scientific transliteration by the International Organization for Standardization. It covers Russian and seven other Slavic languages, ISO9,1995 is the current transliteration standard from ISO. It is based on its predecessor ISO/R9,1968, which it deprecates, for Russian, the UNGEGN, a Working Group of the United Nations, in 1987 recommended a romanization system for geographical names, which was based on the 1983 version of GOST 16876-71. It may be found in some international cartographic products, American Library Association and Library of Congress romanization tables for Slavic alphabets are used in North American libraries and in the British Library since 1975. The formal, unambiguous version of the system requires some diacritics and two-letter tie characters, British Standard 2979,1958 is the main system of the Oxford University Press, and a variation was used by the British Library to catalogue publications acquired up to 1975. The BGN/PCGN system is relatively intuitive for Anglophones to read and pronounce, the portion of the system pertaining to the Russian language was adopted by BGN in 1944 and by PCGN in 1947. In Soviet international passports, transliteration was based on French rules, in 1997, with the introduction of new Russian passports, a diacritic-free English-oriented system was established by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but this system was also abandoned in 2010. In 2006, GOST52535. 1-2006 was adopted, which defines technical requirements and standards for Russian international passports, in 2010, the Federal Migratory Service of Russia approved Order No. 26, stating that all names in the passports issued after 2010 must be transliterated using GOST52535. 1-2006. The standard was abandoned in 2013, finally in 2013, Order No.320 of the Federal Migratory Service of Russia came into force. It states that all names in the passports must be transliterated using the ICAO system. This system differs from the GOST52535. 1-2006 system in two things, ц is transliterated into ts, ъ is transliterated into ie, Scholarly ¹ Some archaic letters are transcribed in different ways
10.
Post-Soviet states
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On March 11,1990, Lithuania was the first to declare its independence, with Estonia and Latvia following suit in August 1991. All three Baltic states claimed continuity from the states that existed prior to their annexation by the Soviet Union in 1944 and were admitted to the United Nations on 17 September 1991. The remaining 12 republics all subsequently seceded,12 of the 15 states, excluding the Baltic states, initially formed the CIS and most joined CSTO, while the Baltic states focused on European Union and NATO membership. The 15 post-Soviet states are divided into the following five groupings. Each of these regions has its own set of traits, owing not only to geographic and cultural factors. In addition, there are a number of de facto independent, the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place as a result and against the backdrop of general economic stagnation, even regression. In all, the process triggered severe economic declines, with Gross Domestic Product dropping by more than 40% overall between 1990 and 1995. This decline in GDP was much more intense than the 27% decline that the United States suffered in the wake of the Great Depression between 1930 and 1934. The economic shocks associated with wholesale privatization resulted in the deaths of roughly 1 million working age individuals throughout the former Soviet bloc in the 1990s, by 2007,10 of the 15 post-Soviet states had recovered and reached GDP greater than what they had in 1991. Only Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan had GDP significantly below the 1991 level, the recovery in Russia was marginal, with GDP in 2006-2007 just nudging above the 1991 level. Combined with the aftershocks of the 1998 economic crisis it led to a return of more interventionist economic policies by Vladimir Putins administration. Change in Gross Domestic Product in constant prices, 1991-2015 *Economy of most Soviet republics started to decline in 1989-1990, **The year when GDP decline switched to GDP growth. List of the present Gross domestic product, The post-Soviet states listed according to their Human Development Index scores, only organizations that are mainly composed of post-Soviet states are listed in this section, organizations with wider memberships are not discussed. The 15 post-Soviet states are divided in their participation to the blocs, Belarus, Russia. It was conceived as an organization to the USSR. It currently consists of nine of the 15 former Soviet republics, with one participating state, Georgia withdrew from the CIS in August 2008. The sole exception to the above has been their recent membership in the Community of Democratic Choice, the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are members of the CIS and participate in several regional organizations that have Russia as a primary mover. Such organizations are the Eurasian Economic Community, Collective Security Treaty Organization, the last two groups only became distinct once Uzbekistan withdrew from GUAM and sought membership in EurAsEc and CSTO
11.
Konstantine Gamsakhurdia
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Konstantine Gamsakhurdia was a Georgian writer and public figure, who, along with Mikheil Javakhishvili, is considered to be one of the most influential Georgian novelists of the 20th century. Hostile to the Soviet rule, he was, nevertheless, one of the few leading Georgian writers to have survived the Stalin-era repressions, including his exile to a White Sea island and his works are noted for their character portrayals of great psychological insight. Another major feature of Gamsakhurdias writings is a new subtlety he infused into Georgian diction, petersburg, where he quarreled with Nicholas Marr. He spent most of the World War I years in Germany, France, as a Russian subject, he was briefly interned at Traunstein in Bavaria where Thomas Mann sent him chocolate. Gamsakhurdia published his first poems, and short stories early in the 1910s, influenced by German Expressionism, while in Germany, he regularly wrote for German press on Georgia and the Caucasus, and was involved in organizing a Georgian Liberation Committee. Gamsakhurdia met the 1921 Bolshevik takeover of Georgia with hostility and he edited the Tbilisi-based literary journals and for a short time led an academic group of writers which placed artistic values above political correctness. Gamsakhurdia published his writings in defiance to the ideological pressure. In 1925, Gamsakhurdia published his first and one of the most impressive novels The Smile of Dionysus and it is a story of a young Georgian intellectual in Paris who is detached from his native society and remains a complete stranger in the city of his ideals. This novel, like his works, was partially Decadent, and did not please the Soviet ideologists. After the suppression of the 1924 anti-Soviet uprising in Georgia, Gamsakhurdia was excluded from the Tbilisi State University where he taught German literature, soon was arrested and deported to the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea where he was to spend a few years. On his release, Gamsakhurdia was forced to keep silence, on the verge of suicide, the writer fought his depression by translating Dante. Early in the 1930s, he obtained Lavrentiy Berias protection and was able to resume writing, with an attempt at socialist novel Stealing the Moon, next came the psychological novella Khogais Mindia, yet another appeal in classical Georgian literature to this Khevsur myth. Beria was critical of works, though. Gamsakhurdia survived the Joseph Stalin-Lavrentiy Beria purges, which destroyed a part of Georgian literary society. He had to pay a tribute to the Stalinist dogma, conceiving a novel on Stalins childhood in 1939, however, as the first published part of this work was not approved by the authorities, it was promptly discontinued and withdrawn from public libraries. The clash of powerful human passions, between illicit love and duty, culminates in the mutilation and execution of Arsakidze at Giorgis behest, the story conveys a subtle allegorical message, and the harassed artists of Stalins era can be recognized in Arsakidze. This work won for the author a prestigious Shota Rustaveli State Prize in 1962, Gamsakhurdia also wrote a biographical novel about Goethe, and literary criticism of Georgian and foreign authors. Publication of his memoirs, Flirting with Ghosts and of his testament was aborted at that time, konstantine Gamsakhurdia, photo by Simon Kiladze
12.
Philology
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Philology is the study of language in written historical sources, it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics. It is more defined as the study of literary texts and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist, in older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics. Indo-European studies involves the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages, Philology, with its focus on historical development, is contrasted with linguistics due to Ferdinand de Saussures insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis. The contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and Chomskyan linguistics alongside its emphasis on syntax, the term changed little with the Latin philologia, and later entered the English language in the 16th century, from the Middle French philologie, in the sense of love of literature. The adjective φιλόλογος meant fond of discussion or argument, talkative, in Hellenistic Greek also implying an excessive preference of argument over the love of true wisdom, as an allegory of literary erudition, Philologia appears in 5th-century post-classical literature, an idea revived in Late Medieval literature. The meaning of love of learning and literature was narrowed to the study of the development of languages in 19th-century usage of the term. Most continental European countries still maintain the term to designate departments, colleges, position titles, J. R. R. Tolkien opposed the nationalist reaction against philological practices, claiming that the philological instinct was universal as is the use of language. Based on the critique of Friedrich Nietzsche, US scholars since the 1980s have viewed philology as responsible for a narrowly scientistic study of language. The comparative linguistics branch of philology studies the relationship between languages, similarities between Sanskrit and European languages were first noted in the early 16th century and led to speculation of a common ancestor language from which all these descended. Philology also includes the study of texts and their history and it includes elements of textual criticism, trying to reconstruct an authors original text based on variant copies of manuscripts. Since that time, the principles of textual criticism have been improved and applied to other widely distributed texts such as the Bible. Scholars have tried to reconstruct the original readings of the Bible from the manuscript variants and this method was applied to Classical Studies and to medieval texts as a way to reconstruct the authors original work. A related study method known as higher criticism studies the authorship, date, as these philological issues are often inseparable from issues of interpretation, there is no clear-cut boundary between philology and hermeneutics. When text has a significant political or religious influence, scholars have difficulty reaching objective conclusions, some scholars avoid all critical methods of textual philology, especially in historical linguistics, where it is important to study the actual recorded materials. Supporters of New Philology insist on a diplomatic approach, a faithful rendering of the text exactly as found in the manuscript. Another branch of philology, cognitive philology, studies written and oral texts and this science compares the results of textual science with the results of experimental research of both psychology and artificial intelligence production systems. In the case of Bronze Age literature, philology includes the prior decipherment of the language under study and this has notably been the case with the Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Hittite, Ugaritic and Luwian languages
13.
Joseph Stalin
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Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 in order to manage the Bolshevik Revolution, alongside Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and he managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin by suppressing Lenins criticisms and expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He remained General Secretary until the post was abolished in 1952, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Gulag labour camps. The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–33, major figures in the Communist Party and government, and many Red Army high commanders, were arrested and shot after being convicted of treason in show trials. Stalins invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact, as it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence agreed with the Axis, Germany ended the pact when Hitler launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive Battles of Moscow, after defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies. The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States, Communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union were established in most countries freed from German occupation by the Red Army, which later constituted the Eastern Bloc. Stalin also had relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea. On February 9,1946, Stalin delivered a public speech in which he explained the fundamental incompatibility of communism and capitalism. He stressed that the system needed war for raw materials. The Second World War was but the latest in a chain of conflicts which could be broken only when the economy made the transformation into communism. Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War, Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed, the exact number of deaths caused by Stalins regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions. Joseph Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. Ioseb was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori, Georgia and his father was Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, while his mother was Ekaterine Keke Geladze, a housemaid. As a child, Ioseb was plagued with health issues
14.
1956 Georgian demonstrations
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The March 1956 demonstrations in the Georgian SSR were a series of protests to Nikita Khrushchevs de-Stalinization policy, which shocked Georgian supporters of Marxist–Leninist–Stalinist ideology. Soon, political demands such as the change of the government in Moscow. The local Georgian authorities, confused and demoralized, passed on the responsibility to the Soviet military, later on 9 March the troops deployed in the city opened fire upon the students picketing the government buildings in what the official Soviet version held was an act of self-defense. The agitated crowds continued resistance on 10 March but were dispersed by tanks. Estimates of the number of range from several dozens to several hundreds. In spite of prompt pacification, the 1956 events marked a point after which Georgian loyalty to the Soviet Union was gravely compromised. The government’s confusion in Tbilisi was a sign that reform was to be limited by the partys determination to preserve its essential monopoly of power. Although the details were unknown, it came as a shock to the Soviet society. In spite of partys restriction of Georgian nationalism, Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization was, paradoxically, now, Stalins denigration was seen as a symbol for the mistreatment of Georgian national consciousness at the hands of the Russian/Soviet rulers. The painful reaction caused by de-Stalinization in Georgia has been variously interpreted and it has been seen by many as a revival of Stalinism and by others as the first open expression of Georgian nationalism since the abortive revolt in 1924. Sergei Arutiunov of the Russian Academy of Sciences relates, The shift of loyalty demanded of them at that moment was too enormous to execute easily, for people with a Transcaucasian background, Khrushchev’s speech was by no means a revelation. But many Georgians reacted in a peculiar way. Consider the peasants in Kardenakhi, the village of my grandfather. These people never referred to Stalin in other terms than as the one, or more explicitly. Now, they promptly displayed portraits of Stalin on the windshields of their tractors and lorries… This was a surprising diametrical shift. However, while among Russians, it was a shift from one sort of conformity to another conformity, in Georgia the shift was from one non-conformist behavior to another kind of non-conformist behavior. ”The events in Georgia passed largely unreported in the Soviet press and became a taboo theme for several decades to come. What happened can be reconstructed on the analysis of several, though frequently conflicting, contemporary reports, eyewitnesses’ accounts, indignant at Khrushchevs speech, they were aggressive towards the policemen who had thrown a cordon around the area. Georgian communist Parastishvili climbed the Stalin monument, drank wine from a bottle, smashed the bottle and said, Let Stalins enemies die
15.
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
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There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called psychopathological mechanisms of dissent, Article 58-10 of the Stalin-era Criminal Code, Anti-Soviet agitation, was to a considerable degree preserved in the new 1958 RSFSR Criminal Code as Article 70 Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. In 1967 a weaker law, Article 190-1 Dissemination of fabrications known to be false and these laws were frequently applied in conjunction with the system of diagnosis for mental illness, developed by Academician Andrei Snezhnevsky. Together they established a framework within which non-standard beliefs could easily be defined as a criminal offence, the KGB routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing publiс trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. Highly classified government documents which have become available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that the authorities consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent. The Russian Federation acknowledged that before 1991 psychiatry had been used for political purposes and it entails the exculpation and committal of citizens to psychiatric facilities based upon political rather than mental health-based criteria. Many authors, including psychiatrists, also use the terms Soviet political psychiatry or punitive psychiatry to refer to this phenomenon, Psychiatry possesses an inherent capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine. The diagnosis of disease can give the state license to detain persons against their will. In addition, receiving a psychiatric diagnosis can in itself be regarded as oppressive, Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have argued, governmental and medical institutions have at times classified threats to authority during periods of political disturbance. In many countries political prisoners are sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions. In the Soviet Union dissidents were often confined in the so-called psikhushka, Psikhushka is the Russian ironic diminutive for mental hospital. One of the first psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan, in 1939 it was transferred to the control of the NKVD on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD. International human rights such as Walter Reich have long recorded the methods by which Soviet psychiatrists in Psikhushka hospitals diagnosed schizophrenia in political dissenters. Western scholars examined no aspect of Soviet psychiatry as thoroughly as its involvement in the control of political dissenters. As early as 1948, the Soviet secret service took an interest in this area of medicine, Russian psychiatrist Pyotr Gannushkin also believed that in a class society, especially during the most severe class struggle, psychiatry was incapable of not being repressive. A system of abuse of psychiatry was developed at the end of Joseph Stalins regime. Punitive psychiatry was not simply an inheritance from the Stalin era, however, the GULag, or Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps, was an effective instrument of political repression
16.
Georgian Orthodox Church
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The Georgian Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church in full communion with the other churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. It is Georgias dominant religious institution, and a majority of Georgian people are members and it asserts apostolic foundation, and its historical roots can be traced to the Christianization of Iberia by Saint Nino in the 4th century AD. As in similar autocephalous Orthodox churches, the Churchs highest governing body is the Holy Synod of bishops, the church is headed by the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia, currently Ilia II, who was elected in 1977. The current Constitution of Georgia recognizes the role of the Georgian Orthodox Church in the countrys history. Government relations are defined and regulated by the Concordat of 2002. The church is the most trusted institution in Georgia, according to a 2013 survey 95% respondents had a favorable opinion of its work. It is highly influential in the sphere and is considered Georgias most influential institution. According to Georgian Orthodox Church tradition, the first preacher of the Gospel in Colchis and Iberia was the apostle Andrew, the First-called. However, modern historiography considers this account mythical, and the fruit of a late tradition, similar traditions regarding Saint Andrew exist in Ukraine, Cyprus and Romania. The Church also claims the presence in Georgia of the Apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus, the propagation of Christianity in present-day Georgia before the 4th century is still poorly known. The first documented event in this process is the preaching of Saint Nino and its consequences, Saint Nino, honored as Equal to the Apostles, was according to tradition the daughter of a Roman general from Cappadocia. She preached in the kingdom of Iberia in the first half of the 4th century, cyril Toumanoff dates the conversion of Mirian to 334, his official baptism and subsequent adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Iberia to 337. From the first centuries C. E. the cult of Mithras, pagan beliefs, the royal baptism and organization of the Church were accomplished by priests sent from Constantinople by Constantine the Great. Conversion of the people of Kartli proceeded quickly in the plains, the conversion of Kartli marked only the beginnings of the formation of the Georgian Orthodox Church. In the next centuries, different processes took place that shaped the Church, and gave it, by the beginning of the 11th century, the main characteristics that it has retained until now. In the 4th and 5th centuries, the Church of Kartli was strictly subordinate to the Apostolic See of Antioch, in 1010, the Catholicos of Kartli was elevated to the honor of Patriarch. From then on, the hierarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church carried the official title of Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia. At the beginnings of the Church history, what is now Georgia was not unified yet politically, such division was reflected in major differences in the development of Christianity
17.
Amnesty International
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Amnesty International is a non-governmental organisation focused on human rights that claims to have over 7 million members and supporters around the world. The stated objective of the organisation is to research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights. Amnesty International was founded in London in 1961, following the publication of the article The Forgotten Prisoners in The Observer on 28 May 1961, Amnesty draws attention to human rights abuses and campaigns for compliance with international laws and standards. It works to public opinion to put pressure on governments that let abuse take place. Amnesty considers capital punishment to be the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights, the organisation was awarded the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for its campaign against torture, and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1978. Amnesty International was founded in London in July 1961 by English labour lawyer Peter Benenson, researchers have never traced the alleged newspaper article in question. In 1960, Portugal was ruled by the Estado Novo government of António de Oliveira Salazar, the government was authoritarian in nature and strongly anti-communist, suppressing enemies of the state as anti-Portuguese. The newspaper reader feels a sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, Benenson worked with friend Eric Baker. It marked the launch of Appeal for Amnesty,1961, the aim of which was to mobilise public opinion, quickly and widely, in defence of these individuals, the Appeal for Amnesty was reprinted by a large number of international newspapers. In the same year, Benenson had a published, Persecution 1961. In July 1961 the leadership had decided that the appeal would form the basis of a permanent organisation, Amnesty, Benenson ensured that all three major political parties were represented, enlisting members of parliament from the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, and the Liberal Party. On 30 September 1962, it was officially named Amnesty International, between the Appeal for Amnesty,1961 and September 1962 the organisation had been known simply as Amnesty. From the very beginning, research and campaigning were present in Amnesty Internationals work, a library was established for information about prisoners of conscience and a network of local groups, called THREES groups, was started. Each group worked on behalf of three prisoners, one each of the then three main ideological regions of the world, communist, capitalist and developing. The international movement was starting to agree on its principles and techniques. In 1967 Peter Benenson resigned after an independent inquiry did not support his claims that AI had been infiltrated by British agents, later he claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had become involved in Amnesty. Leading Amnesty International in the 1970s were key figures Seán MacBride, Amnesty International believed that the reasons underlying torture of prisoners by governments, were either to acquire and obtain information or to quell opposition by the use of terror, or both
18.
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
19.
Chronicle of Current Events
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A Chronicle of Current Events was one of the longest-running samizdat periodicals of the post-Stalin USSR. The unofficial publication reported violations of rights and judicial procedure by the Soviet government. Appearing first in April 1968, it became the main voice of the Soviet human rights movement, inside the country. During the 15 years of its existence the Chronicle covered 424 political trials, not one of the accused was acquitted. In addition,164 people were declared insane and sent for periods of compulsory treatment in psychiatric hospitals. Despite constant harassment by the Soviet authorities more than sixty issues of the Chronicle were compiled and published between April 1968 and July 1982, one issue was confiscated, the last issue never went into circulation. Today the Chronicle offers a historical overview of political repression in the Soviet Union. No other samizdat publication covered the country for so long, recording every aspect of human rights violation committed by the post-Stalin Soviet authorities at national and local level. The periodical modelled itself on earlier more narrowly-focused underground publications and in the early 1970s its example was followed in Ukraine, the Chronicles precursors were produced by confessional and ethnic minority groups, the persecuted Baptists and Crimean Tatars. A Chronicle of Current Events was created by dissenting members of Moscows literary, the first editor and typist of the Chronicle was Natalya Gorbanevskaya. She was a contributor to the publication and responsible for introducing its regular Samizdat update section. A participant in the 1968 Red Square demonstration, she was forced to undergo psychiatric examination, then, in 1970 she was tried and convicted and sent to the Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital, from which she was released in 1972. Others stepped forward to take Gorbanevskayas place and were themselves, in turn, subjected to forms of harassment. This pattern would be repeated more than once over the next 13 years, by the mid-1960s critically minded adults and youngsters in Moscow were confronted by a growing range of information about ongoing political repressions in the Soviet Union. For the circle of future editors, this picture was amplified by Anatoly Marchenkos My Testimony and it provided a detailed account of his time in labor camps and Soviet prisons, as well as describing the conditions there. A prototype already existed in bulletins by repressed groups that had recently begun publication in samizdat, such as a Baptist periodical. An example for the Chronicles first editorial group was the bulletin of the Crimean Tatars. A turning point for the dissident movement came in 1967 when Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Dobrovolsky
20.
International Society for Human Rights
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The ISHR has observer status with the African Commission of Human and Peoples Rights. It has associate status with the Department of Public Information of the United Nations and Roster Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Agrusow, a former Russian forced laborer, who had decided to stay in West Germany after World War II due to the treatment of former forced laborers in the Soviet Union. The society became the International Society for Human Rights in 1982, with the founding of branches in Austria, Switzerland, since then it has grown to include 35 National Sections, National Groups, Regional Committees and Affiliated Organisations worldwide. During the Cold War, the International Society for Human Rights focused mostly on human rights violations in the states of the Eastern bloc, recently, the ISHR has focused on freedom of religion and freedom of press issues in countries such as Vietnam and China. The Society publishes its own periodicals Human Rights Worldwide and Menschenrechte, the Official Site of the International Secretariat of the ISHR
21.
T. S. Eliot
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Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and one of the twentieth centurys major poets. He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working and he eventually became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American citizenship. Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and it was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets. He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry. The Eliots were a Boston family with roots in Old and New England, Thomas Eliots paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. Eliot was the last of six surviving children, his parents were both 44 years old when he was born, Eliot was born at 2635 Locust St. property owned by his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot. His four sisters were between 11 and 19 years older, his brother was eight years older, known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns. Eliots childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors, firstly, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in physical activities. As he was isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the boy immediately became obsessed with books and was absorbed in tales depicting savages. In his memoir of Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living. Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision, I feel that there is something in having passed ones childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been here, rather than in Boston, or New York. From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French and he began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgeralds Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them and his first published poem, A Fable For Feasters, was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript and he also published three short stories in 1905, Birds of Prey, A Tale of a Whale and The Man Who Was King. The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 Worlds Fair of St. Louis, such a link with primitive people importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard
22.
William Shakespeare
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William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the worlds pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called Englands national poet, and the Bard of Avon and his extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 38 plays,154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright, Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children, Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a career in London as an actor, writer. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, at age 49, Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories, which are regarded as some of the best work ever produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, in his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and it was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as not of an age, but for all time. In the 20th and 21st centuries, his works have been adapted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship. His plays remain highly popular and are studied, performed. William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden and he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April. This date, which can be traced back to an 18th-century scholars mistake, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and he was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son. At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, the consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaways neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage, twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585. Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596, after the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the bill of a law case before the Queens Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589
23.
Charles Baudelaire
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Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal, expresses the nature of beauty in modern. Baudelaires highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud. He is credited with coining the term modernity to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in a metropolis. This obsessive idea is all a child of giant cities. Baudelaire is one of the innovators in French literature. He made Paris the subject of modern poetry and he would bring the citys details to life in the eyes and hearts of his readers. Baudelaire was born in Paris, France, on April 9,1821 and his father, François Baudelaire, a senior civil servant and amateur artist, was 34 years older than Baudelaires mother, Caroline. François died during Baudelaires childhood, in 1827, the following year, Caroline married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various noble courts. He stated in a letter to her that, There was in my childhood a period of passionate love for you, Baudelaire regularly begged his mother for money throughout his career, often promising that a lucrative publishing contract or journalistic commission was just around the corner. Baudelaire was educated in Lyon, where he boarded, Baudelaire was erratic in his studies, at times diligent, at other times prone to idleness. Later, he attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, studying law and he began to frequent prostitutes and may have contracted gonorrhea and syphilis during this period. He also began to run up debts, mostly for clothes, upon gaining his degree in 1839, he told his brother I dont feel I have a vocation for anything. His stepfather had in mind a career in law or diplomacy and his mother later recalled, Oh, what grief. If Charles had let himself be guided by his stepfather, his career would have very different. He would not have left a name in literature, it is true and his stepfather sent him on a voyage to Calcutta, India, in 1841 in the hope of ending his dissolute habits. The trip provided strong impressions of the sea, sailing, and exotic ports, on returning to the taverns of Paris, he began to compose some of the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal. At 21, he received an inheritance but squandered much of it within a few years
24.
Oscar Wilde
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Oscar Fingal OFlahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he one of Londons most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment, Wildes parents were successful Anglo-Irish, Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life, at university, Wilde read Greats, he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the philosophy of aestheticism. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles, known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with social themes. He wrote Salome in French in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to the prohibition of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, at the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest, was still being performed in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wildes lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, the charge carried a penalty of up to two years in prison. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest, after two more trials he was convicted and imprisoned for two years hard labour. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain, there he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46, Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin, the second of three children born to Sir William Wilde and Jane Wilde, two years behind William. Wildes mother was of Italian descent, and under the pseudonym Speranza and she read the Young Irelanders poetry to Oscar and Willie, inculcating a love of these poets in her sons. Lady Wildes interest in the neo-classical revival showed in the paintings and busts of ancient Greece, William Wilde was Irelands leading oto-ophthalmologic surgeon and was knighted in 1864 for his services as medical adviser and assistant commissioner to the censuses of Ireland. He also wrote books about Irish archaeology and peasant folklore, a renowned philanthropist, his dispensary for the care of the citys poor at the rear of Trinity College, Dublin, was the forerunner of the Dublin Eye and Ear Hospital, now located at Adelaide Road. On his fathers side Wilde was descended from a Dutchman, Colonel de Wilde, on his mothers side Wildes ancestors included a bricklayer from County Durham who emigrated to Ireland sometime in the 1770s. Wilde was baptised as an infant in St, marks Church, Dublin, the local Church of Ireland church
25.
Shota Rustaveli
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Shota Rustaveli, mononymously known simply as Rustaveli, was a medieval Georgian poet. He is considered to be the preeminent poet of the Georgian Golden Age, Rustaveli is the author of The Knight in the Panthers Skin, a Georgian national epic poem. Little, if anything, is known about Rustaveli from contemporary sources and his poem itself, namely the prologue, provides a clue to his identity, the poet identifies himself as a certain Rustveli. Rustveli is not a surname, but a territorial epithet which can be interpreted as of/from/holder of Rustavi, the fresco was described by the Georgian pilgrim Timote Gabashvili in 1757/58, and rediscovered by a team of Georgian scholars in 1960. Both a folk tradition and the 17th-century royal poet Archil identify Rustaveli as a native of the southern Georgian region of Meskheti and he is assumed to have been born between 1160 and 1165. A legend states that Rustaveli was educated at the medieval Georgian academies of Gelati and Ikalto and he must have produced his major work no earlier than the 1180s and no later than the first decade of the 13th century, most probably 1205-1207. The Knight in the Panthers Skin has been translated into many languages and it was first printed in 1712 in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. The manuscripts of The Knight in the Panthers Skin occupy an important place among the works produced in Georgia. Two folios of this text, dating from the 16th century, are located in the Institute of Manuscripts of Georgia in Tbilisi, all other copies of the poem date from the 17th century. The highest Georgian state prize in the fields of art and literature is the Shota Rustaveli State Prize, tbilisis main thoroughfare is Rustaveli Avenue. The fresco representing the legendary Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli was vandalized in June 2004 in the 11th-century Georgian-built Monastery of the Holy Cross, an unknown vandal scratched out the face of Shota Rustaveli and part of the accompanying Georgian inscription with his name on the south-west pier. Georgia officially complained to Israel after the fresco was defaced in Jerusalem. On September 3,2001, Israel and Georgia jointly issued stamps to honor Shota Rustaveli. Designed by Yitzhak Granot, the Israeli stamp showed the author with Hebrew text in the background, a street in Tashkent, Uzbekistan is named after Rustaveli. A sculpture and a street commemorate Zichys work in Tbilisi, on the first translation of The Knight in the Panthers skin from Georgian into Russian. The Man in the Panthers Skin, full text of M. Wardrops English translation, the Knight in the Panthers Skin. Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, der Mann in Pantherfell. - Georgica, London,1936 Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Tropology of The Knight in the Panthers Skin, Tbilisi,1991,352 pp Shota Rustaveli, the Man in the Panthers Skin, London, The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland,1912, translated by Marjory Scott Wardrop, repr
26.
Leonid Brezhnev
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Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His eighteen-year term as General Secretary was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in duration, during Brezhnevs rule, the global influence of the Soviet Union grew dramatically, in part because of the expansion of the Soviet military during this time. His tenure as leader was marked by the beginning of an era of economic, Brezhnev was born in Kamenskoye into a Russian workers family in 1906. After graduating from the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technicum, he became an engineer in the iron and steel industry. He joined Komsomol in 1923, and in 1929 became a member of the CPSU. He was drafted into military service during World War II. While at the helm of the USSR, Brezhnev pushed for détente between the Eastern and Western countries. However, in December 1981 he decided not to intervene in Poland, instead allowing the countrys government to impose martial law. After years of declining health, Brezhnev died on 10 November 1982 and was succeeded in his post as General Secretary by Yuri Andropov. Brezhnev had fostered a cult of personality, although not nearly to the degree as Stalin. Mikhail Gorbachev, who would lead the USSR from 1985 to 1991, denounced his legacy, in spite of this, opinion polls in Russia show Brezhnev to be the most popular Russian leader of the 20th century. Brezhnev was born on 19 December 1906 in Kamianske in Ukraine, to metalworker Ilya Yakovlevich Brezhnev and his wife and his parents used to live in Brezhnevo before moving to Kamenskoe. Brezhnevs ethnicity was specified as Ukrainian in some documents, including his passport, like many youths in the years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, he received a technical education, at first in land management where he started as a land surveyor and then in metallurgy. He graduated from the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technicum in 1935 and became an engineer in the iron. Brezhnev joined the Communist Party youth organisation, the Komsomol, in 1923, in 1935 and 1936, Brezhnev served his compulsory military service, and after taking courses at a tank school, he served as a political commissar in a tank factory. Later in 1936, he director of the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technicum. In 1936, he was transferred to the center of Dnipropetrovsk and, in 1939, he became Party Secretary in Dnipropetrovsk. As a survivor of Stalins Great Purge of 1937–39, he was able to quickly as the purges created numerous openings in the senior and middle ranks of the Party
27.
Eduard Shevardnadze
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Eduard Ambrosiyevich Shevardnadze was a Georgian politician and diplomat. He served as First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, the de facto leader of Soviet Georgia from 1972 to 1985, Shevardnadze was responsible for many key decisions in Soviet foreign policy during the Gorbachev Era. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was President of Georgia from 1992 to 2003 and he was forced to retire in 2003 as a consequence of the bloodless Rose Revolution. Shevardnadze started his career in the late 1940s as a leading member of his local Komsomol organisation. He was later appointed its Second Secretary, then its First Secretary and his rise in the Georgian Soviet hierarchy continued until 1961 when he was demoted after he insulted a senior official. After spending two years in obscurity, Shevardnadze returned as a First Secretary of a Tbilisi city district and his anti-corruption work quickly garnered the interest of the Soviet government and Shevardnadze was appointed as First Deputy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Georgian SSR. He would later become the head of the internal affairs ministry and was able to charge First Secretary Vasil Mzhavanadze with corruption, Shevardnadzes anti-corruption campaign continued until he resigned from his office as First Secretary. Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Shevardnadze to the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, from then on, with the exception of a brief period between 1990 and 1991, only Gorbachev would outrank Shevardnadze in importance in Soviet foreign policy. In the aftermath of the Soviet Unions collapse in 1991, Shevardnadze returned to the newly independent Georgia and he became the countrys head of state following the removal of the countrys first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Shevardnadze was formally elected president in 1995 and his presidency was marked by rampant corruption and accusations of nepotism. He later lived in obscurity and published his memoirs. Eduard Shevardnadze was born in Mamati in the Transcaucasian SFSR, Soviet Union, on 25 January 1928 and his father Ambrose was a teacher and a devoted communist and party official. His mother had little respect for the communist government and opposed both Shevardnadzes and his fathers party careers, eduard was a cousin of the Georgian painter and intellectual Dimitri Shevardnadze, who was purged during Stalinist repressions. In 1948 at the age of twenty, Shevardnadze joined the Georgian Communist Party and he rose steadily through the ranks of the Georgian Komsomol and after serving a term as Second Secretary, he became its First Secretary. During his Komsomol First Secretaryship, Shevardnadze met Mikhail Gorbachev for his first time, Shevardnadze said he grew disillusioned with the Soviet political system following Nikita Khrushchevs Secret Speech to the 20th CPSU Congress. Like many Soviet people, the crimes perpetrated by Joseph Stalin horrified Shevardnadze, and he was demoted in 1961 by the Politburo of the Georgian Communist Party after offending a senior official. After his demotion Shevardnadze endured several years of obscurity before returning to attention as a First Secretary of a city district in Tbilisi, Shevardnadze challenged Tbilisi First Secretary Otari Lolashvili, and later charged him for corruption. Shevardnadze left party work after his appointment as First Deputy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Georgian SSR in 1964 and it was his successful attempt at gaoling Lolashvili, which got him promoted to the post of First Deputyship
28.
Merab Kostava
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Merab Kostava was a Georgian dissident, musician and poet, one of the leaders of the National-Liberation movement in Georgia. He was born in 1939 in Tbilisi, of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1954, Kostava and Zviad Gamsakhurdia founded the Georgian youth underground organization Gorgasliani. Between 1956 and 1958 Kostava, together with Gamsakhurdia and several members of this organization were jailed by the KGB for anti-Soviet activity. The charges against Kostava and Gamsakhurdia included the dissemination of anti-communist literature, Kostava graduated from the Tbilisi State Conservatoire in 1962. From 1962–1977 he was a teacher at a music school in Tbilisi. In 1973, Kostava and Gamsakhurdia established the Initiative Group for defence of Human Rights, in 1976 Kostava co-founded the Georgian Helsinki Group. From 1976–1977 and 1987–1989 Kostava was a member of the Governing Board of the human rights organization. After 1975 Kostava was a member of Amnesty International, in 1977, Kostava and Gamsakhurdia were jailed. Kostava was sent to Siberia to serve his sentence, in 1978, the two men were nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize by the Congress of the USA. In 1988 Kostava co-founded the Society of Saint Ilia the Righteous and was one of the leaders of this political pro-independence organization, from 1988–1989 he was one of the organizers and active participants of most peaceful pro-independence political actions within the Georgian SSR. On April 9,1989 Kostava was jailed again but was released after 45 days, Merab Kostava was active in the underground network of Samizdat publishers, co-publisher of the Georgian underground periodical Okros Satsmisi. He was the author of important literary and scientific works. On October 13,1989, Merab Kostava died in a car accident, in 2013, he was posthumously awarded the title and Order of National Hero of Georgia
29.
Siberia
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Siberia is an extensive geographical region, and by the broadest definition is also known as North Asia. Siberia has historically been a part of Russia since the 17th century, the territory of Siberia extends eastwards from the Ural Mountains to the watershed between the Pacific and Arctic drainage basins. It stretches southwards from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and to the borders of Mongolia. With an area of 13.1 million square kilometres, Siberia accounts for 77% of Russias land area and this is equivalent to an average population density of about 3 inhabitants per square kilometre, making Siberia one of the most sparsely populated regions on Earth. If it were a country by itself, it would still be the largest country in area, the origin of the name is unknown. Some sources say that Siberia originates from the Siberian Tatar word for sleeping land, another account sees the name as the ancient tribal ethnonym of the Sirtya, a folk, which spoke a language that later evolved into the Ugric languages. This ethnic group was assimilated to the Siberian Tatar people. The modern usage of the name was recorded in the Russian language after the Empires conquest of the Siberian Khanate, a further variant claims that the region was named after the Xibe people. The Polish historian Chycliczkowski has proposed that the name derives from the word for north. He said that the neighbouring Chinese, Arabs and Mongolians would not have known Russian and he suggests that the name is a combination of two words, su and bir. The region is of significance, as it contains bodies of prehistoric animals from the Pleistocene Epoch. Specimens of Goldfuss cave lion cubs, Yuka and another woolly mammoth from Oymyakon, a rhinoceros from the Kolyma River. The Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earths geological history. They continued for a million years and are considered a cause of the Great Dying about 250 million years ago. At least three species of human lived in Southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago, H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, the last was determined in 2010, by DNA evidence, to be a new species. Siberia was inhabited by different groups of such as the Enets, the Nenets, the Huns, the Scythians. The Khan of Sibir in the vicinity of modern Tobolsk was known as a prominent figure who endorsed Kubrat as Khagan of Old Great Bulgaria in 630, the Mongols conquered a large part of this area early in the 13th century. With the breakup of the Golden Horde, the autonomous Khanate of Sibir was established in the late 15th century, turkic-speaking Yakut migrated north from the Lake Baikal region under pressure from the Mongol tribes during the 13th to 15th century
30.
TASS
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TASS is a major news agency in Russia, founded in 1902. Tass is the largest Russian news agency, and the fourth largest in the world after Reuters, Tass is owned by the Government of Russia. Headquartered in Moscow, Russia, Tass has 70 offices in Russia and in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Tass is the Federal State Unitary Enterprise. As the demand for non-business began during the first battles of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904, as there was no change of headquarters and almost no change in its staff and function, it was a mere rebranding. In August 1914, one day after St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd and it was seized by Bolsheviks in November 1917 and by December was renamed as the Central Information Agency of the Soviet Russian Council of Peoples Commissars. On September 7,1918, the government presidium resolved to rename PTA, ROSTA became the central information agency of the whole Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. On July 10,1925 the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union was founded and took over the main functions of the Russian Telegraph Agency as the central information agency of the country. TASS comprised news agencies of all the Soviet republics, RATAU, BELTA, UZTAG, KAZTAG, GRUZINFORM, AZERINFORM, ELTA, ATEM, LATINFORM, KIRTAG, TAJIKTA, ARMENPRESS, TURKMENINFORM, ETA. TASS news and photos were received by 4,000 Soviet newspapers, TV and radio stations and over a thousand foreign media outlets. The news agency ran one of the biggest networks of correspondents in the world -682 offices in the country and 94 bureaus abroad, and employed close to 2,000 journalists and photo correspondents. In May 1994 The Russian Government adopted a resolution On approval of the Charter of the Information Telegraph Agency of Russia, the Tass acronym was, by this point, well-recognised around the world and so was retained after being redefined as the Telegraph agency of communication and messages. The agency as a whole was referred to as ITAR-TASS, in September 2014 the agency returned to its former name under the brand Russian News Agency TASS. The agency organized the first News Agencies World Congress in 2004, TASS multi-media press centre is a communication floor in the heart of Moscow. TASS press centres also operate in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, TASS is a media partner of high-profile conferences, forums and exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Itar-Tass Russian News Agency v. Russian Kurier, Inc, Official English website Official Russian website
31.
Mikhail Gorbachev
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Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman. He was the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, having been General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991 and he was the countrys head of state from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991. Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant Ukrainian–Russian family and he graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While he was at the university, he joined the Communist Party, in 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee, First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of the Politburo in 1979. Within three years of the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief interregna of Andropov and Chernenko, before he reached the post, he had occasionally been mentioned in Western newspapers as a likely next leader and a man of the younger generation at the top level. Gorbachevs policies of glasnost and perestroika and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War. He was awarded the Otto Hahn Peace Medal in 1989, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and this was Gorbachevs third attempt to establish a political party, having started the Social Democratic Party of Russia in 2001 and the Union of Social Democrats in 2007. Gorbachev was born on 2 March 1931 in Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, into a mixed Russian-Ukrainian family of migrants from Voronezh, as a child, Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. He recalled in a memoir that In that terrible year nearly half the population of my village, Privolnoye, starved to death. Both of his grandfathers were arrested on charges in the 1930s. His father was a combine harvester operator and World War II veteran and his mother, Maria Panteleyevna Gorbacheva, was a kolkhoz worker. He was brought up mainly by his Ukrainian maternal grandparents, in his teens, he operated combine harvesters on collective farms. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law, in 1967 he qualified as an agricultural economist via a correspondence masters degree at the Stavropol Institute of Agriculture. While at the university, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and soon very active within the party. Gorbachev met his wife, Raisa Titarenko, daughter of a Ukrainian railway engineer. They married in September 1953 and moved to Stavropol upon graduation and she gave birth to their only child, daughter Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya, in 1957. Raisa Gorbacheva died of leukemia in 1999, Gorbachev has two granddaughters and one great granddaughter. Gorbachev attended the important twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, where Nikita Khrushchev announced a plan to surpass the U. S. in per capita production within twenty years, Gorbachev rose in the Communist League hierarchy and worked his way up through territorial leagues of the party
32.
Ilia Chavchavadze
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He is Georgias most universally revered hero. His most important literary works were, The Hermit, The Ghost, Otaraant Widow, Kako The Robber, Happy Nation, Latters of a Traveller and he was editor-in-chief of the periodicals Sakartvelos Moambe and Iveria, and authored numerous articles for journals. He was a protector of the Georgian language and culture from Russification. He is considered the main contributor of Georgian cultural nationalism, the three main ethnic markers of Georgian identity, according to Chavchavadze, consisted of territory, language, and Christianity. Despite this, his nationalism was secular, Chavchavadze was fatally wounded in Tsitsamuri, outside Mtskheta, by a gang of assassins. His legacy earned him the admiration of the Georgian people. In 1987 he was canonized as Saint Ilia the Righteous by the Georgian Orthodox Church, today, Georgians revere Chavchavadze as The Uncrowned King and the Father of Nation. Ilia Chavchavadze was born in Qvareli, a village in Kvareli, located in the Alazani Valley, in the Kakheti province of Georgia, Ilia was a tavadi, the Georgian title of prince. This resulted in the moving and settling in the Alazani Gorge in Kakheti. According to King Erekle IIs order, Ilias great grandfather, Bespaz Chavchavadze was knighted when he defeated twenty thousand Persian invaders in Kvareli in 1755, Ilia was the third son of Grigol Chavchavadze and Mariam Beburishvili. Grigol, like his father and his famous ancestors, had a military background and he, along with the local militiamen protected the village from numerous Dagestani invasions. Chavchavadze was educated at the level by the deacon of the village before he moved to Tbilisi where he attended the prestigious Academy for Nobility in 1848. However, from an age, Ilia was influenced by his parents who were highly educated in classical literature. From his parents, Ilia learned the stories of Georgian heroism in classical historical novels. In his autobiography, Ilia refers to his mother, Princess Mariam Chavchavadze, Ilia also described the influence of the deacons storytelling, which gave him an artistic inspiration, later applied in his novel writing. Ilias mother, Mariam, died on 4 May 1848, when Ilia was ten years old, Aunt Makrine had a significant impact on Ilias life, because, after 1852, when Ilias father Grigol died, she was the only remaining caretaker of the family. In 1848, after the death of Princess Chavchavadze, Ilia was sent to Tbilisi by his father to begin his secondary education, Ilia attended a private school for three years before he entered the 1st Academy of Tbilisi in 1851. Soon after, Ilias father died and Aunt Makrine looked after the family and his secondary school years were very stressful, due to his fathers death
33.
Republics of the Soviet Union
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The Republics of the Soviet Union or the Union Republics of the Soviet Union were ethnically based proto-states that were subordinated directly to the Government of the Soviet Union. Article 81 of the Constitution stated that the rights of Union Republics shall be safeguarded by the USSR. In the final decades of its existence, the Soviet Union officially consisted of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics, all of them, with the exception of the Russian Federation, had their own local party chapters of the All-Union Communist Party. In 1944, amendments to the All-Union Constitution allowed for branches of the Red Army for each Soviet Republic. They also allowed for Republic-level commissariats for foreign affairs and defense and this allowed for two Soviet Republics, Ukraine and Byelorussia, to join the United Nations General Assembly as founding members in 1945. All of the former Republics of the Union are now independent countries, however, most of the international community did not consider the Baltic countries to have legitimately been part of the USSR. Their position is supported by the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations Human Rights Council, in contrast, the Russian government and state officials maintain that the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states was legitimate. Constitutionally, the Soviet Union was a federation, in accordance with provisions present in the Constitution, each republic retained the right to secede from the USSR. Under the constitution adopted in 1936 and modified along the way until October 1977, along with the state administrative hierarchy, there existed a parallel structure of party organizations, which allowed the Politburo to exercise large amounts of control over the republics. State administrative organs took direction from the party organs, and appointments of all party. Each republic had its own set of state symbols, a flag, a coat of arms, and, with the exception of Russia until 1990. Every republic of the Soviet Union also was awarded with the Order of Lenin, number of the union republics of the USSR varied from 4 to 16. In majority of years and at the decades of its existence. The Soviet Union considered the initial annexation legal, but officially recognized their independence on September 6,1991, the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia, in winter of 1919 The Lithuanian–Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in 1919 but fell very soon. The Persian Socialist Soviet Republic, in what is now Iran, the Turkestan Soviet Federative Republic was proclaimed in 1918 but did not survive to the founding of the USSR, becoming the short-lived Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the RSFSR. When the Tuvan Peoples Republic joined the Soviet Union in 1944, it did not become a union republic, the leader of the Peoples Republic of Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov, suggested in the early 1960s that the country should become a union republic, but the offer was rejected. During the Soviet–Afghan War, the Soviet Union proposed to annex the Northern Afghanistan as its 16th union republic in what was to become the Afghan Soviet Socialist Republic, though administratively part of their respective Union Republics, ASSRs were also established based on ethnic/cultural lines. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, openness and restructuring were intended to liberalise, however, they had a number of effects which caused the power of the republics to increase
34.
South Ossetia
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It has a population of 53,000 people which live in an area of 3,900 km2, south of the Russian Caucasus, with 30,000 living in its capital city of Tskhinvali. South Ossetia declared independence from the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991, the Georgian government responded by abolishing South Ossetias autonomy and trying to re-establish its control over the region by force. The crisis escalation led to the 1991–92 South Ossetia War, Georgian fighting against those controlling South Ossetia occurred on two other occasions, in 2004 and 2008. The latter conflict led to the Russo–Georgian War, during which Ossetian and Russian forces gained full de facto control of the territory of the former South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast. In the wake of the 2008 war, Russia, followed by Nicaragua, Venezuela, Georgia and a significant part of the international community consider South Ossetia to be occupied by the Russian military. South Ossetia relies heavily on military, political and financial aid from Russia, Russia does not allow European Union Monitoring Mission monitors to enter South Ossetia. South Ossetia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Abkhazia are sometimes referred to as post-Soviet frozen conflict zones, the Ossetians are believed to originate from the Alans, a Sarmatian Iranian tribe. In the 17th century, Ossetians started migration from the North Caucasus to Georgia, Ossetian peasants, who were migrating to the mountainous areas of the South Caucasus, often settled in the lands of Georgian feudal lords. The Georgian King of the Kingdom of Kartli permitted Ossetians to immigrate, in the 1770s there were more Ossetians living in Kartli than ever before. This period has been documented in the diaries of Johann Anton Güldenstädt who visited Georgia in 1772. The Baltic German explorer called modern North Ossetia simply Ossetia, while he wrote that Kartli was populated by Georgians, Güldenstädt also wrote that the northernmost border of Kartli is the Major Caucasus Ridge. The Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, part of which was the territory of modern South Ossetia, was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1801. Following the Russian revolution, the area of modern South Ossetia became part of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, although the Ossetians were initially discontented with the economic policies of the central government, the tension soon transformed into ethnic conflict. The first Ossetian rebellion began in February 1918, when three Georgian princes were killed and their land was seized by the Ossetians, the central government of Tiflis retaliated by sending the National Guard to the area. However, the Georgian unit retreated after they had engaged the Ossetians, Ossetian rebels then proceeded to occupy the town of Tskhinvali and began attacking ethnic Georgian civilian population. During uprisings in 1919 and 1920, the Ossetians were covertly supported by Soviet Russia, but even so, were defeated. Between 3,000 and 7,000 Ossetians were killed during the crushing of the 1920 uprising, according to Ossetian sources ensuing hunger, the drawing of administrative boundaries of the South Ossetian AO was quite a complicated process. Many Georgian villages were included within the South Ossetian AO despite numerous protests by the Georgian population, while the city of Tskhinvali did not have a majority Ossetian population, it was made the capital of the South Ossetian AO
35.
George Khutsishvili
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In 1994 he founded the independent non-for-profit and non-partisan International Center on Conflict and Negotiation. Between 1995 and 2013 he was the publisher of Peace Times, Conflicts and Negotiations, for many years he was invited to work as a professor at different leading universities in Georgia and abroad. George Khutsishvili made significant input into study of the essence of theoretical thinking, from 1990s to the end of his days he dedicated his life to establishing and developing peace and conflict studies in Georgia. Khutsishvili was born on 15 November 1948 in Tbilisi to the family of Shota, in 1976, he passed his PhD defense with a thesis on “Infinity and the Problem of its Abstraction in Science” and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1977. The Supreme Attestation Commission awarded him the title of Professor of Philosophy in 1982, in 1987, he completed an intensive course in “English Language Simultaneous Translations” and was awarded a diploma. In 1991 He was invited to Kiev due to his published work in Russian. In 1971-1972, he worked as a mathematician at the Institute of Management Systems at the Academy of Sciences of Georgia. In 1972-1979 he worked as a researcher and then as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. In 1979, Khutsishvili was elected deputy chair of the Methodological Council of the Academy of Sciences and he was frequently invited to deliver public lectures on democratic reforms, which the Methodological Council was conducting regularly in the period of Gorbachev’s “Perestroika”. In October 1988, on behalf of the East German organization Kulturbund, Olaph Krebe, at the end of the 80s, Khutsishvili started researching various methodologies of finding water, biolocation, and bioenergy. His interest in this field was stirred after meeting with the representatives of American dowsers at a Conference in 1989 in the United States, later, from the beginning of the 1990 s, he became a member of the American Society of Dowsers. In 1989, the Institute of Neotic Sciences invited George Khutsishvili to conduct research, in 1988-1990 he went on to work as the head of the Department of Social Sciences at the Ministry of Education of Georgia. In 1992, the Tbilisi State Institute of Foreign languages and Pedagogical Sciences elected him full professor and he had earlier since 1981 held the position of associate professor and chair of Philosophy. The State Committee for Human Rights and Ethnic Relations, established in 1992, opened the Centre for Conflict Analysis, the Centre functioned for 1 year. He was offered work as a consultant the following year in the same Centre, in the spring of 1993 he was awarded a NATO Research Fellowship grant for “Caucasus Knot of Conflicts in Light of Growing Global Insecurity”. In 1994 he became Associate Professor of Conflict and Peace Studies at the Department of International Law and International Relations, javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, where he worked until 2006. In 1995 –1997, he was appointed professor of Sociology at the American University of Hawaiis Tbilisi Campus, in 1995, he was elected Vice - President of the Academy of Georgian Philosophic Sciences. He held this position through 1997, in 2006-2011, he held the position of a full professor at the Georgian University. For many years, he worked as a member of the commission for selecting academic positions, in 2008-2009 he worked as the Chief Investigator of the Multi-track Dialogue for the Georgian-Abkhazian Conflict, in an international programme supported by the European Commission
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