The five chapters of this volume focus on the complex and tumultuous events occurring in Russia during the five months from May through September 1999. They sparked the Russian invasion of Chechnya ...on 1 October and vaulted a previously unknown former KGB agent into the post of Russian prime minister and, ultimately, president. The five chapters are devoted to: ? The intense political struggle taking place in Russia between May and August of 1999, culminating in an incursion by armed Islamic separatists into the Republic of Dagestan.? Two Moscow terrorist bombings of 9 and 13 September 1999, claiming the lives of 224 Muscovites and preparing the psychological and political ground for a full-blown invasion of Chechnya.? The so-called Ryazan Incident of 22 September 1999, when eyewitnesses observed officers of the FSB special forces placing a live bomb in the basement of an apartment building in the town of Rzayan.? The detonation of a powerful truck bomb outside of an apartment house in Buinaksk, Dagestan, on 4 September 1999, which took the lives of fifty-eight innocent victims.? The explosion on 16 September 1999 of a truck bomb in the city of Volgdonsk in southern Russia, which killed eighteen persons and seriously wounded eighty-nine.
The sixteenth-century monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the Third Rome. By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. Clark shows how ...Soviet officials and intellectuals sought to establish their capital as the Fourth Rome--a cosmopolitan post-Christian beacon for the rest of the world.
This paper presents the results of an observational study carried out for monitoring three sites along the Moskva River with different pollution levels by using chlorophyll fluorescence parameters. ...The photosynthetic activity of phytoplankton along the river bed was diverse. The photochemical activity of the phytoplankton was higher in the relatively clean water of the river (the entrance of the river to the city) and lower in the polluted water (middle reaches of the river and at the exit of the city). The efficiency of the light reactions of photosynthesis in photosystem II (
F
V
/
F
M
,
PI
ABS
) for the phytoplankton was higher in the spring than in the summer months. These processes were accompanied by a decrease in the dissipation of absorbed energy into heat (φ
Do
). Incubation of the phytoplankton from the Moskva River in the presence of mercury chloride salts was performed. It was found that addition of mercury chloride salts resulted in different sensitivity to the toxic effects of phytoplankton samples collected from different sites along the river, as well as lower resistance of phytoplankton to mercury in summer season compared to that in the spring. The most sensitive parameter to the toxic effects of mercury was the photosystem II performance index (
PI
ABS
), which can be recommended for bioassay and biomonitoring of the activity of photosynthetic reactions of phytoplankton in natural conditions.
Fifteen tales from Russia's mysterious capital city provide an absorbing and many-sided portrait in fiction for readers who love travelling, armchair travellers, lovers of Russian literature, as well ...as those who love Moscow.
Once the hub of the tsarist state, later Brezhnev's "model Communist city"--home of the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil's Cathedral-- is for many the quintessence of everything Russian. Timothy ...Colton's sweeping biography of this city at the center of Soviet and post-Soviet life reveals what such a position has meant to Moscow and ultimately to Russia itself.
At present, many parts of river valleys, including floodplains, are being actively used for urban construction. This leads to the disturbance of normal functioning of the valleys; alluvial deposits ...and soils become buried under the thickness of various anthropogenic materials. Four profiles of typical urban soils (urbanozems) developed on the floodplain of the Moskva River and its small tributaries have been studied. The macro- and micromorphological characteristics (including data of submicroscopic studies) and the chemical and physicochemical properties of these soils are analyzed. It is shown that the influence of ground-water on the anthropogenically transformed soils of floodplains and low terraces is preserved even upon the cessation of regular flooding. The substitution of urban pedosedimentogenesis for alluvial pedosedimentogenesis has a gradual character with a transitional stage of simultaneous occurrence of both processes. Clayey and clayey-calcareous infillings in the middle-profile horizons and newly formed phosphates of iron and calcium in the lower horizons affected by the groundwater can be considered typical diagnostic features of the urban-alluvial pedogenesis.
Following the violence of the 1905 revolution, Moscow's liberal leaders sought to restore social and political stability by offering attractive programs in education, employment, and housing to the ...unruly lower classes. Their efforts were resisted by the authorities of the Old Regime, who feared the political effects of these programs. Liberal City, Conservative State examines the resulting clash between city and the state as it brought to the surface and exacerbated the deep tensions plaguing Russia by the eve of World War I.
