Face to the Village McDonald, Tracy
Face to the Village,
2011, 20110521, 2010, 2011., 2010-12-31, 20110101
eBook
In the summer of 1924, the Bolshevik Party called on scholars, the police, the courts, and state officials to turn their attention to the villages of Russia. The subsequent campaign to 'face the ...countryside' generated a wealth of intelligence that fed into the regime's sense of alarmed conviction that the countryside was a space outside Bolshevik control. Richly rooted in archival sources, including local and central-level secret police reports, detailed cases of the local and provincial courts, government records, and newspaper reports, Face to the Village is a nuanced study of the everyday workings of the Russian village in the 1920s. Local-level officials emerge in Tracy McDonald's study as vital and pivotal historical actors, existing between the Party's expectations and peasant interests. McDonald's careful exposition of the relationships between the urban centre and the peasant countryside brings us closer to understanding the fateful decision to launch a frontal attack on the countryside in the fall of 1929 under the auspices of collectivization.
The monograph is devoted to the archaeological sites of the 5th-8th centuries AD of a Volga-Baltic watershed. In addition to the culture of the Pskov long barrows, a new group of early Slavic ...archaeological sites was revealed.
This literature review analyzed more than 100 publications on soil erosion in the Central Russian Upland, one of the most erosion-prone regions of Russia. The selection of scientific papers was ...carried out from open web resources, domestic and international citation databases. The following parameters have been analyzed: time; geographical position; scale and methods of research; soil and geomorphological features; anti-erosion measures; type of erosion and rates of soil washout/accumulation; bibliographic information about the publication. There is a shortage of studies at the small-scale and medium-scale levels. The relationship of large-scale studies to the main watershed of the Central Russian Upland was revealed. There are discrepancies in the estimates of soil erosion by different authors, especially at different scale levels. An analysis of changes in soil erosion over time indicates a decrease in the rate of soil erosion in general on the Central Russian Upland, mainly due to climate change and a reduction in the area of arable lands. A lack of studies of rainfall, tillage and wind erosion of soils in this area has been revealed.
Threats of increased differentiation across regions, which have caused inefficient spatial development, are progressively coming into the scientists’ focus. By and large, a peripheral region is ...unlikely to take the place of the center. In the Urals1 , the Sverdlovsk oblast has long been the center and stayed ahead of its neighbours in terms of socioeconomic performance. Our previous research revealed a phenomenon called ‘synchronisation of economies’. Accordingly, the Chelyabinsk oblast in many instances repeats the trends of the Sverdlovsk oblast, but remains at the periphery. In this regard, studying the differentiation between the two economies becomes a relevant issue. The research aims to construct long-term trends of differentiation between regions using the case of the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk oblasts. The theories of spatial development, including the theory of cumulative growth, constitute the methodological basis of the research. Applying the methods of statistical comparison and times series analysis, the study interprets the data published by Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), the Unified Interdepartmental Statistical Information System (UISIS), and generated by FIRA PRO information analytics system (OOO “First Independent Rating Agency”). The author proposes a method for assessing differentiation across regions based on 12 indicators. The findings demonstrate that for 2001–2020, the variation between the regions in terms of GRP per capita (in 2001 prices) has increased, whereas in terms of wages in prices of the same year it decreased. In relation to the outsider region, the Sverdlovsk oblast has kept its position in terms of the real GRP per capita compared to the Chelyabinsk oblast, which is approaching the outsider. At the same time, for 2001–2020, both regions have become closer to the leader. With regard to the real wages, the positions of the regions have nearly equalized, the ‘superiority’ over the outsider has decreased.
The 9/11 attacks, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the oil boom of recent years have greatly increased the strategic importance of resource-rich Central Asia, making an understanding of its ...economic--and therefore political-- prospects more important than ever. In The Central Asian Economies Since Independence, Richard Pomfret provides a concise and up-to-date analysis of the huge changes undergone by the economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book assesses the economic prospects of each country, and the likelihood that economic conditions will spur major political changes. With independent chapters on each country, and chapters analyzing their comparative economic performance, the book highlights similarities and differences. Facing common problems caused by the breakdown of Soviet economic relations and the hyperinflation of the early 1990s, these countries have taken widely divergent paths in the transition from Soviet central planning to more market-based economies. The book ends in 2005 with the bloodless Kyrgyz revolution and the violence in Uzbekistan, which signaled the end of the region's political continuity. Throughout the book, Pomfret emphasizes the economic forces that foster political instability--from Kazakhstan's resource boom and Turkmenistan's lack of reform to Tajikistan's abject poverty.
