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.
While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet ...Union. She draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia--the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today.
A Mennonite in Russia Dyck, Harvey L
A Mennonite in Russia,
2013, 20130617, 2013, 2013-06-17
eBook
Epp's writings reveal a skilled and honest diarist of deep feelings, and tell a human story that no conventional historical account could hope to equal.
The work presents the integrated data on fish populations from 53 lakes of the “Russian North” National Park for a 120-year period. A total of 26 fish species from 7 orders and 8 families were ...recorded. In each of the studied reservoirs, from 1 to 25 species of fish were identified. Large lakes (Siverskoye, Zaulomskoye, Nikolskoye, Borodaevskoye, Ferapontovskoye, Blagoveshchenskoye, Tatarovskoye, and Kishemskoye) demonstrated the richest composition of fish populations. For the last 100 years, silver bream, pikeperch, sabrefish, chub, asp, zope, carp, and rudd entered the lakes from the River Sheksna and later from the Sheksna Reservoir through the canals of the Northern Dvina lock system. Because of deterioration of habitats and breeding conditions, smelt and whitefish disappeared from the water bodies at all. Inexpediency of a ban on industrial fishing in the lakes of the specially protected natural areas was substantiated.
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 study of the level and quality of life, especially in cross-border regions, is one of the current research problems, bearing in mind the pursuit of socio-economic convergence. One of these ...regions with relatively little knowledge about the situation is the Volyn Oblast (Ukraine), which borders directly on the EU (Poland). Therefore, the main goal of the research is to diagnose the level and quality of life of the population, considering statistical measures and materials of field study. The results of the research indicate that the standard of living of the Volyn Oblast could be estimated as low in comparison with average values for Ukraine as well as in the light of selected measures of stimulants and de-stimulants. The obtained results were also confirmed by field research in randomly selected administrative units of the region.
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.
