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.
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.
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 results of a paleoecological study of a peat deposit in Radomsky Mokh area (Smolensk Oblast, Krasninsky District) made it possible to reconstruct the history of the region's landscapes over the ...last 4 thousand years and identify its 4 contrasting periods. The reservoir was a lake at first, after which the pollen spectrum is dominated by pollen from native tree species. After a series of fires on the boundary of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages (3173–2969 14C calendar years ago) (2σ, 99.7%)) a forested mesotrophic swamp formed at the site of the lake, and pollen from pioneer trees with an admixture of alder started to dominate the pollen spectrum. At the third stage, the swamp became mesotrophic, and the landscapes around it become open, which is evidenced by an increase in the proportion of grasses and anthropogenic indicators in the pollen spectrum. The same period is marked with the appearance of pollen of cultivated grasses (2992–2912 simulated years ago), which coincides with the distribution of the monuments of the Dnieper-Dvinian culture in the study area. At the last stage, the swamp became oligotrophic, and a stable curve of cultivated grasses appeared (mid-1st Millennium AD), indicating the spread of agriculture in the study area. The absence of known archaeological sites in an 8-kilometer radius around Radomsky Mokh most likely indicates an insufficient archaeological study level of the area, whereas the economic development of the vicinity of the tract started at the boundary of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages.
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