Letters from Kapitza to his mother, 1921-27

Peter Kapitza (1894—1984) came to England as a member of a Soviet mission sent to renew scientific relations with the West after the upheavals of World War I, the Revolution and the Civil War. He had recently suffered the tragic loss of his wife, their two young children and his father in the epidemics that raged in the Soviet Union at that time. It was partly to distract him from his grief that he was invited to join the mission, and A. F. Joffé, who had been his chief at the Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd, thought it would be a good thing for him to get some first-hand experience of the latest research techniques by spending the winter in a leading physics laboratory in the West. Eventually, Rutherford agreed to have him in the Cavendish and Kapitza made such an impression by his originality and experimental skill that he was encouraged to extend his stay.

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-274
Author(s):  
Dalia Bukelevičiūtė

The first diplomatic contacts between Lithuanian and Romanian representatives started in the aftermath of World War I when Lithuania was looking for the protection of her inhabitants who were still refugees in Russia. As Russia became entrenched with Bolshevism and Civil War, the Lithuanian citizens were evacuated through Romanian territory from South Ukraine and Crimea. Lithuania and Czechoslovakia established diplomatic relations in December 1919 and eventually an attempt was made to set up ties also with Romania. As a member of the Little Entente and an ally of Poland, Romania attracted the attention of the Lithuanian government. Romania recognized Lithuania de jure on August 21, 1924 and Dovas Zaunius was appointed as the first Lithuanian envoy to Bucharest. Nevertheless, during the next decade no political or diplomatic contacts between Lithuania and Romania were recorded. With the growing influence of Germany, the Soviet Union and the Little Entente on the international arena, Edvardas Turauskas was appointed on August 27, 1935 as envoy to Romania residing in Prague and later in the year Romania accredited Constantin Vallimarescu for the position of envoy to Lithuania residing in Riga. The dialogue between the two parties remained, however, occasional. When on July 21, 1940 Lithuania was occupied by Soviet Union, Turauskas visited the Romanian Legation in Bern and presented a note of protest in this respect. Romania did not acknowledge Lithuanian occupation and annexation.


1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-167
Author(s):  
S. Bernard

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.


Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.


2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 773-786 ◽  
Author(s):  
SOPHIE HOHMANN ◽  
SOPHIE ROCHE ◽  
MICHEL GARENNE

SummarySex ratios at birth are known to change during wars or shortly after. This study investigated changes in sex ratios during the civil war that occurred in Tajikistan after the dismantling of the Soviet Union. This civil war was particularly bloody and long lasting, and had many demographic consequences. According to vital registration data, some 27,000 persons died in excess of previous trends during the civil war period (1992–1997), and total mortality was sometimes estimated to be three times higher by independent observers. Birth rates dropped markedly during the war, and sex ratios at birth increased significantly from 104.6 before the war to 106.9 during the war, to return to baseline values afterwards. The change in sex ratio is investigated according to demographic evidence (migration, delayed marriage, spouse separation), substantiated with qualitative evidence (difficulties with food supply), and compared with patterns found in Europe during World War II, as well as with recent wars in the Middle East.


1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 473-480
Author(s):  
Gavin White

Why have churches in the U.S.S.R. been harassed in recent years? It has been supposed by many that if Stalin stopped most persecution during the Second World War, then things under Khrushchev could only improve. Instead they deteriorated, and all liberties of Soviet citizens received more respect except the religious.A common answer has been that the Soviet authorities were horrified by the continued hold of religion which they considered to be a threat to Marxism. Such a view is quite popular in the west where a clash of ideologies, with Christianity triumphing over Marxism, consoles churchmen who cannot find such a triumph in their own society. But this assumes that the Soviet rulers consider Christianity to be a religion based on certain tenets, and as Marxists they cannot be expected to do so. For them religion is primarily an instrument of social control.


1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-241
Author(s):  
David Crowe

The Soviet absorption of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during World War II caused hundreds of thousands of Baltic immigrants to come to the West, where they established strong, viable ethnic communities, often in league with groups that had left the region earlier. At first, Baltic publishing and publications centered almost exclusively on nationalistic themes that decried the loss of Baltic independence and attacked the Soviet Union for its role in this matter. In time, however, serious scholarship began to replace some of the passionate outpourings, and a strong, academic field of Baltic scholarship emerged in the West that dealt with all aspects of Baltic history, politics, culture, language, and other matters, regardless of its political or nationalistic implications. Over the past sixteen years, these efforts have produced a new body of Baltic publishing that has revived a strong interest in Baltic studies and has insured that regardless of the continued Soviet-domination of the region, the study of the culture and history of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania will remain a set fixture in Western scholarship on Eastern Europe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 317
Author(s):  
Nina N. Loginova ◽  
Milan M. Radovanović ◽  
Anatoliy A. Yamashkin ◽  
Goran Vasin ◽  
Marko D. Petrović ◽  
...  

Population changes of the Russians and other Slavs are an important original indicator of demographic, economic, political, and cultural analysis of over 300 million Slavic inhabitants in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. The indicators are conditioned by the large number of people executed in World War I and World War II, significant economic migrations, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Utilizing data from official reports, the authors proceed to analyze the demographic tendencies in order to find out the relationship between modern demographic trends and political and economic events over the past years. The results showed that economic and demographic stagnation, which favor religious and national (ethnic) ambivalence, influence the strengthening of groups ethnically isolated or religiously differentiated in the observed macroregions of Eurasia. The contemporary challenges of modern society in terms of global politics (e.g. terrorism and migrations) will be more pronounced and turbulent in these areas. For these reasons, the original data represent an important segment of the study of Slavic history, demography, and politics throughout the turbulent 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium.   


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-281
Author(s):  
Vjeran Pavlaković

Yugoslav scholarship about the Spanish Civil War, specifically the Yugoslav volunteers who fought in the International Brigades, was almost exclusively tied to the partisan struggle during the Second World War and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Many countries in the Soviet bloc published books about their heroes who fought fascism before Western Europe reacted and raised monuments to Spanish Civil War veterans. However, many lost their lives during Stalinist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s since they were potentially compromised cadres who returned to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other countries only after the Red Army's occupation. Yugoslav volunteers, however, generally had a more prominent status in the country (and historiography) since the Yugoslav resistance movement liberated the country with only minimal support from the Soviet Union.


2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
Éva Forgács

AbstractThe avant-gardes of the nineteen twenties are discussed in the art historical literature as the art products of a rarely upbeat decade, which featured great utopian aspirations and progressive art between the wake of World War I and the Nazi takeover in Germany, as well as the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This essay depicts the decade as being far from a homogenous period, demonstrating that the early internationalism and sense of unlimited possibilities gave way, in or around 1923, to less idealistic, more pragmatic views and practices in even the avant-garde. If examined in this framework, the reception of avant-garde artists and works in the late 1920s that had been enthusiastically embraced in the first years of the decade, was understandably cooler. Professional eminence was overwriting great ideas. The lack of the earlier fervor had disappeared, not because the art was worse, but on account of the new Zeitgeist that brought about the new moral idea of utilitarianism, requiring that the artists be, first of all, of use to the community. Several artists and art writers suddenly turned against those ideas and art that they had only a short time earlier held in the highest esteem.


Author(s):  
Gerard L. Weinberg

The German attack on Poland began on September 1 1939, and triggered the declaration of war on Germany by Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. Germany and the Soviet Union were agreed on a dual attack on Poland from the West and East, which left Poland unable to defend itself. An important aspect of the war between Germany and the Allies was the war of the oceans. The battles between warships, targets on merchant ships, and the use of submarines in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans continued from 1939 up until Germany's surrender in May 1945 and drew in many Baltic and Scandinavian countries.


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