A Different Approach to the History of Islam and Muslims in Europe: A North-Eastern Angle, or the Need to Reconsider the Research Field

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Göran Larsson ◽  
Egdūnas Račius
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Research Field ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslims In Europe ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Eastern Baltic

AbstractWhile the ever more strongly felt presence of Muslims in western Europe has already stimulated numerous scholars of various social sciences to embark upon research on issues related to that presence, it is apparent that just a few studies and introductory text books have so far dealt with the evolution of Muslim communities in other parts of Europe, especially in countries of central, eastern, and northern Europe. Without appreciation of and comprehensive research into the more than six-hundred-year-long Muslim presence in the eastern Baltic rim the picture of the development of Islam and Muslim-Christian relations in Europe remains incomplete and even distorted. Therefore, this article argues for the necessity of approaching the history of Islam and Muslims in Europe from a different and ultimately more encompassing angle by including the minorities of Muslim cultural background that reside in the countries of the European part of the former Soviet Union—the Baltic states and Belarus. Besides arguing that it is necessary to reconsider and expand the research field in order to develop more profound studies of Islam and Muslims in Europe, the article also outlines suggestions as to why the Muslim history in the eastern Baltic rim has been generally excluded from the history of Islam in Europe.

Great Men and Large Numbers: Undertheorising a History of Mass Killing

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-143
Author(s):  
THOMAS KÜHNE
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
European History ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
German Jews ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Market Shares ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Baltic

Scholarship is not only about gaining new insights or establishing accurate knowledge but also about struggling for political impact and for market shares – shares of public or private funds, of academic jobs, of quotations by peers, and of media performances. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands fights for recentring contemporary European history.1 No longer, his new book implies, should the centre of that history be Germany, which initiated two world wars and engaged with three genocides; even less should the centre be Western Europe, which historians for long have glorified as the trendsetter of modernity; and the Soviet Union, or Russia, does not qualify as ‘centre’ anyway. Introducing ‘to European history its central event’ (p. 380) means to focus on the eastern territories of Europe, the lands between Germany and Russia, which, according to Snyder, suffered more than any other part from systematic, politically motivated, mass murder in the twentieth century. The superior victimhood of the ‘bloodlands’ is a numerical one. Fourteen million people, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the territories of what is today most of Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus, western Russia, and the Baltic States did not become just casualties of war but victims of deliberate mass murder. Indeed, this is ‘a very large number’ (p. 411), one that stands many comparisons: ten million people perished in Soviet and German concentration camps (as opposed to the Nazi death camps, which were located within the ‘bloodlands’), 165,000 German Jews died during the Holocaust (p. ix), and even the number of war casualties most single countries or territories counted in the Second World War was smaller.

scholarly journals Surveillance of anti-tuberculosis drug resistance in Europe, 1999

2002 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 93-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
A Infuso ◽  
D Antoine ◽  
P Barboza ◽  
D Falzon ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Drug Resistance ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Previous Treatment ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Baltic States ◽  
Representative Data ◽  
Foreign Origin ◽  
The Baltic

With the exception of Israel, representative data from Western and Central Europe indicate consistently low levels of resistance to isoniazid (0-9,3%) or rifampicin (0-2,1%) and of multidrug resistance (0-2,1%) among new tuberculosis (TB) cases. Resistance is more frequent among previously treated cases, but comparisons of data should be done cautiously, as criteria for inclusion in TB notifications may vary across countries. In Western Europe, drug resistance is more frequent among cases of foreign origin, a group with high TB incidence. In 1999, cases of foreign origin accounted for over 90% of the MDR cases in the West, and for all MDR cases notified in Israel. The majority of foreign born cases notified originated from Africa or Asia. In the East, representative data from the Baltic States show that overall, 15% of TB cases notified in 1999 were MDR, among the highest proportion worldwide and indicating inadequacies in previous treatment programmes. In the other countries of the former Soviet Union, non-representative data show high levels of resistance which, along with data from the Baltic states and results of surveys, are very alarming.

scholarly journals Hepatitis C virus genotype 1 and 2 recombinant genomes and the phylogeographic history of the 2k/1b lineage

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Reilly Hostager ◽  
Manon Ragonnet-Cronin ◽  
Ben Murrell ◽  
Charlotte Hedskog ◽  
Anu Osinusi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Hepatitis C Virus ◽  
Hepatitis C ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Sequence Data ◽  
Coding Region ◽  
Migration Routes ◽  
Virus Genotype ◽  
History Of

Abstract Recombination is an important driver of genetic diversity, though it is relatively uncommon in hepatitis C virus (HCV). Recent investigation of sequence data acquired from HCV clinical trials produced twenty-one full-genome recombinant viruses belonging to three putative inter-subtype forms 2b/1a, 2b/1b, and 2k/1b. The 2k/1b chimera is the only known HCV circulating recombinant form (CRF), provoking interest in its genetic structure and origin. Discovered in Russia in 1999, 2k/1b cases have since been detected throughout the former Soviet Union, Western Europe, and North America. Although 2k/1b prevalence is highest in the Caucasus mountain region (i.e., Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia), the origin and migration patterns of CRF 2k/1b have remained obscure due to a paucity of available sequences. We assembled an alignment which spans the entire coding region of the HCV genome containing all available 2k/1b sequences (>500 nucleotides; n = 109) sampled in ninteen countries from public databases (102 individuals), additional newly sequenced genomic regions (from 48 of these 102 individuals), unpublished isolates with newly sequenced regions (5 additional individuals), and novel complete genomes (2 additional individuals) generated in this study. Analysis of this expanded dataset reconfirmed the monophyletic origin of 2k/1b with a recombination breakpoint at position 3,187 (95% confidence interval: 3,172–3,202; HCV GT1a reference strain H77). Phylogeography is a valuable tool used to reveal viral migration dynamics. Inference of the timed history of spread in a Bayesian framework identified Russia as the ancestral source of the CRF 2k/1b clade. Further, we found evidence for migration routes leading out of Russia to other former Soviet Republics or countries under the Soviet sphere of influence. These findings suggest an interplay between geopolitics and the historical spread of CRF 2k/1b.

The Birth of Europe as a Eurasian Phenomenon

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. I. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Southern Italy ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Peripheral Region ◽  
Eurasian Continent ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dynamic Regions ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
North Western

Although they still differ considerably in their willingness to acknowledge it, specialists in the history of north-western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE are increasingly treating it as that of the emergence of a new civilization in what had previously been a peripheral region of the Mediterranean-based civilization of the classical west, rather than as a continuation or revival of that civilization itself. In this light Europe, or Latin Christendom as it saw itself, offers a number of striking resemblances to the developments which Lieberman discusses. The most dynamic regions of the new Europe—north-western France, Flanders and lowland England, north-eastern Spain, northern Italy, southern Italy and Sicily—were all peripheral, though in various senses, both to the long-defunct classical civilization and its direct successors, the Byzantine and Abbasid Empires, and to the transitional and much more loosely based ninth-and tenth-century empires of the Franks and Saxons (Ottonians). To this one might add that by the end of the twelfth century the remaining rimlands of the Eurasian continent in a purely geographical sense—Scandinavia, including Iceland, and still more the southern coast of the Baltic and the areas dominated by the rivers which drained into it—were developing very rapidly indeed.

The Perception of Historical Identity and the Restoration of Estonian National Independence

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rein Ruutsoo
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Global Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Vital Matter ◽  
Former Ussr

Attitude towards one's past, the farewell to the communist past, has become a vital matter on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The failure of the “building of communism” project has, besides a devastated environment, left behind it a spiritual “homelessness.” For Russians, for whom communism was the path to global power, the collapse of the Soviet Union also meant a collapse of their national identity. “Look back in anger” might be the most concise way of characterizing their attitude to their history of the past seventy years. The same might be said of the other peoples of the former USSR. Sovietologists who treated the Soviet Union as one entity and placed the Baltic nations into the same category as the other “fraternal” people created insurmountable problems for an understanding of Baltic developments, and Estonian, in particular.

scholarly journals Between Berlin and Moscow: Polish Western Thought in the Twenty-Year Interwar Period

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Masnyk
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The Russian Empire

This article deals with the professional discussion about the so-called “difficult questions” of Russian history that involves historians and teachers in the now independent republics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block. Both academic publications and teaching books are used as primary sources for the study. In the first section, the author studies several problems connected with the origin of Russian statehood, the Varangian question, and civilizational characteristics of East Slavic nations. The second section is devoted to the Russian imperial past and especially to the discourse on colonialism, which is often used as an explanatory model for the imperial period by historians and textbook authors in some of the post-Soviet countries. The third section is concerned with the conception of the 1917 revolution. The author emphasizes the fact that the conception of a continuous revolutionary process (1917–1922) has yet to be accepted by Russian secondary schools. In this part, the author considers several other factors significant for understanding the revolutionary process including issues such as the origins of the First World War and the developmental level of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. In the fourth section, the article discusses the conception of the 1930s Soviet modernization along with negative opinions about the Soviet period given by scholars of different former Soviet republics. In the fifth section, the author briefly observes contemporary studies of culture and everyday life. It is concluded that the history of culture is not represented well in Russian school textbooks, and it is also found that the studies on everyday life are often lacking in depth. Discussing various “difficult questions” of Russian history, the author highlights controversial historical ideas and opinions, formulated in the post-Soviet countries during the last decades.

scholarly journals To the 100th anniversary of Vadim Evgen’evich Garutt (October 12, 1917 – March 28, 2002)

2018 ◽  
Vol 322 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-214
Author(s):  
V.S. Baygusheva ◽  
I.V. Foronova ◽  
S.V. Semenova
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
100Th Anniversary ◽  
Northern Eurasia ◽  
Mammuthus Primigenius ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Woolly Mammoth

The article contains a biography of the famous Russian paleontologist V.E. Garutt (1917–2002), the oldest research worker of the Zoological institute of Russian Academy of Sciences, who studied the Pleistocene elephants of Northern Eurasia. He published more than 70 scientific papers on the origin and evolution of elephants of mammoth line, the morphology, changeability and features of the development of ancient proboscides. V.E. Garutt suggested two subfamilies Primelephantinae and Loxodontinae. He is the author of several taxa of fossil elephants of the generic, specific and subspecific levels. On his initiative, the skeleton of the Taimyr mammoth was adopted as the neotype of the woolly mammoth Mammuthus primigenius. He actively defended the independence of the genus Archidiskodon. A number of famous and important for the science paleontological specimens (skulls and skeletons of southern elephants, trogontherine and woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and elasmotherium) were restored and mounted by V.E. Garutt. They adorn a number of museums and institutes in Russia (St. Petersburg, Stavropol, Pyatigorsk, Azov, Rostov-on-Don) and abroad (Tbilisi, Vilnius, Edersleben, Sangerhausen). In addition, V.E. Garutt was an active popularizer of paleontological science. He collected a scientific archive on the remains of elephants from many regions of the former Soviet Union and some countries of Western Europe, which is now stored in the Azov museum-reserve (Azov). Several grateful pupils began their way in paleontology under the leader ship of V.E. Garutt. And they continue active work nowadays.

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