Ustalenie granicy polsko-sowieckiej – w 100. rocznicę delimitacji granicy ryskiej

The end of World War I brought the issue of the borders of the reborn Poland on the agenda. Their shaping was a long and dramatic process. Among the numerous disputes and conflicts, the Polish-Russian war occupies a special place. Its effect was the defense of the reborn state and the establishment of the eastern border of Poland. The war began in February 1919. However, it ended with the signing of the preliminary treaty on October 12, 1920, and the peace treaty on March 18, 1921 in Riga. The peace treaty eliminated the state of war and established the border line between Poland and Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Its precise delimitation in the field and placing border marks on it was carried out by a special mixed border commission consisting of two delegations - Polish and Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian. The content of this article is an attempt to look at one of the most important events in the modern history of Poland from the perspective of 100 years, which was the establishment and guidelines of the eastern border of Poland by a mixed border commission. The aim of the paper is to present the work of the committees which took place in an atmosphere of constant dispute and conflicts between representatives of the delegations of both countries. Both parties repeatedly threatened to terminate or suspend the works. Due to the volume framework, it is not possible to fully characterize the archival sources and the published publications. It could be a topic of a separate study. I hope that the bibliography attached to the article will help to provide a thorough and comprehensive presentation of the topic.

BIVALVE MOLLUSCS (BIVALVIA: UNIONIDAE, DREISSENIDAE, SPHAERIIDAE) OF UDMURTIA

The results of the studies of fauna of bivalve molluscs of Udmurt Republic are summarized. The annotated check-list of species of bivalve molluscs of the waterbodies of Udmurtiya is presented. After examination of own collections and critical assessment of published data, 26 species of bivalves from 74 localities (14 rivers, 2 reservoirs, 8 pounds and 2 oxbow lakes) have been included into the final list. In studied region 11 species of bivalves are recorded for the first time. From the zoogeographical point of view most species belong to the European-Siberian faunistic group (46 %), also a considerable part of fauna are European species (26,9% of overall species composition), which are located in the region at the Eastern border of the range.

Genesis of the Eastern Adamello Plutons (Northern Italy): Inferences for the Alpine Geodynamics

The Corno Alto–Monte Ospedale magmatic complex crops out at the eastern border of the Adamello batholith, west of the South Giudicarie Fault (NE Italy). This complex includes tonalites, trondhjemites, granodiorites, granites and diorites exhibiting an unfoliated structure suggesting passive intrusion under extensional-to-transtensional conditions. Major, minor elements, REE and isotopic analyses and geochemical and thermodynamic modelling have been performed to reconstruct the genesis of this complex. Geochemical analyses unravel a marked heterogeneity with a lack of intermediate terms. Samples from different crust sections were considered as possible contaminants of a parental melt, with the European crust of the Serre basement delivering the best fit. The results of the thermodynamic modelling show that crustal melts were produced in the lower crust. Results of the geochemical modelling display how Corno Alto felsic rocks are not reproduced by fractional crystallization nor by partial melting alone: their compositions are intermediate between anatectic melts and melts produced by fractional crystallization. The tectonic scenario which favored the intrusion of this complex was characterized by extensional faults, active in the Southalpine domain during Eocene. This extensional scenario is related to the subduction of the Alpine Tethys in the Eastern Alps starting at Late Cretaceous time.

Mass Arrivals of Poles in the 1980s as a Symptom of Political and Economic Changes in the Eastern Bloc

The article concerns the subject of mass Ukrainian-Polish contacts in the last decade of the USSR. Documents produced by the Polish consular services and the political police allow for the study of Poles’ travel across the eastern border. They were visiting Ukraine e.g. as employees of cultural and commercial institutions, construction companies, participants of official delegations, students of Soviet universities, trainees, participants of trips and — the most frequent — individual tourists. The most important were informal contacts, almost all visitors tried to trade illegally. The intensification of these trips (in 1988 Ukraine was visited by 700,000 Poles), their circumstances and character were the effect of the progressive disintegration of the communist system, which had been taking place in Poland since 1980 and in Ukraine since 1985. The deepening economic crisis increased interest in the transportation of goods across the border and their illegal sale as a source of household supplies or income. Weakening state structures were unable, or unwilling, to effectively counteract this practice. The progressive liberalization of travel regulations increased the number of visitors, who were interested not only in business but also in Ukraine’s past and culture, especially in monuments of Lviv. Poles sometimes demonstrated their critical attitude to the Communist regime, manifested freedom or religious attitudes and often broke harsh Soviet rules. The militia and secret service found them to be troublesome guests. However, non-political people-to-people contacts, virtually nonexistent after WWII, were established and renewed then. These relations developed into close neighborly cooperation after the fall of the USSR.

Polska polityka wschodnia w świetle teorii realizmu. Zagrożenia dla bezpieczeństwa państwa polskiego w latach 1989-2014

The main purpose of the article is to present Polish eastern policy as motivated by a threat to state security. It was assumed that it is a continuation of the concepts referred to as „the Jagiellonian idea” and the sources of the threat are located beyond the eastern border of the Republic of Poland. In the conducted analysis, a realistic perspective was used as the one that best characterizes the political situation in Poland’s eastern neighborhood.

Silent Traces and Deserted Places

This article explores how silence is held and transmitted through the materiality of deserted and abandoned places along the Polish frontier; and the generative role that silencing plays in local practices of tolerance. The article discusses two specific sites of silence in a town on Poland’s eastern border. Both sites were abandoned or destroyed at the same time, and are part of a larger landscape of religious and ethnic conflict in the area. This history of conflict is managed through small everyday acts of forgetting, minimising and silencing. Yet, the two sites at the centre of this article demonstrate that silencing is an incomplete process. The fragmented materiality of the two places undercuts local silences, actively invoking experiences and memories of the Holocaust. The objects missing and present in these haunted places are too inconsequential to be considered ruins – one site is notable only because it is an empty field. Yet these sites and objects act as powerful silent traces. Traces, as Napolitano (2015) has observed, are knots of history with an ambiguous auratic presence, located between memory and forgetting, repression and amplification. Traces conjure that which we can and that which we cannot say. The deserted places of the town draw attention to the silences that conviviality is built upon. This article considers how paying close attention to the specific silences concerning ‘unthinkable’ histories can reveal the power relations embedded in the process of history making and community building not just nationally, but also at the local level (Trouillot 1995).

Gentile- und Reichsadel am östlichen Rand des Karolingischen Reiches

At the eastern border of the Carolingian Empire two different groups of elite emerged. When referred to, the individuals in one of the groups were called either by personal names, or by the name of the area they governed; individuals in the other group were called by the name of their people. Members of the first group administered the territorial units of the central area of the former Avar Khaganate just like the Carolingian chief officials and royal vassals in the interior of the Empire. The members of the second group were (indirect) allies of the Avars and had their own tribal prince and gentile nobles. The administrative centres of the Carolingian province Pannoniae developed in synchrony with the inner centres of the Empire, while the centres of power outside the Empire had their own special settlement structures showing a conglomerate of the courts of the tribal nobility.

România, Rusia și geopolitica conflictului transnistrean / Russia and the geopolitics of the Transnistrian conflict

In the context of the phenomenon of restructuring and opening of the Soviet society, respectively of the processes of “glasnost” and “perestroika” initiated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, there will be an intensification of the national reawakening process of Bessarabian Romanians from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR). The new political realities in the Moldavian space generated a reaction from the conservative forces in the Soviet Union that led to the Dniester War (March 2 - July 21, 1992) which was to give rise to numerous sufferings, involving human and material losses, as well as a “frozen conflict” with implications in the geopolitics of places. Romania supported politically and diplomatically the second Romanian state in its efforts to consolidate the independence and to assert a democratic course in terms of political developments in Chisinau, as well as to resolve the serious insecurity problems at the eastern border of the Euro-Atlantic world.

Lion and spotted hyena distributions within a buffer area of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem

Most large carnivore populations are declining due to anthropogenic activities including direct persecution, prey depletion, habitat loss and degradation. protected areas (PAs) can help maintain viable large carnivore populations; however, anthropogenic activities occurring near and within PA borders or edges can reduce their effectiveness. We investigated the influence of edge effects on abundance of lions (Panthera leo) and spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) in Maswa Game Reserve (MGR), a part of the Serengeti ecosystem in northern Tanzania. We conducted repeated call-ins to attract and enumerate lions and hyenas at 20 stations in MGR during June–July 2017. We used N-mixture models to estimate hyena and lion abundance in relation to land cover and distance from the south-western MGR borders which are adjacent to villages. We found lowest lion and hyena abundances by the south-western border, with abundance of both species increasing toward the eastern border adjacent to Serengeti National Park. Lions were uniformly distributed among land covers whereas hyenas were more abundant in woodlands. We suggest that reduced lion and hyena abundance near human settlements was in response to depleted prey, due to human actions. We recommend ecologically compatible land uses and effective border patrols to mitigate these adverse effects.

The ant genus Strumigenys Smith, 1860 (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in western North America North of Mexico

Strumigenys is a globally distributed genus of mostly cryptic leaf-litter ants. In North America they are common throughout eastern deciduous forests but become increasingly rare to the west. Here I review the Strumigenys fauna of western North America north of the Mexico border including all states west of the eastern border of Texas. Six new native species with ranges entirely within this region are described: S. collinsae sp. nov., S. macgowni sp. nov., S. mendezi sp. nov., S. moreauviae sp. nov., S. lucky sp. nov., and S. subtilis sp. nov. Strumigenys ananeotes Longino & Booher 2019 is given a more thorough description, and S. alberti Forel 1893, a Neotropical species, is reported from the region for the first time. All new species bear clear morphological relationships with a native North American clade of “smithistrumiform” species. I include species accounts and provide an illustrated key for all species of this region.