Hasil untuk "History of Russia. Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics"

Thomas Compton

This paper presents a comparative analysis of community unionism (CU) in two distinct historical and organizational contexts: the National Boot and Shoe Union (B\&S) in the 1920s and Unite Community in the 2010s--2020s. Using BERTopic for thematic modeling and cTF-IDF weighting, alongside word frequency analysis, the study examines the extent to which each union's discourse aligns with key features of CU -- such as coalition-building, grassroots engagement, and action beyond the workplace. The results reveal significant differences in thematic focus and discursive coherence. While Unite Community demonstrates stronger alignment with outward-facing, social justice-oriented themes, the B\&S corpus emphasizes internal administration, industrial relations, and member services -- reflecting a more traditional, servicing-oriented union model. The analysis also highlights methodological insights, demonstrating how modern NLP techniques can enhance the study of historical labor archives. Ultimately, the findings suggest that while both unions engage with community-related themes, their underlying models of engagement diverge significantly, challenging assumptions about the continuity and universality of community unionism across time and sector.

Igor Halperin

This volume, \textbf{Physicists Are Still Joking}, serves as a definitive almanac of scientific humor spanning sixty years. It traces the evolution of professional folklore across geopolitical divides and technological eras. \textbf{Part I} restores the classic 1966 anthology \textbf{Physicists Joke}, which originally served as a window for Soviet scientists into the best traditions of Western scientific humor; it consists primarily of articles translated from English, here meticulously restored to their original wording. \textbf{Part II} presents the 1992 sequel, \textbf{Physicists Keep Joking}, which captures the shift toward an original, introspective Russian scientific folklore born during the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. \textbf{Part III: Still Joking} explores the modern digital age, compiling contemporary science humor from physics, astronomy, biology, computer science and AI research. While the tools of science have evolved from slide rules to neural networks, the tradition of skeptical, self-referential wit remains a constant. Spanning from the "Golden Age" of vacuum tubes to the era of AI and Large Language Models, this collection documents the enduring ability of scientists to laugh at the universe and themselves.

Vitalii Stepkin

Kalach caves dug out in a chalk relic in the town of Kalach, Voronezh region, is an underinvestigated historical and cultural heritage site. The archive materials found in the funds of RSHA, together with evidence of local people, provide insight into the final period of the cult dungeon functioning in the late XIX – early XX centuries. At that time the rural community of Kalach made an attempt to establish there an official orthodox cave monastery. On the 11th of August, 1885, residents of Kalach authorized peasants Ivan Serjakov, Matvey Bezugly and Gavriil Lebedinsky to solicit different authorities for a monastery foundation. The community also allocated 1300 roubles and 36 dessiatines of land area for the monastery arrangement. The rural community request was examined in Voronezh Ecclesiastical Consistory, Voronezh Provincial Government, Voronezh Provincial Peasant Council and in the Second (Peasant) Senate Department. The attempt was not successful, it encountered resistance of authorities. Meanwhile the cave diggers managed to accommodate the caves and arrange regular divine service by the local secular clergy. Functioning of the caves as a sacred locus for the rural community was interrupted by revolution events of early XX century. At present Kalach caves are put on Russian cultural heritage register.

Tatiana Itskovich, Natalia Kupina

Рассмотрен автобиографический роман Анатолия Омельчука «Река возвращается». Цель исследования – выявление категориальных особенностей сибирского текста, позволяющих воссоздать ментально-специфический типаж сибиряка. Реализации целевой установки способствует использование процедуры категориально-текстового анализа, которая сопровождается приемами смысловой, лингвостилистической и лингвоаксиологической интерпретации языковых средств, в том числе регионализмов. Установлено, что целостность романа, включающего 169 рассказов и новелл, формируется на базе категорий пространства, времени и образа автора. Специально выделены для описания аксиологически маркированные единицы ономастического лексикона. Топонимы, оронимы, гидронимы выступают как элементы текстового поля локальности, ядром которого является ключевое слово Сибирь. Доказано, что уникальное пространство Сибири осмысляется в контексте линейного и «причинного» времени и исторического прошлого. Значимыми для биографического времени автора оказываются послевоенная действительность, годы оттепели, постсоветское настоящее. Отмечено, что мозаичность текста преодолевают биографические высказывания, на базе которых читатель воспринимает картины жизни сибирских поселений, уточняет сложившиеся представления о динамике социально-общественного устройства сибирского региона. Результаты анализа позволяют сделать вывод о том, что конструирование образа автора неразрывно связано с родной деревней Могочино, родительским домом, одноклассниками, наставниками, а также лесозаводом, внедрявшим совместно со школой идею воспитания строителей социализма. Труд, занятия спортом, чтение, общение с природой – все это способствовало становлению отмеченных в статье свойств сибирского характера. Выявление векторов динамики образа автора проведено на основе анализа мотива столкновения политических императивов и констант общероссийской ментальности. Интерпретация стенограмм судеб позволила очертить особенности ментально-специфического типажа сибиряка: это духовность, вольнолюбие, трудолюбие, открытость, бескорыстие, стремление познать природу края, сохранить его культурное наследие и языковую самобытность, правдолюбие, а также способность к сопротивлению и противостоянию политическим императивам, осознание права на персональный аксиологический выбор, приверженность вневременным нравственным ценностям.

Ksenia A. Klimova

This article presents a detailed account of the folk-mythological representations of the deceased in the traditional culture of the Pontic Greeks. It is primarily based on field data collected during expeditions conducted between 2022 and 2024 in the areas where the Pontic Greeks have traditionally lived in concentrated settlements. The data was collected from the Krasnodar and Stavropol regions, the Republics of Karachay-Cherkessia, North Ossetia-Alania and Dagestan, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia, as well as from written sources on the traditional culture of the Pontic Greeks and dialect dictionaries. The characteristics of the Pontic mythological character "hortlach" ("walking dead," zombie) are considered according to the scheme developed by the team of authors of the Moscow ethnolinguistic school. This includes a description of the character's names and titles, its hypostases, characteristics of its appearance, genesis, loci, time of activation, properties, characteristic occupations, functions and predicates, objects of influence, characteristic motifs, and other relevant information. A distinctive quality of the Pontic "hortlach" is its capacity to alter its physical form. During the daytime, it assumes the appearance of a deceased individual interred in a grave, at night, it emerges from the cemetery and departs from the burial ground. Another distinctive attribute of the Pontic "hortlach" is its capacity to transform into a werewolf. During the daytime, it lies in the grave in the form of a deceased individual, while at night it emerges from the cemetery and traverses the village in the guise of a massive black canine. The concepts associated with the "Chortlakh" are more enduring among Turkic-speaking Urum Greeks, who are native to Greek villages in Georgia. This observation correlates with the overall more robust preservation of folk-mythological beliefs and traditional culture within this subgroup. Narratives about "chortlakh" are ubiquitous across all surveyed regions, and the lexeme itself is fixed in a multitude of phraseological expressions, including "to wander like a chortlakh," "to walk at night like a chortlakh," and as a swear word. Extended texts with descriptions of mythological characters or full texts of classical stories are very rarely recorded in the surveyed territories, and mythological vocabulary is gradually fading into oblivion.

Алла Геннадьевна Шешкен

Македонский писатель Венко Андоновский (1964) в прозе последних десятилетий (романах «Азбука для непослушных», «Пуп земли», «Пуп света» и др.) и эссеистике («Достоевский и Макдональдс») поднимает вопрос аксиологии современной литературы, интреграции ее ценностных смыслов в мировосприятие современников. Ценностные доминанты художественной литературы, их интерпретация в произведениях современных авторов стали важной проблемой в XXI в. для славянских стран, особенно остро — для авторов «малых литератур». На фоне крупных общественно-политических сдвигов в последние десятилетия приобрела интенсивный характер коммерциализация литературы, она серьезно затронула славянские литературы. Современный писатель часто должен выбирать между подлинным творчеством (серьезным и глубоким осмыслением судьбы своего народа, важных событий современности, совершенствованием языка и стиля и т. д.) и коммерческим успехом, который обеспечивает статус бестселлера. Размышляя об этом явлении, В. Андоновский видит в нем проявление глобализации в искусстве и называет его «литературным фастфудом». Выбор между подлинными и мнимыми художественными ценностями писатель образно называет «выбором между Достоевским и “Макдональдсом”». В эссе и романах В. Андоновский раскрывает идею важности сохранения национальной традиции и ориентацию на достижения мировой литературы, содержащие ценности высшего духовного порядка. Статья поступила в редакцию 25.01.2024. Рецензирование завершено 31.01.2024. Статья принята к публикации 12.03.2024. Цитирование Шешкен А. Г. Македонский писатель Венко Андоновский о подлинных и мнимых художественных ценностях // Славянский альманах. 2024. No 1–2. С. 274–285. DOI: 10.31168/2073-5731.2024.1-2.14

André F. C. Gomes, Mário A. T. Figueiredo

The partial information decomposition (PID) framework is concerned with decomposing the information that a set of (two or more) random variables (the sources) has about another variable (the target) into three types of information: unique, redundant, and synergistic. Classical information theory alone does not provide a unique way to decompose information in this manner and additional assumptions have to be made. One often overlooked way to achieve this decomposition is using a so-called measure of union information - which quantifies the information that is present in at least one of the sources - from which a synergy measure stems. In this paper, we introduce a new measure of union information based on adopting a communication channel perspective, compare it with existing measures, and study some of its properties. We also include a comprehensive critical review of characterizations of union information and synergy measures that have been proposed in the literature.

S. Radchenko

One day in December 2019 I knew something was badly amiss. Russian President Vladimir Putin had called a meeting with the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States – the vague post-Soviet association of former Soviet republics that semi-defer to Russia – in order to discuss history. Not just discuss: he actually brought a thick stack of archival documents to the meeting, which, he said, demonstrated certain truths about the history of the Second World War. These had allegedly been forgotten or perhaps deliberately ignored in the West. He then selectively cited from these documents (most, if not all, of which are well-known to historians) to prove that, effectively, the West, and especially Poland, were responsible for the war.

Aleksandar Lukić

After Chernenko's demise and Gorbachev's coming to power in 1985, the period known as perestroika began in the Soviet Union. Realignment led to an ostensible end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, thanks to Yeltsin's declaration of sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). As a consequence, former Soviet socialist republics, including Ukraine, became independent states. The United States of America declared victory in the Cold War and a new world order was established with the United States as the great hegemon. In this paper, our aim is to show that the ongoing conflict in the territory of Ukraine did not start either in 2022 or in 2014 (when the conflict became armed). Instead, the conflict was kick-started with the independent state of Ukraine being established in 1991, on historically Russian lands, the purpose of this exercise being to create a new Ukrainian nation. The thirty-year history of the Ukrainian state bears witness to its non-Russian and anti-Russian character, as well as to the undisguised influence of the United States of America, which was particularly evident in the so-called colour revolutions and the armed coup of 2014, which led to the overthrow of the legally elected president of this country, Viktor Yanukovych. Russian intervention in 2022, which has a global geopolitical character, shows that a new perestroika is in full play. Denazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine, declared as the main goals of the Russian Federation, are the fundamental measures of the new perestroika. If the Russian Federation succeeds in this endeavour, this would undoubtedly mark the end of U.S. hegemony, while a new multicentric world would be created. If Russian intervention turns out to be a failure, U.S. hegemony will be reconfirmed so that the interests of the Russian Federation would most likely be faced with a threat of further disintegration. Thus, this is not primarily a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but rather a decisive battle between Russia and the collective West led by the United States. This is the reason why the West is putting in a strenuous effort, and suffering substantial economic damage, to win this war. It defends Ukraine for its own sake, not for the sake of Ukraine itself. Not by their own choice, Ukrainians are in a tragic position in which their nation is used for the achievement of Western interests.

E. Bevzyuk, O. Kotlyar

The paper analyzes the circumstances of the formation of a new security paradigm in Asian countries (former Soviet republics - Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan). The twilight of bipolarity, unfortunately, did not open a new qualitative page in the system of regional security. Global socio-economic transformations and political upheavals have added to political instability and uncertainty. Against this historical and political background, Russia's war against Ukraine became a bifurcation point for such a region as Western Eurasia. The relevance of the research topic is determined by the international political processes that are taking place today in the territory of the former Soviet Union. The security format of the former republics of the Union is traditionally considered mainly in the regional - post-Soviet geopolitical context. Therefore, when analyzing the foreign policy features of the region, one should take into account the fact that the Asian republics were part of the USSR for a long time. At the same time, the process of the collapse of the Soviet Union did not fundamentally change the specific status of Russia in the Eurasian “Heartland”. For a long time, Russia and the southern republics of the former Soviet Union were bound by ties of common imperial history, culture and values. However, the fact that Asia has been under the political roof of the Russian Empire for many years has determined the paradigm of Russia's paternalistic attitude towards the countries of the region and for many years defined the framework of the regional security paradigm. Regional political processes are an urgent problem in the system of researching processes and phenomena in the post-Soviet space, causing a clash of different points of view and practice. The focus of the research is the problem of the past and present in the countries of Asia (former Soviet republics) as international regional actors and the determination of possible prospects for the development of their foreign policy scenario. The purpose of the study is to clarify the role and place of Asian countries (former republics of the USSR) in the process of forming a new regional security paradigm from the moment of the beginning of the active phase of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine. The object of research is Western Eurasia as a modern regional phenomenon of geopolitics. The subject of the study is the foreign policy of modern Asian countries (former Soviet republics) in the conditions of the formation of a new paradigm of international relations and the growing competition of world actors in the region (USA, EU, China, Russia).

Koyena Pal, Aamod Khatiwada, Roee Shraga et al.

Data management has traditionally relied on synthetic data generators to generate structured benchmarks, like the TPC suite, where we can control important parameters like data size and its distribution precisely. These benchmarks were central to the success and adoption of database management systems. But more and more, data management problems are of a semantic nature. An important example is finding tables that can be unioned. While any two tables with the same cardinality can be unioned, table union search is the problem of finding tables whose union is semantically coherent. Semantic problems cannot be benchmarked using synthetic data. Our current methods for creating benchmarks involve the manual curation and labeling of real data. These methods are not robust or scalable and perhaps more importantly, it is not clear how robust the created benchmarks are. We propose to use generative AI models to create structured data benchmarks for table union search. We present a novel method for using generative models to create tables with specified properties. Using this method, we create a new benchmark containing pairs of tables that are both unionable and non-unionable but related. We thoroughly evaluate recent existing table union search methods over existing benchmarks and our new benchmark. We also present and evaluate a new table search methods based on recent large language models over all benchmarks. We show that the new benchmark is more challenging for all methods than hand-curated benchmarks, specifically, the top-performing method achieves a Mean Average Precision of around 60%, over 30% less than its performance on existing manually created benchmarks. We examine why this is the case and show that the new benchmark permits more detailed analysis of methods, including a study of both false positives and false negatives that were not possible with existing benchmarks.

Raphael Yuster

In a recent breakthrough, Gilmer proved the union closed conjecture up to a constant factor. Using Gilmer's method and additional ideas, Chase and Lovett proved an optimal result for almost union-closed set systems. Here that result is extended to higher order unions.

P. Kolstø

I. Hurak, O. Boichuk, M. Nahorniak

At the beginning of the XXI century the leadership of the Kremlin significantly strengthened control over the processes in the Russian state, achieved certain successes in the implementation of integration projects in the post-Soviet space. To increase the geopolitical weight of the Russian Federation and further strengthen its position on the territory of the so-called “near abroadˮ, Kremlin political technologists developed a new imperial ideology. Ivan Ilyin, a critic of the Bolsheviks and a supporter of monarchism and fascism, acted as an ideological guide for the Russian ruling elite. A practical manifestation of the new ideological approaches was the introduction of the “Day of People’s Unityˮ associated with the traditions of tsarist Russia, which essentially replaced the celebration of the so called “Great October Socialist Revolutionˮ. In the same vein, we can consider the launch of the action called “Saint George's ribbonˮ, which is a kind of attempt to combine the legacy of the Romanovs with the pages of the history of the USSR convenient for the Kremlin. Criticizing the federal nature of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin at the same time actively used the victory of the USSR in World War II for its geopolitical purposes. To the greatest extent, this was manifested due to the active popularization of the myth of the “Great Victoryˮ and the hypertrophied celebration of “Victory Dayˮ − the so-called “Pobedobesieˮ. One of the important components of the new state ideology of the Russian Federation was the active use of the “besieged fortressˮ concept. Tough declarations of the leadership of Russia at that time were complemented by decisive steps. The use of radioactive substances on the territory of Great Britain to kill a former employee of the FSB, cyber-attacks on the governmental structure of a NATO and EU member – Estonia, a return to the Soviet practice of aviation combat duty, a missile strike on Georgian territory by a Russian aircraft demonstrated the readiness of official Moscow to raise the stakes in the framework of the struggle for the redistribution of geopolitical “chessboardˮ. The ideological project “Russian Worldˮ became the decoration for Russian imperialism and revanchism. During the second presidential term of Vladimir Putin, it was already possible to trace warming signals that unequivocally demonstrated that behind the “humanitarianˮ envelope of “Russian Worldˮ the aggressive foreign policy goals of the Russian leadership were hidden. The most openly imperial essence of the Putin regime in its early stages is reflected in the framework of the so-called “Russian doctrineˮ. This document included provisions on the messianic role of Russia, criticism of the Bolsheviks for the division of the USSR into republics, the postulate on the historical continuity of the Russian Federation from tsarist times, etc. In the context of outlining the foreign policy goals of the Russian Federation, the doctrine refers to the creation of a multipolar world, the non-recognition of the 1991 Belovezh Accords, and the beginning of the path that should lead to the “reunificationˮ of Russia with Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan is declared.

Oleg Asipchuk, Vladyslav Drezels

In this paper, we construct explicit exponential bases on finite or infinite unions of segments of total length one with some conditions on gaps between them. We also construct exponential bases on certain unions of cubes in $\R^d$ and we prove a stability result for unions of segments that generalize Kadec's $\frac{1}{4}-$theorem.

Olival Freire Junior

Alain Aspect's three experiments on Bell's theorem, published in the early 1980s, were a turning point in the history of the research on the foundations of quantum mechanics not only because they corroborated entanglement as the distinctive quantum signature but also because these experiments brought wider recognition to this field of research and Aspect himself. These experiments may be considered the most direct precursors of the research on quantum information, which would blossom a decade later.

Anton Baranov, Yurii Belov, Alexander Kuznetsov

We study the properties of a system biorthogonal to a complete and minimal system of exponentials in $L^2(E)$, where $E$ is a finite union of intervals, and show that in the case when $E$ is a union of two or three intervals the biorthogonal system is also complete.

Sebastian Krapohl, Alexandra Vasileva-Dienes

The failure of regionalism in Central Asia is a puzzle. Whereas almost all world regions have seen a rise of regional organisations since the end of the Cold War, attempts to establish durable regional cooperation among Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan proofed unsuccessful. Although some of the Central Asian countries participate in wider regional organisations like the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the genuine Central Asian Cooperation Organisation (CACO) was dissolved in 2005. Given the cultural, economic and political similarities between the five Central Asian countries, this lack of a regional organisation is surprising. In contrast to previous work, this paper argues that the failure of regionalism in Central Asia is not so much due to domestic political factors, but more to the extra-regional economic dependence of the regional economies and the impact of external powers within Central Asia. Challenged by the rise of China, Russia uses the EAEU in order to preserve its hegemonic influence over the former Soviet Republics. By joining the Russian dominated EAEU, Central Asia’s regional power Kazakhstan enjoys economic benefits which outweigh the potential gains of Central Asian cooperation within CACO by far. Consequently, Kazakhstan follows its extra-regional interests in closer cooperation with Russia at the cost of regional cooperation with its Central Asian neighbours. As a result, the Central Asian countries are unable to build up a unified regional block in relation to extra-regional powers like China or Russia.

Anna Abalkina

This study attempts to detect papers originating from the Russia-based paper mill International publisher LLC. A total of 1009 offers published during 2019-2021 on the 123mi.ru website were analysed. The study allowed us to identify at least 434 papers that are potentially linked to the paper mill including one preprint, a duplication paper and 15 republications of papers erroneously published in hijacked journals. Evidence of suspicious provenance from the paper mill is provided: matches in title, number of coauthorship slots, year of publication, country of the journal, country of a coauthorship slot and similarities of abstracts. These problematic papers are coauthored by scholars associated with at least 39 countries and submitted both to predatory and reputable journals. This study also demonstrates collaboration anomalies and the phenomenon of suspicious collaboration in questionable papers and examines the predictors of the Russia-based paper mill. The value of coauthorship slots offered by International Publisher LLC in 2019-2021 is estimated at $6.5 million. Since the study analysed a particular paper mill, it is likely that the number of papers with forged authorship is much higher.

A. Chubariyan

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.