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Blat (Russia)
In Russian, ''blat'' (russian: блат) is a form of corruption comprising a system of informal agreements, exchanges of services, connections, Party contacts, or black market deals to achieve results or get ahead. In the USSR, ''blat'' was widespread because of the permanent shortage of consumer goods and services. This was due to the price of consumer goods being dictated by the state rather than set by the free market. Networks of ''blat'' made it easier for the general public to gain access to much-coveted goods and services. ''Blat'' also took place at the enterprise-level in the form of '' tolkachs'', employees whose explicit role was to exploit their networks to secure positive outcomes for their employers. The system of ''blat'' can be seen as an example of a social network with some similarities to networking (especially "good ol' boy" networks) in the United States, old boy networks in the United Kingdom and the former British Empire, and ''guanxi'' in China. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russian Language
Russian (russian: русский язык, russkij jazyk, link=no, ) is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language mainly spoken in Russia. It is the First language, native language of the Russians, and belongs to the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. It is one of four living East Slavic languages, and is also a part of the larger Balto-Slavic languages. Besides Russia itself, Russian is an official language in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and is used widely as a lingua franca throughout Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to some extent in the Baltic states. It was the De facto#National languages, ''de facto'' language of the former Soviet Union,1977 Soviet Constitution, Constitution and Fundamental Law of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1977: Section II, Chapter 6, Article 36 and continues to be used in public life with varying proficiency in all of the post-Soviet states. Russian has over 258 million total speakers worldwide. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or dyna ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages.Aram Yardumian"A Tale of Two Hypotheses: Genetics and the Ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jewry".University of Pennsylvania. 2013. Yiddish is primarily written in the Hebrew alphabet. Prior to World War II, its worldwide peak was 11 million, with the number of speakers in the United States and Canada then totaling 150,000. Eighty-five percent of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,Solomon Birnbaum, ''Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache'' (4., erg. Aufl., Hambu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Vasmer
Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (; russian: Максимилиан Романович Фа́смер, translit=Maksimilian Romanovič Fásmer; 28 February 1886 – 30 November 1962) was a Russo-German linguist. He studied problems of etymology in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worked on the history of Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, and Finno-Ugric peoples. Biography Born to German parents in Saint Petersburg, Vasmer graduated from Saint Petersburg University in 1907. From 1910, he delivered lectures there as a professor. During the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, he worked in the Universities of Saratov and of Dorpat (Tartu). In 1921, he settled in Leipzig, but in 1925 moved to Berlin. In 1938–1939, he delivered lectures at Columbia University in New York City. It was there that he started to work on his ''magnum opus'', the . He delivered the eulogy for Professor Aleksander Brückner in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in 1939 and he took over the chair of Slavistic studies a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adverb
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering questions such as ''how'', ''in what way'', ''when'', ''where'', ''to what extent''. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by single words (adverbs) or by multi-word adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses. Adverbs are traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech. Modern linguists note that the term "adverb" has come to be used as a kind of "catch-all" category, used to classify words with various types of syntactic behavior, not necessarily having much in common except that they do not fit into any of the other available categories (noun, adjective, preposition, etc.) Functions The English word ''adverb'' derives (through French) from Latin ''adverbium'', from ''ad-'' ("to"), ''verbum'' ("word", "verb"), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gosplan
The State Planning Committee, commonly known as Gosplan ( rus, Госплан, , ɡosˈpɫan), was the agency responsible for central economic planning in the Soviet Union. Established in 1921 and remaining in existence until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Gosplan had as its main task the creation and administration of a series of five-year plans governing the economy of the USSR. History Economic background The time of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War which followed was a period of virtual economic collapse. Production and distribution of necessary commodities were severely tested as factories were shuttered and major cities such as Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) were depopulated, with urban residents returning to the countryside to claim a place in land redistribution and in order to avoid the unemployment, lack of food, and lack of fuel which had become endemic. By 1919 hyperinflation had emerged, further pushing the struggling economic syst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tolkach
The tolkachi ( rus, толкачи, p=təlkɐˈt͡ɕi, ''pushers'') emerged in the Soviet Union as employees of enterprises whose role was to use informal connections to enable production managers to meet or manipulate targeted outputs imposed by the central economic plan. They evolved in the context of the various Five Year Plans helping them to work by violating their core principles: i.e. as success was determined by meeting the targets, using persuasion to have targets reduced was a means of achieving success. The tolkachi were premier practitioners of '' blat'', a contemporaneous Russian term to describe the procurement of favours. By 1937 the tolkachi had come to occupy a key position mediating between the enterprises and the commissar Commissar (or sometimes ''Kommissar'') is an English transliteration of the Russian (''komissar''), which means 'commissary'. In English, the transliteration ''commissar'' often refers specifically to the political commissars of Soviet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda ( rus, Ге́нрих Григо́рьевич Яго́да, Genrikh Grigor'yevich Yagoda, born Yenokh Gershevich Iyeguda; 7 November 1891 – 15 March 1938) was a Soviet secret police official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised arrests, show trials, and executions of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, climactic events of the Great Purge. Yagoda also supervised construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal with Naftaly Frenkel, using penal labor from the GULAG system, during which 12,000–25,000 laborers died. Like many Soviet NKVD officers who conducted political repression, Yagoda himself ultimately became a victim of the Purge. He was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov in 1936 and arrested in 1937. Charged with crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism and conspiracy, Yagoda was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anastas Mikoyan
Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan (; russian: Анаста́с Ива́нович Микоя́н; hy, Անաստաս Հովհաննեսի Միկոյան; 25 November 1895 – 21 October 1978) was an Armenian Communist revolutionary, Old Bolshevik and Soviet statesman. He was the only Soviet politician who managed to remain at the highest levels of power within the Communist Party while that power oscillated between the Central Committee and the Politburo. His career extended from the days of Lenin, to the eras of Stalin and Khrushchev, to his peaceful retirement under Brezhnev. An early convert to the Bolshevik cause, Mikoyan participated in the Baku Commune under the leadership of Stepan Shahumyan during the Russian Civil War in the Caucasus. In the 1920s, he served as the First Secretary of the North Caucasus region. During Stalin's rule, Mikoyan held several high governmental posts, including that of Minister of Foreign Trade. However, by the 1940s, Mikoyan began to lose favou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich, also Kahanovich (russian: Ла́зарь Моисе́евич Кагано́вич, Lázar' Moiséyevich Kaganóvich; – 25 July 1991), was a Soviet politician and administrator, and one of the main associates of Joseph Stalin. He was one of several associates who helped Stalin to seize power, demonstrating exceptional brutality towards those deemed threats to Stalin's regime and facilitating the executions of thousands of people. Born to Jewish parents in modern Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) in 1893, Kaganovich was the son of Moisei Benovich Kaganovich (1863-1923) and Genya Iosifovna Dubinskaya (1860-1933). Of the 13 children born to the family, 6 died in infancy. Lazar had four elder brothers, all of whom became members of the Bolshevik party. Several of Lazar's brothers ended up occupying positions of varying significance in the Soviet government. Mikhail Kaganovich (1888–1941) served as People's Commissar of Defence Industry bef ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kliment Voroshilov
Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (, uk, Климент Охрімович Ворошилов, ''Klyment Okhrimovyč Vorošylov''), popularly known as Klim Voroshilov (russian: link=no, Клим Вороши́лов, ''Klim Vorošilov''; 4 February 1881 – 2 December 1969), was a prominent Soviet military officer and politician during the Stalin era. He was one of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union, the highest military rank of the Soviet Union, and served as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Soviet head of state, from 1953 to 1960. Born to a Russian worker's family in modern Ukraine, Voroshilov took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an early member of the Bolsheviks. He served with distinction at the Battle of Tsaritsyn, during which he became a close friend of Stalin. Voroshilov was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1921, and in 1925 Stalin appointed him People's Commissar for Military and Navy Affair ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov. ; (;. 9 March Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates">O._S._25_February.html" ;"title="Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Old Style and New Style dates">O. S. 25 February">Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Old Style and New Style dates">O. S. 25 February1890 – 8 November 1986) was a Russian politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik, and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s onward. He served as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars from 1930 to 1941 and as Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Soviet Union), Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1939 to 1949 and from 1953 to 1956. During the 1930s, he ranked second in the Soviet leadership, after Joseph Stalin, whom he supported loyally for over 30 years, and whose reputation he continued to defend after Stalin's death, having himself been deeply implicated in the worst atrocities of the Stalin years – the forced collectivisation of agriculture in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
%2C_Scientist_and_Co-worker_with_Lenin_(Birth_Centenary)).jpg "Click for more on -> Gosplan")
