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This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2007. The length of the article is 963 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.(Book review)
Author: Charles J. Halperin
Publication: Canadian Journal of History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 42Issue: 1Page: 164(3)

Article Type: Book review

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This digital document is an article from World Education Encyclopedia, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 6238 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.This country-by-country survey of educational systems provides detailed essays on the histories, legal foundations, and primary and secondary educational systems of 233 countries. This edition provides up-to-date coverage of reorganized educational systems and technological advances. ... Read more

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In any assessment and understanding of Belarus, the key questions to address include: Why has Belarus apparently rejected independence under its first president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and sought a union with Russia? Why has the government rejected democracy, infringed on the human rights of its citizens and fundamentally altered its constitution in favor of presidential authority? Has the country made any progress toward market reforms? How have Russia and the West responded to the actions of Belarus? And what is the future likely to hold for its ten million citizens? The author's conclusions are optimistic. Belarus, he believes, will survive into the twenty-first century, but as a Eurasian rather than a European state. ... Read more

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Anatoly Kulik and Susanna Pshizova have compiled an engaging and comprehensive, cross-national study that explores the stormy political developments in the post-Soviet countries. They gathered essays regarding the formation of the various new democratic institutions of Russia, the Baltic States, the Slavic States, and Moldova. The contributors are all distinguished scholars indigenous to their areas of focus; consequently, they are able to provide a true insider's perspective of the political climates of their respective lands. Kulik and Pshizova have organized the studies into seven generously detailed, nation-specific chapters that permit readers to see the individual party systems in both their sub-regional contexts as well as in their national ones.

The Newly Independent States that appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union faced the necessity of creating their own democratic political systems in the first months of independence.While each state had the same basic task and came out of roughly the same background, each country implemented its own methods of government rule: they each pursued different paths with different outcomes. It is logical to view and study the states as a group, but also necessary to see them as individual governments with individual policies and political cultures.

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Completely updated and revised for this new edition, our unique electronic book on two CD-ROMs has an amazing collection of the finest federal documents and resources about Belarus, providing encyclopedic coverage of all aspects of the country. This disc set provides a truly fantastic reference source, with over one hundred thousand pages reproduced in Adobe Acrobat format! There is complete coverage of newsworthy material about Belarus, including USAID (with over 5,000 pages of reports about Belarus), doing business in Belarus, Chernobyl and Belarus, sanctions, Belarus election controversy, START treaty, Belarus democracy act, Belarus thyroid study.This incredible and comprehensive series on the countries of the world contains material from the State Department, Department of Defense, White House, and cabinet agencies including Agriculture, Energy, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.There is complete information about geography, people, government, the economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues.In addition to the nation-specific material, as a bonus we have included reports about every country on the globe, with 271 nations, dependent areas, and other entities identified by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA World Factbook is considered an invaluable "world encyclopedia" reference book. ... Read more

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The history of Jewish Rechitsa began in the late sixteenth century, when official tolerance in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania combined with economic opportunity to attract Jewish settlement. In the mid-seventeenth century Rechitsa, as other shtetls in eastern Belorussia, fell victim to the Khmelnitsky campaigns and invasion by Muscovy. The steady decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth translated into hard times for the Jewish community in the eighteenth century, including a relative de-urbanization. The differing treatment and experience of the Jews in the former Lithuanian lands and those of Poland led to the development of a strongly differentiated sub-ethnos, the "Litvaks," in the Lithuanian lands of Belorussia and the Baltic. After the Partitions of Poland brought the area into the Russian Empire, the new authorities maintained the existing system of communal responsibility for interactions with the government such as payment of taxes and provision of recruits, reaffirming Jewish distinctiveness from the rest of the population. The government's growing commitment to "Russification," and the reimposition of legal restrictions on the Jews, had the counter-effect of stimulating the national self-consciousness of the Empire's non-Russian peoples; in the case of the Jews, the last decades of the Empire witnessed an increasing desire for national reorganization and recognition, emigration to America, the birth of the Zionist movement, secularization, and the growing attraction of Jewish youth to the revolutionary movement. The late nineteenth century witnessed an increase in Jewish charitable activity, personified in the career of the tzadik (rebbe) Sholom-Dov-Ber Shneerson. By that time Rechitsa had become one of the most important centers of Hasidism in the Empire. After the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution political activity remained possible only within the framework of institutions created, or at least approved, by the ruling party. ... Read more

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This 2006 book documents developments in the countries of eastern Europe, including the rise of authoritarian tendencies in Russia and Belarus, as well as the victory of the democratic 'Orange Revolution' in Ukraine, and poses important questions about the origins of the East Slavic nations and the essential similarities or differences between their cultures. It traces the origins of the modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nations by focusing on pre-modern forms of group identity among the Eastern Slavs. It also challenges attempts to 'nationalize' the Rus' past on behalf of existing national projects, laying the groundwork for understanding of the pre-modern history of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The book covers the period from the Christianization of Kyivan Rus' in the tenth century to the reign of Peter I and his eighteenth-century successors, by which time the idea of nationalism had begun to influence the thinking of East Slavic elites. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of Russian History, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 656 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Providing a comprehensive discussion of the people, politics, economics, religion, culture, and social systems of Russia, this work spans the time from the earliest beginnings of the Russian nation (among the ancient Eastern Slavic tribes) to the end of czarist Russia and on through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. It provides the necessary information for readers to obtain a greater understanding of and appreciation for Russia in all of its many spheres. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (25)

Disturbing
This book is gruesome and disturbing. It's a collection of personal accounts of what happened after the disaster of Chernobyl. It's quite chilling and emotional at times but a fantastic read.

The other side of Chernobyl
This book tells the story of people of lived through consequences of the disaster. Consequences that people generallynot talk about. It is the other side from the the disaster. The book is not about technical facts but describes the worries and fears of the victims. Victims who had to leave, victims who lost loved ones etc.
Highly recommended to get more feeling with the impact of the Chernobyl disaster that was not in the media a lot.

Terrifying View of a Very Human Situation
'Voices from Chernobyl' is a very chilling view of an event that had wide spread human impacts.Before this most of my knowledge of Chernobyl was technical in nature, but after reading this volume you will see a great human tragedy.For example, a village that was supplied with some protective gear and iodine to distribute to the people, but didn't. Why? In a effort to not cause panic.It was curious to see the diversity of people Alexievich spoke with.Some supporting the party until the very end, some protesting the party the whole way, and some lost without their loved ones.

For those of us unfamiliar with soviet culture some traditions or words used in the text don't mean much, but this does not really take away from the main message of each monologue.Also, Alexievich also lists all names at the beginning of a multiple person monologue, separating each by a * making it difficult to follow.Towards the end several young children are talking and after each child told their story I had to flip back and see who was speaking next.Not a big thing, but just a small organizational thing that could be easily addressed.These are the only reasons this is a 4/5.

If you are looking for a read about how humans can react to disaster, and get probably the closest look at what actually happened in 'the zone' this is the book for you.You'll see scientists, physicists, and experts locked out in favor of political leaders after the accident and efforts of a failing system to keep face.

Best Personal Account Book I Have Read
This is hands down the best personal account book I have read. To hear from the people who actual lived through the evacuation, the residents, the liquidators, the children of Chernobyl, is incredibly moving. If you are looking for a book with stories from the people who had to leave their homes behind, from the people who cleaned up the wreckage, this is the book for you. I have actually read through this book 3 times now.

Outstanding first-person accounts but lacks elsewhere
This latter part of this book is a gut-wrenching, incredible oral history of the victims and survivors and family members of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986, and the "author" deserves credit for a tremendous amount of work over three years gathering and recording these important personal stories for history.

However, the book needed some background about the disaster and some explanation of what actually occurred in the disaster to put all the stories into perspective. It also could benefit from some brief paragraphs explaining some of the things the survivors mention -- I was confused about times and dates and some of the terminology.

And the first few sections are very confusing because the dialog makes no sense. It would have been better paraphrased. I almost gave up reading this book but I'm glad I didn't because the second half stories are much more coherent and compelling.

I also would have appreciated having the ages of the narrators along with their names and affiliation before each story, not at the end.

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Polonia, which is the name for Poland in Latin and in many other languages, refers in modern Polish language to the Polish diaspora, and to people of Polish origin who live outside Poland. There are roughly 15 to 20 million people of Polish ancestry living outside Poland, making the Polish diaspora one of the largest in the world. Reasons for this displacement vary from border shifts, to forced resettlement, to political or economic emigration. Major populations of Polish ancestry can be found in Germany, France, several other European countries, the United States, Canada, Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas.A large proportion of the Polish citizens who migrated in the early twentieth century were Polish Jews, and these also make up part of the Jewish diaspora. Poland was home to the world's largest Jewish population as late as 1938, a decade before the establishment of Israel. Over three million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and most of the survivors emigrated. Today only about 25,000 Jewish people live in Poland. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Russian Life, published by Russian Information Services, Inc. on May 1, 2010. The length of the article is 3779 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The city of Chagall.(Vitebsk)(City overview)
Author: Nicky Gardner
Publication: Russian Life (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 2010
Publisher: Russian Information Services, Inc.
Volume: 53Issue: 3Page: 41(9)

Article Type: City overview

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Jogaila. Jadwiga of Poland, Polish¿Lithuanian¿Teutonic War, Battle of Grunwald, Family relations of Jogaila, History of Poland (1385¿1569), Names and titles of Jogaila, List of rulers of Belarus, List of rulers of Lithuania, King Jagiello Monument ... Read more