The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community. Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet.
In the 1930s, more than six thousand Finns emigrated from Canada and the United States to Soviet Karelia, a region in the Soviet Union where Finnish Communist émigrés were building a society to implement their ideals of a socialist Finland. Educated and skilled, North American Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformation who would modernize the Soviet Karelian economy and enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants in the socialist colonization agenda and created a unique culture based on the Finnish language and revolutionary aspirations of their generation. But just as this new culture began to influence the cultural transformation of Soviet Karelian society, the immigrant communities became the targets of the witch-hunting campaigns of the late 1930s, were victimized by the same regime that had recruited them for socialist building, and were finally destroyed in the course of the Second World War. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is the first comprehensive account in English of this fascinating story. Using a vast body of sources from archives in Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russian- and Finnish-language press, and oral history interviews, Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala present an in-depth exploration of the causes and consequences of the “Karelian fever” that swept through the North American Finnish community, and bring to light a heretofore neglected area of research in Soviet and immigration history.
The Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people's gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regime to transform them into a rationally organized, disciplined, and easily controllable community. Golubev argues that late Soviet materiality had an immense impact on the organization of the Soviet historical and spatial imagination. His approach also makes clear the ways in which the Soviet self was an integral part of the global experience of modernity rather than simply an outcome of Communist propaganda. Through its focus on materiality and personhood, The Things of Life expands our understanding of what made Soviet people and society "Soviet.
In the 1930s, thousands of Finns emigrated from their communities in the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia, a region in the Soviet Union where Finnish Communist émigrés were building a society to implement their ideals of socialist Finland. To their new socialist home, these immigrants brought critically needed skills, tools, machines, and money. Educated and skilled, American and Canadian Finns were regarded by Soviet authorities as agents of revolutionary transformations who would not only modernize the economy of Soviet Karelia, but also enlighten its society. North American immigrants, indeed, became active participants of socialist colonization of what Bolshevik leaders perceived as dark, uneducated and backward Soviet ethnic periphery. The Search for a Socialist El Dorado is the first comprehensive account in English of this fascinating story. Using a vast body of documentary sources from archives in Petrozavodsk and Moscow, Russian- and Finnish-language press and literature from the 1930s, oral history interviews and secondary literature, Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala explore in depth the “Karelian fever” among Finnish Americans and Canadians, and the lives of immigrants in the Soviet Union, their contribution to Soviet economy and culture, and their fates in the Great Terror.
The importance and actuality of nanotechnology is unabated and will be for years to come. A main challenge is to understand the various properties of certain nanostructures, and how to generate structures with specific properties for use in actual applications in Electrical Engineering and Medicine. One of the most important structures are nanowires, in particular superconducting ones. They are highly promising for future electronics, transporting current without resistance and at scales of a few nanometers. To fabricate wires to certain defined standards however, is a major challenge, and so is the investigation and understanding of these properties in the first place. A promising approach is to use carbon nanotubes as well as DNA structures as templates. Many fundamental theoretical questions are still unanswered, e.g. related to the role of quantum fluctuations. This work is tackling them and provides a detailed analysis of the transport properties of such ultrathin wires. It presents an account of theoretical models, charge transport experiments, and also conveys the latest experimental findings regarding fabrication, measurements, and theoretical analysis. In particular, it is the only available resource for the approach of using DNA and carbon nanotubes for nanowire fabrication. It is intended for graduate students and young researchers interested in nanoscale superconductivity. The readers are assumed to have knowledge of the basics of quantum mechanics and superconductivity.
This monograph provides a comprehensive introduction to the classical geometric approximation theory, emphasizing important themes related to the theory including uniqueness, stability, and existence of elements of best approximation. It presents a number of fundamental results for both these and related problems, many of which appear for the first time in monograph form. The text also discusses the interrelations between main objects of geometric approximation theory, formulating a number of auxiliary problems for demonstration. Central ideas include the problems of existence and uniqueness of elements of best approximations as well as properties of sets including subspaces of polynomials and splines, classes of rational functions, and abstract subsets of normed linear spaces. The book begins with a brief introduction to geometric approximation theory, progressing through fundamental classical ideas and results as a basis for various approximation sets, suns, and Chebyshev systems. It concludes with a review of approximation by abstract sets and related problems, presenting novel results throughout the section. This text is suitable for both theoretical and applied viewpoints and especially researchers interested in advanced aspects of the field.
This book provides an up-to-date overview of results in rigid body dynamics, including material concerned with the analysis of nonintegrability and chaotic behavior in various related problems. The wealth of topics covered makes it a practical reference for researchers and graduate students in mathematics, physics and mechanics. Contents Rigid Body Equations of Motion and Their Integration The Euler – Poisson Equations and Their Generalizations The Kirchhoff Equations and Related Problems of Rigid Body Dynamics Linear Integrals and Reduction Generalizations of Integrability Cases. Explicit Integration Periodic Solutions, Nonintegrability, and Transition to Chaos Appendix A : Derivation of the Kirchhoff, Poincaré – Zhukovskii, and Four-Dimensional Top Equations Appendix B: The Lie Algebra e(4) and Its Orbits Appendix C: Quaternion Equations and L-A Pair for the Generalized Goryachev – Chaplygin Top Appendix D: The Hess Case and Quantization of the Rotation Number Appendix E: Ferromagnetic Dynamics in a Magnetic Field Appendix F: The Landau – Lifshitz Equation, Discrete Systems, and the Neumann Problem Appendix G: Dynamics of Tops and Material Points on Spheres and Ellipsoids Appendix H: On the Motion of a Heavy Rigid Body in an Ideal Fluid with Circulation Appendix I: The Hamiltonian Dynamics of Self-gravitating Fluid and Gas Ellipsoids
The book is devoted to the physics of plasma at high density, which has been compressed so strongly that the effects of interparticle interactions and non-ideality govern its behavior. Interest in this non-traditional plasma has been generated in recent years when states of matter with high concentration of energy became accessible experimentally as the basis of modern technologies and facilities. The greatest part of the matter in the Universe is in this exotic state. In this book, the methods of generation and diagnostics of strongly coupled plasmas are presented, along with the main theoretical methods and experimental results on thermodynamical, kinetic and optical properties. Particular attention is given to fast developing modern directions of strongly coupled plasma physics such as metallization of dielectrics and dielectrization of metals, non-neutral plasmas, dusty plasmas and their crystallization. The book is written for physicists and astrophysicists, engineers, and material scientists.
This book examines the construction, dissemination, and reception of the Stalin cult in East Germany from the end of World War II to the building of the Berlin Wall. By exporting Stalin’s cult to the Eastern bloc, Moscow aspired to symbolically unite the communist states in an imagined cult community pivoting around the Soviet leader. Based on Russian and German archives, this work analyzes the emergence of the Stalin cult’s transnational dimension. On one hand, it looks at how Soviet representations of power were transferred and adapted in the former “enemy’s” country. On the other hand, it reconstructs “spaces of agency” where different agents and generations interpreted, manipulated, and used the Stalin cult to negotiate social identities and everyday life. This study reveals both the dynamics of Stalinism as a political system after the Cold War began and the foundations of modern politics through mass mobilization, emotional bonding, and social engineering in Soviet-style societies. As an integral part of the global history of communism, this book opens up a comparative, entangled perspective on the ways in which veneration of Stalin and other nationalistic cults were established in socialist states across Europe and beyond.
This book is a brief summary of the course of lectures in Geochemistry for undergraduate and graduate students from other than Geological Departments (chemists, biologists, ecologists and naturalists). It describes the Earth’s structure and some geological processes. The modern geochemical concepts take proper account of global geological processes and the influence of Cosmos. They are based on the laws and approaches of equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The cycles of energy and chemical elements within the Earth are interrelated with the global geochemical cycle. In addition to the traditional Geochemistry course, this book offers Geochemistry of microorganisms, Geochemistry of dispersed systems, Geochemistry of cryogenesis, and Geochemistry of cryptobiosphere. Features: Provides the reader with a general idea of the Earth’s chemical life and its related global geological events Offers a concise and clear description of the modern concepts in Geochemistry, including new directions such as Geochemistry of Cryogenesis, Geochemistry of Disperse Systems, Geochemistry of Microorganisms, and Geochemistry of Cryptobiosphere Implies a wide application of the thermodynamic approach. Useful for students who, though lacking in geology basics, are experienced in chemistry and biology
Chemometrics is the chemical discipline that uses mathematical, statistical and other methods employing formal logic: to design or select optimal measurement procedures and experiments, and -- to provide maximum relevant chemical information by analysing chemical data. Being conceived as a branch of analytical chemistry, chemometrics now is a general approach. It extracts relevant information out of measured data, regardless of their origin: chemical, physical, biological, etc. Chemometrics has been applied in different areas, and most successfully in multivariate calibration, pattern recognition, classification and discriminant analysis, multivariate modelling, and monitoring of processes. The main chemometric principle is a concept of hidden data structures that can be found using methods of multivariate data analysis. These are the well-known statistic tools such as partial least squares (PLS), soft independent modelling of class analogy (SIMCA), principal-component regression (PCR), wavelet analysis, and many others. Current activities of chemometricians fall into two main categories: (1) development of new methods for manipulating multivariate data and (2) new applications of the known chemometric techniques in different areas such as environment control, food industry, agriculture, medicine, and engineering.
“A fresh look at what is perhaps the most famous battle of the Russo-German War from the Soviet perspective.” —The NYMAS Review Much has been written about the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet victory that turned the tide of the Second World War. Yet our knowledge and understanding continues to evolve, and this engrossing account by Alexey Isaev brings together previously unpublished Russian archive material—strategic directives and orders, after-action reports, and official records of all kinds—with the vivid recollections of soldiers who were there, on the front lines, reconstructing what happened in extraordinary new detail. The evidence leads him to question common assumptions about the conduct of the battle—about the use of tanks and mechanized forces, for instance, and the combat capability and tenacity of the defeated and surrounded German Sixth Army in the last weeks before it surrendered. His gripping narrative carries the reader through the course of the entire battle from the first small-scale encounters on the approaches to Stalingrad in July 1942, through the intense continuous fighting through the city, to the encirclement, the beating back of the relieving force, and the capitulation of the Sixth Army in February 1943. Military historian Alexey Isaev’s latest book, with maps and illustrations included, is an important contribution to the literature on this decisive battle. It offers a thought-provoking revised view of events for readers already familiar with the story, and a fascinating introduction for those coming to it for the first time.
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