Biography: Slavomir Rawicz was born in the city of Pinsk (today a city in White Russia) in 1915, to a Polish father and a Russian Mother. In Pinsk, The Rawicz family lived a relatively well-to-do life. They not only owned a successful estate business, but a beautiful house within ...

Around the world, at any instant, millions of people are watching movies. They watch mainstream entertainment, serious "art films," documentaries, cartoons, experimental films, educational shorts. They sit in air-conditioned theaters, in village squares, in art museums, in college classroo...

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR II Even while World War II war still being fought, leaders of the Allied powers began thinking about how to reconstruct Europe after the war. Winston Churchill of Britain, Franklin Roosevelt of the United States, and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union a...

"In addition to the children in the United States who need families, there are countless thousands of homeless children in countries scattered around the globe" (Klibanoff 166). Consequently, private adoption agencies are expanding their adoption services by entering into the international arena....

The "Swinging Sixties" was a time when music, style, and a hope for peace and freedom came together as a protest against authority and war. The new music with thoughtful lyrics provided youth with an escape from the everyday pressures of being a teenager. Technological advances allowed t...

It has been a 'splendid little war' wrote John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt after the fall of Santiago. Little, the Spanish-American War was; it was over in barely four months. Splendid? Maybe for those at home, reading the headline about its lucky victories. But for those men who fo...

The Cold War was an extremely long war that last from 1945 until 1990. It did not clearly start until 1945, but strained relations remained between the United States and the Soviet Union since 1917. The ending of WWII and the struggle between Communism and Capitalism, led to this unique war. This...

Diary... Analysis of my exile... December 1922 I would urge strongly that at this congress a number of changes be made in out political structure. I want to tell you of the considerations to which I attach most importance. At the head of the list I set an increase in the num...

Joseph Stalin led the Socialist Soviet Union in the "Revolution from Above," a movement to centralize the government and transform society without popular participation. Because Stalin's radical goals were destructive for the populace to attain, his legitimacy was based on the credibility of his ...

Exploring the importance of the Revolutions of 1917 in bringing about the rise of a single-party state in Russia. "No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution.... Revolution is but thought carried into action (Emma Goldman, Anarchism 1917)." The people of Russ...

In the years following the end of the Cold War, many historians and social scientists have written accounts of what were some of the causes and effects of this period when the threat of war was almost always present. One such person was Melvyn Leffler and his work, The Specter of Communism, whic...

The causes and reasons for the decline and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union are many and of a vastly varying nature. Yet, despite the various schools of thought on this issue, these causes can generally be placed into two differing scopes, those being the domestic and international arenas. M...

Introduction On the morning of Tuesday October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy was reading the Tuesday morning newspapers in his bed at the Whitehouse. Not twenty fours hours before, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, received the results of Major Richard S. H...

Major Sources of Discord between the Bolsheviks and European States: 1917 to 1921 There were several major sources that created discord between the Bolsheviks and western states in Europe from 1917 to 1921. Conflicting ideologies that each attacked the very fabric of the other's respecti...

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, due to many pressures both internal and external, the ex-soviet satellites were given their independence, much to Russia's dismay. A new trend towards sovereignty made it difficult for the largest country in the world to deny it's former members the right to se...

Cuban Missile Crisis John F. Kennedy's greatest triumph as President of the United States came in 1962, as the world's two largest superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, edged closer and closer to nuclear war. The Soviet premier of Russia was caught arming Fidel Castro with nu...

In February 1945, Nazi armies were quickly beaten back towards Berlin by armies of the Soviet Union. British and American forces were preparing to invade Germany. Unconditional surrender could be expected from Germany in a matter of weeks. Also, in the Pacific War, American forces moved steadily ...

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed as a nation state. Although, in retrospect, this seemed the likely outcome after years of economic stagnation, political corruption, and most importantly, the collapse of all pro-Soviet communist regimes in Eastern Europe by 1989, no one expected it (Pa...

The persecution, deportation, and general abuse of those who call themselves Chechnyans, has been a heavy burden to bear over the last few centuries. Ethnically and religiously these people from the Caucasus are markedly different from their expansionist Russian neighbors. Centuries of miscommunicat...

The Influence of the Cold War and the Space Race On the Evolution of Today's Technology A few hundred key inventions have marked mankind's progress from the Stone Age to the Space Age. What were these inventions? Who made them possible? Where would the world be today if the space r...

Following the war in 1945, the United States of America, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union divided the city of Berlin into sectors. Each sector was under the control of a different country. The United States, Britain, and France joined their sections together to form a democratic state on May 24...

In his introduction to The Lexus and the Olive Tree, published in 1999, Thomas Freidman states that "[t]he world is 10 years old. It was born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The Cold War system was replaced by a new, very greased, interconnected system called globalization." As a...

Unless we accept the claim that Lenin's coup that gave birth to an entirely new state, and indeed to a new era in the history of mankind, we must recognize in today's Soviet Union the old empire of the Russians -- the only empire that survived into the mid 1980s (Luttwak, 1). In their...

During World War II, many countries of the world came together to fight against the oppressive nations of Germany, Italy, Japan, and their allies. The United States, Russia, and Great Britain, who emerged as leaders of the fight against these adversaries, formed an alliance that was eventually able...

The overlapping crises in Hungary and Poland in the autumn of 1956 posed a severe challenge for the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU). After a tense standoff with Poland, the CPSU Presidium (as the Politburo was then called) decided to refrain from military intervention and to s...