A Brief History of Russia

Ancient Russia (800-1200)

The early history of Russia, like those of many countries, is one of migrating peoples and ancient kingdoms. In fact, earlyRussia was not exactly "Russia," but a collection of cities that gradually coalesced into an empire. I n the early part of the ninth century, as part of the same great movement that brough the Danes to England and the Norsemen to Western Europe, a Scandanavian people known as the Varangians crossed the Baltic Sea and landed in Eastern Europe. The leader of the Varangians was the semilegendary warrior Rurik, who led his people in 862 to the city of Novgorod on the Volkhov River. Whether Rurik took the city by force or was invited to rule there, he certainly invested the city. From Novgorod, Rurik's successor Oleg extended the power of the city southward. In 882, he gained control of Kiev, a Slavic city that had arisen along the Dnepr River around the 5th century. 

   

The Mongols and the Emergence of Moscow (1237-1613)

Kievan Rus' struggled on into the 13th century, but was decisively destroyed by the arrival of a new invader--the Mongols. In 1237 Batu Khan, a grandson of Jenghiz Khan, launched an invasion into Kievan Rus' from his capital on the lower Volga (at present-day Kazan). Over the next three years the Mongols (or Tatars) destroyed all of the major cities of Kievan Rus' with the exceptions of Novgorod and Pskov. The regional princes were not deposed, but they were forced to send regular tribute to the Tatar state, which became known as the Empire of the Golden Horde. Invasions of Russia were attempted during this period from the west as well, first by the Swedes (1240) and then by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword (1242), a regional branch of the fearsome Teutonic Knights. In the best news of the era for Russia, both were decisively defeated by the great warrior Alexander Nevsky, a prince of Novgorod who earned his surname from his victory over the Swedes on the Neva River.

The Romanovs (1613-1825)

For the first few generations, the Romanovs were happy to maintain the status quo in Russia. They continued to centralize power, but they did very little to bring Russia up to speed with the rapid changes in economic and political life that were taking place elsewhere in Europe. Peter the Great decided to change all of that.

Peter the Great

Peter was his father's youngest son and the child of his second wife. When his father, Tsar Alexis, died in 1676 Peter’s brother Feodor became Tsar, but his poor health brought an early death in 1682. The family of Peter's mother succeeded in having him chosen over his mentally retarded brother Ivan to be Tsar, but no sooner was he established than the Ivan's family struck back. Gaining the support of the Kremlin Guard, they launched a coup d'etat, which resulted in a joint Tsar-ship, with both Peter and Ivan placed under the regency of Ivan's elder sister Sophia.

In 1689, just as Peter was to come of age, Sophia attempted another coup--this time, however, she was defeated and confined to Novodevichiy Convent. Six years later Ivan died, leaving Peter in sole possession of the throne.

Catherine the Great

The future Catherine the Great was born a German princess in one of the tiny German states, but turned out to be a powerful and enlightened ruler of the vast Russian Empire. In 1745 she was married to prince Carl Peter Ulrich, the heir to the Russian throne (the future Emperor Peter III). Being a bright personality with a strong sense of determination she joined the Russian Orthodox Church, learned the Russian language and by doing a lot of reading acquired a brilliant education. In June 1762 she took an active part in a coup against her husband Emperor Peter III. He was overthrown and soon killed "in an accident", while Catherine became Russia's ruler.

Napolean’s Invasion

In June of 1812, Napoleon began his fatal Russian campaign, a landmark in the history of the destructive potential of warfare. Virtually all of continental Europe was under his control, and the invasion of Russia was an attempt to force Tsar Alexander I to submit once again to the terms of a treaty that Napoleon had imposed upon him four years earlier. Having gathered nearly half a million soldiers, from France as well as all of the vassal states of Europe, Napoleon entered Russia at the head of the largest army ever seen. 

The Path to Revolution (1825-1920)

Since the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Russian Tsars had followed a fairly consistent policy of drawing more political power away from the nobility and into their own hands. This centralization of authority in the Russian state had usually been accomplished in one of two ways--either by simply taking power from the nobles and braving their opposition (Ivan the Terrible was very good at this), or by compensating the nobles for decreased power in government by giving them greater power over their land and its occupants. Serfdom, as this latter system was known, had increased steadily in Russia from the time of Ivan the Terrible, its inventor. By the time of Catherine the Great, the Russian Tsars enjoyed virtually autocratic rule over their nobles. However, they had in a sense purchased this power by granting those nobles virtually autocratic power over the serfs, who by this time had been reduced to a state closer to slavery than to peasantry.

The Provisional Government set up by the Duma attempted to pursue a moderate policy, calling for a return to order and promising reform of worker's rights. However, it was unwilling to endorse the most pressing demand of the soviets--an immediate end to the war. For the next 9 months, the Provisional Government, first under Prince Lvov and then under Alexandr Kerensky, unsuccessfully attempted to establish its authority. In the meanwhile, the Bolsheviks gained increasing support from the ever more frustrated soviets. On October 25, led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, they stormed the Winter Palace and deposed the Kerensky government.

The Soviet Era

The first few years of Soviet rule were marked by an extraordinary outburst of social and cultural change. Although the Bolsheviks had maintained complete control of the economy during the civil war, Lenin decided at its end that a partial return to a market economy would help the country recover from the destruction of the previous three years. His New Economic Policy, or NEP, brought about a period of relative prosperity, allowing the young Soviet government to consolidate its political position and rebuild the country's infrastructure. This was also the period during which the Russian Avant-Garde reached its height, developing the radical new styles of Constructivism, Futurism, and Suprematism. Although the country still faced enormous challenges, there was a widespread sense of optimism and opportunity.

Lenin's death in 1924 was followed by an extended and extremely divisive struggle for power in the Communist Party. By the latter part of the decade, Joseph Stalin had emerged as the victor, and he immediately set the country on a much different course. The NEP was scrapped, to be replaced by an economic plan dictated from the top. Agricultural lands were collectivized, creating large, state-run farms. Industrial development was pushed along at breakneck speed, and production was almost entirely diverted from consumer products to capital equipment. Art and literature were placed under much tighter control, and the radical energy of the Russian Avant-Garde was replaced by the solemn grandeur of Soviet realism. Religion was violently repressed, as churches were closed, destroyed, or converted to other uses. 

As was the case with the Napoleonic Wars, the Soviet Union emerged from World War II considerably stronger than it had been before the war. Although the country suffered enormous devastation and lost more than twenty million lives, it had gained considerable territory and now ranked as one of the two great world powers along with the United States. Nonetheless, life in the country continued to suffer. Industrial production was once again concentrated on heavy industry, agricultural failures produced widespread famine, political freedoms were restricted even further, and another huge wave of purges was carried out. As the Cold War got underway, an increasing proportion of the Soviet Union's resources were funneled into military projects, further exacerbating the quality of life. Stalin remained in power until 1953, when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Almost immediately after the death of Stalin, many of the repressive policies that he had instituted were dismantled. Under the leadership of Nikita Khruschev, political controls were to some degree relaxed, and cultural life experienced a brief period of revival. By the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev, as general secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), had become the next prominent Soviet leader. When Breshnev died in 1982 he was succeeded as general secretary first by Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, and then by Konstantin Chernenko, neither of whom managed to survive long enough to effect significant changes. In March of 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary, the need for reforms was pressing.

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The String theory

     In the last few decades, string theory has emerged as the most promising candidate for a microscopic theory of gravity. And it is infinitely more ambitious than that: it attempts to provide a complete, unified, and consistent description of the fundamental structure of our universe. (For this reason it is sometimes, quite arrogantly, called a 'Theory of Everything').
     The essential idea behind string theory is this: all of the different 'fundamental ' particles of the Standard Model are really just different manifestations of one basic object: a string. How can that be? Well, we would ordinarily picture an electron, for instance, as a point with no internal structure. A point cannot do anything but move. But, if string theory is correct, then under an extremely powerful 'microscope' we would realize that the electron is not really a point, but a tiny loop of string. A string can do something aside from moving--- it can oscillate in different ways. If it oscillates a certain way, then from a distance, unable to tell it is really a string, we see an electron. But if it oscillates some other way, well, then we call it a photon, or a quark, or a ... you get the idea. So, if string theory is correct, the entire world is made of strings!
     Perhaps the most remarkable thing about string theory is that such a simple idea works--- it is possible to derive (an extension of) the Standard Model (which has been verified experimentally with incredible precision) from a theory of strings. But it should also be said that, to date, there is no direct experimental evidence that string theory itself is the correct description of Nature. This is mostly due to the fact that string theory is still under development. We know bits and pieces of it, but we do not yet see the whole picture, and we are therefore unable to make definite predictions. In recent years many exciting developments have taken place, radically improving our understanding of what the theory is.

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The Universe building blocks

     We live in a wonderfully complex universe, and we are curious about it by nature. Time and again we have wondered--- why are we here? Where did we and the world come from? What is the world made of?It is our privilege to live in a time when enormous progress has been made towards finding some of the answers. String theory is our most recent attempt to answer the last (and part of the second) question.
     So, what is the world made of? Ordinary matter is made of atoms, which are in turn made of just three basic components: electrons whirling around a nucleus composed of neutrons and protons. The electron is a truly fundamental particle (it is one of a family of particles known as leptons), but neutrons and protons are made of smaller particles, known as quarks. Quarks are, as far as we know, truly elementary.
     Our current knowledge about the subatomic composition of the universe is summarized in what is known as the Standard Model of particle physics. It describes both the fundamental building blocks out of which the world is made, and the forces through which these blocks interact. There are twelve basic building blocks. Six of these arequarks--- they go by the interesting names of up, down, charm,strange, bottom and top. (A proton, for instance, is made of two up quarks and one down quark.) The other six are leptons--- these include the electron and its two heavier siblings, the muon and the tauon, as well as three neutrinos.
     There are four fundamental forces in the universe: gravity,electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Each of these is produced by fundamental particles that act as carriers of the force. The most familiar of these is the photon, a particle of light, which is the mediator of electromagnetic forces. (This means that, for instance, a magnet attracts a nail because both objects exchange photons.) The graviton is the particle associated with gravity. The strong force is carried by eight particles known as gluons. Finally, the weak force is transmitted by three particles, the W+, the W- , and the Z.
     The behavior of all of these particles and forces is described with impeccable precision by the Standard Model, with one notable exception: gravity. For technical reasons, the gravitational force, the most familiar in our every day lives, has proven very difficult to describe microscopically. This has been for many years one of the most important problems in theoretical physics-- to formulate a quantum theory of gravity.

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Life building blocks on a meteorite

     Researchers from the NASA Astrobiology Program have discovered amino acids in a meteorite where none were expected.
     “This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.” Glavin is lead author of a paper on this discovery appearing December 15 in Meteoritics and Planetary Science. “Finding them in this type of meteorite suggests that there is more than one way to make amino acids in space, which increases the chance for finding life elsewhere in the Universe.”
     Amino acids are used to make proteins, the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes, the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins. Previously, scientists at the Goddard Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory have found amino acids in samples of comet Wild 2 from NASA’s Stardust mission, and in various carbon-rich meteorites. Finding amino acids in these objects supports the theory that the origin of life got a boost from space — some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite impacts.

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Web 3.0

     Any veteran of the software industry will tell you that version 2.0 of any product tends to be a short lived staging post on the way to 3.0, which is where it finally hits the mark. Windows was a classic example. 1.0 was so buggy it was hardly worth using. 2.0 fixed some serious problems but still had a lot of shortcomings. 3.0, launched in May 1990, was an instant success, and the rest of the story, as they say, is history.
     Don’t be surprised, then, if Web 2.0 also turns out to be just a staging post on the way to a much more mature and durable Web 3.0 era.  Don’t assume Google, Amazon.com and eBay will inevitably become the dominant players of Web 3.0. There are some less obvious players, including WebEx, WebSideStory, NetSuite, Jamcracker, Rearden Commerce and Salesforce.com. Each of these companies shed interesting light on how Web 3.0 may develop. As with any shift from one generation to the next, there’s plenty of scope for new leaders to emerge — and for established front-runners to stumble — in the battle for supremacy.
     Web 3.0 isn’t just about shopping, entertainment and search. It’s also going to deliver a new generation of business applications that will see business computing converge on the same fundamental on-demand architecture as consumer applications. So this is not something that’s of merely passing interest to those who work in enterprise IT. It will radically change the organizations where they work and their own career paths.

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