:: wikimiki.org ::

Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan

Derived from Greek cosmos (the world) and polis (city), cosmopolitan describes something influenced by many cultures from around the world. Applied to people, a cosmopolitan is someone who has adopted a taste for cultures besides the one he or she was born into; thus living both a local and global life as a "citizen of the world."
- It is sometimes misused to mean only "the global", either as a person who is seasoned in ways of the world, or as an adjective, to describe something with a far-reaching impact.
- As Cosmopolitanism--a socio-political stance or movement regarding all persons in all nations as members of a single global community. Contrast with nationalism.
- Variants are the World Citizens and anationalism.
- As a synonym for worldly or sophisticated.
- It is sometimes used by antisemites as an euphemism for Jew. Stalin used a variant of this; rootless cosmopolitan.
- In biology, cosmopolitan refers to an animal or plant found all over the world, like the cosmopolite butterfly (Vanessa cardui).
- Also a popular magazine. See Cosmopolitan Magazine.
- A satellite/cable channel owned by the above magazine. See Cosmopolitan (television).
- A cosmopolitan also refers to a cocktail made with vodka, cranberry juice, and orange liquor.
- The Cosmopolitan is a resort and casino under construction in Las Vegas, Nevada. Category:Social groups

World

:This article is about the World, meaning the Earth. For uses of the specific phrase "The World", see The World (disambiguation) The World (disambiguation)] The World (disambiguation) In English, world is rooted in a compound of the obsolete words were, man, and eld, age; thus, its oldest meaning is "age or life of man". Its primary modern meaning is the planet Earth, especially when capitalized: the World. In this sense, a world map is a map of the surface of the Earth. World can also refer to human population in general or to a distinct group of people.
Physical locations
In other contexts, "world" is sometimes used to mean any planet or moon; for example, Mars and Titan are two worlds within the solar system. "World" is sometimes used to refer to the entire Universe. This is less common now that knowledge of space is more commonplace; however, it is still used vaguely in this sense (as in "the whole wide world"), which it is actually the most frequent sense in philosophy.
Other meanings
World can be used in less literal words; for example, two people with very little in common are "living in two different worlds." The "end of the world" usually means "the end of everything I am familiar with."
- In Christianity the world connotes the fallen and corrupt world order of human society outside the community of believers. The world is frequently cited alongside the flesh and the Devil as a source of temptation that Christians should flee. Monks speak of striving to be "in this world, but not of this world", and the term "worldhood" has been distinguished from "monkhood", the former being the status of merchants, farmers, and others who deal with "worldly" things.
- World can also refer to a fictional setting, for example the world of Star Trek or the world of The Lord of the Rings. See fictional realm.
- In knowledge engineering and knowledge level modeling, a system's world is the knowledge that system has about its environment.
- The term can also be used in a culturally specific context: commentators increasingly refer, for example, to the "Muslim world" as if it were a distinct entity.
- In Native American mythology, the Fifth World is the coming world that will exist after the current world.
- World can refer to WORLD Magazine, the fourth largest newsweekly in the United States.
- In Europe, the word "World" refers to Europe (and sometimes America as well).
First World, Second World, Third World
Europe]] The terms First World, Second World, and Third World were used to divide the nations of Earth into three broad categories. The three terms did not arise simultaneously. After World War II it became common to speak of the capitalist and Communist countries as two major blocs, scarcely using such terms as the "free world" as compared to the "communist bloc". The two "worlds" were not numbered. It was eventually pointed out that there were a great many countries that fit into neither category, and in the 1950s this latter group came to be called the Third World. It then began to seem that there ought to be a "First World" and a "Second World." These latter terms were always much less common. In the context of the Cold War:
- First World refers to nations that were within the Western European and United States' sphere of influence — e.g., the NATO countries of North America and Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and some of the former British colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
- Second World referred to nations within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence, principally the Warsaw Pact countries. Besides the Soviet Union proper, most of Eastern Europe was run by satellite governments working closely with Moscow. This term may or may not also refer to Communist countries whose leadership were at odds with Moscow, e.g. China and Yugoslavia. Recently, this term has been used to describe former Third World countries that have experienced too much development to be classified any longer as being a part of the Third World.
- Third World refers to nations within neither sphere of influence, who were often members of the Non-Aligned Movement. They were mostly developing countries, and many of them are located in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. They are often nations that were colonized by another nation in the past. After World War II, the First and Second Worlds struggled to expand their respective spheres of influence to the Third World. The militaries and intelligence services of the United States and the Soviet Union worked both secretly and overtly to influence Third World governments, with mixed success. There were a number of countries which did not fit comfortably into this neat definition of partition, including Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland, which chose to be neutral. Finland was under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence but was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact. Austria was under the United States' sphere of influence, but in 1955, when the country again became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remained neutral. With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the term "Second World" largely fell out of use, though the term "Third World" remains popular, mostly as another term for developing countries. The remaining Communist countries either became more isolated from the world economy, as in North Korea and Cuba, or began integrating capitalist concepts such as private enterprise into their societies and forging new trading ties with external capitalist economies, as in Vietnam and China. In more recent use, the term First World refers to developed nations, while Third World, in contrast, refers to developing/undeveloped nations. There is also the less commonly used term Fourth World, often used to refer to nations that lack any national representation at the UN, but that may enjoy representation at UNPO — indigenous peoples living within or across state boundaries. "The World" can also be used to refer to the group of people on the planet earth.
See also

- World economy Category:Culture Category:Geography Category:Universe ja:世界

Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism pertains to wide international experience. Cosmopolitan, meaning citizenship of the world; refers to a taste or consideration for cultures besides one's own culture of origin, as with a traveller or globally conscious person. The term derives from Greek cosmos (world) + polis (city, people, citizenry), and was widely used by ancient philosophers, such as the Stoics and Cynics, to describe a universal love of humankind as a whole, regardless of nation. The term may also be used as a synonym for worldly or sophisticated. In the realms of social and political philosophy, cosmopolitanism is the idea that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community; contrasted with ideologies of patriotism and nationalism. Cosmopolitanism may or may not entail some sort of world government; or may simply refer to more inclusive moral, economic, and/or political relationships between nations or individuals of different nations. Cosmopolitans believe there is a burden on all of the people to cultivate and improve humanity as a whole and to provide enrichment in the best way that they can. This ties into ideas of brotherhood of humanity, and how the human race is one entity that humans must all band together to support. Nation-states are in a Hobbseian state of nature amongst each other, and in order to avoid conflicts and injustices, a "social contract" should be established among them. The cosmopolitan writer, Klitou, argues in his book, "The Friends and Foes of Human Rights," that cosmopolitanism is a major friend and a necessary element of the human rights movement. Furthermore, Klitou argues that a cosmopolitan "Human identity" is as necessary for the truimph of human rights, as a European identity is for a politcal European Union. He controversially argues that, "This is a major dilemma for the European project. We have a European Union, but no Europeans or a European identity. The same is equally true for human rights. We have human rights, but no Humans or a human identity" (p. 44). Some critics of cosmopolitanism suggest that national affiliations are important to persons' identities, and that cosmopolitanism would strip an important component of social fulfillment and belonging from individuals. Critics of economic cosmopolitanism argue that the economies of nation-states are necessary for an international economy to function, and a single world economy would fail. Critics of moral cosmopolitanism argue that the concept of loyalty describes a virtue, and insofar as one does no wrong to people of other nation-states, one's priority should be the people of one's own country.

External link

- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/ Cosmopolitanism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Resources

- Amanda Anderson. 1998. Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity. In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, edited by P. Cheah and B. Robbins. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
- Bruce Robbins. 1998. Comparative Cosmopolitanisms. In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, edited by P. Cheah and B. Robbins. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
- 2005. The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, edited by Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse. [http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521846609 Cambridge University Press].

World citizen

A world citizen (or citizen of the world) is a person who wishes to transcend the geopolitical divisiveness inherent in the national citizenships of the various sovereign states and countries. In this respect the concept differs from internationalism, which is still based on the idea of nations. By refusing to accept a patriotic identity dictated by any national government, world citizens assert their independence as citizens of the Earth, the world, or the cosmos.

Overview

The first people to identify themselves as "world citizens" were the Stoic philosophers (see Zeno of Citium). The perspective of a world citizen has affinities with an existentialist philosophical outlook in that world citizens:
- do not want to be categorized by any artificially imposed categories :: and/or
- wish to identify themselves first and foremost as human beings and then by any groupings to which they may seem to belong. human Some world citizens may also:
- work for a reformed, strengthened, yet sufficiently decentralized United Nations which represents and responds to the will of the people of the world, more than to intergovernmental hagglings, and adheres to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, similar to a federal system on the national scale :: and/or
- work toward other developments to strengthen a common identity and harmony between their fellow world citizens on the planet, while respecting local and national loyalties and diversity. World citizens are not limited to any specific faith or ideology, but will often adhere to the following:
- freedom from all national, ethnic, racial, and religious prejudices
- belief in the basic equality of all sexes and support
- democratic globalization
- elimination of poverty
- international auxiliary languages
- uniform system of weights and measures
- universal currency
- universal education
- universal health care

Promoting world citizenship

- Promotion of the concept and its implications in public schools among students toward their building a sense of world identity and building support among them for the development of and progressive adherence to justly constituted global institutions and international law, just as national identity and loyalty has historically been promoted in most if not all countries
- Advocacy of the concept in media, drawing attention to the perceived inadequacy of attempts to rally people together sustainably solely under a national flag or identity

Famous world citizens

Some famous people who have identified themselves as world citizens:
- Socrates
- Zeno of Citium
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Erasmus
- Thomas Paine
- Bertrand Russell
- Noam Chomsky
- Linus Pauling
- Lord Boyd Orr
- Eugene V. Debs
- Albert Einstein
- Jules Verne
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Charles Chaplin
- Bahá'u'lláh
- Cyrano de Bergerac
- Bruce Lee

Euphemism

A euphemism is an expression intended by the speaker to be less offensive, disturbing, or troubling to the listener than the word or phrase it replaces, or in the case of doublespeak to make it less troublesome for the speaker. When a phrase is used as a euphemism, it often becomes a metaphor whose literal meaning is dropped. Euphemisms are often used to hide unpleasant or disturbing ideas, even when the literal term for them is not necessarily offensive. This type of euphemism is used in public relations and politics, where it is sometimes disparagingly called doublespeak. There are also superstitious euphemisms, based (consciously or unconsciously) on the idea that words have the power to bring bad fortune (for example, not speaking the word "cancer"; see Etymology and Common examples below) and religious euphemisms, based on the idea that some words are sacred, or that some words are spiritually imperiling (taboo; see Etymology and Religious euphemisms below).

Etymology

The word euphemism comes from the Greek word euphemos, meaning "auspicious/good/fortunate speech" which in turn is derived from the Greek root-words eu (ευ), "good/well" + pheme (φήμη) "speech/speaking". The eupheme was originally a word or phrase used in place of a religious word or phrase that should not be spoken aloud (see taboo). The primary example of taboo words requiring the use of a euphemism are the unspeakable names for a deity, such as Persephone, Hecate, Nemesis or Yahweh. By speaking only words favorable to the gods or spirits, the speaker attempted to procure good fortune by remaining in good favor with them. Historical linguistics has revealed traces of taboo deformations in many languages. Several are known to have occurred in Indo-European, including the original Indo-European words for bear (
- rtkos), wolf (
- wlk^wos), and deer (originally, hart). In different Indo-European languages, each of these words has a difficult etymology because of taboo deformations — a euphemism was substituted for the original, which no longer occurs in the language. An example is the Slavic root for bear—
- medu-ed-, which means "honey eater". In some languages of the Pacific, using the name of a deceased chief is taboo. Since people are often named after everyday things, this leads to the swift development of euphemisms. These languages have a very high rate of vocabulary change.

The "euphemism treadmill"

Euphemisms can eventually become taboo words themselves through a process the linguist Steven Pinker has called the euphemism treadmill (cf. Gresham's Law in economics). Words originally intended as euphemisms may lose their euphemistic value, acquiring the negative connotations of their referents. In some cases, they may be used mockingly and become dysphemistic. For example concentration camp was used by the British during the Second Boer War and until the Third Reich used the expression for their death camps, it was an acceptable description for the British concept. Since then new terms have been invented as euphemisms for them, such as internment camps, resettlement camps, fortified villages, etc. Also, in some versions of English, toilet room, itself a euphemism, was replaced with bathroom and water closet, which were replaced (respectively) with rest room and W.C. Connotations easily change over time. Idiot was once a neutral term, and moron a similar one. Negative senses of a word tend to crowd out neutral ones, so the word retarded was pressed into service to replace them. Now that too is considered rude, and as a result, new terms like mentally challenged or special have replaced retarded. In a few decades, calling someone special may well be a grave insult, and indeed among many young school students, it is already a common term of abuse, if not yet a particularly grave one. A similar progression occurred with :crippled → handicapped → disabled → differently-abled although in that case the meaning has also broadened; a dyslexic or colorblind person would not be termed crippled. The euphemism treadmill also occurs with notions of profanity and obscenity, but in the reverse direction. Words once called "offensive" were later described as "objectionable," and later "questionable." A complementary "dysphemism treadmill" exists, but is more rarely observed. One modern example is the word "sucks." "That sucks" began as American slang for "that is very unpleasant", and is shorthand for "that sucks dick." It developed over the late-20th century from being an extremely vulgar phrase to near-acceptability.
Classification of euphemisms
Many euphemisms fall into one or more of these categories:
- Terms of foreign and/or technical origin (derriere, copulation, perspire, urinate, security breach)
- Abbreviations (SOB for "son of a bitch", BS for "bullshit", TS for "tough shit", etc.)
- Abstractions (it, the situation, go, left the company, do it)
- Indirections (behind, unmentionables, privates, live together, go to the bathroom , sleep together)
- Mispronunciation (goldarnit, freakin, shoot, etc. 'See' minced oath)
- Plays on abbreviations (barbecue sauce for "bull shit", sugar honey ice tea for "shit", Maryland farmer for "motherfucker", etc.) There is some disagreement over whether certain terms are or are not euphemisms. For example, sometimes the phrase visually impaired is labeled as a politically correct euphemism for blind. However, visual impairment can be a broader term, including, for example, people who have partial sight in one eye, a group that would be excluded by the word blind. There are three antonyms of euphemism, dysphemism, cacophemism, and power word. The first can be either offensive or merely humorously deprecating with the second one generally used more often in the sense of something deliberately offensive. The last is used mainly in arguments to make a point seem more correct.
The evolution of euphemisms
Euphemisms may be formed in a number of ways. Periphrasis or circumlocution is one of the most common -- to "speak around" a given word, implying it without saying it. Over time, circumlocutions become recognized as established euphemisms for particular words or ideas. To alter the pronunciation or spelling of a taboo word (such as a swear word) to form a euphemism is known as taboo deformation. There are an astonishing number of taboo deformations in English, of which many refer to the infamous four-letter words. In American English, words which are unacceptable on television, such as fuck, may be represented by deformations such as freak — even in children's cartoons. Some examples of Cockney rhyming slang may serve the same purpose — to call a person a berk sounds less offensive than to call him a cunt, though berk is short for Berkshire Hunt which rhymes with cunt. Bureaucracies such as the military and large corporations frequently spawn euphemisms of a more deliberate (and to some, more sinister) nature. Organizations coin doublespeak expressions to describe objectionable actions in terms that seem neutral or inoffensive. For example, a term used for radiation leaked from an improperly operated nuclear power plant is sunshine units. Militaries at war frequently do kill people, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by mistake; in doublespeak, the first may be called neutralizing the target and the second collateral damage. A common term when a soldier accidentally is killed (buys the farm) by the side they are fighting for is friendly fire. ("Buy the farm" has its own interesting [http://www.snopes.com/language/phrases/farm.htm history].) Execution is an established euphemism referring to the act of putting a person to death, with or without judicial process. Likewise, industrial unpleasantness such as pollution may be toned down to outgassing or runoff — descriptions of physical processes rather than their damaging consequences. Some of this may simply be the application of precise technical terminology in the place of popular usage, but beyond precision, the advantage of technical terminology may be its lack of emotional undertones, the disadvantage being the lack of real-life context.
Euphemisms for the profane
Profane words and expressions are generally taken from three areas: religion, excretion, and sex. While profanities themselves have been around for some time, their limited use in public and by the media has only in the past decade become socially acceptable, and there are still many expressions which cannot be used in polite conversation. The common marker of acceptability would appear to be use on prime-time television or in the presence of children. Thus, damn (and most other religious profanity) is acceptable, and as a consequence, euphemisms for religious profanity have taken on a very stodgy feeling. Excretory profanity such as piss and shit may be acceptable in adult conversation, while euphemisms like Number One and Number Two are preferred for use with children. Most sexual terms and expressions either remain unacceptable for general use or have undergone radical rehabilitation (penis and vagina, for instance).
Religious euphemisms
Euphemisms for God and Jesus are used by Christians to avoid taking the name of God in a vain oath, which would violate one of the Ten Commandments. Euphemisms for hell, damnation, and the devil, on the other hand, are often used to avoid invoking the power of the adversary.
Excretory euphemisms
While urinate and defecate are not euphemisms, they are used almost exclusively in a clinical sense. The basic Anglo-Saxon words for these functions, piss and shit, are considered vulgarities, despite the use of piss in the King James Bible (in Isaiah 36:12 and elsewhere). The word manure, referring to animal feces used as fertilizer for plants, literally means "worked with the hands", alluding to the mixing of manure with earth. Several zoos market the byproduct of elephants and other large herbivores as Zoo Doo, and there is a brand of chicken manure available in garden stores under the name Cock-a-Doodle Doo. Similarly, the string of letters BS often replaces the word bullshit in polite society. There are any number of lengthier periphrases for excretion used to excuse oneself from company, such as to powder one's nose or to see a man about a horse (or dog). Slang expressions which are neither particularly euphemistic nor dysphemistic, such as take a leak, form a separate category.
Sexual euphemisms
The term pudendum for the genitals literally means "shameful thing". Groin and crotch refer to a larger region of the body, but are euphemistic when used to refer to the genitals. Virtually all other sexual terms are still considered profane and unacceptable for use even in a euphemistic sense.
Euphemisms for death
The English language contains numerous euphemisms related to dying, death, burial, and the people and places which deal with death. The practice of using euphemisms for death is likely to have originated with the "magical" belief that to speak the word 'death' was to invite death (where to "draw Death's attention" is the ultimate bad-fortune -- a common theory holds that death is a taboo subject in most English-speaking cultures for precisely this reason). It may be said that one is not dying, but fading quickly because the end is near. People who have died are referred to as having passed away or passed or departed. Deceased is a euphemism for 'dead', and sometimes the deceased is said to have gone to a better place, but this is used primarily among the religious with a concept of heaven. There are many euphemisms for the dead body, some polite and some profane, as well as dysphemisms such as worm food, or dead meat. The corpse was once referred to as the shroud (or house or tenement) of clay, and modern funerary workers use terms such as the loved one (title of a novel about Hollywood undertakers by Evelyn Waugh) or the dearly departed. (They themselves have given up the euphemism funeral director for grief therapist, and hold arrangement conferences with relatives.) Among themselves, mortuary technicians often refer to the corpse as the client. Contemporary euphemisms and dysphemisms for death tend to be quite colorful, and someone who has died is said to have passed away, passed on, bit the big one, bought the farm, croaked, given up the ghost, kicked the bucket, gone south, tits up, shuffled off this mortal coil (from William Shakespeare's Hamlet), or assumed room temperature. When buried, they may be said to be pushing up daisies or taking a dirt nap. There are hundreds of such expressions in use. Euthanasia also attracts euphemisms. One may put him out of his misery, or put him to sleep, the latter phrase being used primarily with non-humans. There are a few euphemisms for killing which are neither respectful nor playful, but rather clinical and detached. Some examples of this type are terminate, wet work, to take care of one or to take them for a ride, to do them in, to off, frag, smoke, or waste someone. To cut loose (from U.S. Sgt. Massey's account of activities during the American occupation of Iraq) or open up on someone, means 'to shoot at with every weapon available'. The Dead Parrot Sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus contains an extensive list of euphemisms for death, referring to the deceased parrot that the character played by John Cleese purchases (the sketch has led to another euphemism for death: "pining for the fjords"). A similar passage occurs near the beginning of The Twelve Chairs, where Bezenchuk, the undertaker, astonishes Vorobyaninov with his classification of people by the euphemisms used to speak of their deaths.
Doublespeak
What distinguishes doublespeak from other euphemisms is its deliberate usage by governmental, military, or corporate institutions. Doublespeak is in turn distinguished from jargon in that doublespeak attempts to confuse and conceal the truth, while jargon often provides greater precision to those that understand it (while inadvertently confusing those who don't). An example of the distinction is the use by the military of the word casualties instead of deaths — what may appear to be an attempt to hide the fact that people have been killed is actually a precise way of saying "personnel who have been rendered incapable of fighting, whether by being killed, being badly wounded, psychologically damaged, incapacitated by disease, rendered ineffective by having essential equipment destroyed, or disabled in any other way." "Casualties" is used instead of "deaths," not for propagandistic or squeamish reasons, but because most casualties are not dead, but nevertheless useless for waging war. Proper examples of doublespeak included taking friendly fire as a euphemism for being attacked by your own troops. Commentators such as Noam Chomsky and George Orwell have written at length about the dangers of allowing such euphemisms to shape public perceptions and national policy. Violent countercultural groups and their apologists have doublespeak of their own, such as replacing "sabotage" and "vandalism" with "direct action."
Common examples
Other common euphemisms include:
- restroom for toilet room (the word toilet was itself originally a euphemism). This is an Americanism.
- making love to, playing with or sleeping with for having sexual intercourse with
- motion discomfort bag and air-sickness bag for vomit bag
- sanitary landfill for garbage dump (and a temporary garbage dump is a transfer station)
- pre-owned vehicles for used cars
- the big C for cancer (in addition, some people whisper the word when they say it in public, and doctors have euphemisms to use in front of patients)
- bathroom tissue, t.p., or bath tissue for toilet paper (Usually used by toilet paper manufacturers)
- custodian for janitor (also originally a euphemism—in Latin, it means doorman.)
- sanitation worker for "garbage man"
- Where can I wash my hands? or Where can I powder my nose? for Where can I find a toilet?. (This is also an Americanism. If this question is asked in Europe to someone not used to American habits the person who asks the question might actually end up at a place where there just only is a washbasin and not at a place equipped according to their needs. On the other hand, Americans might find the more direct question rude if asked by Europeans who don't know about this euphemism.) These lists might suggest that most euphemisms are well-known expressions. Often euphemisms can be somewhat situational; what might be used as a euphemism in a conversation between two friends might make no sense to a third person. In this case, the euphemism is being used as a type of innuendo. As an example, in the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the Banks family (who are black) discuss Hilary's new boyfriend, who happens to be white, using tall as a euphemism for white. Will, who apparently doesn't catch on, remarks that he is the only one who seems to notice the new boyfriend is white. The inflation of occupational titles is similar to the euphemism treadmill. For instance, the engineering professions have traditionally resisted the tendency by other technical trades to appropriate the prestige of the title engineer. Most people calling themselves software engineers or network engineers are not, in fact, accredited in engineering. Extreme cases, such as sanitation engineer for janitor are cited humorously more often than they are used seriously. In the television cartoon series "The Flintstones", Fred takes a job as the live-in superintendent of a large apartment building and is given a title using the word engineer to make his job sound more important than it actually is. As he and his wife are moving in, a policeman is about to write him a parking ticket for being illegally parked in front of the building. He informs the officer that he is (as the building's owner referred to him) the "Resident Stationary Engineer" for the building. The cop turns to him and says, "I don't care if you are the janitor, move this car now!" Less extreme cases, such as custodian for janitor, are considered more terms of respect than euphemisms. The word euphemism itself can be used as a euphemism. In the animated short It's Grinch Night (See Dr. Seuss), a child asks to go to the euphemism, where euphemism is being used as a euphemism for outhouse. This euphemistic use of "euphemism" originally occurred in the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where a character requests, "Martha, will you show her where we keep the, uh, euphemism?".
See also

- Minced oaths
- Bypassing
- Politeness
- Doublespeak
- Spin (public relations)
- Toilet humour
- F-word
- Framing (communication theory)
- Code word (figure of speech)
- Bowdlerisation
- List of sexual slang
References

- Rawson, Hugh, A Dictionary of Euphemism & Other Doublespeak, second edition, 1995. ISBN 0517702010
- R.W.Holder: How Not to Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms, Oxford University Press, 501 pages, 2003. ISBN 0198607628
- Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression (ISSN US 0363-3659)
External links

- [http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/ct.wg.euphemism.html Propaganda critic: Euphemisms]
- [http://phrontistery.50megs.com/longpig/dead.html Dead and Buried: Death Euphemisms]
- [http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/cumming/ling50/euphemism+dysphemism.htm Language & Power: Euphemism and dysphemism]
- [http://www.figarospeech.com Figures of speech, served up fresh] Category:slang Category:Figures of speech Category:Rhetoric Category:Propaganda In the

Stalin

(Russian, in full: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин (Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin), real name: Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), Georgian: იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი (Ioseb Jughashvili); December 6 (OS)/December 18 (NS), 1878 – March 5, 1953) was the leader of the Soviet Union from mid-1920s to his death in 1953 and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953), a position which had later become that of party leader. Stalin became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922 and following the death of Vladimir Lenin, he prevailed over Leon Trotsky in a power struggle during the 1920s. In the 1930s Stalin eliminated effective political opposition both within the Party and among the population (see Gulag) and consolidated his authority with the Great Purge, a period of widespread arrests and executions which reached its peak in 1937, remaining in power through World War II and until his death. Stalin molded the features that characterized the new Soviet regime; his policies, based on Marxist–Leninist ideology, are often considered to represent a political and economic system called Stalinism. Under Stalin, who replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s with five year plans (introduced in 1928) and collective farming, the Soviet Union was transformed from a largely peasant society to a major world industrial power by the end of the 1930s. Since many peasants resisted collectivization, the government resorted to often violent repression against the "kulaks," resulting in millions of deaths. A hard-won victory in World War II (the Great Patriotic War, 1941–45), made possible in part through the capacity for production that was the outcome of industrialization, laid the groundwork for the formation of the Warsaw Pact and established the USSR as one of the two major world powers, a position it maintained for nearly four decades following Stalin's death in 1953. Stalin's cult of personality, his extreme concentration of power and the means of its execution defines him as a dictator. He was directly or indirectly responsible, via his policies, for tens of millions of deaths and unjust deportations to labour camps in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's actual successor, denounced his mass repressions and cult of personality in 1956, initiating the process of "de-Stalinization". Apparently Winston Churchill once said of Stalin: "The outside world was at liberty to wonder respectfully at the hidden meaning of his actions."

Childhood and early years

de-Stalinization.]] Stalin was born in Gori, Georgia, to a cobbler named Vissarion Jughashvili. His mother, Ekaterina Geladze, was born a serf. Their other three children died young; Joseph, nicknamed "Soso" (the Georgian pet name for Joseph), was effectively the only child. Vissarion Ivanovich Jughashvili was a former serf who, when freed, became a cobbler. He opened his own shop, but quickly went bankrupt, forcing him to work in a shoe factory in Tiflis (Archer 11). Rarely seeing his family and drinking heavily, Vissarion often beat his wife and small son. One of Stalin's friends from childhood wrote, "Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father." The same friend also wrote that he never saw him cry (Hoober 15). Another of his childhood friends, Iremashvili, felt that the beatings by Stalin's father gave him a hatred of authority. He also said that anyone with power over others reminded Stalin of his father's cruelty. One of the people for whom Ekaterina did laundry and housecleaning was a Gori Jew, David Papismedov. Papismedov gave Joseph, who would help out his mother, money and books to read, and encouraged him. Decades later, Papismedov came to the Kremlin to learn what had become of little Soso. Stalin surprised his colleagues by not only receiving the elderly man, but happily chatting with him in public places. In 1888, Stalin's father left to live in Tiflis, leaving the family without support. Rumors said he died in a drunken bar fight; however, others said they had seen him in Georgia as late as 1931. At the age of eight, Soso began his education at the Gori Church School. When attending school in Gori, Soso was among a very diverse group of students. Stalin and most of his classmates were Georgian and spoke mostly Georgian. However, at school they were forced to use Russian. Even when speaking in Russian, their Russian teachers mocked Stalin and his classmates because of their Georgian accents. His peers were mostly the sons of affluent priests, officials, and merchants. Although Stalin later sought to hide his Georgian origins, during his childhood he was fascinated by Georgian folklore. The stories he read told of Georgian mountaineers who valiantly fought for Georgian independence. Stalin's favorite hero of these stories was a legendary mountain ranger named Koba, which became his first alias as a revolutionary. He graduated first in his class and at age 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, a Russian Orthodox institution which he attended from 1894 and onward. In addition to the small stipend from the scholarship he was also paid for singing in the choir. Although his mother wanted him to be a priest (even after he had become leader of the Soviet Union), he attended seminary not because of any religious vocation, but because it was one of the few educational opportunities available as the Tsarist government of Russia was wary of establishing a university in Georgia. Tsarist government] Stalin's involvement with the socialist movement (or, to be more exact, the branch of it that later became the communist movement) began at the seminary. During these school years, Stalin joined a Georgian Social-Democratic organization, and began propagating Marxism. Stalin was expelled from the seminary in 1899 for these actions. He worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, experiencing repeated arrests and exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917. He adhered to Vladimir Lenin's doctrine of a strong centralist party of professional revolutionaries. His practical experience made him useful in Lenin's Bolshevik party, gaining him a place on its Central Committee in January 1912. Some historians have suggested that, during this period, Stalin was actually a Tsarist spy, who was working to infiltrate the Bolshevik party, but there are no reliable documents to substantiate this. In 1913 he adopted the name Stalin, which means "steel man" in Russian. His only significant contribution to the development of the Marxist theory at this time was a treatise, written while he was briefly in exile in Vienna, Marxism and the national question. It presents an orthodox Marxist position on this important debate. This treatise may have contributed to his appointment as People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs after the revolution (see Lenin's article On the right of nations to self-determination[http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/] for comparison).

Marriages and family

People's Commissar Stalin's first wife was called Ekaterina Svanidze, he married for just three years until her death in 1907. At her funeral, Stalin said that any warm feelings he had for people died with her, for only she could mend his heart. With her he had a son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, with whom he did not get along in later years. His son tried to kill himself, unsucessfully, resulting in serious injuries. Stalin was quoted to have laughed at the boy, saying, "Ha! He could not even shoot straight!" Yakov served in the Red Army and was captured by the Germans. They offered to exchange him for a German General, but Stalin turned the offer down, allegedly saying "A lieutenant is not worth a General," and Yakov is said to have died running into an electric fence in the camp where he was being held. This however, is the "official report", and to this day, his cause of death is not known. Nonetheless, there are many who believe his death was a suicide. People's CommissarHis second wife was Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who died in 1932; she may have committed suicide by shooting herself after a quarrel with Stalin, leaving a suicide note which according to their daughter was "partly personal, partly political". "Officially", she died of an illness, but other theories claim that Stalin himself killed her. It is alleged that Stalin had said "She died an enemy," at her funeral. With her, he had two children: a son, Vassili, and a daughter, Svetlana. Vassili rose through the ranks of the Soviet Air Force, but died an alcoholic death in 1962. Stalin doted on Svetlana when she was young, but she ended up defecting from the Soviet Union in 1967. Stalin's mother died in 1937; he did not attend the funeral but instead sent a wreath. Stalin is said to have remained bitter at his mother because of her forcing him to join the Tiflis Theological Seminary, and is reputed to have called her "an old whore." In March 2001, Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson living in Novokuznetsk. Yuri Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage, but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, he was told to keep quiet. Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn had mentioned a son being born to Stalin and his common law wife, Lida, in 1918 during his exile in northern Siberia.

Rise to power

Siberia In 1912 Stalin was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the Prague Party Conference. In 1917 Stalin was editor of Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership were in exile. Following the February Revolution, Stalin and the editorial board took a position in favor of supporting Kerensky's provisional government and, it is alleged, went to the extent of declining to publish Lenin's articles arguing for the provisional government to be overthrown. When Lenin returned from exile, he wrote the April Theses which put forward his position. In April 1917, Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the Politburo of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the remainder of his life. According to many accounts, Stalin only played a minor role in the revolution of November 7.Other writers such as Adam Ulam stressed that each man in the Central Committee had a job he was assigned to do. The following summary of Trotsky's Role in 1917 was given by Stalin in Pravda, November 6th 1918: "All practical work in connection with the organisation of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organised." (Although this passage was quoted in Stalin's book "The October Revolution" issued in 1934, it was expunged in Stalin's Works released in 1949). Later, in 1924, Stalin himself created a myth around a so-called "Party Centre" which "directed" all practical work pertaining to the uprising, consisting of himself, Sverdlov, Dzherzhinsky, Uritsky, and Bubnov. However, no evidence was ever shown for the activity of this "centre", which was anyway, subordinate to the Military Revolutionary Council, headed by - Trotsky. During the Russian Civil War and Polish-Soviet War, Stalin was a political commissar in the Red Army at various fronts. Stalin's first government position was as People's Commissar of Nationalities Affairs (1917–23). Also, he was People's Commissar of Workers and Peasants Inspection (1919–22), a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the republic (1920–23) and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (from 1917). In April 1922, Stalin became general secretary of the ruling Communist Party, a post that he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country. This position was an unwanted one within the party (Stalin was sometimes referred to as "Comrade Card-Index" by fellow party members) but Stalin saw its potential as a power base. The position had great influence on who joined the party. This allowed him to fill the party with his allies. Stalin's accumulation of personal power increasingly alarmed the dying Lenin, and in Lenin's Testament he famously called for the removal of the "rude" Stalin, also stating that Stalin's views were too extreme and violent. However, this document was suppressed by members of the Central Committee, many of whom were also criticised by the Bolshevik leader in the testament. After Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev together governed the party, placing themselves ideologically between Trotsky (on the left wing of the party) and Bukharin (on the right). During this period, Stalin abandoned the traditional Bolshevik emphasis on international revolution in favor of a policy of building "Socialism in One Country", in contrast to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. Stalin would soon switch sides and join with Bukharin. Together they fought a new opposition of Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin was supreme among the leadership, and the following year Trotsky was exiled because of his intrigues. Having also outmaneuvered Bukharin's Right Opposition and now advocating collectivization and industrialization, Stalin can be said to have exercised control over the party and the country. However, as the popularity of other leaders such as Sergei Kirov and the so-called Ryutin Affair were to demonstrate, Stalin did not achieve absolute power until the Great Purge of 1936–38.

Stalin and changes in Soviet society

Industrialization

Main article: Industrialization of the USSR. The Russian Civil War had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. Under Stalin's direction, the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism, was replaced by a system of centrally ordained Five-Year Plans in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. The Soviet Union, generally ranked as the poorest nation in Europe in 1922, now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far surpassing Germany's pace of industrialization in the 19th century and Japan's earlier in the 20th. With no seed capital, little international trade, and barely any modern industry to start with, Stalin's government financed industrialization by both restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the peasantry. In 1933, worker's real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. There was also use of the almost free labor of prisoners in forced-labor camps and the frequent "mobilization" of communists and Komsomol members for various construction projects.

Collectivization

Main article: Collectivization in the USSR Collectivization in the USSR Stalin's regime moved to force collectivization of agriculture. This was in order to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, to make tax collection more efficient, and to provide workers for Gulags. Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced widespread and often violent resistance among the peasantry. In the first years of collectivization, it was estimated that industrial and agricultural production would rise by 200% and 50%, respectively; however, agricultural production actually dropped. Stalin blamed this unexpected drop on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. Therefore those defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers" and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge. The two-stage progress of collectivization — interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy with success"[http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/DS30.html] (Pravda, March 2, 1930), and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" [http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/RCFC30.html] (Pravda, April 3, 1930)— is a prime example of his capacity for tactical retreats. Many historians agree that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major famines which caused up to 5 million deaths in 1932–33, particularly in Ukraine and the lower Volga region. (Chairman Mao Zedong of China would trigger a similar famine in 1958 to 1960 with his Great Leap Forward.) Not only rich peasants were killed. The Black Book of Communism documents that all grains were taken from areas that did not meet targets, including the next year's seed grain. It also documents that peasants were forced to remain in the starving areas, sales of train tickets were stopped, and the State Political Directorate set up barriers to prevent people from leaving the starving areas (p. 164). The Soviet Union exported grain while millions of Soviet citizens were starving to death (p. 167). Similar detailed references can be found here [http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/health/hunger/famine/soviet_famine.html].

Science

Main article: Research in the Soviet Union. Science in the Soviet Union was under strict ideological control, along with art, literature and everything else. On the positive side, there was significant progress in "ideologically safe" domains due to the free Soviet education system and state-financed research. However, in several cases the consequences of ideological pressure were dramatic, the most notable examples being the "bourgeois pseudosciences," genetics and cybernetics. In the late 1940s there were also attempts to suppress special and general relativity, as well as quantum mechanics, on grounds of "idealism." However, top Soviet physicists made it clear that without using these theories, they would be unable to create a nuclear bomb. Linguistics was the only area of Soviet academic thought to which Stalin personally and directly contributed. At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovievich Marr, who argued that language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, felt he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work discussing linguistics is a small essay, Marxism and Linguistic Questions . Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics. Scientific research in nearly all areas was hindered by the fact that many scientists were sent to labor camps (including Lev Landau, later a Nobel Prize winner, who spent a year in prison in 1938–39) or executed (e.g. Lev Shubnikov, shot in 1937). They were persecuted for their (real or imaginary) dissident views, and seldom for "politically incorrect" research. Nevertheless, great progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. It laid the ground for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of Sputnik in 1957. Indeed, many politicians in the United States began to fear, after the "Sputnik crisis," that their country had been eclipsed by the Soviet Union in science and in public education.

Social services

Sputnik crisis Stalin's government placed heavy emphasis on the provision of free medical services. Campaigns were carried out against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors was increased as rapidly as facilities and training would permit; and death and infant mortality rates steadily declined. Education in primary schools continued to be free and was expanded, with many more Soviet citizens learning to read and write, and higher education also expanded. Stalin was the only ruler in the history of Russia and Soviet Union who established fees for secondary education in public schools. With the industrialization and heavy human losses due to the World War II and repressions the generation that survived under Stalin saw a major expansion in job opportunities, especially for women.

Culture and religion

It was during Stalin's reign that the official and long-lived style of Socialist Realism was established for painting, sculpture, music, drama and literature. Previously fashionable "revolutionary" expressionism, abstract art, and avant-garde experimentation were discouraged or denounced as "formalism." Careers were made and broken, some more than once. Famous figures were not only repressed, but often persecuted, tortured and executed, both "revolutionaries" (among them Isaac Babel, Vsevolod Meyerhold) and "non-conformists" (for example, Osip Mandelstam). A minority, both representing the "Soviet man" (Arkady Gaidar) and remnants of the older pre-revolutionary Russia (Konstantin Stanislavski), thrived. A number of former emigrés returned to the Soviet Union, among them Alexei Tolstoi in 1925, Alexander Kuprin in 1936, and Alexander Vertinsky in 1943. It is of note that Anna Akhmatova was subjected to several cycles of suppression and rehabilitation, but was never herself arrested, although her first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, had been shot in 1921, and her son, historian Lev Gumilev, spent two decades in the Gulag. The degree of Stalin's personal involvement in general and specific developments has been assessed variously. His name, however, was constantly invoked during his reign in discussions of culture as in just about everything else; and in several famous cases, his opinion was final. Stalin's occasional beneficence showed itself in strange ways. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov was driven to poverty and despair; yet, after a personal appeal to Stalin, he was allowed to continue working. His play, The Days of the Turbines, with its sympathetic treatment of an anti-Bolshevik family caught up in the Civil War, was finally staged, apparently also on Stalin's intervention, and began a decades-long uninterrupted run at the Moscow Arts Theater. Bulgakov was relatively fortunate - in the vast majority of cases, appeals had little effect and the slightest displeasure caused to others or guilt by any association was tantamount to a harsh sentence, if not death. Some insights into Stalin's political and esthetic thinking might perhaps be gleaned by reading his favorite novel, Pharaoh, by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus, a historical novel on mechanisms of political power. Similarities have been pointed out between this novel and Sergei Eisenstein's film, Ivan the Terrible, produced under Stalin's tutelage. In architecture, a Stalinist Empire Style (basically, updated neoclassicism on a very large scale, exemplified by the seven skyscrapers of Moscow) replaced the constructivism of the 1920s. An amusing anecdote has it that the Moskva Hotel in Moscow was built with mismatched side wings because Stalin had mistakenly signed off on both of the two proposals submitted, and the architects had been too afraid to clarify the matter. (This was actually just a joke: the hotel had been built by two independent teams of architects that had different visions of how the hotel should look.) Stalin's role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex. Continuous persecution in the 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been levelled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were dead or imprisoned. During World War II, however, the Church was allowed a partial revival, as a patriotic organization: thousands of parishes were reactivated, until a further round of suppression in Khrushchev's time. The Church Synod's recognition of the Soviet government and of Stalin personally led to a schism with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia that remains not fully healed to the present day. Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects were outlawed and persecuted. Stalin's rule had a largely disruptive effect on the numerous indigenous cultures that made up the Soviet Union. The politics of the Korenization and forced development of Cultures National by Form, Socialist by their substance was arguably beneficial to later generations of indigenous cultures in allowing them to integrate more easily into Russian society. However, the unification of the cultures evident from the second half of the Stalin citation, was very harmful. The political repressions and purges had even more devastating repercussions on the indigenous cultures than on the urban ones, since the cultural elite of the indigenous culture was often not very numerous. The traditional lives of many peoples in the Siberian, Central Asian and Caucasian provinces was upset and large populations were displaced and scattered in order to prevent nationalist uprisings. Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism underwent the same or worse ordeals as the Orthodox church in other parts: thousands of monks were tortured and executed, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and so on were razed.

Purges and deportations

The purges

Main article: Great Purge Stalin, as head of the Politburo, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s that started with a Great Purge of his political and ideological opponents (real or merely suspected), culminating not only in the extermination of the majority of the original Bolshevik Central Committee, and of over half of the largely pliant delegates of the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, but also of huge swathes of the population. Measures ranged from imprisonment in Gulag labor camps to execution after a show trial or summary trial by NKVD troikas. Some argue that a motive for the purge was a feeling that the Party needed to be unified in the face of anticipated conflict with Nazi Germany; others believe that it was motivated only by Stalin's desire to consolidate his own power. Several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. There were four key trials during this period: the Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936); Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); the trial of Red Army generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky (June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One (including Bukharin) in March 1938. Trotsky's August 1940 assassination in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since 1936, eliminated the last of Stalin's opponents among the former Party leadership. Only three members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) now remained in Politburo —Stalin himself, "the all-Union Chieftain" (всесоюзный староста) Mikhail Kalinin, and Chairman of Sovnarkom Vyacheslav Molotov. The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a "river of blood" separated Stalin's regime from that of Lenin. In contrast, Solzhenitsyn is among those who argued that Stalin only continued the political repressions that had started under Lenin's regime, such as labor camps and express executions of political opponents. No segment of society was left untouched during the purges. Article 58 of the legal code, listing prohibited "anti-Soviet activities", was applied in the broadest manner. Initially, the execution lists for the enemies of the people were confirmed by the Politburo. Over time the procedure was greatly simplified and delegated down the line of command. People would inform on others arbitrarily, to attempt to redeem themselves, or to gain small retributions. The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an "Enemy of the People", starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam and one of the key memoirists of the Purges, recalls being shouted at by Akhmatova, also a famous Russian poet: "Don't you understand? They are arresting people for nothing now?" The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD. Towards the end of the purge, the Politburo relieved NKVD head Nikolai Yezhov, from his position for overzealousness. He was subsequently executed. Some historians such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest postulate that Stalin had Yezhov and his predecessor, Yagoda, removed in order to deflect blame from himself.

Deportations

Main article: Population transfer in the Soviet Union Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union. Over 1.5 million people were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics. Separatism, resistance to Soviet rule and collaboration with the invading Germans were cited as the main official reasons for the deportations. The following ethnic groups were deported completely or partially: Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians. Large numbers of Kulaks, regardless of their nationality, were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportations as a violation of Leninist principles, and reversed most of them, although it was not until as late as 1991 that the Tatars, Meskhs and Volga Germans were allowed to return en masse to their homelands. The deportations had a profound effect on the peoples of the Soviet Union. The memory of the deportations played a major part in the separatist movements in the Baltic republics, Tatarstan and Chechnya.

Death toll

It is generally agreed by historians that if famines, prison and labor camp mortality, and state terrorism (deportations and political purges) are taken into account, Stalin and his colleagues were directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions. How many millions died under Stalin is greatly disputed. Comparison of the 1926–37 census results suggests 5–10 million deaths in excess of what would be normal in the period, mostly through famine in 1931–34. The 1926 census shows the population of the Soviet Union at 147 million and in 1937 another census found a population of between 162 and 163 million. This was 14 million less than the projected population value and was suppressed as a "wrecker's census" with the census takers severely punished. A census was taken again in 1939, but its published figure of 170 million has been generally attributed directly to the decision of Stalin (see also Demographics of the Soviet Union). Note that the figure of 14 million does not have to imply 14 million additional deaths, since as many as 3 million may be births that never took place due to reduced fertility and choice. Since "the margin of error" with regard to the number of Stalin's victims is virtually impossible to narrow down to a universally accepted figure, various historians have come up with extremely varying [http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Stalin estimates of the number of victims], with the most likely figure of 20 million. A quote popularly attributed to Stalin is "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." (Possibly said in response to Churchill at the Potsdam Conference in 1945).

World War II

Potsdam Conference] After declining Franco-British missions to Moscow in hopes that the USSR would enter a treaty of Polish defense with them, Stalin began to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Hitler's Germany. In his speech on August 19, 1939, Stalin prepared his comrades for the great turn in Soviet policy, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. Officially a non-aggression treaty only, it had a 'secret' annex according to which Central Europe was divided into the two powers' respective spheres of influence. The exact motivations behind this pact are disputed, but it appears that neither side expected it to last very long. On September 1 1939, the German invasion of Poland started World War II. According to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact [popularly known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact], Eastern Poland was in the Soviet sphere of influence. Hence, Stalin decided to intervene and on September 17 the Red Army invaded Poland as well. Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to modify the spheres of influences slightly and Poland was divided between these two states. According to the 'secret' annex of the pact, the Soviets were promised a slice of Poland, the annexation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and an undisturbed military advance on Finland, which the Soviets acted on almost immediately. In November, 1939, Stalin sent troops over the Finnish border provoking war. The Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland proved to be more difficult than Stalin and the Red Army was prepared for, and the Soviets sustained high casualties. The Soviets finally prevailed in March, 1940, but their inferior army had been revealed to the rest of the world, including Germany. In June 1941, Hitler broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Stalin had not expected this — or at the very least, he had not expected an invasion to come so soon — and the Soviet Union was largely unprepared for this invasion. Until the last moment, Stalin had sought to avoid any obvious defensive preparation which might provoke German attack, in the hope of buying time to modernize and strengthen his military forces. Even after the attack commenced, Stalin appeared unwilling to accept the fact and, according to some historians, was too stunned to react appropriately for a number of days. A controversial theory put forward by Viktor Suvorov asserts that Stalin had been preparing an invasion of Germany while neglecting preparations for defensive warfare, which left Soviet forces vulnerable despite their heavy concentration near the border. Such speculations are difficult to substantiate, as information on the Soviet Army from 1939 to 1941 remains classified, but it is known that the Soviets had advanced and detailed warnings of the German invasion through their extensive foreign intelligence agents, such as Richard Sorge. The Nazis initially made huge advances, capturing and killing millions of Soviet troops. The 1937–38 execution of many of the Red Army's experienced generals had a severely debilitating effect on the ability of the USSR to organize defences. Hitler's experts had expected eight weeks of war, and early indications evidenced their prescience. In response on November 6 1941, Stalin addressed the Soviet Union for only the second time during his three-decade rule (the first time was earlier that year on July 2). He claimed that although 350,000 troops had been killed by German attacks, the Germans had lost 4.5 million soldiers (an inflated figure) and that Soviet victory was near. The Soviet Red Army did put up fierce resistance, but during the war's early stages was largely ineffective against the better-equipped and trained German forces, until the invaders were halted and then driven back in December 1941 in front of Moscow. Stalin then worked with independent-minded Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov to orchestrate the decisive German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad. Battle of Stalingrad, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin at the Yalta Conference.]] Stalin met in several conferences with Churchill and/or Roosevelt in Moscow, Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam to plan military strategy (Truman taking the place of the deceased Roosevelt).
In these conferences, his first appearances on the world stage, Stalin proved to be a formidable negotiator. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary noted:
"Marshal Stalin as a negotiator was the toughest proposition of all. Indeed, after something like thirty years' experience of international conferences of one kind and another, if I had to pick a team for going into a conference room, Stalin would be my first choice. Of course the man was ruthless and of course he knew his purpose. He never wasted a word. He never stormed, he was seldom even irritated." His shortcomings as strategist are frequently noted regarding massive Soviet loss of life and early Soviet defeats. (In his autobiography Khrushchev claimed that Stalin tried to conduct tactical decisions using a world globe.) Yet Stalin did rapidly move Soviet industrial production east of the Volga river, far from Luftwaffe-reach, to sustain the Red Army's war machine with astonishing success. Additionally, Stalin was well aware that other European armies had utterly disintegrated when faced with Nazi military efficacy and responded effectively by subjecting his army to galvanizing terror and unrevolutionary patriotism. Stalin's Order No. 227 of July 27 1942 illustrates the ruthlessness with which he sought to stiffen army resolve: all those who retreated or otherwise left their positions without orders to do so were to be summarily shot. Other orders declared that the families of those who surrendered were subject to NKVD terror. Barrier forces of NKVD were soon set up in the rear to machine-gun anyone who retreated. The surrendered Soviet soldiers were declared traitors and sent to the Gulag after their release from POW camps. POW camp, 1943. Time had named Stalin Man of the Year the first time for the year 1939.]] In the war's opening stages, the retreating Red Army also sought to deny resources to the enemy through a scorched earth policy of destroying the infrastructure and food supplies of areas before the Germans could seize them. Unfortunately, this, along with abuse by German troops, caused inconceivable starvation and suffering among the civilian population that were left behind. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of civilian and military losses in World War II. Approximately 7 million Red Army personnel and 20 million civilians died. The Nazis considered Slavs to be "sub-human," and many people believe the Nazis killed Slavs as an ethnically targeted genocide. This concept of Slavic inferiority was also the reason why Hitler did not accept into his army many Russians who wanted to fight the Stalinist regime until 1944, when the war was lost for Germany. In the Soviet Union, World War II left a huge deficit of men of the wartime fighting-age generation. To this day the war is remembered very vividly in Russia, Belarus, and other parts of the former Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War, and May 9, Victory Day, is one of Russia's biggest national holidays.

Post-war era

May 9]] Following World War II, the Red Army occupied much of the territory that had been formerly held by the Axis countries: there were Soviet occupation zones in Germany and Austria. Hungary and Poland were under practical military occupation, despite the fact that the latter was formally an Allied country. Soviet-friendly governments were established in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and homegrown communist regimes existed in Yugoslavia and Albania. Finland retained formal independence, but was politically isolated and economically dependent on the Soviet Union. Greece, Italy and France were under the strong influence of local communist parties, which were at the very least friendly towards Moscow. Stalin hoped that the withdrawal of the Americans from Europe would lead to Soviet hegemony over the whole continent. The foundation of Trizonia and American help for the anti-communist side in the Greek Civil War changed the situation. East Germany was proclaimed a separate country in 1949, ruled by German communists. Moreover, Stalin made a decision to switch to direct control over his satellites in Central Europe: all of the countries were to be ruled by local communist parties that tried to implement the Soviet template locally. In 1948 this decision led to the establishment of Stalinist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, later called the "Communist Bloc". Communist Albania remained an ally, but Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito broke with the USSR. Stalin viewed Soviet

Biology

Biology is the study, or science, of life. It is concerned with the characteristics and behaviors of organisms, how species and individuals come into existence, and the interactions they have with each other and with the environment. Biology encompasses a broad spectrum of academic fields that are often viewed as independent disciplines. However, together they address the phenomenon of life over a wide range of scales. At the atomic and molecular scale, life is studied in the disciplines of molecular biology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics. At the level of the cell, it is studied in cell biology, and at multicellular scales, it is examined in physiology, anatomy, and histology. Developmental biology studies life at the level of an individual organism's development or ontogeny. Moving up the scale towards more than one organism, genetics considers how heredity works between parent and offspring. Ethology considers group behavior of more than one individual. Population genetics looks at the level of an entire population, and systematics considers the multi-species scale of lineages. Interdependent populations and their habitats are examined in ecology and evolutionary biology. A speculative new field is astrobiology (or xenobiology), which examines the possibility of life beyond the Earth.

Biology studies the variety of life (clockwise from top-left) E. coli, tree fern, gazelle, Goliath beetle

Principles of biology

Unlike physics, biology does not usually describe systems in terms of objects which obey immutable physical laws described by mathematics. Nevertheless, the biological sciences are characterized and unified by several major underlying principles and concepts: universality, evolution, diversity, continuity, homeostasis, and interactions.

Universality: Biochemistry, cells, and the genetic code

mathematics]] Main articles: Life The most salient example of biological universality is that all living things share a common carbon-based biochemistry and in particular pass on their characteristics via genetic material, which is based on nucleic acids such as DNA and which uses a common genetic code with only minor variations. Another universal principle is that all organisms (that is, all forms of life on Earth except for viruses) are made of cells. Similarly, all organisms share common developmental processes. For example, in most metazoan organisms, the basic stages of early embryonic development share similar morphological characteristics and include similar genes.

Evolution: The central principle of biology

Main article: Evolution The central organizing concept in biology is that all life has a common origin and has changed and developed through the process of evolution (see Common descent). This has led to the striking similarity of units and processes discussed in the previous section. Charles Darwin established evolution as a viable theory by articulating its driving force, natural selection (Alfred Russell Wallace is recognized as the co-discoverer of this concept). Genetic drift was embraced as an additional mechanism of evolutionary development in the modern synthesis of the theory. The evolutionary history of a species— which describes the characteristics of the various species from which it descended— together with its genealogical relationship to every other species is called its phylogeny. Widely varied approaches to biology generate information about phylogeny. These include the comparisons of DNA sequences conducted within molecular biology or genomics, and comparisons of fossils or other records of ancient organisms in paleontology. Biologists organize and analyze evolutionary relationships through various methods, including