Trofim Lysenko became the Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin. He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from the changed plants, which sharply contradicted Mendelian genetics. As a result, Lysenko became a fierce critic of theories of the then rising modern genetics.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
The two brothers accused of blowing up homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon came from a Chechen family that for decades had been tossed from one country to another by war and persecution.
Their father and former neighbors from Kyrgyzstan — home to many Chechens who were deported from their native villages by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin — tell of a family often on the move in search of safety and a better life.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout, and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured alive, had moved to the United States about a decade ago with their parents and two sisters. By all accounts, the younger brother had many friends, but his older brother felt alienated from American society and in recent years had turned increasingly to Islam.
Although neither spent much time in Chechnya, a province in southern Russia that has been torn apart by war and an Islamic insurgency, both strongly identified themselves as Chechens. They took up boxing and wrestling, two of the most popular sports in Chechnya, where people are proud of their warrior traditions.
The brothers’ story begins in Tokmok, a town about 60 kilometers (35 miles) from the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a country in Central Asia that was once part of the Soviet Union. Stalin rounded up the Chechens and shipped them east during World War II, seeing them as potentially disloyal. Their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, was born in Kyrgyzstan.
“This was a very good family,” Badrudi Tsokoev, a fellow Chechen who lived next door to the Tsarnaevs, said Saturday. “They all strove to get a higher education, to somehow set themselves up in life.”
The brothers’ grandfather had died tragically when a shell exploded as he was scavenging for metal that could be sold as scrap, neighbors said.
After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the family moved to Chechnya, only to have war break out in 1994 between Russian troops and Chechen separatists fighting for an independent homeland. Dzhokhar was born in 1993 and shares the name of Chechnya’s first separatist leader.
The fierce battles, which reduced much of Chechnya to rubble, sent the Tsarnaevs fleeing back to Kyrgyzstan with their two young sons, a daughter and another one on the way.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/cmMkBdvjQRg/
Russian President Vladimir Putin has voiced support for building memorials to honor Red Army soldiers who died in a 1939-1940 war with Finland.
Putin said Thursday at a meeting with military historians that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin launched the war to “correct mistakes” made in drawing the border with Finland after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
Putin says the Red Army sustained heavy losses because of errors, but it mobilized to make Finland “feel all the power of the Russian, then Soviet state,” according to Russian news agencies.
The Soviet Union attacked Finland in November 1939, and the Winter War ended with a peace treaty in March 1940 that left the Soviets with significant territorial gains. The Red Army lost up to 150,000 soldiers, and about 20,000 Finns were killed.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has called for the revival of the Soviet-era physical evaluation program that required all schoolchildren to pass fitness tests.
Putin, a judo enthusiast and a regular swimmer, said Wednesday that the restoration of GTO, the Russian acronym for Ready for Labor and Defense, would teach children to “to stand up for themselves, their family and, in the final run, the Fatherland.”
GTO, which was introduced in 1931 under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin‘s rule, required all schoolchildren to regularly pass physical training tests. Those managing to qualify would receive silver- or gold-colored badges.
The program gradually lost its scope and prestige over the years and ceased to exist with the 1991 Soviet collapse. Since then, schools largely have been left on their own regarding physical training standards.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has called for the revival of the Soviet-era physical evaluation program that required all schoolchildren to pass fitness tests.
Putin, a judo enthusiast and a regular swimmer, said Wednesday that the restoration of GTO, the Russian acronym for Ready for Labor and Defense, would teach children to “to stand up for themselves, their family and, in the final run, the Fatherland.”
GTO, which was introduced in 1931 under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin‘s rule, required all schoolchildren to regularly pass physical training tests. Those managing to qualify would receive silver- or gold-colored badges.
The program gradually lost its scope and prestige over the years and ceased to exist with the 1991 Soviet collapse. Since then, schools largely have been left on their own regarding physical training standards.
By hnn
MOSCOW — Devotees of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, whose brutal purges killed millions of innocent citizens and made his name a byword for totalitarian terror, flocked to the Kremlin to praise him for making his country a world power Tuesday, while experts and politicians puzzled and despaired over his enduring popularity.
Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov led some 1,000 zealots who laid carnations at Stalin’s grave by the Kremlin wall in Moscow, praising him as a symbol of the nation’s “great victories” and saying that Russia needs to rely on this “unique experience” to overcome its problems….
…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at History News Network – George Mason University
Millions of people died in Soviet dictator Josef Stalin‘s gulag, but the 75th anniversary of the founding of one of the notorious forced-labor camps was cause for a celebration in Russia.
Russian news portals reported Tuesday that local officials and prison wardens threw a party last week honoring the Usolsky camp in the Urals, with music and dancing and speeches by former camp guards.
The NKVD, the KGB predecessor which ran the gulag, “instilled traditions in the camp that still hold value today,” the Solikamsky regional department of Russia‘s prison service said in a statement. These traditions included allegiance to the motherland, mutual assistance and respect for war veterans, the statement said.
Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers who had been captured by Nazi forces during World War II were sent to the gulag after the war.
“So hard were the times in which the Usolsky camp was founded, so heavy were the burdens it overcame!” Sergei Yerofeyev, deputy chairman of a committee for retired prison wardens, said in the statement. The camp was founded in 1938, a year when the NKVD executed hundreds of thousands of people for “political crimes” and sent millions more to the gulag.
“What bravery its directors displayed over that time, so that the institution could stand tall and successfully complete its production and social tasks,” Yerofeyev added.
Usolsky camp held from 10,000 to 30,000 prisoners at any given time, including those convicted of “counter-revolutionary activity” and other political crimes. More than 16 percent of prisoners there died of malnutrition and overwork, one of the highest rates in the gulag.
Many political prisoners were freed after Stalin died in 1953. The Usolsky camp transferred its remaining political prisoners in 1955 and was closed in 1960.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
The Soviet soldiers used their own bodies as shields, covering women and children escaping on ferry boats from a Nazi bombardment that killed 40,000 civilians in a single day. It was the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War II.
“They were all hit in the back,” said 90-year-old Alexei Stefanov. “But they did not flee.”
Stefanov is among the few surviving veterans of the battle, which claimed 2 million lives and raged for nearly 200 days before the Red Army turned back the Nazi forces, decisively changing the course of the war. Russia celebrates the 70th anniversary of that victory on Saturday, with President Vladimir Putin taking part in ceremonies in Volgograd, the current name of the city in southern Russia that stretches along the western bank of the Volga River.
Stefanov arrived in Stalingrad in August, 1942, just a month after the Nazis began their onslaught. A marine, he commanded what was left of a reconnaissance platoon, 17 scouts who had survived previous missions on the front lines.
The German army invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, and by the following summer had pushed deep inside the country. For Adolf Hitler, taking the city named after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin would be a symbolic victory, and it also would allow the Germans to cross the Volga and secure access to Russian oil supplies.
What Stefanov saw was a once-thriving industrial city being reduced to rubble by shelling and bombing by the Nazis and their Romanian, Italian, Hungarian and Spanish allies. Only about 100,000 residents had been evacuated, and the remaining civilians were frantically helping to dig trenches.
The Red Army had orders from Stalin not to retreat, so only women, children and wounded soldiers were allowed to take the crossing over the wide river to relative safety.
The day Stefanov remembers most vividly is Aug. 23, 1942, when hundreds of Nazi planes bombed the city, turning it into a giant burning ruin. Hundreds of Soviet soldiers with wounds bad enough to keep them out of the battle but not severe enough to incapacitate them set out to rescue women and children from the basements of demolished buildings. They rushed them to ferries that would take them across the Volga, a river about 2 kilometers (more than 1 mile) from shore to shore.
Fires from spilled oil and gasoline burned on the water, and the defenseless ferries were easy prey for the Nazi planes. The Soviet soldiers covered the children with their own bodies. Stefanov is still haunted by the sight of the soldiers who died, their backs ripped apart.
In the city, thousands of dead bodies were left unburied, lying amid the ruins in the sweltering August heat. For the only time during the Battle of Stalingrad, German tanks got to the river, and Soviet tanks and artillery fiercely fought them back.
“That was hell, literal hell,” Stefanov said. “This one episode to me was equal to the whole war.”
Stefanov recalls reconnaissance missions deep inside enemy territory, when he had to crawl for hours and hide in ravines to gather intelligence on the location and number of Nazi troops and weapons.
In September, 1942, Stefanov was hit in his left hand, a wound that still troubles him. He later returned to active service and was with Soviet troops when they drove the Germans out of Norway and marched into Warsaw and Berlin.
He was back in Moscow in late June, 1945, to participate in the Victory Parade on Red Square. Then he went on to China to help drive out the imperial Japanese.
Stefanov’s contribution to the war effort won him dozens of medals. Although they weigh a combined 11 kilograms (24 pounds), he still wears them pinned to the front of his uniform on holidays and other special occasions.
His real reward at the end of the war was his marriage to Lyudmilla, also a decorated war veteran. They are still together 67 years later.
“War is not a game, it’s the most horrible thing,” said Stefanov, who heads a government-run organization of World War II veterans. “That’s the thing youngsters should always know.”
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
