Today, The Grandma has been reading The Hunt for Red October, an interesting thriller novel written by TomClancy,the American novelist, who was born on a day like today in 1947.
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. (April 12, 1947-October 1, 2013) was anAmericannovelist.He is best known for his technically detailed espionageand military-science storylines setduringand after the Cold War.
Seventeen of his novels have been bestsellers and more than 100 million copies of his books have been sold. His name was also used on movie scripts written by ghostwriters, nonfiction books on military subjects occasionally with co-authors, and video games. He was a part-owner of his hometown Major League Baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles of the American League, and vice-chairman of their community activities and public affairs committees.
Originally an insurance agent, his literary career began in 1984 when he sold his first military thriller novel The Hunt for Red October for $5,000 published by the small academic Naval Institute Press of Annapolis, Maryland.
His works The Hunt for Red October (1984), Patriot Games (1987), Clear andPresent Danger (1989), and The Sum of All Fears (1991) have been turned into commercially successful films.
Tom Clancy's works also inspired games such as the Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six,The Division, and Splinter Cell series. Since Clancy's death in 2013, the JackRyan series has been continued by his family estate through a series of authors.
Clancy was born on April 12, 1947, at Franklin Square Hospital inBaltimore, Maryland, and grew up in the Northwood neighborhood in northeast Baltimore. The family was Irish-American. He was the second of three children to Thomas Clancy, who worked for the United States Postal Service, and Catherine Clancy, who worked in a store's credit department. He was a member of Troop 624 of the Boy Scouts of America.
Clancy's mother worked to send him to the private Catholic secondary school taught by the Jesuit religious order (Society of Jesus), Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, from which he graduated in 1965. He then attended the associated Loyola College (now Loyola University Maryland) in Baltimore, graduating in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in English literature. While at Loyola College, he was president of the chess club.
He joined the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps; however, he was ineligible to serve due to his myopia (nearsightedness), which required him to wear thick eyeglasses.
After graduating, Clancy worked for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1973, Clancy joined the O. F. Bowen Agency, a small insurance agency based in Owings, Maryland, founded by his wife's grandfather.
In 1980, he purchased the insurance agency from his wife's grandmother and wrote novels in his spare time. While working at the insurance agency, he wrote his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984).
Clancy's literary career began in 1982 when he started writing The Hunt for RedOctober, which in 1984 he sold for publishing to the Naval Institute Press for $5,000.
The publisher was impressed with the work; Deborah Grosvenor, the Naval Institute Press editor who read through the book, said later that she convinced the publisher: I think we have a potential best seller here, and if we don't grab this thing, somebody else would. She believed Clancy had an innate storytelling ability, and his characters had this very witty dialogue.
Clancy, who had hoped to sell 5,000 copies, ended up selling over 45,000. After publication, the book received praise from President Ronald Reagan, who called the work the best yarn, subsequently boosting sales to 300,000 hardcover and 2 million paperback copies of the book, making it a national bestseller.
The book was critically praised for its technical accuracy, which led to Clancy meeting several high-ranking officers in the U.S. military including Steve Pieczenik, and to inspiration for reoccurring characters in his works.
Clancy's novels focus on the hero, most notably Jack Ryan and John Clark,both Irish Catholics like himself. He repeatedly uses the formula whereby the heroes are highly skilled, disciplined, honest, thoroughly professional, and only lose their cool when incompetent politicians or bureaucrats get in their way. Their unambiguous triumphs over evil provide symbolic relief from the legacy of the Vietnam War.
The Cold War epic Red Storm Rising (1986) was co-written, according to Clancy in the book's foreword, with fellow military-oriented author Larry Bond. The book was published by Putnam and sold almost a million copies within its first year.
Clancy became the cornerstone of a publishing list by Putnam which emphasized authors like Clancy who would produce annually. His publisher, Phyllis E. Grann, called these repeaters.
Clancy died on October 1, 2013, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, near his Baltimore home.
The Chicago Tribune quoted Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and author Stephen Hunter as saying, When he published The Hunt for Red October, he redefined and expanded the genre, and as a consequence of that, many people were able to publish such books who had previously been unable to do so.
The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.
Today is Christmas Day. TheGrandma and her friends want to congratulate all people who celebrate this feast.
December, 25 is not only Christmas Day but an important day in recent European history. On a day like today in 1991, MikhailGorbachev resigned as Presidentof the Soviet Union and the union itself was dissolved the next day. The Grandma wants to talk about this important event that changed the history of the world because of it was the end of the cold war and about Mikhail Gorbachev, an important figure in the USSR and in the European history.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (born 2 March 1931) is a Russian and formerly Soviet politician. The eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union,he was the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991.
He was also the country's head of state from 1985 until 1991, serving as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990, and President of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, he initially adhered to Marxism-Leninism although by the early 1990s had moved toward social democracy.
Of mixed Russian and Ukrainian heritage, Gorbachev was born in Privolnoye, Stavropol Krai to a poor peasant family. Growing up under the rule of Joseph Stalin, in his youth he operated combine harvesters on a collective farm before joining the Communist Party, which then governed the Soviet Union as a one-party state according to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. While studying at Moscow State University, he married fellow student Raisa Titarenko in 1953 prior to receiving his law degree in 1955.
Moving to Stavropol, he
worked for the Komsomol youth organisation and, after Stalin's death,
became a keen proponent of the de-Stalinization reforms of Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev. He was appointed the First Party Secretary of the
Stavropol Regional Committee in 1970, in which position he oversaw
construction of the Great Stavropol Canal.
In 1978 he returned to Moscow to become a Secretary of the party's Central Committee and in 1979 joined its governing Politburo. Within three years of the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, following the brief regimes of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, the Politburo elected Gorbachev as General Secretary, the de facto head of government, in 1985.
Although committed to preserving the Soviet state and to its socialist ideals, Gorbachev believed significant reform was necessary, particularly after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. He withdrew from the Soviet-Afghan War and embarked on summits with United States President Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear weapons and end the Cold War.
Domestically,
his policy of glasnost, openness allowed for enhanced freedom of speech
and press, while his perestroikarestructuring sought to decentralise
economic decision making to improve efficiency. His democratisation
measures and formation of the elected Congress of People's Deputies
undermined the one-party state.
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
Gorbachev declined to intervene militarily when various Eastern Bloc countries abandoned Marxist-Leninist governance in 1989-90. Internally, growing nationalist sentiment threatened to break up the Soviet Union, leading Marxist-Leninist hardliners to launch the unsuccessful August Coup against Gorbachev in 1991.
In the wake of this, the Soviet Union dissolved against Gorbachev's wishes and he resigned. After leaving office, he launched his Gorbachev Foundation,became a vocal critic of Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, and campaigned for Russia's social-democratic movement.
Widely considered one of the most significant figures of the second half of the 20th century, Gorbachev remains the subject of controversy. The recipient of a wide range of awards -including the Nobel Peace Prize-he was widely praised for his pivotal role in ending the Cold War, curtailing human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, and tolerating both the fall of Marxist-Leninist administrations in eastern and central Europe and the reunification of Germany.
Conversely,
in Russia he is often derided for not stopping the Soviet collapse, an
event which brought a decline in Russia's global influence and
precipitated an economic crisis.
Gorbachev's
leadership style differed from that of his predecessors. He would stop
to talk to civilians on the street, forbade the display of his portrait
at the 1985 Red Square holiday celebrations, and encouraged frank and
open discussions at Politburo meetings.
To the West, Gorbachev was seen as a more moderate and less threatening Soviet leader; some Western commentators however believed this an act to lull Western governments into a false sense of security. His wife was his closest adviser, and took on the unofficial role of a first lady by appearing with him on foreign trips; her public visibility was a breach of standard practice and generated resentment. His other close aides were Georgy Shakhnazarov and Anatoly Chernyaev.
Gorbachev was aware that
the Politburo could remove him from office, and that he could not
pursue more radical reform without a majority of supporters in the
Politburo. He sought to remove several older members from the Politburo,
encouraging Grigory Romanov, Nikolai Tikhonov, and Viktor Grishin into
retirement.
He moved Gromyko from
his role in foreign policy to that of head of state and replaced
Gromyko's former role with his own ally, Eduard Shevardnadze. Other
allies whom he saw promoted were Yakovlev, Anatoly Lukyanov, and Vadim
Medvedev. Another of those promoted by Gorbachev was Boris Yeltsin, who
was made a Secretary of the Central Committee in July 1985.
Five key moments in the fall of the USSR
Most of these appointees
were from a new generation of well-educated officials who had been
frustrated during the Brezhnev era. In his first year, 14 of the 23
heads of department in the secretariat were replaced. Doing so,
Gorbachev secured dominance in the Politburo within a year, faster than
either Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev had achieved. In January 1987, Gorbachev attended a Central Committee plenum where he talked about perestroika and democratisation while criticising widespread corruption. He considered putting a proposal to allow multi-party elections into his speech, but decided against doing so.
After the plenum, he focused his attentions on economic reform, holding discussions with government officials and economists. Many
economists proposed reducing ministerial controls on the economy and
allowing state-owned enterprises to set their own targets; Ryzhkov and
other government figures were sceptical.
In
June, Gorbachev finished his report on economic reform. It reflected a
compromise: ministers would retain the ability to set output targets but
these would not be considered binding. That month, a plenum accepted
his recommendations and the Supreme Soviet passed a law on enterprises
implementing the changes.
Economic problems
remained: by the late 1980s there were still widespread shortages of
basic goods, rising inflation, and declining living standards. These
stoked a number of miners' strikes in 1989.
By
1987, the ethos of glasnost had spread through Soviet society:
journalists were writing increasingly openly, many economic problems
were being publicly revealed, and studies appeared that critically
reassessed Soviet history. Gorbachev was broadly supportive, describing
glasnost as the crucial, irreplaceable weapon of perestroika.
He
nevertheless insisted that people should use the newfound freedom
responsibly, stating that journalists and writers should avoid sensationalism and be completely objective in their reporting.
Nearly two hundred previously restricted Soviet films were publicly
released, and a range of Western films were also made available. In
1989, Soviet culpability for the 1940 Katyn massacre was finally
revealed.
In September 1987, the government stopped jamming the signal of the British Broadcasting Corporation and Voice of America.
The reforms also
included greater tolerance of religion; an Easter service was broadcast
on Soviet television for the first time and the millennium celebrations
of the Russian Orthodox Church were given media attention.
Independent
organisations appeared, most supportive of Gorbachev, although the
largest, Pamyat, was ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic in nature.
Gorbachev also announced that Soviet Jews wishing to migrate to Israel
would be allowed to do so, something previously prohibited.
In
February 1990, both liberalisers and Marxist-Leninist hardliners
intensified their attacks on Gorbachev. A liberaliser march took part in
Moscow criticising Communist Party rule, while at a Central Committee
meeting, the hardliner Vladimir Brovikov accused Gorbachev of reducing
the country to anarchy and ruin and of pursuing Western approval at
the expense of the Soviet Union and the Marxist-Leninist cause.
Gorbachev
was aware that the Central Committee could still oust him as General
Secretary, and so decided to reformulate the role of head of government
to a presidency from which they could not remove him. He decided that
the presidential election should be held by the Congress of People's
Deputies. He chose this over a public vote because he thought the latter
would escalate tensions and feared that he might lose it; a spring 1990
poll nevertheless still showed him as the most popular politician in
the country.
The New York Times announced the end of the USSR
At
the 28th Communist Party Congress in July, hardliners criticised the
reformists but Gorbachev was re-elected party leader with the support of
three-quarters of delegates and his choice of Deputy General Secretary,
Vladimir Ivashko, was also elected.
Seeking compromise with the
liberalisers, Gorbachev assembled a team of both his own and Yeltsin's
advisers to come up with an economic reform package: the result was the 500 Days programme. This called for further decentralisation and some
privatisation.
Gorbachev
described the plan as modern socialism rather than a return to
capitalism but had many doubts about it. In September, Yeltsin presented
the plan to the Russian Supreme Soviet, which backed it. Many in the
Communist Party and state apparatus warned against it, arguing that it
would create marketplace chaos, rampant inflation, and unprecedented
levels of unemployment.
The
500 Days plan was abandoned. At this, Yeltsin rallied against Gorbachev
in an October speech, claiming that Russia would no longer accept a
subordinate position to the Soviet government.
By
mid-November 1990, much of the press was calling for Gorbachev's resignation and predicting civil war. Hardliners were urging Gorbachev
to disband the presidential council and arrest vocal liberals in the
media.
In
November, he addressed the Supreme Soviet where he announced an
eight-point program, which included governmental reforms, among them the
abolition of the presidential council. By this point, Gorbachev was
isolated from many of his former close allies and aides. Yakovlev had
moved out of his inner circle and Shevardnadze had resigned. His support
among the intelligentsia was declining, and by the end of 1990 his
approval ratings had plummeted.
Amid growing dissent in the Baltics, especially Lithuania, in January 1991 Gorbachev demanded that the Lithuanian Supreme Council rescind its pro-independence reforms. Soviet troops occupied several Vilnius buildings and clashed with protesters, 15 of whom were killed.
Gorbachev was widely blamed by liberalisers, with Yeltsin calling for his
resignation. Gorbachev denied sanctioning the military operation,
although some in the military claimed that he had; the truth of the
matter was never clearly established. Fearing more civil disturbances,
that month Gorbachev banned demonstrations and ordered troops to patrol
Soviet cities alongside the police. This further alienated the
liberalisers but was not enough to win-over hardliners.
Wanting
to preserve the Union, in April Gorbachev and the leaders of nine
Soviet republics jointly pledged to prepare a treaty that would renew
the federation under a new constitution; six of the republics -Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia- did not endorse this. A
referendum on the issue brought 76.4% in favour of continued federation
but the six rebellious republics had not taken part. Negotiations as to
what form the new constitution would take took place, again bringing
together Gorbachev and Yeltsin in discussion; it was planned to be
formally signed in August.
The fall of the USSR
On 30 October, Gorbachev attended a conference in Madrid trying to revive the Israeli–Palestinian peace process.
The event was co-sponsored by the U.S. and Soviet Union, one of the first examples of such cooperation between the two countries. There, he again met with Bush. En route home, he travelled to France where he stayed with Mitterrand at the latter's home near Bayonne. After the coup, Gorbachev continued to pursue plans for a new union treaty but found increasing opposition to the idea of a continued federal state as the leaders of various Soviet republics bowed to growing nationalist pressure. Yeltsin stated that he would veto any idea of a unified state, instead favouring a confederation with little central authority. Only the leaders of the Kazakhstan and Kirghizia supported Gorbachev'sapproach. On 1 December a referendum in Ukraine produced over 90% support for secession from the Union; Gorbachev had expected Ukrainians to reject independence.
Without Gorbachev's
knowledge, Yeltsin met with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and
Belarusian President Stanislav Shushkevich in Belovezha Forest, near
Brest, Belarus, on 8 December and signed the Belavezha Accords, which
declared the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and formed the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as its successor.
Gorbachev only learned of this development when Shushkevich phoned him; Gorbachev was furious. He desperately looked for an opportunity to preserve the Soviet Union, hoping in vain that the media and intelligentsia might rally against the idea of its dissolution.
Ukrainian, Belarussian, and Russian Supreme Soviets then ratified the establishment of the CIS. On 10 December, he issued a statement calling the CIS agreement illegal and dangerous. On 20 December, the leaders of 11 of the 12 remaining republics -all except Georgia– met in Alma-Ata and signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, agreeing to dismantle the Soviet Union and formally establish the CIS. They also provisionally accepted Gorbachev's resignation as president of what remained of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev revealed that he would resign as soon as he saw that the CIS was a reality.
Yeltsin was tasked with overseeing the transfer of power from Gorbachev to its successor states. He and Gorbachev agreed that the latter would formally announce his resignation as Soviet President and Commander-in-Chief on 25 December, before vacating the Kremlin by 29 December.
Yakovlev, Chernyaev, and Shevardnadze joined Gorbachev to help him write a resignation speech. Gorbachev then gave his speech in the Kremlin in front of television cameras, allowing for international broadcast. In it, he announced, I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
He expressed regret for the breakup of the Soviet Union but cited what he saw as the achievements of his administration: political and religious freedom, the end of totalitarianism, the introduction of democracy and a market economy, and an end to the arms race and Cold War.
Gorbachev was only the second Soviet leader, after Khrushchev, not to die in office.
The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1991.
Today, The Grandma is still playing with her new Space Invaders machine. She is a little exhausted after playing without stopping during hours and after having realized that the Anti Christ has returned to manage her current city during four more years. She is ready to fight against this cynic egocentric fake figure without surrender.
The Grandma has decided to watch something to relax herself and she has chosen some ballet performances of one of her two favourite dancers, RudolfNureyev -the other is Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Nureyev lived the years of the ColdWar, the period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states (the Eastern Bloc), and the United States with its allies (the Western Bloc) after World War II. He defected from the Soviet Union on a day like today in 1961.
Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev, in Tatar Рудольф Хәмит улы Нуриев (17 March 1938-6 January 1993) was a Soviet ballet and contemporary dancer and choreographer.
Named Lord of the Dance, Nureyev is widely regarded as the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation.
Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, SovietUnion to a Tatar Muslim family. Nureyev began his early career with the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg.
He defected from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961, despite KGB efforts to stop him. This was the first defection of a Soviet artist during the Cold War and it created an international sensation.
He went on to dance with The Royal Ballet in London and from 1983 to 1989 served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet. In addition to his technical prowess, Rudolf Nureyev was an accomplished choreographer serving as the chief choreographer of the Paris Opera Ballet. He produced his own interpretations of numerous classical works, including Swan Lake, Giselle, and La Bayadère.
Rudolf Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Union, while his mother, Farida, was travelling to Vladivostok, where his father Khamet, a Red Army political commissar, was stationed. He was raised as the only son with three older sisters in a Tatar Muslim family.
Rudolf Nureyev in 1961
When his mother took Nureyev and his sisters into a performance of the ballet Song of the Cranes, he fell in love with dance. As a child he was encouraged to dance in Bashkir folk performances and his precocity was soon noticed by teachers who encouraged him to train in Saint Petersburg, named as Leningrad 1924–1991.
On a tour stop in Moscow with a local ballet company, Nureyev auditioned for the Bolshoi ballet company and was accepted. However, he felt that the Mariinsky Ballet school was the best, so he left the local touring company and bought a ticket to St. Petersburg.
Owing to the disruption of Soviet cultural life caused by World War II, Nureyev was unable to enroll in a major ballet school until 1955, aged 17, when he was accepted by the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet of Saint Petersburg, the associate school of the Mariinsky Ballet. The ballet master Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin took an interest in him professionally and allowed Nureyev to live with him and his wife.
Upon his graduation in 1958, Nureyev joined the Kirov Ballet, now Mariinsky. He moved immediately beyond the corps level, and was given solo roles as a principal dancer from the outset. Rudolf Nureyev regularly partnered Dudinskaya, the company's senior ballerina and the wife of its director, Konstantin Sergeyev. Natalia Dudinskaya, 26 years his senior, chose him as her partner in the ballet Laurencia.
Before long Rudolf Nureyev became one of the Soviet Union's best-known dancers. From 1958 to 1961, in his three years with the Mariinsky, he danced 15 roles, usually opposite his partner, Ninel Kurgapkina, with whom he was very well paired, although she was almost a decade older than he was.
Nureyev and Kurgapkina were invited to dance at a gathering at Khrushchev's dacha, and in 1959 they were allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union, dancing in Vienna at the International Youth Festival. Not long after, he was told by the Ministry of Culture that he would not be allowed to go abroad again. In one memorable incident, Nureyev interrupted a performance of Don Quixote for 40 minutes, insisting on dancing in tights and not in the customary trousers. He relented in the end, but his preferred dress code was adopted in later performances.
Rudolf Nureyev & Zizi Jeanmarie, 1966
By the late 1950s, RudolfNureyev had become asensation in the Soviet Union.
Yet, as the Mariinsky Ballet was preparing to go on a tour to Paris and London, Nureyev'srebelliouscharacter and a non-conformist attitude made him an unlikely candidate for a trip to the West, which was to be of crucial importance to the Soviet government's ambitions to portray what they felt was their cultural supremacy. Furthermore, tensions between Rudolf Nureyev and the Mariinsky's artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev, husband and former dance partner of Natalia Dudinskaya, were growing. After a representative of the French tour organizers saw Nureyev dance in Leningrad in 1960, the French organizers urged Soviet authorities to let him dance in Paris, and he was allowed to go.
Nureyev was seen to have broken the rules about mingling with foreigners and allegedly frequented gay bars in Paris, which alarmed the Mariinsky'smanagement and the KGB agents observing him. The KGB wanted to send him back to the Soviet Union.
On 16 June 1961, the Mariinsky group had gathered at Le Bourget Airport in Paris to fly to London. Sergeyev then took Nureyev aside and told him that he would have to return to Moscow, for a special performance in the Kremlin. Nureyev became suspicious and refused. Next he was told that his mother had fallen severely ill and he needed to come home immediately to see her. Nureyev refused again, believing that on return to the USSR he was likely to be imprisoned. With the help of French police and a Parisian socialite friend -Clara Saint, who had been engaged to the son of the French Minister of Culture Andre Malraux- Nureyev got away from his KGB minders and asked for asylum.Sergeyev and the KGB tried to discuss it with him but he chose to stay in Paris.
Within a week, he was signed up by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and was performing The Sleeping Beauty with Nina Vyroubova. On a tour of Denmark he met Erik Bruhn, soloist at the Royal Danish Ballet who became his lover, his closest friend and his protector until Bruhn's death in 1986.
Soviet authorities made Nureyev's
father, mother and dance teacher Pushkin write letters to him, urging
him to return, without effect. Although he petitioned the Soviet
government for many years to be allowed to visit his mother, he was not
allowed to do so until 1987, when his mother was dying and Mikhail
Gorbachev consented to the visit.
Rudolf Nureyev
In 1989, he was invited to dance the role of James in La Sylphide with the Mariinsky Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. The visit gave him the opportunity to see many of the teachers and colleagues he had not seen since his defection.
In 1982, Nureyev became anaturalized citizen of Austria. In 1983, he was appointed director of the Paris Opera Ballet, where, as well as directing, he continued to dance and to promote younger dancers. He remained there as a dancer and chief choreographer until 1989. His artistic directorship of the Paris Opera Ballet was a great success, lifting the company out of a dark period.
When AIDS appeared in France's news around 1982, Nureyev took little notice. The dancer tested positive for HIV in 1984, but for several years he simply denied that anything was wrong with his health. However, by the late 1980s his diminished capabilities disappointed his admirers who had fond memories of his outstanding prowess and skill. Nureyev began a marked decline only in the summer of 1991 and entered the final phase of the disease in the spring of 1992.
In March 1992, living with advanced AIDS, he visited Kazan and appeared as a conductor in front of the audience at Musa Cälil Tatar Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, which now presents the Rudolf Nureyev Festival in Tatarstan.
Returning to Paris, with a high fever, he was admitted to the hospital Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours in Levallois-Perret, a suburb northwest of Paris, and was operated on for pericarditis, an inflammation of the membranous sac around the heart.
At that time, what inspired him to fight his illness was the hope that he could fulfill an invitation to conduct Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet at an AmericanBallet Theatre benefit on 6 May 1992 at the MetropolitanOperaHouse in New York. He did so and was elated at the reception.
Rudolf Nureyev
In July 1992, Nureyev
showedrenewed signs of pericarditis but determined to forswear further
treatment. His last public appearance was on 8 October 1992, at the
premiere at Palais Garnier of a new production of La Bayadère that he choreographed after Marius Petipa for the Paris Opera Ballet.
Nureyev had managed to obtain a photocopy of the original score by Minkus when in Russia in 1989. The ballet was a personal triumph although the gravity of his condition was evident. The French Culture Minister, Jack Lang, presented him that evening on stage with France's highest cultural award, the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Nureyev re-entered the hospital Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours in Levallois-Perret on 20 November 1992 and remained there until his death from AIDS complications at age 54 on 6 January 1993.
His funeral was held in the marble foyer of the Paris Garnier Opera House.Many paid tributes to his brilliance as a dancer. One such tribute came from Oleg Vinogradov of the Mariinsky Ballet in Saint Petersburg, Russia, stating: What Nureyev did in the west, he could never have done here.
Nureyev's grave, at a Russian cemetery in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris, features a tomb draped in a mosaic of an oriental carpet. Nureyev was an avid collector of beautiful carpets and antique textiles. As his coffin was lowered into the ground, music from the last act of Giselle was played and his ballet shoes were cast into the grave along with white lilies.
After so many years of having been denied a place in the Mariinsky Ballet history, Nureyev's reputation was restored. His name was reentered in the history of the Mariinsky and some of his personal effects were placed on display at the theatre museum in St. Petersburg.
At the famed Vaganova Academy a rehearsal room was named in his honour. As of October 2013, the Centre National du Costume de Scene has a permanent collection of Nureyev's costumesthat offers visitors a sense of his exuberant, vagabond personality and passion for all that was rare and beautiful. In 2015, he was inducted into the Legacy Walk.
At the Paris Opera there is a tradition to organize a dance night as homage to Rudolf Nureyev every ten years after he died in 1993. The homage to Nureyev was scheduled on 20 March 2003 and on 6 March 2013 respectively because he was born in March.
Today, October 4, is Saint Francisof Assisi the women’s Order of Saint Clare founder.
The Grandma went to a Franciscan school when she was young and she remembers this day singing and praying to Saint Francis, to the animals and to the sun. It was a real nightmare for a child. But today, TheGrandma wants to congratulate all people who celebrate their day, especially Paqui Jones and Paqui Bean. Franciscus means the Frenchman and it is widely used in most Romance languages, including Italian, Catalan, French, Occitan and Castilian, and place of origin is Italy. It is derived from the same source as the female name Frances, and the male names Francesco, Francesc, Francis and Francisco. The Grandma is going to visit the Saint Francis of Assisi's church in El Poble Nou, Barcelona, where she has a meeting with Joseph de Ca'th Lon who is going to explain her one of the most interesting things that happened on a day like today in 1957: the Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, was launched. During the travel by urban bus, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her First Certificate Language Practice manual (Chapter 36).
Sputnik 1was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957, orbiting for three weeks before its batteries died, then silently for two more months before falling back into the atmosphere.
It was a 58 cm diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable even by radio amateurs, and the 65° inclination and duration of its orbit made its flight path cover virtually the entire inhabited Earth. This surprise success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, a part of the ColdWar. The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments.
A Soviet scientist works in the Sputnik 1
Tracking and studying Sputnik 1 from Earth provided scientists with valuable information. The density of the upper atmosphere could be deduced from its drag on the orbit, and the propagation of its radio signals gave data about the ionosphere.
Sputnik 1 was launched during the InternationalGeophysical Year from Site No.1/5, at the 5th Tyuratam range, in Kazakh SSR, now known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The satellite travelled at about 29,000 kilometres per hour, taking 96.2 minutes to complete each orbit. It transmitted on 20.005 and 40.002 MHz, which were monitored by radio operators throughout the world. The signals continued for 21 days until the transmitter batteries ran out on 26 October 1957.
Sputnik burned up on 4 January 1958 while reentering Earth's atmosphere, after three months, 1440 completed orbits of the Earth, and a distance travelled of about 70 million km.
On 17 December 1954, chief Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev proposed a developmental plan for an artificial satellite to Minister of Defence Industry Dimitri Ustinov. Korolev forwarded a report by Mikhail Tikhonravov with an overview of similar projects abroad. Tikhonravov had emphasized that the launch of an orbital satellite was an inevitable stage in the development of rocket technology.
Sergei Korolev
On 29 July 1955, U.S.PresidentDwight D. Eisenhower announced through his press secretary that the United States would launch an artificial satellite during the International Geophysical Year (IGY).
A week later, on 8 August, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union approved the proposal to create an artificial satellite. On 30 August Vasily Ryabikov, the head of the State Commission on R-7 rocket test launches, held a meeting where Korolev presented calculation data for a spaceflight trajectory to the Moon. They decided to develop a three-stage version of the R-7 rocket for satellite launches.
The control system of the Sputnik rocket was adjusted to an intended orbit of 223 by 1,450 km, with an orbital period of 101.5 min. The trajectory had been calculated earlier by Georgi Grechko, using the USSR Academy of Sciences' mainframe computer.
The Sputnik rocket was launched on 4 October 1957 at 19:28:34 UTC, 5 October at the launch site, from Site No.1 at NIIP-5. Telemetry indicated that the strap-ons separated 116 seconds into the flight and the core stage engine shut down 295.4 seconds into the flight. At shut down, the 7.5 tonne core stage with PS-1 attached had attained an altitude of 223 km above sea level, a velocity of 7,780 m/s and velocity vector inclination to the local horizon of 0 degrees 24 minutes. This resulted in an initial orbit of 223 kilometres by 950 kilometres, with an apogee approximately 500 kilometres lower than intended, and an inclination of 65.1 degrees and a period of 96.2 minutes.
October 4, 1957 when Sputnik 1 was launched
The launch came very close to failure, a postflight examination of telemetry data found that the Blok G strap-on had not attained full power at ignition and the resulting imbalanced thrust caused the booster to pitch over about 2° six seconds after liftoff.
Two seconds later, the flight control system tried to compensate by rapidly moving the vernier engines and stabilizer fins. The Blok G strap-on finally reached 100% thrust only one second before the pitch angle would have been great enough to trigger an automatic shutdown command, which would have terminated the launch and sent the R-7 and Sputnik 1 crashing to the ground in a fireball only a short distance from the pad.
Sputnik 1 was not immediately used for Soviet propaganda. The Soviets had kept quiet about their earlier accomplishments in rocketry, fearing that it would lead to secrets being revealed and failures being exploited by the West. When the Soviets began using Sputnik in their propaganda, they emphasized pride in the achievement of Soviet technology, arguing that it demonstrated the Soviets' superiority over the West.
People were encouraged to listen to Sputnik's signals on the radio and to look out for Sputnik in the night sky. While Sputnik itself had been highly polished, its small size made it barely visible to the naked eye. What most watchers actually saw was the much more visible 26 meter core stage of the R-7.
Sputnik 1
Shortly after the launch of PS-1, USSR President Nikita Khrushchev pressed Korolev to launch another satellite in time for the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution on 7 November 1957.
Initially U.S. President Eisenhower was not surprised by Sputnik 1. He had been forewarned of the R-7's capabilities by information derived from U-2 spy plane overflight photos, as well as signals and telemetry intercepts. The Eisenhower administration's first response was low-key and almost dismissive. Eisenhower was even pleased that the USSR, not the U.S., would be the first to test the waters of the still-uncertain legal status of orbital satellite overflights.
Eisenhower had suffered the Soviet protests and shoot-downs of ProjectGenetrix (Moby Dick) balloons and was concerned about the probability of a U-2 being shot down. To set a precedent for freedom of space before the launch of America's secret WS-117L spy satellites, the U.S. had launched ProjectVanguard as its own civilian satellite entry for the International Geophysical Year.
Eisenhower greatly underestimated the reaction of the American public, who were shocked by the launch of Sputnik and by the televised failure of the Vanguard Test Vehicle 3 launch attempt. The sense of fear was inflamed by Democratic politicians and professional cold warriors, who portrayed the United States as woefully behind.
The Bonds are spending their last hours in Berlin. The visit has been incredible and the family is preparing their suitcases. Tomorrow, they'll return to Barcelona but today they're visiting Potsdamer Platz.
Potsdamer Platz is an important public square and traffic intersection in the centre of Berlin, Germany, lying about 1 km south of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag and close to the southeast corner of the Tiergarten park.
It is named after the city of Potsdam, some 25 km to the south west, and marks the point where the old road from Potsdam passed through the city wall of Berlin at the Potsdam Gate.
After developing within the space of little over a century from an intersection of rural thoroughfares into the most bustling traffic intersection in Europe, it was totally laid waste during World War II and then left desolate during the Cold War era when the Berlin Wall bisected its former location. Since German reunification, Potsdamer Platz has been the site of major redevelopment projects.
Potsdamer Platzbegan as a trading post where several country roads converged just outside Berlin's old customs wall. The history of Potsdamer Platz can probably be traced back to 29 October 1685, when the Tolerance Edict of Potsdam was signed, whereby Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia from 1640 to 1688, allowed large numbers of religious refugees, including Jews from Austria and Huguenots expelled from France, to settle on his territory.
Potsdamer Platz in an old picture
A key motivation behind the Edict was so the Elector could encourage the rapid repopulation, restabilising and economic recovery of his kingdom, following the ravages of the Thirty Years' War (1618–48). Altogether up to 15,000 Huguenots made new homes in the Brandenburg region, some 6,000 of these in its capital, Berlin, indeed, by 1700 and for a while afterwards as much as 20% of Berlin’s population was French-speaking.
As was the case in most of central Berlin, almost all of the buildings around Potsdamer Platz were turned to rubble by air raids and heavy artillery bombardment during the last years of World War II. The three most destructive raids, out of 363 that the city suffered, occurred on 23 November 1943, and 3 February and 26 February 1945. Things were not helped by the very close proximity of Hitler's Reich Chancellery, just one block away in Voßstraße, and many other Nazi government edifices nearby as well, and so Potsdamer Platz was right in a major target area.
With the construction of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961, along the intracity frontier, Potsdamer Platz now found itself physically divided in two. What had once been a busy intersection had become totally desolate. With the clearance of most of the remaining bomb-damaged buildings on both sides, on the eastern side, this was done chiefly to give border guards a clear view of would-be escapees and an uninterrupted line of fire, little was left in an area of dozens of hectares.
After the initial opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, Potsdamer Platz became one of the earliest locations where the Wall was breached to create a new border crossing between East and West Berlin.
The future Potsdamer Platz was most definitely outside Berlin, and therefore not subject to the planning guidelines and constraints that would normally be expected in a city keen to show itself off as the capital of an empire. It grew very rapidly in a piecemeal and haphazard way, and came to epitomise wildness and excess in a manner that contributed much to its legendary status.
Checkpoint Charlie or Checkpoint C was the name given by the Western Allies to the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War (1947–1991).
GDR leader Walter Ulbricht agitated and maneuvered to get the Soviet Union's permission to construct the Berlin Wall in 1961 to stop Eastern Bloc emigration westward through the Soviet border system, preventing escape across the city sector border from communist East Berlin into West Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of East and West. Soviet and American tanks briefly faced each other at the location during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.
On August 13, 1961, a barbed-wire barrier that would become the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin was erected by the East Germans. Two days later, police and army engineers began to construct a more permanent concrete wall. Along with the wall, the 830 mile zonal border became 3.5 miles wide on its East German side in some parts of Germany with a tall steel-mesh fence running along a death strip bordered by bands of ploughed earth, to slow and to reveal the prints of those trying to escape, and mined fields.
American sector of Checkpoint Charlie
The name Charlie came from the letter C in the NATO phonetic alphabet; similarly for other Allied checkpoints on the Autobahn from the West: Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt and its counterpart Checkpoint Bravo at Dreilinden, Wannsee in the south-west corner of Berlin. The Soviets simply called it the Friedrichstraße Crossing Point, КПП Фридрихштрассе or KPP Fridrikhshtrasse. The East Germans referred officially to Checkpoint Charlie as the Grenzübergangsstelle, Border Crossing Point.
On 17 August 1962, a teenaged East German, Peter Fechter, was shot in the pelvis by East German guards while trying to escape from East Berlin. His body lay tangled in a barbed wire fence, and he bled to death, in full view of the world's media. American soldiers could not rescue him because he was a few metres inside the Soviet sector. East German border guards were reluctant to approach him for fear of provoking Western soldiers, one of whom had shot an East German border guard just days earlier. More than an hour later, Fechter's body was removed by the East German guards. A spontaneous demonstration formed on the American side of the checkpoint, protesting the action of the East and the inaction of the West.
Although the wall was opened in November 1989 and the checkpoint booth removed on June 22, 1990, the checkpoint remained an official crossing for foreigners and diplomats until German reunification during October 1990 when the guard house was removed; it is now on display in the open-air museum of the Allied Museum in Berlin-Zehlendorf.
The Bonds ready to cross Checkpoint Charlie
The course of the former wall and border is now marked in the street with a line of cobblestones. A copy of the guard house and sign that once marked the border crossing was later built where Checkpoint Charlie once was. It resembles the first guard house erected during 1961, behind a sandbag barrier towards the border. Over the years it was replaced several times by guard houses of different sizes and layouts. The one removed during 1990 was considerably larger than the first one and did not have sandbags.
After the dissolution of
the Eastern Bloc and the reunification of Germany, the building at
Checkpoint Charlie became a tourist attraction. It is now located in the
Allied Museum in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin.
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