Today, The Grandma has been reading aboutMikhailBaryshnikov, the Latvianand American dancer, who defected from the USSR on a day like today in 1974.
Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov, in Latvian Mihails Barišņikovs (born January 28, 1948) is a Latvian and American dancer, choreographer, and actor. He was the preeminent male classical ballet dancer of the 1970s and 1980s. He became a noted dance director.
Born in Riga, Latvian SSR, into a Russian family, Baryshnikov had a promising start in the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad before defecting to Canada in 1974 for more opportunities in Western dance. After dancing with the American Ballet Theatre, he joined the New York City Ballet as a principal dancer for one season to learn about George Balanchine's neoclassical Russian style of movement. He then returned to the American Ballet Theatre, where he later became artistic director.
Baryshnikov has spearheaded many of his own artistic projects and has been associated in particular with promoting modern dance, premiering dozens of new works, including many of his own. His success as a dramatic actor on stage, cinema, and television, has helped him become probably the most widely recognized contemporary ballet dancer. After his 1974 defection, Baryshnikovnever returned to the USSR.
Since 1986, he has been a naturalized citizen of the United States. After Latvia declared independence on 4 May 1990, he often returned there; in 2017, the Republic of Latvia granted Baryshnikov citizenship for extraordinary merit.
In 1977, he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of Yuri Kopeikine in the film The Turning Point. He starred in the movie White Nights with Gregory Hines, Helen Mirren, and Isabella Rossellini, and had a recurring role in the last season of the television series Sex and the City.
Mikhail Baryshnikov was born in Riga, in the Latvian SSR, Soviet Union, now known as Latvia. His parents were ethnic Russians: his mother was Alexandra (a dressmaker) and his father was Nikolay (an engineer). According to Baryshnikov, his father was a strict, nationalist military man, and his mother introduced him to theatre, opera, and ballet. She died by suicide when he was 12 years old.
Baryshnikov's talent was obvious from his youth, but being 165 cm or 168 cm tall -shorter than most male ballet dancers- he could not tower over a ballerina en pointe and was therefore relegated to secondary parts. More frustrating to him, the Soviet dance world hewed closely to 19th-century traditions and deliberately shunned Western choreographers, whose work Baryshnikov glimpsed in occasional tours and films. His main reason for leaving the Soviet Union was to work with these innovators.
On June 29, 1974, in Toronto while on tour with the Bolshoi, Baryshnikovdefected, requesting political asylum in Canada. As recalled by John Fraser, a ballet critic from Toronto who helped Baryshnikov to escape, Fraser wrote down phone numbers of people on a small piece of paper and hid it under his wedding ring. At a banquet after one show he managed to distract the KGB officer who followed Baryshnikov as an interpreter and gave Baryshnikov the paper.
Soon, Baryshnikov joined the National Ballet of Canada for a brief time in a guest role. He also announced that he would not return to the USSR. He later said that Christina Berlin, an American friend, helped engineer his defection during his 1970 tour of London. His first televised performance after coming out of temporary seclusion in Canada was with the National Ballet of Canada in La Sylphide. He then went to the United States.
In December 1975, he and his dance partner Natalia Makarova featured prominently in an episode of the BBC television series Arena.
From 1974 to 1978, Baryshnikov was a principal dancer with the AmericanBallet Theatre (ABT), where he partnered with Gelsey Kirkland.
In 1978, Baryshnikov abandoned his freelance career to spend 18 months as a principal of the New York City Ballet, run by George Balanchine.
Baryshnikov returned to the American Ballet Theatre in September 1980 as an artistic director, a position he held until 1989.
From 1990 to 2002, Baryshnikov was artistic director of the White Oak Dance Project, a touring company he co-founded with Mark Morris.
In 2003, Baryshnikov won the Prix Benois de la Danse for lifetime achievement.
In 2005, he launched the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about the TsarBomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created that was tested on a day like today in 1961.
The Tsar Bomba, in Russian Царь-бо́мба, (code name Ivan or Vanya), also known by the alphanumerical designation AN602, was a thermonuclear aerial bomb, and the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested.
Tsar Bomba was developed in the Soviet Union (USSR) by a group of nuclear physicists under the leadership of Igor Kurchatov, an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
Tested on 30 October 1961, the scientific result of the test was the experimental verification of calculation principles and multi-stage thermonuclear charges.
The bomb was dropped by parachute from a Tu-95V aircraft, and detonated autonomously 4,000 metres above the cape Sukhoy Nos of Severny Island, Novaya Zemlya, 15 km from Mityushikha Bay, north of the Matochkin Strait.
The detonation was intended to be secret, but was detected by United States intelligence agencies, via a KC-135A aircraft (Operation SpeedLight) in the area at the time. A secret U.S. reconnaissance aircraft named Speed Light Alpha monitored the blast, coming close enough to have its antiradiation paint scorched.
The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around 58 Mt, which was the accepted yield in technical literature until 1991, when Soviet scientists revealed that their instruments indicated a yield of 50 Mt. As they had the instrumental data and access to the test site, their yield figure has been accepted as more accurate.
In theory, the bomb would have had a yield in excess of 100 Mt if it had included the uranium-238 fusion tamper which figured in the design but which was omitted in the test to reduce radioactive fallout. Because only one bomb was built to completion, that capability has never been demonstrated. The remaining bomb casings are located at the Russian Atomic Weapon Museum in Sarov and the Museum of Nuclear Weapons, All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics, in Snezhinsk.
In the mid-1950s, the United States had an unconditional superiority over the USSR in nuclear weapons, although thermonuclear charges had already been created in the USSR at this time. Also, there were no effective means of delivering nuclear warheads to the US, both in the 1950s and in 1961. The USSR was not therefore able to muster a possible realistic retaliatory nuclear strike against the US.
Given the Soviet Union's actual strategic disadvantage in relation to America's nuclear weapons possessions, foreign policy and propaganda considerations during the leaderships of Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev made a response to the perceived US nuclear blackmail imperative. The creation of the Tsar Bomba represented a necessitated bluff in order to maintain the concept of nuclear deterrence.
Also on June 23, 1960, the Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR was issued on the creation of a super-heavy ballistic missile N-1 (GRAU index-11A52) with a warhead weighing 75 tonnes.
The development of new designs of nuclear and thermonuclear ammunition requires testing. The operability of the device, its safety in emergency situations, and the calculated energy release during an explosion must be confirmed.
The bomb was officially known as product 602 (изделие 602) or AN602, and codenamed "Ivan". The usage of different names can be a source of confusion. The Tsar Bomba, being a modification of the RN202, is sometimes mistakenly labelled as RDS-37, RDS-202 or PH202 (product 202).
Unofficially, the bomb was known as Tsar Bomba and Kuzka's mother (Кузькина мать, Kuz'kina mat'). The name Tsar Bomba (loosely translated as Emperor of Bombs) comes from the fact that, like the Tsar Cannon and the Tsar Bell, it is the most powerful bomb in history. The name Kuzka's Mother was inspired by the statement of Khrushchev to then US Vice President Richard Nixon: We have funds at our disposal that will have dire consequences for you. We will show you Kuzka's mother!
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) designated the bomb (or its test) as JOE 111.
Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party, announced the upcoming tests of a 50-Mt bomb in his opening report at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on October 17, 1961. Before the official announcement, in a casual conversation, he told an American politician about the bomb, and this information was published on September 8, 1961, in The New York Times.
The Tsar Bomba was tested on October 30, 1961.
The Tsar Bomba is the single most physically powerful device ever deployed on Earth, the most powerful nuclear bomb tested and the largest man-made explosion in history.
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.
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