and in the still disputed Kuril Islands.

World War II Ends and Divisions Harden

Invasion of Normandy

Big Three Meet at Tehran

An Anglo-American decision to confront the Germans first in North Africa and then in Sicily and Italy angered Soviet leaders who felt they were carrying the brunt of the fight against Hitler’s forces.

America Enters the War Allied with USSR, U.K.

U.S. Embassy Evacuates Moscow

American Lend-Lease to the USSR Begins

The British, facing Germany alone since the fall of France in 1940, sent aid to the Soviet Union in the form of weapons, food, and materials — much of it imported from the still neutral United States.

USSR Absorbs the Baltic States, Parts of Romania

World War II Begins

the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact included a secret protocol made public after the Cold War that divided territories of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Romania into German and Soviet "spheres of influence."

The experience led Japan to seek a nonaggression pact with Moscow in early 1941, a deal that suited both at the time. The pact held until Soviet forces declared war on Japan two days after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.

The Great Terror

One year into his long presidential tenure, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established relations with the Soviet Union. The U.S. at the time said it received pledges from Moscow to respect religious freedoms, to halt support for communist groups in the U.S., and to open talks on settling pre–Soviet era Russian debts. In practice, little changed, and the relationship quickly soured, though the two nations never severed diplomatic ties again.

Scott worked in Magnitogorsk in an iron and steel plant from 1932 to 1937. He chronicled his experiences in the Soviet Union in Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, published in 1940.

Walter Duranty, the then Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times, ignored and even denied the famine despite overwhelming eyewitness testimony. In August 1933, Duranty reported, “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” instead saying that there was a “food shortage” in the famine regions that have “caused heavy loss of life.”

The largest projects were in Magnitogorsk where several American companies and engineers provided expertise or labor.

Dreiser was taken with Moscow’s exotic, primitive, and yet grand landscapes and published his impressions of the Soviet Union in his book, Dreiser Looks at Russia, in 1928.

Sam Wooding and the Chocolate Kiddies Tour the USSR

Commemorated as the Stalin Dam on October 10, 1932, the Dnepr River dam remains the largest electricity producer in Ukraine today.

Mayakovsky assailed America for its lack of artistic appreciation and obsession with materialism. He chronicled his travels in his book, My Discovery of America.

American Trading Corporation, Amtorg

Immigration Act of 1924

Grigori Zinoviev

Headed by Olga Kameneva, revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s sister and wife of Politburo member Lev Kamenev

Boris Skvirsky

Nikita Balieff

Russian poet Sergei Esenin

Isadora Duncan

Representatives of the communist parties of Russia, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation signed a union treaty that formally created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR.

First Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov

Politburo member Lev Kamenev

Armand Hammer, the son of Russian emigrants to the U.S., signed an agreement with the Soviet government to develop asbestos mines in the Urals

Russian writer Maxim Gorky made a direct appeal to Europe and the United States for famine relief. In the letter, Gorky wrote, “I ask all honest European and American people for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give bread and medicine.”

Nonetheless, Henry Ford began talks about licensing vehicle production in Soviet Russia, a deal that would result in the construction of a massive Ford assembly line plant in the central Russian city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in 1929.

Ludwig Martens

The exodus from Crimea numbered around 200,000 people. Many White émigrés found refuge in Europe and the United States.

Bainbridge Colby

Some notable African American personages who studied at the Communist University in the 1920s were Claude McKay, Harry Haywood, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, and George Padmore, among others.

William C. Bullitt

Red Scare

Fulfilling its promise to withdraw from World War I, Lenin’s Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, officially ending its participation in the war and thus its alliance with the United States and the Western allies. The treaty further alienated Lenin’s government from the West and its terms forced the Soviet republic to cede the Baltic states to Germany and other lands to the Ottoman Turks, as well as grant independence to Ukraine.

The United States stationed some 5,000 troops near Arkhangelsk and Murmansk and 5,000 in Siberia between 1918 and 1919, losing 222 in clashes with Red forces before withdrawing.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points

the Bolsheviks unleashed a wave of mass executions and arrests. Forces related to the anti-Bolshevik White movement also engaged in political terror and anti-Jewish pogroms. Historians estimate that as many as 200,000 people were killed in the resulting political violence.

With the Bolshevik Party at the helm of the government of Russia, the United States refused to recognize the new republic.

American Red Cross

The Root Commission, led by former U.S. secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elihu Root, arrived in revolutionary Russia to arrange cooperation with a “democratic” Russia and pressured the Provisional Government to remain in the war.

geopolitics

Aided by German intelligence agents, exiled Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, along with 23 other Russian banished revolutionaries, secretly returned to Russia in a sealed train.

the United States entered World War I on the side of Britain, France, and Russia.

Alexander Kerensky

David R. Francis

Russia’s Revolution Begins

Bolshevik Revolution

Trans-Siberian Railway

Maxim Gorky

Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty

Battle of Tsushima

Kishinev Pogrom

Pavel Miliukov,

Alexis Babine

1894

The Russian famine of 1891–1892 caused up to half a million deaths, stirring popular discontent against the Tsarist regime. The United States, especially the American Red Cross, provided famine relief to Russia

Taking advantage of Russia’s rapid industrialization, major American companies like Singer, International Harvester, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Baldwin Locomotive, New York Life Insurance, Equitable Life Assurance, and New York City Bank established subsidiaries in Russia.

A wave of pogroms against Jews erupted in Russia in response to Tsar Alexander II’s assassination. The American public was slow to react, though the plight of Russia’s Jews received increased attention as more Jews emigrated to the United States.

Siberia and the Exile System.

Grant told Tsar Alexander II, that “although the two governments are very opposite in their character, the great majority of the American people are in sympathy with Russia,” which good feeling he hoped would long continue. Grant retained fond memories of his trip to Russia in his retirement.

Following in the footsteps of the Mennonites, thousands of Volga Germans left Russia and settled in the United States.

hundreds of families from the pacifist sect left Russia and settled in the American Midwest.

A period of emigration by Russian Jews — many to America — began in earnest.

The highlight of the tour included a buffalo hunt with Buffalo Bill (William Cody), George Custer, and Pawnee Indian chiefs. Later, Alexis was crowned king of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

U.S. Secretary of State William Seward secured a deal to purchase Alaska from the Russian government for $7.2 million.

Upon seeing Odessa, he wrote, “Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we only saw America! There was not one thing to remind us that we were in Russia.”

Russia was among the first countries to present official condolences upon the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. The message came in a letter on behalf of the Tsar from Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Gorchakov, Russia’s foreign minister from 1856–1882, who wrote, “it is easy for me to realize in advance the impression which the news of this odious crime will cause his Imperial Majesty to experience.”

With American approval, Russian warships were based for a short time in New York and San Francisco to help secure the U.S. cities from potential British or French attack.

Tsar Alexander II issued a manifesto emancipating Russian serfs. American abolitionists celebrated the Tsar’s move, using it to condemn slavery in America.

Russia under Tsar Alexander II announced an official position supporting the Union

Taras Shevchenko

The black American Shakespearean actor, Ira Aldridge, plays Othello in St. Petersburg.

The Northern Society, a secret society that planned the revolt, relied heavily on the American Constitution for their plans to establish a Russian constitutional monarchy.

The Kozlov Affair

Russo-American Treaty of 1824

American Influence on Russian Railroads

Russians from the Russian-American Company were some of the first forty-niners.

100-mile zone of Russian control over water off the coast of its northwest American territories to protect its shores from Americans smuggling to natives

Fort Ross, the southernmost Russian outpost on the western North American coast, was sold by the Russian-American Company to an American rancher, Captain John Sutter.

American support for Russia was reflected by the more than 30 American surgeons who volunteered to serve the Russian military and the presence of American military observers on the Russian side.

restricted European expansion into North America, including Russia in Alaska.

Treaty of Ghent

Shareholders of the Russian-American Company (RAC) ordered Ivan Kuskov, a RAC employee in Alaska, to establish a southern base at Fort Ross near Bodega Bay in California, which was at that time a territory of Spain, France’s ally against Russia in the Napoleonic wars. It was the furthest south Russia would move in North America.

Andrei Dashkov

Battle of Sitka

exchanged letters

Russifying

Russian-American Company

Ekaterina Dashkova

Grigory Shelekhov

Alexander Radishchev

Adams’s 14-year-old son John Quincy, the future first official American minister to Russia and sixth U.S. president, accompanied Dana. Catherine withheld diplomatic recognition, and Dana was recalled in 1783 due to mounting costs with little gain from his embassy.

Declaration of Armed Neutrality in the American War of Independence

Empress Catherine the Great refused, on the grounds that supporting Britain against the colonists would spark a wider European conflict with France.

Mikhail Lomonosov

Franz Aepinus

Josias Braun,

Ezra Stiles

Benjamin Franklin

The American merchant ship, the Wolfe, made the first direct voyage from Boston to St. Petersburg, inaugurating direct trade between Russia and the American colonies.

1763–64

scorched earth policy

Aleuts

Alaska

Inuit

Alexi Chirikov

Vitus Bering

Kamchatka Peninsula

Quakers

the Tsar’s own challenges with religious sectarians in Russia

British tobacco merchants monopoly rights in Russia, expanding the market for a key colonial American export.

William Penn

rapid industrialization

subsequent emancipation

human bondage

internal colonization across a great plain;

donations from individuals, joint fundraising committees, political action committees (PACs), and super PACs

Russia, Iran, and China have all engaged in disinformation campaigns

Laws vary from state to state, with some requiring merely a fee or a few thousand signatures, and others requiring tens of thousands of signatures gathered under tight deadline pressure, along with other administrative hurdles.

He described state ballot laws in the United States as “the worst in the Western world, by orders of magnitude.”

538 total electoral votes

ballots are counted in each state

primaries and caucuses

individuals interested in running for president officially declare their candidacy

Everyone has duties to the community

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality

The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion;

Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Everyone has the right to a nationality.

Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

presumed innocent until proved guilty

arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal,

effective remedy

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.

as a person

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

equal rights of men and women

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

foundation of freedom, justice and peace

the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948

It already Feels like I am going to war.

machine learning offers potential assistance

Enheduanna

On this day the boy feels successful, but on the next, his teachers repeatedly beat him for infractions such as tardiness, talking, and poor handwriting. In the end, the boy’s father invites the headmaster to dinner and gives him gifts and money. Appeased (and bought off, although such payments may have been expected), the headmaster declares to the boy: “You have carried out well the school’s activities. You are a man of learning!”

Working harder could lead to a prosperous life composing legal documents—or even writing correspondence for a royal court. Those who persevered could become scholars with knowledge of mathematics, medicine, religious ritual, divination, laws, and mythology, or even authors of literature

Mesopotamians used seals, mostly of durable and sometimes expensive materials.

This tablet reflects bureaucratic accounting, but similar lists were used in the following centuries by individuals to keep track of personal property and business agreements

At about the same time, or a little later, the Egyptians were inventing their own form of hieroglyphic writing.

The earliest known writing was invented there around 3400 B.C. in an area called Sumer near the Persian Gulf.

And it all starts with coffee on the porch swing, a form of time machine that keeps the day at bay for just a few minutes longer just by oscillating to the amplitude of our wind chimes.

future of learning

collection of links

Art, like speech, is a means of communication, and therefore of progress, i.e. of the movement of humanity forward towards perfection.

The third consequence of the perversion of art is the perplexity produced in the minds of children and of plain folk. Among people not perverted by the false theories of our society, among workers and children, there exists a very definite conception of what people may be respected 179and praised for. In the minds of peasants and children the ground for praise or eulogy can only be either physical strength: Hercules, the heroes and conquerors; or moral, spiritual, strength: Sakya Muni giving up a beautiful wife and a kingdom to save mankind, Christ going to the cross for the truth he professed, and all the martyrs and the saints. Both are understood by peasants and children. They understand that physical strength must be respected, for it compels respect; and the moral strength of goodness an unperverted man cannot fail to respect, because all his spiritual being draws him towards it. But these people, children and peasants, suddenly perceive that besides those praised, respected, and rewarded for physical or moral strength, there are others who are praised, extolled, and rewarded much more than the heroes of strength and virtue, merely because they sing well, compose verses, or dance. They see that singers, composers, painters, ballet-dancers, earn millions of roubles and receive more honour than the saints do: and peasants and children are perplexed.

The art of the future, therefore, will not be poorer, but infinitely richer in subject-matter. And the form of the art of the future will also not be inferior to the present forms of art, but infinitely superior to them. Superior, not in the sense of having a refined and complex technique, but in the sense of the capacity briefly, simply, and clearly to transmit, without any superfluities, the feeling which the artist has experienced and wishes to transmit.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

Therefore this third condition—sincerity—is the most important of the three. It is always complied with in peasant art, and this explains why such art always acts so 155powerfully; but it is a condition almost entirely absent from our upper-class art, which is continually produced by artists actuated by personal aims of covetousness or vanity.

If a man is infected by the author’s condition of soul, if he feels this emotion and this union with others, then the object which has effected this is art; but if there be no such infection, if there be not this union with the author and with others who are moved by the same work—then it is not art. And not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art.

Symbolists and Decadents

We think the feelings experienced by people of our day and our class are very important and varied; but in reality almost all the feelings of people of our class amount to but three very insignificant and simple feelings—the feeling of pride, the feeling of sexual desire, and the feeling of weariness of life. These three feelings, with their outgrowths, form almost the only subject-matter of the art of the rich classes.

what distinguishes a work of art from all other mental activity is just the fact that its language is understood by all, and that it infects all without distinction.

While art was as yet undivided, and only religious art was valued and rewarded while indiscriminate art was left unrewarded, there were no counterfeits of art, or, if any existed, being exposed to the criticism of the whole people, they quickly disappeared. But as soon as that division occurred, and the upper classes acclaimed every kind of art as good if only it afforded them pleasure, and began to reward such art more highly than any other social activity, immediately a large number of people devoted themselves to this activity, and art assumed quite a different character and became a profession.

Wagner wishes that musical art should submit to dramatic art, and that both should appear in full strength. But this is impossible, for every work of art, if it be a true one, is an expression of intimate feelings of the artist, which are quite exceptional, and not like anything else.

If it is true that art is an activity by means of which one man having experienced a feeling intentionally transmits it to others, then we have inevitably to admit further, that of all that among us is termed the art of the upper classes—of all 144those novels, stories, dramas, comedies, pictures, sculptures, symphonies, operas, operettas, ballets, etc., which profess to be works of art—scarcely one in a hundred thousand proceeds from an emotion felt by its author, all the rest being but manufactured counterfeits of art in which borrowing, imitating, effects, and interestingness replace the contagion of feeling.

It is true that their foremost thinkers—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—felt that goodness may happen not to coincide with beauty. Socrates expressly subordinated beauty to goodness; Plato, to unite the two conceptions, spoke of spiritual beauty; while Aristotle demanded from art that it should have a moral influence on people (κάθαρσις). 62But, notwithstanding all this, they could not quite dismiss the notion that beauty and goodness coincide.

The artists of the Middle Ages, vitalised by the same source of feeling—religion—as the mass of the people, and transmitting, in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry or drama, the feelings and states of mind they experienced, were true artists; and their activity, founded on the highest conceptions accessible to their age and 57common to the entire people, though, for our times a mean art, was, nevertheless a true one, shared by the whole community.

all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others

Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.

And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.

According to Véron (1825-1889), art is the manifestation of emotion transmitted externally by a combination of lines, forms, colours, or by a succession of movements, sounds, or words subjected to certain rhythms.

“That which is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable, what is harmonious and proportionable is true, and what is at once both beautiful and true is of consequence agreeable and good.”[13] Beauty, he taught, is recognised by the mind only. God is fundamental beauty; beauty and goodness proceed from the same fount.

With reference to the manifestations of beauty, Baumgarten considers that the highest embodiment of beauty is seen by us in nature, and he therefore thinks that the highest aim of art is to copy nature. (This position also is directly contradicted by the conclusions of the latest æstheticians.)

In Russian, by the word krasota (beauty) we mean only that which pleases the sight. And though latterly people have begun to speak of “an ugly deed,” or of “beautiful music,” it is not good Russian. A Russian of the common folk, not knowing foreign languages, will not understand you if you tell him that a man who has given his last coat to another, or done anything similar, has acted “beautifully,” that a man who has cheated another has done an “ugly” action, or that a song is “beautiful.” In Russian a deed may be kind and good, or unkind and bad. Music may be pleasant and good, or unpleasant and bad; but there can be no such thing as “beautiful” or “ugly” music.

But without even asking the ordinary man what differentiates the “good” ballet and the “graceful” operetta from their opposites (a question he would have much difficulty in answering), if you ask him whether the activity of costumiers and hairdressers, who ornament the figures and faces of the women for the ballet and the operetta, is art; or the activity of Worth, the dressmaker; of scent-makers and men-cooks, then he will, in most cases, deny that their activity belongs to the sphere of art.

the labourers produce food for themselves and also food that the cultured class accept and consume, but that the artists seem too often to produce their spiritual food for the cultured only—at any rate that a singularly small share seems to reach the country labourers who work to supply the bodily food! Even were the “division of labour” shown to be a fair one, the “division of products” seems remarkably one-sided.