title: History of Russia

text: In foreign policy, he sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, fearing the remote colony would fall into British hands if there was another war. He modernized the military command system. He sought peace, and moved away from France when Napoleon III fell. He joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation. The Russian Empire expanded in Siberia and in the Caucasus and made gains at the expense of China. Faced with an uprising in Poland in 1863, he stripped that land of its separate Constitution and incorporated it directly into Russia. To counter the rise of a revolutionary and anarchistic movements, he sent thousands of dissidents into exile in Siberia and was proposing additional parliamentary reforms when he was assassinated in 1881.


title: History of Russia

text: In the late 1870s Russia and the Ottoman Empire again clashed in the Balkans. The Russo-Turkish War was popular among the Russian people, who supported the independence of their fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs and the Bulgarians. Russia's victory in this war allowed a number of Balkan states to gain independence: Romania, Serbia, Montenegro. In addition, Bulgaria de facto also became independent after 500 years of Turkish rule. However, the war increased tension with Austria-Hungary, which also had ambitions in the region. The Tsar was disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, but abided by the agreement.


title: History of Russia

text: During this period Russia expanded its empire into Central Asia, conquering the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva, as well as the Trans-Caspian region. Russia's advance in Asia led to British fears that the Russians planned aggression against British India. Before 1815 London worried Napoleon would combine with Russia to do that in one mighty campaign. After 1815 London feared Russia alone would do it step by step. Rudyard Kipling called it "the Great Game" and the term caught on. However historians report that the Russians never had any intention to move against India.


title: History of Russia

text: In the 1860s, a movement known as Nihilism developed in Russia. A term originally coined by Ivan Turgenev in his 1862 novel "Fathers and Sons", Nihilists favoured the destruction of human institutions and laws, based on the assumption that they are artificial and corrupt. At its core, Russian nihilism was characterized by the belief that the world lacks comprehensible meaning, objective truth, or value. For some time, many Russian liberals had been dissatisfied by what they regarded as the empty discussions of the intelligentsia. The Nihilists questioned all old values and shocked the Russian establishment. They became involved in the cause of reform and became major political forces. Their path was facilitated by the previous actions of the Decembrists, who revolted in 1825, and the financial and political hardship caused by the Crimean War, which caused many Russians to lose faith in political institutions. Russian nihilists created the manifesto «Catechism of a Revolutionary». One leader of Russian nihilists, Sergei Nechaev, was basis for Dostoevsky's novel "Demons".


title: History of Russia

text: After the Nihilists failed to convert the aristocracy and landed gentry to the cause of reform, they turned to the peasants. Their campaign became known as the "Narodnk" ("Populist") movement. It was based on the belief that the common people had the wisdom and peaceful ability to lead the nation.


title: History of Russia

text: As the "Narodnik" movement gained momentum, the government moved to extirpate it. In response to the growing reaction of the government, a radical branch of the Narodniks advocated and practiced terrorism. One after another, prominent officials were shot or killed by bombs. This represented the ascendancy of anarchism in Russia as a powerful revolutionary force. Finally, after several attempts, Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, on the very day he had approved a proposal to call a representative assembly to consider new reforms in addition to the abolition of serfdom designed to ameliorate revolutionary demands.


title: History of Russia

text: The end of the 19th century - the beginning of the 20th century is known as the Silver Age of Russian culture. The Silver Age was dominated by the artistic movements of Russian Symbolism, Acmeism, and Russian Futurism, many poetic schools flourished, including the Mystical Anarchism tendency within the Symbolist movement. The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russian Empire and Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many separate art movements of the era in painting, literature, music and architecture.


title: History of Russia

text: Unlike his father, the new tsar Alexander III (1881–1894) was throughout his reign a staunch reactionary who revived the maxim of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and National Character". A committed Slavophile, Alexander III believed that Russia could be saved from chaos only by shutting itself off from the subversive influences of Western Europe. In his reign Russia concluded the union with republican France to contain the growing power of Germany, completed the conquest of Central Asia, and exacted important territorial and commercial concessions from China.


title: History of Russia

text: The tsar's most influential adviser was Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor to Alexander III and his son Nicholas, and procurator of the Holy Synod from 1880 to 1895. He taught his royal pupils to fear freedom of speech and press and to hate democracy, constitutions, and the parliamentary system. Under Pobedonostsev, revolutionaries were hunted down and a policy of Russification was carried out throughout the empire.


title: History of Russia

text: Alexander was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894–1918). The Industrial Revolution, which began to exert a significant influence in Russia, was meanwhile creating forces that would finally overthrow the tsar. Politically, these opposition forces organized into three competing parties: The liberal elements among the industrial capitalists and nobility, who wanted peaceful social reform and a constitutional monarchy, founded the Constitutional Democratic party or "Kadets" in 1905. Followers of the Narodnik tradition established the Socialist-Revolutionary Party or "Esers" in 1901, advocating the distribution of land among the peasants who worked it. A third radical group founded the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or "RSDLP" in 1898; this party was the primary exponent of Marxism in Russia. Gathering their support from the radical intellectuals and the urban working class, they advocated complete social, economic and political revolution.


title: History of Russia

text: In 1903, the RSDLP split into two wings: the radical Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the relatively moderate Mensheviks, led by Yuli Martov. The Mensheviks believed that Russian socialism would grow gradually and peacefully and that the tsar's regime should be succeeded by a democratic republic in which the socialists would cooperate with the liberal bourgeois parties. The Bolsheviks advocated the formation of a small elite of professional revolutionaries, subject to strong party discipline, to act as the vanguard of the proletariat in order to seize power by force.


title: History of Russia

text: At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia continued its expansion in the Far East; Chinese Manchuria was in the zone of Russian interests. Russia took an active part in the intervention of the great powers in China to suppress the Boxer rebellion. During this war, Russia occupied Manchuria, which caused a clash of interests with Japan. In 1904, the Russo-Japanese War began, which ended extremely unfavourably for Russia.


title: History of Russia

text: The disastrous performance of the Russian armed forces in the Russo-Japanese War was a major blow to the Russian State and increased the potential for unrest.


title: History of Russia

text: In January 1905, an incident known as "Bloody Sunday" occurred when Father Gapon led an enormous crowd to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to present a petition to the tsar. When the procession reached the palace, Cossacks opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds. The Russian masses were so aroused over the massacre that a general strike was declared demanding a democratic republic. This marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Soviets (councils of workers) appeared in most cities to direct revolutionary activity.


title: History of Russia

text: In October 1905, Nicholas reluctantly issued the October Manifesto, which conceded the creation of a national Duma (legislature) to be called without delay. The right to vote was extended, and no law was to go into force without confirmation by the Duma. The moderate groups were satisfied; but the socialists rejected the concessions as insufficient and tried to organize new strikes. By the end of 1905, there was disunity among the reformers, and the tsar's position was strengthened for the time being.


title: History of Russia

text: On 28 June 1914, Bosnian Serbs assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary. In a delayed response, on 23 July, Austro-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia, which it considered a Russian client-state. Russia had no treaty obligation to Serbia, and most Russian leaders wanted to avoid war. But in that crisis they had the support of France, and believed that supporting Serbia was important for Russia's credibility and for its goal of a leadership role in the Balkans. Tsar Nicholas II mobilised Russian forces on 30 July 1914 to defend Serbia from Austria-Hungary. Christopher Clark states: "The Russian general mobilisation [of 30 July] was one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilisations. It came at the moment when the German government had not yet even declared the State of Impending War". Germany responded with its own mobilisation and declaration of War on 1 August 1914. At the opening of hostilities, the Russians took the offensive against both Germany and Austria-Hungary.


title: History of Russia

text: The very large but poorly led and under-equipped Russian army fought tenaciously and desperately at times, despite its lack of organization and very weak logistics. Casualties were enormous. In the 1914 campaign, Russian forces defeated Austro-Hungarian forces in the Battle of Galicia. The success of the Russian army forced the German army to withdraw troops from the western front to the Russian front. However, defeats in Poland by the Central Powers in the 1915 campaign, led to a major retreat of the Russian army. In


title: History of Russia

text: By 1915, morale was bad and getting worse. Many recruits were sent to the front unarmed, and told to pick up whatever weapons they could from the battlefield. Nevertheless, the Russian army fought on, and tied down large numbers of Germans and Austrians. When the homefront showed an occasional surge of patriotism, the tsar and his entourage failed to exploit it for military benefit. The Russian army neglected to rally the ethnic and religious minorities that were hostile to Austria, such as Poles. The tsar refused to cooperate with the national legislature, the Duma, and listened less to experts than to his wife, who was in thrall to her chief advisor, the holy man Grigori Rasputin. More than two million refugees fled.


title: History of Russia

text: Repeated military failures and bureaucratic ineptitude soon turned large segments of the population against the government. The German and Ottoman fleets prevented Russia from importing urgently needed supplies through the Baltic and Black seas.


title: History of Russia

text: By the middle of 1915 the impact of the war was demoralizing. Food and fuel were in short supply, casualties kept occurring, and inflation was mounting. Strikes increased among low-paid factory workers, and the peasants, who wanted land reforms, were restless. Meanwhile, elite distrust of the regime was deepened by reports that Rasputin was gaining influence; his assassination in late 1916 ended the scandal but did not restore the autocracy's lost prestige.


title: History of Russia

text: In late February (3 March 1917), a strike occurred in a factory in the capital Petrograd (the new name for Saint Petersburg). On 23 February (8 March) 1917, thousands of female textile workers walked out of their factories protesting the lack of food and calling on other workers to join them. Within days, nearly all the workers in the city were idle, and street fighting broke out. The tsar ordered the Duma to disband, ordered strikers to return to work, and ordered troops to shoot at demonstrators in the streets. His orders triggered the February Revolution, especially when soldiers openly sided with the strikers. The tsar and the aristocracy fell on 2 March, as Nicholas II abdicated.


title: History of Russia

text: To fill the vacuum of authority, the Duma declared a Provisional Government, headed by Prince Lvov, which was collectively known as the Russian Republic. Meanwhile, the socialists in Petrograd organized elections among workers and soldiers to form a soviet (council) of workers' and soldiers' deputies, as an organ of popular power that could pressure the "bourgeois" Provisional Government.


title: History of Russia

text: In July, following a series of crises that undermined their authority with the public, the head of the Provisional Government resigned and was succeeded by Alexander Kerensky, who was more progressive than his predecessor but not radical enough for the Bolsheviks or many Russians discontented with the deepening economic crisis and the continuation of the war. While Kerensky's government marked time, the socialist-led soviet in Petrograd joined with soviets that formed throughout the country to create a national movement.


title: History of Russia

text: The German government provided over 40 million gold marks to subsidize Bolshevik publications and activities subversive of the tsarist government, especially focusing on disgruntled soldiers and workers. In April 1917 Germany provided a special sealed train to carry Vladimir Lenin back to Russia from his exile in Switzerland. After many behind-the-scenes maneuvers, the soviets seized control of the government in November 1917 and drove Kerensky and his moderate provisional government into exile, in the events that would become known as the October Revolution.


title: History of Russia

text: When the national Constituent Assembly (elected in December 1917) refused to become a rubber stamp of the Bolsheviks, it was dissolved by Lenin's troops and all vestiges of democracy were removed. With the handicap of the moderate opposition removed, Lenin was able to free his regime from the war problem by the harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) with Germany. Russia lost much of her western borderlands. However, when Germany was defeated the Soviet government repudiated the Treaty.


title: History of Russia

text: The Bolshevik grip on power was by no means secure, and a lengthy struggle broke out between the new regime and its opponents, which included the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anti-Bolshevik White movement, and large numbers of peasants. At the same time the Allied powers sent several expeditionary armies to support the anti-Communist forces in an attempt to force Russia to rejoin the world war. The Bolsheviks fought against both these forces and national independence movements in the former Russian Empire. By 1921, they had defeated their internal enemies and brought most of the newly independent states under their control, with the exception of Finland, the Baltic States, the Moldavian Democratic Republic (which was annexed by Romania), and Poland (with whom they had fought the Polish–Soviet War). Finland also annexed the region Pechenga of the Russian Kola Peninsula; Soviet Russia and allied Soviet republics conceded the parts of its territory to Estonia (Petseri County and Estonian Ingria), Latvia (Pytalovo), and Turkey (Kars). Poland incorporated the contested territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, the former parts of the Russian Empire (except Galicia) east to Curzon Line.


title: History of Russia

text: Both sides regularly committed brutal atrocities against civilians. During the civil war era for example, Petlyura and Denikin's forces massacred 100,000 to 150,000 Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were left homeless and tens of thousands became victims of serious illness. These massacres are now referred to as the White Terror (Russia).


title: History of Russia

text: Estimates for the total number of people killed during the Red Terror carried out by the Bolsheviks vary widely. One source asserts that the total number of victims of repression and pacification campaigns could be 1.3 million, whereas others give estimates ranging from 10,000 in the initial period of repression to 50,000 to 140,000 and an estimate of 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922. The most reliable estimations for the total number of killings put the number at about 100,000, whereas others suggest a figure of 200,000.


title: History of Russia

text: The Russian economy was devastated by the war, with factories and bridges destroyed, cattle and raw materials pillaged, mines flooded and machines damaged. The droughts of 1920 and 1921, as well as the 1921 famine, worsened the disaster still further. Disease had reached pandemic proportions, with 3,000,000 dying of typhus alone in 1920. Millions more also died of widespread starvation. By 1922 there were at least 7,000,000 street children in Russia as a result of nearly ten years of devastation from the Great War and the civil war. Another one to two million people, known as the White émigrés, fled Russia, many were evacuated from Crimea in the 1920, some through the Far East, others west into the newly independent Baltic countries. These émigrés included a large percentage of the educated and skilled population of Russia.


title: History of Russia

text: The history of Russia between 1922 and 1991 is essentially the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the Soviet Union. This ideologically based union, established in December 1922 by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party, was roughly coterminous with Russia before the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At that time, the new nation included four constituent republics: the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Belarusian SSR, and the Transcaucasian SFSR.


title: History of Russia

text: The constitution, adopted in 1924, established a federal system of government based on a succession of soviets set up in villages, factories, and cities in larger regions. This pyramid of soviets in each constituent republic culminated in the All-Union Congress of Soviets. However, while it appeared that the congress exercised sovereign power, this body was actually governed by the Communist Party, which in turn was controlled by the Politburo from Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, just as it had been under the tsars before Peter the Great.


title: History of Russia

text: The period from the consolidation of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until 1921 is known as the period of war communism. Land, all industry, and small businesses were nationalized, and the money economy was restricted. Strong opposition soon developed. The peasants wanted cash payments for their products and resented having to surrender their surplus grain to the government as a part of its civil war policies. Confronted with peasant opposition, Lenin began a strategic retreat from war communism known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The peasants were freed from wholesale levies of grain and allowed to sell their surplus produce in the open market. Commerce was stimulated by permitting private retail trading. The state continued to be responsible for banking, transportation, heavy industry, and public utilities.


title: History of Russia

text: Although the left opposition among the Communists criticized the rich peasants, or kulaks, who benefited from the NEP, the program proved highly beneficial and the economy revived. The NEP would later come under increasing opposition from within the party following Lenin's death in early 1924.


title: History of Russia

text: As the Russian Empire included during this period not only the region of Russia, but also today's territories of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Moldavia and the Caucasian and Central Asian countries, it is possible to examine the firm formation process in all those regions. One of the main determinants of firm creation for given regions of Russian Empire might be urban demand of goods and supply of industrial and organizational skill.


title: History of Russia

text: While the Russian economy was being transformed, the social life of the people underwent equally drastic changes. The Family Code of 1918 granted women equal status to men, and permitted a couple to take either the husband or wife's name. Divorce no longer required court procedure,


title: History of Russia

text: and to make women completely free of the responsibilities of childbearing, abortion was made legal as early as 1920. As a side effect, the emancipation of women increased the labor market. Girls were encouraged to secure an education and pursue a career in the factory or the office. Communal nurseries were set up for the care of small children, and efforts were made to shift the center of people's social life from the home to educational and recreational groups, the soviet clubs.


title: History of Russia

text: The Soviet government pursued a policy of eliminating illiteracy Likbez. After industrialization, massive urbanization began in the USSR. In the field of national policy in the 1920s, the Korenizatsiya was carried out. However, from the mid-30s, the Stalinist government returned to the tsarist policy of Russification of the outskirts. In particular, the languages of all the nations of the USSR were translated into the Cyrillic alphabet Cyrillization.


title: History of Russia

text: The years from 1929 to 1939 comprised a tumultuous decade in Soviet history—a period of massive industrialization and internal struggles as Joseph Stalin established near total control over Soviet society, wielding virtually unrestrained power. Following Lenin's death Stalin wrestled to gain control of the Soviet Union with rival factions in the Politburo, especially Leon Trotsky's. By 1928, with the Trotskyists either exiled or rendered powerless, Stalin was ready to put a radical programme of industrialisation into action.


title: History of Russia

text: In 1929, Stalin proposed the first five-year plan. Abolishing the NEP, it was the first of a number of plans aimed at swift accumulation of capital resources through the buildup of heavy industry, the collectivization of agriculture, and the restricted manufacture of consumer goods. For the first time in history a government controlled all economic activity. The rapid growth of production capacity and the volume of production of heavy industry (4 times) was of great importance for ensuring economic independence from western countries and strengthening the country's defense capability. At this time, the Soviet Union made the transition from an agrarian country to an industrial one.


title: History of Russia

text: As a part of the plan, the government took control of agriculture through the state and collective farms ("kolkhozes"). By a decree of February 1930, about one million individual peasants ("kulaks") were forced off their land. Many peasants strongly opposed regimentation by the state, often slaughtering their herds when faced with the loss of their land. In some sections they revolted, and countless peasants deemed "kulaks" by the authorities were executed. The combination of bad weather, deficiencies of the hastily established collective farms, and massive confiscation of grain precipitated a serious famine, and several million peasants died of starvation, mostly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and parts of southwestern Russia. The deteriorating conditions in the countryside drove millions of desperate peasants to the rapidly growing cities, fueling industrialization, and vastly increasing Russia's urban population in the space of just a few years.


title: History of Russia

text: The plans received remarkable results in areas aside from agriculture. Russia, in many measures the poorest nation in Europe at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far surpassing Germany's pace of industrialization in the 19th century and Japan's earlier in the 20th century.


title: History of Russia

text: The NKVD gathered in tens of thousands of Soviet citizens to face arrest, deportation, or execution. Of the six original members of the 1920 Politburo who survived Lenin, all were purged by Stalin. Old Bolsheviks who had been loyal comrades of Lenin, high officers in the Red Army, and directors of industry were liquidated in the Great Purges. Purges in other Soviet republics also helped centralize control in the USSR.


title: History of Russia

text: Stalin destroyed the opposition in the party consisting of the old Bolsheviks during the Moscow trials. The NKVD under the leadership of Stalin's commissar Nikolai Yezhov carried out a series of massive repressive operations against the kulaks and various national minorities in the USSR. During the Great Purges of 1937–38, about 700 000 people were executed.


title: History of Russia

text: Penalties were introduced, and many citizens were prosecuted for fictitious crimes of sabotage and espionage. The labor provided by convicts working in the labor camps of the Gulag system became an important component of the industrialization effort, especially in Siberia. An estimated 18 million people passed through the Gulag system, and perhaps another 15 million had experience of some other form of forced labor.


title: History of Russia

text: After the partition of Poland in 1939, the NKVD executed 20,000 captured Polish officers in the Katyn massacre. In the late 30s - first half of the 40s, the Stalinist government carried out massive deportations of various nationalities. A number of ethnic groups were deported from their settlement to Central Asia.


title: History of Russia

text: The Soviet Union viewed the 1933 accession of fervently anti-Communist Hitler's government to power in Germany with great alarm from the onset, especially since Hitler proclaimed the Drang nach Osten as one of the major objectives in his vision of the German strategy of Lebensraum. The Soviets supported the republicans of Spain who struggled against fascist German and Italian troops in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938–1939, immediately prior to WWII, the Soviet Union successfully fought against Imperial Japan in the Soviet–Japanese border conflicts in the Russian Far East, which led to Soviet-Japanese neutrality and the tense border peace that lasted until August 1945.


title: History of Russia

text: In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and, together with major Western European powers, signed the Munich Agreement following which Germany, Hungary and Poland divided parts of Czechoslovakia between themselves. German plans for further eastward expansion, as well as the lack of resolve from Western powers to oppose it, became more apparent. Despite the Soviet Union strongly opposing the Munich deal and repeatedly reaffirming its readiness to militarily back commitments given earlier to Czechoslovakia, the Western Betrayal led to the end of Czechoslovakia and further increased fears in the Soviet Union of a coming German attack. This led the Soviet Union to rush the modernization of its military industry and to carry out its own diplomatic maneuvers. In 1939, the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact: a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany dividing Eastern Europe into two separate spheres of influence. Following the pact, the USSR normalized relations with Nazi Germany and resumed Soviet–German trade.


title: History of Russia

text: On 17 September 1939, sixteen days after the start of World War II and with the victorious Germans having advanced deep into Polish territory, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland, stating as justification the "need to protect Ukrainians and Belarusians" there, after the "cessation of existence" of the Polish state. As a result, the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet republics' western borders were moved westward, and the new Soviet western border was drawn close to the original Curzon line. In the meantime negotiations with Finland over a Soviet-proposed land swap that would redraw the Soviet-Finnish border further away from Leningrad failed, and in December 1939 the USSR invaded Finland, beginning a campaign known as the Winter War (1939–1940). The war took a heavy death toll on the Red Army but forced Finland to sign a Moscow Peace Treaty and cede the Karelian Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia. In summer 1940 the USSR issued an ultimatum to Romania forcing it to cede the territories of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. At the same time, the Soviet Union also occupied the three formerly independent Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania).


title: History of Russia

text: The peace with Germany was tense, as both sides were preparing for the military conflict, and abruptly ended when the Axis forces led by Germany swept across the Soviet border on 22 June 1941. By the autumn the German army had seized Ukraine, laid a siege of Leningrad, and threatened to capture the capital, Moscow, itself. Despite the fact that in December 1941 the Red Army threw off the German forces from Moscow in a successful counterattack, the Germans retained the strategic initiative for approximately another year and held a deep offensive in the south-eastern direction, reaching the Volga and the Caucasus. However, two major German defeats in Stalingrad and Kursk proved decisive and reversed the course of the entire World War as the Germans never regained the strength to sustain their offensive operations and the Soviet Union recaptured the initiative for the rest of the conflict. By the end of 1943, the Red Army had broken through the German siege of Leningrad and liberated much of Ukraine, much of Western Russia and moved into Belarus. During the 1944 campaign, the Red Army defeated German forces in a series of offensive campaigns known as Stalin's ten blows. By the end of 1944, the front had moved beyond the 1939 Soviet frontiers into eastern Europe. Soviet forces drove into eastern Germany, capturing Berlin in May 1945. The war with Germany thus ended triumphantly for the Soviet Union.


title: History of Russia

text: As agreed at the Yalta Conference, three months after the Victory Day in Europe the USSR launched the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, defeating the Japanese troops in neighboring Manchuria, the last Soviet battle of World War II.


title: History of Russia

text: Although the Soviet Union was victorious in World War II, the war resulted in around 26–27 million Soviet deaths (estimates vary) and had devastated the Soviet economy in the struggle. Some 1,710 towns and 70,000 settlements were destroyed. The occupied territories suffered from the ravages of German occupation and deportations of slave labor by Germany. Thirteen million Soviet citizens became victims of the repressive policies of Germany and its allies in occupied territories, where people died because of mass murders, famine, absence of elementary medical aid and slave labor. The Nazi Genocide of the Jews, carried out by German "Einsatzgruppen" along with local collaborators, resulted in almost complete annihilation of the Jewish population over the entire territory temporarily occupied by Germany and its allies. During the occupation, the Leningrad region lost around a quarter of its population, Soviet Belarus lost from a quarter to a third of its population, and 3.6 million Soviet prisoners of war (of 5.5 million) died in German camps.


title: History of Russia

text: Collaboration among the major Allies had won the war and was supposed to serve as the basis for postwar reconstruction and security. USSR became one of the founders of the UN and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. However, the conflict between Soviet and U.S. national interests, known as the Cold War, came to dominate the international stage in the postwar period.


title: History of Russia

text: The Cold War emerged from a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. Russia had suffered three devastating Western onslaughts in the previous 150 years during the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, and the Second World War, and Stalin's goal was to establish a buffer zone of states between Germany and the Soviet Union. Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the Yalta agreement. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, Stalin was also biding his time, as his own atomic bomb project was steadily and secretly progressing.


title: History of Russia

text: In April 1949 the United States sponsored the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact in which most Western nations pledged to treat an armed attack against one nation as an assault on all. The Soviet Union established an Eastern counterpart to NATO in 1955, dubbed the Warsaw Pact. The division of Europe into Western and Soviet blocks later took on a more global character, especially after 1949, when the U.S. nuclear monopoly ended with the testing of a Soviet bomb and the Communist takeover in China.


title: History of Russia

text: The foremost objectives of Soviet foreign policy were the maintenance and enhancement of national security and the maintenance of hegemony over Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union maintained its dominance over the Warsaw Pact through crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, suppressing the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and supporting the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s. The Soviet Union opposed the United States in a number of proxy conflicts all over the world, including the Korean War and Vietnam War.


title: History of Russia

text: As the Soviet Union continued to maintain tight control over its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Cold War gave way to "Détente" and a more complicated pattern of international relations in the 1970s in which the world was no longer clearly split into two clearly opposed blocs. The nuclear race continued, the number of nuclear weapons in the hands of the USSR and the United States reached a menacing scale, giving them the ability to destroy the planet multiple times. Less powerful countries had more room to assert their independence, and the two superpowers were partially able to recognize their common interest in trying to check the further spread and proliferation of nuclear weapons in treaties such as SALT I, SALT II, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.


title: History of Russia

text: U.S.–Soviet relations deteriorated following the beginning of the nine-year Soviet–Afghan War in 1979 and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a staunch anti-communist, but improved as the communist bloc started to unravel in the late 1980s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia lost the superpower status that it had won in the Second World War.


title: History of Russia

text: Nikita Khrushchev solidified his position in a speech before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 detailing Stalin's atrocities.


title: History of Russia

text: In 1964, Khrushchev was impeached by the Communist Party's Central Committee, charging him with a host of errors that included Soviet setbacks such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. After a period of collective leadership led by Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgorny, a veteran bureaucrat, Brezhnev, took Khrushchev's place as Soviet leader. Brezhnev emphasized heavy industry, instituted the Soviet economic reform of 1965, and also attempted to ease relationships with the United States. Soviet science and industry peaked in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. The world's first nuclear power plant was established in 1954 in Obninsk, and the Baikal Amur Mainline was built. In the 1950s the USSR became a leading producer and exporter of petroleum and natural gas. In addition, in 1980 Moscow hosted the Summer Olympic Games.


title: History of Russia

text: While all modernized economies were rapidly moving to computerization after 1965, the USSR fell further and further behind. Moscow's decision to copy the IBM 360 of 1965 proved a decisive mistake for it locked scientists into an antiquated system they were unable to improve. They had enormous difficulties in manufacturing the necessary chips reliably and in quantity, in programming workable and efficient programs, in coordinating entirely separate operations, and in providing support to computer users.


title: History of Russia

text: One of the greatest strengths of Soviet economy was its vast supplies of oil and gas; world oil prices quadrupled in 1973–1974, and rose again in 1979–1981, making the energy sector the chief driver of the Soviet economy, and was used to cover multiple weaknesses. At one point, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin told the head of oil and gas production, "things are bad with bread. Give me 3 million tons [of oil] over the plan." Former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, an economist looking back three decades, in 2007 wrote:


title: History of Russia

text: The Soviet space program, founded by Sergey Korolev, was especially successful. On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik. On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space in the Soviet spaceship Vostok 1. Other achievements of Russian space program include: the first photo of the far side of the Moon; exploration of Venus; the first spacewalk by Alexei Leonov; first female spaceflight by Valentina Tereshkova. In 1970 and 1973, the world's first planetary rovers were sent to the moon and successfully worked there: Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2. More recently, the Soviet Union produced the world's first space station, Salyut which in 1986 was replaced by Mir, the first consistently inhabited long-term space station, that served from 1986 to 2001.


title: History of Russia

text: Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. After the rapid succession of former KGB Chief Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, transitional figures with deep roots in Brezhnevite tradition, Mikhail Gorbachev implemented perestroika in an attempt to modernize Soviet communism, and made significant changes in the party leadership. However, Gorbachev's social reforms led to unintended consequences. His policy of "glasnost" facilitated public access to information after decades of government repression, and social problems received wider public attention, undermining the Communist Party's authority. "Glasnost" allowed ethnic and nationalist disaffection to reach the surface, and many constituent republics, especially the Baltic republics, Georgian SSR and Moldavian SSR, sought greater autonomy, which Moscow was unwilling to provide. In the revolutions of 1989 the USSR lost its allies in Eastern Europe. Gorbachev's attempts at economic reform were not sufficient, and the Soviet government left intact most of the fundamental elements of communist economy. Suffering from low pricing of petroleum and natural gas, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and outdated industry and pervasive corruption, the Soviet planned economy proved to be ineffective, and by 1990 the Soviet government had lost control over economic conditions. Due to price control, there were shortages of almost all products, reaching their peak in the end of 1991, when people had to stand in long lines and were lucky to buy even the essentials. Control over the constituent republics was also relaxed, and they began to assert their national sovereignty over Moscow.


title: History of Russia

text: The tension between Soviet Union and Russian SFSR authorities came to be personified in the bitter power struggle between Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Squeezed out of Union politics by Gorbachev in 1987, Yeltsin, who represented himself as a committed democrat, presented a significant opposition to Gorbachev's authority. In a remarkable reversal of fortunes, he gained election as chairman of the Russian republic's new Supreme Soviet in May 1990. The following month, he secured legislation giving Russian laws priority over Soviet laws and withholding two-thirds of the budget. In the first Russian presidential election in 1991 Yeltsin became president of the Russian SFSR.


title: History of Russia

text: At last Gorbachev attempted to restructure the Soviet Union into a less centralized state. However, on 19 August 1991, a coup against Gorbachev, conspired by senior Soviet officials, was attempted. The coup faced wide popular opposition and collapsed in three days, but disintegration of the Union became imminent. The Russian government took over most of the Soviet Union government institutions on its territory. Because of the dominant position of Russians in the Soviet Union, most gave little thought to any distinction between Russia and the Soviet Union before the late 1980s. In the Soviet Union, only Russian SFSR lacked even the paltry instruments of statehood that the other republics possessed, such as its own republic-level Communist Party branch, trade union councils, Academy of Sciences, and the like. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was banned in Russia in 1991–1992, although no lustration has ever taken place, and many of its members became top Russian officials. However, as the Soviet government was still opposed to market reforms, the economic situation continued to deteriorate. By December 1991, the shortages had resulted in the introduction of food rationing in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for the first time since World War II. Russia received humanitarian food aid from abroad. After the Belavezha Accords, the Supreme Soviet of Russia withdrew Russia from the Soviet Union on 12 December. The Soviet Union officially ended on 25 December 1991, and the Russian Federation (formerly the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) took power on 26 December. The Russian government lifted price control in January 1992. Prices rose dramatically, but shortages disappeared.


title: History of Russia

text: Although Yeltsin came to power on a wave of optimism, he never recovered his popularity after endorsing Yegor Gaidar's "shock therapy" of ending Soviet-era price controls, drastic cuts in state spending, and an open foreign trade regime in early 1992 ("see" Russian economic reform in the 1990s). The reforms immediately devastated the living standards of much of the population. In the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn that was, in some ways, more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression. Hyperinflation hit the ruble, due to monetary overhang from the days of the planned economy.


title: History of Russia

text: Meanwhile, the profusion of small parties and their aversion to coherent alliances left the legislature chaotic. During 1993, Yeltsin's rift with the parliamentary leadership led to the September–October 1993 constitutional crisis. The crisis climaxed on 3 October, when Yeltsin chose a radical solution to settle his dispute with parliament: he called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his opponents. As Yeltsin was taking the unconstitutional step of dissolving the legislature, Russia came close to a serious civil conflict. Yeltsin was then free to impose the current Russian constitution with strong presidential powers, which was approved by referendum in December 1993. The cohesion of the Russian Federation was also threatened when the republic of Chechnya attempted to break away, leading to the First and Second Chechen Wars.


title: History of Russia

text: Economic reforms also consolidated a semi-criminal oligarchy with roots in the old Soviet system. Advised by Western governments, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, Russia embarked on the largest and fastest privatization that the world had ever seen in order to reform the fully nationalized Soviet economy. By mid-decade, retail, trade, services, and small industry was in private hands. Most big enterprises were acquired by their old managers, engendering a new rich (Russian tycoons) in league with criminal mafias or Western investors. Corporate raiders such as Andrei Volgin engaged in hostile takeovers of corrupt corporations by the mid-1990s.


title: History of Russia

text: By the mid-1990s Russia had a system of multiparty electoral politics. But it was harder to establish a representative government because of two structural problems—the struggle between president and parliament and the anarchic party system.


title: History of Russia

text: Meanwhile, the central government had lost control of the localities, bureaucracy, and economic fiefdoms, and tax revenues had collapsed. Still in a deep depression, Russia's economy was hit further by the financial crash of 1998. After the crisis, Yeltsin was at the end of his political career. Just hours before the first day of 2000, Yeltsin made a surprise announcement of his resignation, leaving the government in the hands of the little-known Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official and head of the FSB, the KGB's post-Soviet successor agency.


title: History of Russia

text: In 2000, the new acting president defeated his opponents in the presidential election on 26 March and won in a landslide four years later. The Second Chechen war ended with the victory of Russia, at the same time, after the September 11 terrorist attacks, there was a rapprochement between Russia and the United States. Putin has created a system of guided democracy in Russia by subjugating parliament, suppressing independent media and placing major oil and gas companies under state control.


title: History of Russia

text: International observers were alarmed by moves in late 2004 to further tighten the presidency's control over parliament, civil society, and regional officeholders. In 2008, Dmitri Medvedev, a former Gazprom chairman and Putin's head of staff, was elected new President of Russia. In 2012, Putin and Medvedev switched places, Putin became president again, prompting massive protests in Moscow in 2011–2012.


title: History of Russia

text: Russia's long-term problems include a shrinking workforce, rampant corruption, and underinvestment in infrastructure. Nevertheless, reversion to a socialist command economy seemed almost impossible. The economic problems are aggravated by massive capital outflows, as well as extremely difficult conditions for doing business, due to pressure from the security forces "Siloviki" and government agencies.


title: History of Russia

text: Due to high oil prices, from 2000 to 2008, Russia's GDP at PPP doubled. Although high oil prices and a relatively cheap ruble initially drove this growth, since 2003 consumer demand and, more recently, investment have played a significant role. Russia is well ahead of most other resource-rich countries in its economic development, with a long tradition of education, science, and industry. The economic recovery of the 2000s allowed Russia to obtain the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.


title: History of Russia

text: In 2014, following a controversial referendum, in which separation was favored by a large majority of voters according to official results, the Russian leadership announced the accession of Crimea into the Russian Federation. Following Russia's annexation of Crimea and alleged Russian interference in the war in eastern Ukraine, Western sanctions were imposed on Russia.


title: History of Russia

text: Since 2015, Russia has been conducting military intervention in Syria in support of the Bashar al-Assad regime, against ISIS and the Syrian opposition.


title: History of Russia

text: In 2018, the FIFA World Cup was held in Russia. Vladimir Putin was re-elected for a fourth presidential term.


title: History of Russia

text: In 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine, which was denounced by NATO and the European Union. They aided Ukraine and imposed massive International sanctions during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. A leading banker in Moscow said the damage might take a decade to recover, as half of its international trade has been lost. Despite international opposition, Russia officially annexed the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, along with most of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts on 30 September. According to the United Nations, Russia has committed war crimes during the invasion of Ukraine.


title: Marc Maron

text: Marcus David Maron (born September 27, 1963) is an American stand-up comedian, podcaster, writer, actor, and musician.


title: Marc Maron

text: In the 1990s and 2000s, Maron was a frequent guest on the "Late Show with David Letterman" and has appeared more than forty times on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien", more than any other stand-up comedian. He hosted "Comedy Central's Short Attention Span Theater" from 1993 to 1994, replacing Jon Stewart. He was also a regular guest on "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn" and hosted the short-lived 2002 American version of the British game show "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" on VH1. He was a regular on the left-wing radio network Air America from 2004 to 2009, hosting "The Marc Maron Show" and co-hosting "Morning Sedition" and "Breakroom Live".


title: Marc Maron

text: In September 2009, soon after "Breakroom Live" was cancelled Maron began hosting the twice-weekly podcast "WTF with Marc Maron", where he interviews comedians, authors, musicians, and celebrities in his garage in Highland Park, Los Angeles. Highlights include a 2010 episode with Louis C.K. that was rated the No. 1 podcast episode of all time by "Slate" magazine, a 2012 interview with comedian Todd Glass in which Glass publicly revealed that he was gay, and a 2015 interview with President Barack Obama.


title: Marc Maron

text: From 2013 to 2016, he starred in his own IFC television comedy series, "Maron", for which he also served as executive producer and occasional writer. From 2017 to 2019 he co-starred in the Netflix comedy series "GLOW". He also had a minor role in 2019's "Joker". He also provided the voice of Mr. Snake in the DreamWorks Animation film "The Bad Guys" (2022).


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of mother Toby and father Barry Ralph Maron, an orthopedic surgeon. He has a younger brother, Craig.


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron is from a Jewish family, originally from Poland and Ukraine, including Drohobych. He lived in Wayne, New Jersey until he was six. Maron's father joined the U.S. Air Force for two years for his medical residency in Alaska, and so Maron and his family moved there. When his father left the Air Force, he moved his family to Albuquerque, New Mexico and started a medical practice. Maron lived in Albuquerque from third grade through high school. He graduated from Highland High School.


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron first performed standup in 1987 when he was 24 years old. However, his professional comedy career began at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles where he became an associate of Sam Kinison. He later moved to New York City and became part of the New York alternative comedy scene. During the summer of 1994, he appeared a few times on Monday open-mic night, coordinated by Tracey Metzger, at the now-closed Greenwich Village location of the Boston Comedy Club. He auditioned unsuccessfully for the 1995 "Saturday Night Live" cast overhaul and attributes being passed over due to being high during a meeting with show creator and producer, Lorne Michaels.


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron continued to be a standup performer and also began to appear on television; his voice was used in episodes of "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist", and he hosted "Short Attention Span Theater" for a time. He also recorded half-hour specials for HBO and "Comedy Central Presents" as well as comedy showcases like the Cam Neely Foundation fundraiser, which also featured performers such as Jon Stewart, Denis Leary and Steven Wright. He frequently appeared in the live alternative standup series he had organized with Janeane Garofalo called "Eating It", which used the rock bar Luna Lounge in New York's Lower East Side as its venue, from the 1990s until the building was razed in 2005.


title: Marc Maron

text: His first one-man show, "Jerusalem Syndrome", had an extended off-Broadway run in 2000 and was released in book form in 2001. In 2009, he began workshopping another one-man show, "Scorching The Earth". According to Maron (in "Scorching The Earth"), these two shows "bookend" his relationship with his second wife, comic Mishna Wolff, which ended in a bitter divorce.


title: Marc Maron

text: In May 2008, he toured with Eugene Mirman and Andy Kindler in "Stand Uppity: Comedy That Makes You Feel Better About Yourself and Superior to Others." In January 2009, a collaboration with Sam Seder which had begun in September 2007 as a weekly hour-long video webcast became "Breakroom Live with Maron & Seder", produced by Air America. Until its cancellation in July 2009 the show was webcast live weekdays at 3 p.m. Eastern, with episodes archived for later viewing as well. In its final incarnation, the show was quite informal, taking place in the actual break room of Air America Media, with the cafeteria vending machines just off-camera. This meant occasional distractions when Air America staff and management alike would occasionally come in for food and drink. Maron and Seder held court in an online "post-show chat" with viewers, in an even less formal continuation of each webcast, after the credits had rolled.


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron's standup comedy act is marked by his commitment to self-revelation and cultural analysis. He is particularly known for relentless on-stage exploration of his own relationships with family, girlfriends, and other standup comedians that he has known and befriended over his many years in the business. In October 2013, Maron released his first hour-long special via Netflix titled, "Marc Maron: Thinky Pain". Maron would follow this with another special titled, "More Later", which he released in December 2015, on the website Epix.


title: Marc Maron

text: Kliph Nesteroff's 2015 book "The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy" is dedicated to Maron.


title: Marc Maron

text: From almost the first day of the liberal talk radio network Air America's broadcasts in 2004, Maron co-hosted "Morning Sedition", a three-hour early-morning radio show with Mark Riley that aired weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern time. The show was unique in the Air America lineup in its heavy reliance on both live and pre-produced sketch comedy, utilizing the talents of staff writers as well as the on-air hosts. The format was a left-leaning near-satire of typical morning "Buddy" radio programs, including recurring characters, interviews and listener call-in segments, and it attracted a loyal fan base.


title: Marc Maron

text: As 2005 came to an end, it became known that Maron's contract would not be renewed on its December 1, 2005, end date because of problems with then Air America executive Danny Goldberg. Goldberg reportedly did not "get" the comedy or agree with the satiric and often angry tone set by Maron and other writers (Jim Earl and Kent Jones) for a morning drive-time show. On November 28, 2005, it was officially announced that Maron's contract had not been renewed. His last "Morning Sedition" broadcast was on December 16, 2005, and the show was discontinued shortly thereafter.


title: Marc Maron

text: On February 28, 2006, Maron began hosting a nighttime radio program with Jim Earl as a sidekick for KTLK Progressive Talk 1150AM in Los Angeles called "The Marc Maron Show" from 10:00 pm until midnight PST. The program was frequently delayed (sometimes for over an hour) owing to KTLK's contractual agreement to broadcast local sports events that would often go into overtime. "The Marc Maron Show" was never nationally syndicated by Air America despite reported contractual clauses promising such. The show was streamed online live, but the show was not publicized, and the existence of the stream was not well promoted.


title: Marc Maron

text: On July 5, it was announced that Maron's final episode would be on July 14. A few days before that date, Maron bluntly discussed his long struggle with Air America Radio's executives on-air. In 2008, Marc and Sam Seder expanded their prior collaboration on a weekly hour-long video webcast (streamed at The Sam Seder Show website) into a daily show (and "post-show chat") produced by Air America Media called "Maron v. Seder". The show became "Breakroom Live with Maron & Seder" starting in 2009 and could be viewed on Air America Media's website. On July 15, 2009, after less than one year, Air America Media canceled "Breakroom Live". According to the show's hosts, the cancellation was for financial reasons. Ironically, the day before the cancellation, the show got some of the first real publicity it had ever received when MaximumFun.org posted its podcast of an interview with Maron on "The Sound of Young America".


title: Marc Maron

text: On the final "Breakroom Live" webcast, Maron said that this marked the third time since 2005 he'd been told by an executive at the network that his services would not be required in the immediate future. Co-host Sam Seder pointed out that this would be the end of his "fourth" show at Air America since the troubled network's inception.


title: Marc Maron

text: Due to a failing comedic career, on September 1, 2009, Maron began a twice-weekly podcast called "WTF with Marc Maron". In a free-form discussion, Maron and his guests touch on topics like the arc of the interviewees' careers, their shared past experiences, and stories from the road. As of 2020, Maron has released over 1,000 episodes of the show, with notable guests over the years including President Barack Obama, Sir Paul McCartney, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Lorne Michaels, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Brad Pitt. The show has been noted for its influence on other long-form interview podcasts that emerged after its debut. In April 2021 it was announced that Maron and his producer Brendan McDonald would be the recipients of the first-ever Governors Award by the Podcast Academy for Excellence in Audio ("The Ambies") for their work on "WTF".


title: Marc Maron

text: His only major film credit for many years was a small part credited as "angry promoter" in the 2000 Cameron Crowe film "Almost Famous", in which he is first seen fighting with Noah Taylor's character and then yelling at and chasing after the main characters as they drive away on a bus, at which point he yells, "Lock the gates!" which is now used in the intro to his podcasts. He was also featured at the Luna Lounge in the 1997 mockumentary "Who's the Caboose?" starring Sarah Silverman and Sam Seder. In 2019, Maron starred in a Lynn Shelton-directed comedy film titled "Sword of Trust". In 2020, Maron played publicist Ron Oberman opposite Johnny Flynn's young David Bowie in the movie "Stardust".


title: Marc Maron

text: In 2012, he provided the voice of Magnus Hammersmith in three episodes of "Metalocalypse". Maron has made two guest appearances as himself on his longtime friend Louis C.K.'s show "Louie," first in the third-season episode "Ikea/Piano Lesson" and then again in the fourth season episode "Pamela: Part 3".


title: Marc Maron

text: "Maron", a television series created by and starring Maron for a 10-episode first season, premiered on IFC on May 3, 2013. The show is loosely autobiographical, revolving around Maron's life as a twice-divorced sober comedian running a comedy podcast out of his garage but establishing many differences between the real-life Maron and the version of him on TV. As the executive producer and star of "Maron", Maron appeared in all 51 episodes of the show from 2013 to 2016, portraying a fictionalized version of himself. The show ended in 2016 after four seasons on IFC. Maron directed two episodes of the show, "The Joke" and "Ex-Pod."


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron played a supporting role in Todd Phillips's Joker origin story film "Joker", starring Joaquin Phoenix as the title character, alongside Robert De Niro and Zazie Beetz.


title: Marc Maron

text: In addition to his own show, Maron was the voice of the raccoon Randl on 12 episodes of the Nickelodeon show "Harvey Beaks" in 2015 and 2016. He appeared in the Netflix series "Easy", playing a graphic novelist, Jacob Malco. Maron also appeared on two episodes of "Girls" in season four in 2015, playing New York City councilman Ed Duffield.


title: Marc Maron

text: Since 2017, Maron has co-starred in the Netflix comedy "GLOW" and has been nominated for multiple awards.


title: Marc Maron

text: In 2013, Maron played a guitar solo on the protest song and charity single "Party at the NSA" by electropop music duo Yacht. Inspired by the 2013 global surveillance disclosures, "Party at the NSA" critiques the state of governmental surveillance programs in the United States. Proceeds from the single benefit the international non-profit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. Previously, Maron said he was a fan of the band.


title: Marc Maron

text: In an interview with KCRW, Maron stated "I have no idea why they asked me to play guitar on the track. I'm only good at one thing on the guitar. It just so happens it was exactly the thing they needed."


title: Marc Maron

text: Reviews for the solo were positive. IFC's Melissa Locker said "Marc Maron plays a mean guitar." "Spin"s Chris Martins called the guitar solo a "shredfest" as well as "angular." "The Stranger" called it "a frequency-fraying guitar solo that's better than you'd expect, although it won't make J Mascis jealous."


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron lived in Astoria, Queens through the 1990s and most of the 2000s but moved back to Los Angeles in late 2009. Maron also speaks openly of his caring for numerous stray cats that he takes into his home. This has led to him to refer to his home, on the WTF Podcast, as the "Cat Ranch". After his cat Boomer went missing, Maron began incorporating the catchphrase "Boomer lives!" to the end of each podcast. Since then, he has one addition to the "Cat Ranch" by the name of Buster Kitten. LaFonda died in December 2019. After she passed, Maron briefly replaced "Boomer lives!" with "LaFonda lives!" for a few episodes of his podcast. Monkey died in August 2020. He now usually concludes his podcast with some guitar playing and the phrase "Boomer lives... LaFonda... Monkey... Cat angels everywhere!" Maron currently lives in Glendale, Los Angeles, with his two cats, Buster and Sammy.


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron has spoken openly, both in his act and on his podcast, about his alcohol and drug abuse during the 1990s. Maron has been sober since August 9, 1999. Maron had a turbulent long-time friendship with fellow standup comic Louis CK but publicly disavowed CK after the November 2017 confirmation of CK's sexual misconduct, stating that CK had lied to him about the allegations in the past.


title: Marc Maron

text: Maron has been married twice, once to Kimberly Reiss and once to Mishna Wolff, a former standup comedian. Both relationships have figured prominently in his act at various times. During numerous appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 2007, Maron riffed on his then-recent separation and divorce from Wolff.


title: Marc Maron

text: On the October 14, 2013, episode of his podcast, Maron announced that he had broken up with his former fiancée, Jessica Sanchez. He then had a five-month relationship with Moon Zappa. More recently, he dated visual artist Sarah Cain for several years, breaking up with her in early 2019.


title: Marc Maron

text: Starting in late 2019, he began making reference to his relationship with director Lynn Shelton. She was a guest on his podcast in both 2015 and 2018, and she directed the 2019 film "Sword of Trust" which stars Maron and Michaela Watkins. Maron and Shelton were together until Shelton's abrupt death from cancer in May 2020.


title: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell

text: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell (born 4 March 1987) is a Northern Irish actress from Derry. She is best known for her role as Michelle Mallon in the Channel 4 sitcom "Derry Girls".


title: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell

text: O’Donnell was born on 4 March 1987 to a large family in Derry, Northern Ireland. She attended St Anne's Primary School, St Cecilia's College, and North West Regional College.


title: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell

text: She began acting at a young age in school plays. Upon graduation, she decided to pursue it professionally despite not being able to afford drama school. She instead studied performing arts at De Montfort University in Bedfordshire. She began auditioning and dividing her time between England and home, taking part in theatrical productions and working as a dancer for promotions and pantomimes.


title: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell

text: Between 2012 and 2015, O'Donnell played her first significant role as Eva Maguire, one of the main characters of the BBC2 NI series "6Degrees", after the end of which she took part in the film "Urban & the Shed Crew", by Candida Brady.


title: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell

text: In 2018, she starred in a theatre production "I Told My Mum I Was Going on an RE Trip", by Julia Samuels, playing an underage girl who decides to undergo an abortion. The following year, she joined the cast of "Girls and Dolls", a play by the "Derry Girls" creator Lisa McGee, and acted in Martin McDonagh's "The Cripple of Inishmaan" at the Gaiety Theatre.


title: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell later landed the role of Michelle Mallon in "Derry Girls", a sitcom by Channel 4, which gained international fame. Of her role as Michelle, she says, "Michelle really thinks she's maybe just a bit too big for the place she was born in and she's ready to take on the world one swearword at a time. She's really feisty, really ballsy, doesn't really care about authority, just sort of up for anything and up for a laugh."


title: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell and her fellow "Derry Girls" costars participated in the RTÉ fundraising special "RTÉ Does Comic Relief", performing a sketch alongside Saoirse Ronan. All proceeds from the night went towards those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Jamie-Lee O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell lives in Derry with her partner, DJ Paul McCay. She is a patron of the Liverpool-based youth theatre company 20 Stories High.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Mary Tudor (; 18 March 1496 – 25 June 1533) was an English princess who was briefly Queen of France as the wife of Louis XII. She was the younger surviving daughter of King Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York, and the third wife of King Louis XII of France, who was more than 30 years her senior.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Following Louis's death, she married Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. Performed secretly in France, the marriage occurred without the consent of Mary's brother, Henry VIII. The marriage necessitated the intervention of Thomas Wolsey; Henry eventually pardoned the couple, after they paid a large fine. Mary's second marriage produced four children. Through her older daughter, Frances, she was the maternal grandmother of Lady Jane Grey the queen of England for nine days in July 1553.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Mary was the fifth child of Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York, and the youngest to survive infancy. She was born at Sheen Palace, on 18 March 1496. A privy seal bill dated from midsummer 1496 authorizes a payment of 50 shillings to her nurse, Anne Skeron. Also, Erasmus stated that she was four years old when he visited the royal nursery in 1499–1500. At age six, she was given her own household, complete with "a staff of gentlewomen assigned to wait upon her", a schoolmaster, and a physician. She was given instruction in French, Latin, music, dancing, and embroidery. Her Governess was Joan Vaux, whom she called Mother Guildford; the two shared a close relationship and Mary was furious when Joan was sent back to England upon her arrival in France.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: As children, Mary and her brother, the future King Henry VIII, shared a close friendship. He named his first surviving child, the future Queen Mary I, in her honour. They lost their mother when Mary was just six and, given the number of bills paid to her apothecary from 1504 to 1509, it would appear that Mary's own health was fragile.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: She was known in her youth as one of the most beautiful princesses in Europe; Erasmus said of her that "Nature never formed anything more beautiful."


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: In 1506, during a visit from Philip I of Castile, Mary was called to entertain the guests, dancing and playing the lute and clavichord. In September 1506, Philip died, and on 21 December 1507, Mary was betrothed to his son Charles, later Holy Roman Emperor. The betrothal was called off in 1513.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Cardinal Wolsey negotiated a peace treaty with France, and on 9 October 1514, at the age of 18, Mary married the 52-year-old King Louis XII of France at Abbeville. She was accompanied to France by four English maids of honour (one of whom was Anne Boleyn) under the supervision of her old governess Lady or "Mother" Guildford, who acted as her principal lady-in-waiting.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Despite two previous marriages, Louis had no living sons, and sought to produce one. But he died on 1 January 1515, less than three months after marrying Mary, reputedly worn out by his exertions in the bedchamber, but more likely from the effects of gout. Their union produced no children. Following Louis's death, the new king Francis I made unsuccessful attempts to arrange a second marriage for Mary.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Mary had been unhappy in her marriage of state to King Louis XII, as she was almost certainly already in love with Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. King Henry VIII was aware of Mary's feelings; letters from her in 1515 indicated that she had agreed to wed Louis only on condition that "if she survived him, she should marry whom she liked." But Henry VIII wanted any future marriage to be to his advantage. The King's Council, not wishing to see Charles Brandon gain further power at court, was also opposed to the match.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Meanwhile, rumours swirled in France that she would wed either Antoine, Duke of Lorraine, or Charles III, Duke of Savoy. At one point, even King Francis I, perhaps in hope of his wife Queen Claude's death, was one of Mary's suitors in the first week of her widowhood; Mary asserted that she had given him her confidence in order to avoid his overtures. A pair of French friars went so far as to warn Mary that she must not wed Charles Brandon because he "had traffickings with the devil."


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: When King Henry VIII sent Brandon to bring Mary back to England in late January 1515, he made the Duke promise that he would not propose to her. Once in France, Mary persuaded Charles to abandon that pledge; Charles later wrote to the King stating he "never saw a woman so weep." The couple wed in secret at the Hotel de Clugny in Paris on 3 March 1515 in the presence of just 10 people, among them King Francis I. Technically, this was treason as Charles Brandon had married a royal princess without King Henry's consent. Thus Henry was outraged, and the privy council urged that Charles be imprisoned or executed; Mary, as royalty and the King's favourite sister, was safe from execution.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Because of the intervention of Thomas Wolsey and Henry's affection for both his sister and Charles, the couple were given only a heavy fine of £24,000, to be paid to the King in yearly instalments of £1000; the whole of Mary's dowry from King Louis XII of £200,000; and the gold plate and jewels King Louis had given or promised her. The £24,000, approximately equivalent to £7,200,000 today, was later reduced by the King. They officially later married on 13 May 1515 at Greenwich Palace in the presence of King Henry VIII and his courtiers. In 1528, Charles secured a papal bull from Pope Clement VII legitimizing the marriage.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Mary was Charles Brandon's third wife, and he had two daughters, Anne and Mary, by his second marriage to Anne Browne, who had died in 1511. Mary raised the girls with her own children. Even after her second marriage, Mary was normally referred to at the English court as the Queen of France, and was not known as the Duchess of Suffolk in her lifetime, despite being legally allowed to be. Mary spent most of her time at the Duke's country seat of Westhorpe Hall in Suffolk.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: In the late 1520s, relations between King Henry VIII and his sister Mary were strained when she opposed the King's attempt to obtain an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, whom Mary had known for many years. Mary strongly disliked Anne Boleyn (King Henry's intended wife), whom she had first encountered in France. Anne and her sister Mary Boleyn had been among the maids of honour in the entourage that had accompanied Mary to France for her wedding to King Louis XII.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: In March 1532, Venetian Ambassador Carlo Capello wrote of an incident where one of the chief gentlemen in the service of the said Duke of Norfolk, with 20 followers, assaulted and killed in the sanctuary of Westminster Sir William Pennington chief gentleman and kinsman of the Duke of Suffolk. In consequence of this, the whole Court was in an uproar. Though it was said to be caused by a private quarrel, he was "assured it was owing to opprobrious language uttered against Madam Anne by his Majesty's sister, the Duchess of Suffolk, Queen Dowager of France.". Anne Boleyn was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk mentioned by Capello.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Mary suffered multiple bouts of illness, requiring treatments over her lifetime. She died, age 37, at Westhorpe Hall, Suffolk, on 25 June 1533, having never fully recovered from the sweating sickness she caught in 1528. The cause of death has been speculated to have been angina, tuberculosis, appendicitis, or cancer.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: As an English princess, daughter of a king, sister to the current king, and a dowager queen of France, Mary Tudor's funeral and interment was conducted with much heraldic ceremony. A requiem mass was held at Westminster Abbey. Her body was embalmed and held in state at Westhorpe Hall for three weeks.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: On 22 July 1533, a delegation from France joined the English delegation for the lavish funeral ceremony. Her daughter Frances was chief mourner, accompanied by her husband and siblings. As was tradition, neither Mary's husband nor her brother the king attended.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: The funeral procession included 100 torch bearers, clergy carrying the cross, six horses pulling the hearse, other nobility and 100 of the duke's yeomen. A requiem mass and burial at Bury St. Edmunds Abbey followed the next day. At the funeral, her step-daughters, Anne and Mary, pushed themselves to the head of the cortège just before the coffin was lowered into the crypt of the Abbey, much to the consternation of their half-siblings.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Five years later, when the monastery was dissolved, Mary's body was removed to nearby St. Mary's Church, Bury St. Edmunds. In 1784, her remains were disinterred, her coffin opened, and locks of her hair were taken by Horace Walpole, Dorothy Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, and several others.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Upon her arrival in France, Mary was described as being "handsome and well favoured, were not her eyes and eyebrows too light; she is slight, rather than defective from corpulence, and conducts herself with so much grace, and has such good manners, that for her age of 18 years—and she does not look more—she is a paradise."


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Contemporaries lauded her beauty, including her husband, Louis XII, who described her as a "nymph from heaven". She regularly took part in masques at her brother's court, and enjoyed "hearing singing, instrumental music, and dancing".


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Mary was described as "very lively", with one nobleman noting "[she] is never still." She was also said to be cheerful and affable; this is shown when, upon meeting her future husband Louis for the first time, she blew him a kiss in greeting.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Mary and Charles raised their children at their home at Westhorpe Hall. Their two sons, both named Henry, are commonly mistaken for being the same son. Both boys died when they were children.


title: Mary Tudor, Queen of France

text: Mary's widower later married their son's (Henry Brandon, Earl of Lincoln) betrothed, who was also his ward, the 14-year-old Catherine Willoughby, by whom he had his two youngest sons.


title: Cubism

text: Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from a single viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris (Montmartre and Montparnasse) or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.


title: Cubism

text: The movement was pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and joined by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger. One primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne. A retrospective of Cézanne's paintings was held at the Salon d'Automne of 1904, current works were displayed at the 1905 and 1906 Salon d'Automne, followed by two commemorative retrospectives after his death in 1907.


title: Cubism

text: In France, offshoots of Cubism developed, including Orphism, abstract art and later Purism. The impact of Cubism was far-reaching and wide-ranging. In France and other countries Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, Vorticism, De Stijl and Art Deco developed in response to Cubism. Early Futurist paintings hold in common with Cubism the fusing of the past and the present, the representation of different views of the subject pictured at the same time or successively, also called multiple perspective, simultaneity or multiplicity, while Constructivism was influenced by Picasso's technique of constructing sculpture from separate elements. Other common threads between these disparate movements include the faceting or simplification of geometric forms, and the association of mechanization and modern life.


title: Cubism

text: Historians have divided the history of Cubism into phases. In one scheme, the first phase of Cubism, known as "Analytic Cubism", a phrase coined by Juan Gris a posteriori, was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1910 and 1912 in France. A second phase, "Synthetic Cubism", remained vital until around 1919, when the Surrealist movement gained popularity. English art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, "The Cubist Epoch". According to Cooper there was "Early Cubism", (from 1906 to 1908) when the movement was initially developed in the studios of Picasso and Braque; the second phase being called "High Cubism", (from 1909 to 1914) during which time Juan Gris emerged as an important exponent (after 1911); and finally Cooper referred to "Late Cubism" (from 1914 to 1921) as the last phase of Cubism as a radical avant-garde movement. Douglas Cooper's restrictive use of these terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris (from 1911) and Léger (to a lesser extent) implied an intentional value judgement.


title: Cubism

text: Cubism burgeoned between 1907 and 1911. Pablo Picasso's 1907 painting "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" has often been considered a proto-Cubist work.


title: Cubism

text: In 1908, in his review of Georges Braque's exhibition at Kahnweiler's gallery, the critic Louis Vauxcelles called Braque a daring man who despises form, "reducing everything, places and a figures and houses, to geometric schemas, to cubes".


title: Cubism

text: Vauxcelles recounted how Matisse told him at the time, "Braque has just sent in [to the 1908 Salon d'Automne] a painting made of little cubes". The critic Charles Morice relayed Matisse's words and spoke of Braque's little cubes. The motif of the viaduct at l'Estaque had inspired Braque to produce three paintings marked by the simplification of form and deconstruction of perspective.


title: Cubism

text: Georges Braque's 1908 "Houses at L’Estaque" (and related works) prompted Vauxcelles, in "Gil Blas", 25 March 1909, to refer to "bizarreries cubiques" (cubic oddities). Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as "Reservoir at Horta de Ebro", as the first Cubist paintings. The first organized group exhibition by Cubists took place at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris during the spring of 1911 in a room called 'Salle 41'; it included works by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay and Henri Le Fauconnier, yet no works by Picasso or Braque were exhibited.


title: Cubism

text: By 1911 Picasso was recognized as the inventor of Cubism, while Braque's importance and precedence was argued later, with respect to his treatment of space, volume and mass in the L’Estaque landscapes. But "this view of Cubism is associated with a distinctly restrictive definition of which artists are properly to be called Cubists," wrote the art historian Christopher Green: "Marginalizing the contribution of the artists who exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911 [...]"


title: Cubism

text: The assertion that the Cubist depiction of space, mass, time, and volume supports (rather than contradicts) the flatness of the canvas was made by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as early as 1920, but it was subject to criticism in the 1950s and 1960s, especially by Clement Greenberg.


title: Cubism

text: Contemporary views of Cubism are complex, formed to some extent in response to the "Salle 41" Cubists, whose methods were too distinct from those of Picasso and Braque to be considered merely secondary to them. Alternative interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed. Wider views of Cubism include artists who were later associated with the "Salle 41" artists, e.g., Francis Picabia; the brothers Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp, who beginning in late 1911 formed the core of the Section d'Or (or the Puteaux Group); the sculptors Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Csaky and Ossip Zadkine as well as Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens; and painters such as Louis Marcoussis, Roger de La Fresnaye, František Kupka, Diego Rivera, Léopold Survage, Auguste Herbin, André Lhote, Gino Severini (after 1916), María Blanchard (after 1916) and Georges Valmier (after 1918). More fundamentally, Christopher Green argues that Douglas Cooper's terms were "later undermined by interpretations of the work of Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger that stress iconographic and ideological questions rather than methods of representation."


title: Cubism

text: John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with the mechanical diagram. "The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: The diagram being a visible symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearance but these too will be treated as signs not as imitations or recreations."


title: Cubism

text: There was a distinct difference between Kahnweiler's Cubists and the Salon Cubists. Prior to 1914, Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger (to a lesser extent) gained the support of a single committed art dealer in Paris, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who guaranteed them an annual income for the exclusive right to buy their works. Kahnweiler sold only to a small circle of connoisseurs. His support gave his artists the freedom to experiment in relative privacy. Picasso worked in Montmartre until 1912, while Braque and Gris remained there until after the First World War. Léger was based in Montparnasse.


title: Cubism

text: In contrast, the Salon Cubists built their reputation primarily by exhibiting regularly at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, both major non-academic Salons in Paris. They were inevitably more aware of public response and the need to communicate. Already in 1910 a group began to form which included Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay and Léger. They met regularly at Henri le Fauconnier's studio near the boulevard du Montparnasse. These soirées often included writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon. Together with other young artists, the group wanted to emphasise a research into form, in opposition to the Neo-Impressionist emphasis on color.


title: Cubism

text: Louis Vauxcelles, in his review of the 26th Salon des Indépendants (1910), made a passing and imprecise reference to Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Léger and Le Fauconnier as "ignorant geometers, reducing the human body, the site, to pallid cubes." At the 1910 Salon d'Automne, a few months later, Metzinger exhibited his highly fractured "Nu à la cheminée (Nude)", which was subsequently reproduced in both "Du "Cubisme"" (1912) and "Les Peintres Cubistes" (1913).


title: Cubism

text: The first public controversy generated by Cubism resulted from Salon showings at the Indépendants during the spring of 1911. This showing by Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, le Fauconnier and Léger brought Cubism to the attention of the general public for the first time. Amongst the Cubist works presented, Robert Delaunay exhibited his "Eiffel Tower, Tour Eiffel" (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York).


title: Cubism

text: At the Salon d'Automne of the same year, in addition to the Indépendants group of "Salle 41", were exhibited works by André Lhote, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, Roger de La Fresnaye, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and František Kupka. The exhibition was reviewed in the October 8, 1911 issue of "The New York Times". This article was published a year after Gelett Burgess' "The Wild Men of Paris", and two years prior to the Armory Show, which introduced astonished Americans, accustomed to realistic art, to the experimental styles of the European avant garde, including Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism. The 1911 "New York Times" article portrayed works by Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Metzinger and others dated before 1909; not exhibited at the 1911 Salon. The article was titled "The "Cubists" Dominate Paris' Fall Salon" and subtitled "Eccentric School of Painting Increases Its Vogue in the Current Art Exhibition – What Its Followers Attempt to Do."


title: Cubism

text: Among all the paintings on exhibition at the Paris Fall Salon none is attracting so much attention as the extraordinary productions of the so-called "Cubist" school. In fact, dispatches from Paris suggest that these works are easily the main feature of the exhibition. [...]


title: Cubism

text: In spite of the crazy nature of the "Cubist" theories the number of those professing them is fairly respectable. Georges Braque, André Derain, Picasso, Czobel, Othon Friesz, Herbin, Metzinger—these are a few of the names signed to canvases before which Paris has stood and now again stands in blank amazement.


title: Cubism

text: What do they mean? Have those responsible for them taken leave of their senses? Is it art or madness? Who knows?


title: Cubism

text: The subsequent 1912 Salon des Indépendants located in Paris (20 March to 16 May 1912) was marked by the presentation of Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2", which itself caused a scandal, even amongst the Cubists. It was in fact rejected by the hanging committee, which included his brothers and other Cubists. Although the work was shown in the Salon de la Section d'Or in October 1912 and the 1913 Armory Show in New York, Duchamp never forgave his brothers and former colleagues for censoring his work. Juan Gris, a new addition to the Salon scene, exhibited his "Portrait of Picasso" (Art Institute of Chicago), while Metzinger's two showings included "La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a horse)" 1911–1912 (National Gallery of Denmark). Delaunay's monumental "La Ville de Paris" (Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris) and Léger's "La Noce", "The Wedding" (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris), were also exhibited.


title: Cubism

text: In 1912, Galeries Dalmau presented the first declared group exhibition of Cubism worldwide ("Exposició d'Art Cubista"), with a controversial showing by Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin and Marcel Duchamp (Barcelona, 20 April to 10 May 1912). The Dalmau exhibition comprised 83 works by 26 artists. Jacques Nayral's association with Gleizes led him to write the Preface for the Cubist exhibition, which was fully translated and reproduced in the newspaper "La Veu de Catalunya". Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" was exhibited for the first time.


title: Cubism

text: Extensive media coverage (in newspapers and magazines) before, during and after the exhibition launched the Galeries Dalmau as a force in the development and propagation of modernism in Europe. While press coverage was extensive, it was not always positive. Articles were published in the newspapers "Esquella de La Torratxa" and "El Noticiero Universal" attacking the Cubists with a series of caricatures laced with derogatory text. Art historian Jaime Brihuega writes of the Dalmau show: "No doubt that the exhibition produced a strong commotion in the public, who welcomed it with a lot of suspicion.


title: Cubism

text: The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne created scandal regarding the use of government owned buildings, such as the Grand Palais, to exhibit such artwork. The indignation of the politician Jean Pierre Philippe Lampué made the front page of "Le Journal", 5 October 1912. The controversy spread to the Municipal Council of Paris, leading to a debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such art. The Cubists were defended by the Socialist deputy, Marcel Sembat.


title: Cubism

text: It was against this background of public anger that Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote "Du "Cubisme"" (published by Eugène Figuière in 1912, translated to English and Russian in 1913). Among the works exhibited were Le Fauconnier's vast composition "Les Montagnards attaqués par des ours (Mountaineers Attacked by Bears)" now at Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Joseph Csaky's "Deux Femme, Two Women" (a sculpture now lost), in addition to the highly abstract paintings by Kupka, "Amorpha" (The National Gallery, Prague), and Picabia, "La Source (The Spring)" (Museum of Modern Art, New York).


title: Cubism

text: The most extreme forms of Cubism were not those practiced by Picasso and Braque, who resisted total abstraction. Other Cubists, by contrast, especially František Kupka, and those considered Orphists by Apollinaire (Delaunay, Léger, Picabia and Duchamp), accepted abstraction by removing visible subject matter entirely. Kupka's two entries at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, "Amorpha-Fugue à deux couleurs" and "Amorpha chromatique chaude", were highly abstract (or nonrepresentational) and metaphysical in orientation. Both Duchamp in 1912 and Picabia from 1912 to 1914 developed an expressive and allusive abstraction dedicated to complex emotional and sexual themes. Beginning in 1912 Delaunay painted a series of paintings entitled "Simultaneous Windows", followed by a series entitled "Formes Circulaires", in which he combined planar structures with bright prismatic hues; based on the optical characteristics of juxtaposed colors his departure from reality in the depiction of imagery was quasi-complete. In 1913–14 Léger produced a series entitled "Contrasts of Forms", giving a similar stress to color, line and form. His Cubism, despite its abstract qualities, was associated with themes of mechanization and modern life. Apollinaire supported these early developments of abstract Cubism in "Les Peintres cubistes" (1913), writing of a new "pure" painting in which the subject was vacated. But in spite of his use of the term Orphism these works were so different that they defy attempts to place them in a single category.


title: Cubism

text: Also labeled an Orphist by Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp was responsible for another extreme development inspired by Cubism. The ready-made arose from a joint consideration that the work itself is considered an object (just as a painting), and that it uses the material detritus of the world (as collage and papier collé in the Cubist construction and Assemblage). The next logical step, for Duchamp, was to present an ordinary object as a self-sufficient work of art representing only itself. In 1913 he attached a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and in 1914 selected a bottle-drying rack as a sculpture in its own right.


title: Cubism

text: The "Section d'Or", also known as "Groupe de Puteaux", founded by some of the most conspicuous Cubists, was a collective of painters, sculptors and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism, active from 1911 through about 1914, coming to prominence in the wake of their controversial showing at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants. The "Salon de la Section d'Or" at the "Galerie La Boétie" in Paris, October 1912, was arguably the most important pre-World War I Cubist exhibition; exposing Cubism to a wide audience. Over 200 works were displayed, and the fact that many of the artists showed artworks representative of their development from 1909 to 1912 gave the exhibition the allure of a Cubist retrospective.


title: Cubism

text: The group seems to have adopted the name Section d'Or to distinguish themselves from the narrower definition of Cubism developed in parallel by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, and to show that Cubism, rather than being an isolated art-form, represented the continuation of a grand tradition (indeed, the golden ratio had fascinated Western intellectuals of diverse interests for at least 2,400 years).


title: Cubism

text: The idea of the Section d'Or originated in the course of conversations between Metzinger, Gleizes and Jacques Villon. The group's title was suggested by Villon, after reading a 1910 translation of Leonardo da Vinci's "Trattato della Pittura" by Joséphin Péladan.


title: Cubism

text: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Polynesian, Micronesian and Native American art. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when both artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. They became friendly rivals and competed with each other throughout their careers, perhaps leading to Picasso entering a new period in his work by 1907, marked by the influence of Greek, Iberian and African art. Picasso's paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as notably seen in "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", the antecedent of Cubism.


title: Cubism

text: The art historian Douglas Cooper states that Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne "were particularly influential to the formation of Cubism and especially important to the paintings of Picasso during 1906 and 1907". Cooper goes on to say: "The "Demoiselles" is generally referred to as the first Cubist picture. This is an exaggeration, for although it was a major first step towards Cubism it is not yet Cubist. The disruptive, expressionist element in it is even contrary to the spirit of Cubism, which looked at the world in a detached, realistic spirit. Nevertheless, the "Demoiselles" is the logical picture to take as the starting point for Cubism, because it marks the birth of a new pictorial idiom, because in it Picasso violently overturned established conventions and because all that followed grew out of it."


title: Cubism

text: The most serious objection to regarding the "Demoiselles" as the origin of Cubism, with its evident influence of primitive art, is that "such deductions are unhistorical", wrote the art historian Daniel Robbins. This familiar explanation "fails to give adequate consideration to the complexities of a flourishing art that existed just before and during the period when Picasso's new painting developed." Between 1905 and 1908, a conscious search for a new style caused rapid changes in art across France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, and Russia. The Impressionists had used a double point of view, and both Les Nabis and the Symbolists (who also admired Cézanne) flattened the picture plane, reducing their subjects to simple geometric forms. Neo-Impressionist structure and subject matter, most notably to be seen in the works of Georges Seurat (e.g., "Parade de Cirque", "Le Chahut" and "Le Cirque"), was another important influence. There were also parallels in the development of literature and social thought.