title: Arthur's Seat

text: Two stony banks on the east side of the hill represent the remains of an Iron Age hill-fort and a series of cultivation terraces are obvious above the road just beyond and best viewed from Duddingston.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: On 1 May 1590, to celebrate the safe return of James VI of Scotland and Anna of Denmark, a bonfire was lit that night on the Salisbury Crags fuelled with ten loads of coal and six barrels of tar.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: A track rising along the top of the slope immediately under Salisbury Crags has long been a popular walk, giving a view over the city. It became known as the Radical Road after it was paved in the aftermath of the Radical War of 1820, using the labour of unemployed weavers from the west of Scotland at the suggestion of Walter Scott as a form of work relief. This route has been closed since 2018 after 50 tons of rock fell from the cliffs above.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In 1836 five boys hunting for rabbits found a set of 17 miniature coffins containing small wooden figures in a cave on the crags of Arthur's Seat. The purpose has remained a mystery ever since the discovery. A strong contemporary belief was that they were made for witchcraft, though more recently it has been suggested that they might be connected with the murders committed by Burke and Hare in 1828. There were 16 known victims of the serial-killers plus the first person sold "to the doctors", namely a man who had died of natural causes. However, the murder victims were primarily female, while the eight surviving figures are male. Alternatively, the coffins may have represented the 16 bodies sold to the doctors, plus that of the final victim who remained unburied at the time of the duo's arrest, but was, as a destitute beggar, very likely dissected in any case. The surviving coffins are now displayed in Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: The prominence of Arthur's Seat over Edinburgh has attracted various groups and has a particular significance to the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because this is where the nation of Scotland was dedicated in 1840 "for the preaching of the gospel". The apostle, Orson Pratt, arrived in Scotland in early 1850 and climbed the hill to pray to God for more converts.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In 1884, alpine mountain guide Emile Rey visited Edinburgh where he climbed Arthur's Seat, local tradition stating that before doing so he estimated it would take much of the day to reach the top.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: Arthur's Seat is often mentioned as one of the possible locations for Camelot, the legendary castle and court of the Romano-British warrior-chief, King Arthur.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: Tradition has it that it was at the foot of Arthur's Seat, covered by the forest of Drumselch, that Scotland's 12th-century king David I encountered a stag while out hunting. Having fallen from his horse and about to be gored, he had a vision of a cross appearing between the animal's antlers, before it inexplicably turned away, leaving him unharmed. David, believing his life had been spared through divine intervention, founded Holyrood Abbey on the spot. The burgh arms of the Canongate display the head of the stag with the cross framed by its antlers.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: The slopes of the hill facing Holyrood are where young girls in Edinburgh traditionally bathe their faces in the dew on May Day to make themselves more beautiful. The poem "Caller Water" (fresh cool water), written by Robert Fergusson in 1773, contains the lines:


title: Arthur's Seat

text: Arthur's Seat plays a prominent role in Scottish writer James Hogg's 1824 novel "The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner". Robert and George Colwan, two feuding brothers, are caught in a fog atop Arthur's Seat and witness what could be interpreted as a Brocken spectre, a strange phenomenon of the light, which causes George to believe that he is seeing a ghost. In the confusion, George nearly kills Robert, but they both escape to the bottom of the hill as the fog begins to clear.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In January 1829, in his "General Preface" to the Waverley Novels, Sir Walter Scott included Arthur's Seat among the "solitary and romantic environs" he roamed in the 1780s as a schoolboy with "a chosen friend", telling each other "interminable tales of knight-errantry and battles and enchantments",


title: Arthur's Seat

text: Arthur's Seat has a passing mention as one of the sights of Edinburgh in the novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: The 2009 novel "One Day" by David Nicholls begins and ends with the main characters, Emma and Dexter, climbing Arthur's Seat after their graduation from university. Arthur's Seat is shown at the end of the 2011 film "One Day", which was based on the novel.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In Jules Verne's novel, "The Underground City" (or, "The Child of the Cavern"), Nell, a young girl who is an inhabitant of Verne's Underground City, is taken to Arthur's Seat to view her first sunrise. She has never before been above ground and is being acclimatized to life above ground.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In Catherine Sinclair's "Holiday House", the children climb Arthur's Seat during a rare day away from their nurse. On the way down the children misbehave, almost causing Laura to fall over a cliff. She catches herself, and her brother comes to her rescue.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In Stephen Baxter's disaster novel "Moonseed", the volcano reactivates and obliterates most of Edinburgh during the first act of Earth's eventual destruction.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: The 17 coffins found on Arthur's Seat are the subject of Philip Caveney's 2014 teen fiction novel "Seventeen Coffins".


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In Julian May's "Galactic Milieu" series, Arthur's Seat has a central role as one of the sites of the Great Intervention. One of the main families in the series lives in Willowbrae on the slopes of the hill.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In "Z. Rex", the first part of Steve Cole's "The Hunting" trilogy, Arthur's Seat is the first location that Zed and Adam Adler land after they reach Scotland, following their long flight across the Atlantic Ocean.


title: Arthur's Seat

text: In the 2017 film, T2 Trainspotting, Ewan McGregor and Ewen Bremner ran up the hill to begin Spud’s detox.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse (pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform ) is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin. "Onegin" is considered a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes (so-called "superfluous men"). It was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832. The first complete edition was published in 1833, and the currently accepted version is based on the 1837 publication.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Almost the entire work is made up of 389 fourteen-line stanzas (5,446 lines in all) of iambic tetrameter with the unusual rhyme scheme , where the uppercase letters represent feminine rhymes while the lowercase letters represent masculine rhymes. This form has come to be known as the "Onegin stanza" or the "Pushkin sonnet". The innovative rhyme scheme, the natural tone and diction, and the economical transparency of presentation all demonstrate the virtuosity which has been instrumental in proclaiming Pushkin as the undisputed master of Russian poetry.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: The story is told by a narrator (a lightly fictionalized version of Pushkin's public image), whose tone is educated, worldly, and intimate. The narrator digresses at times, usually to expand on aspects of this social and intellectual world. This narrative style allows for a development of the characters and emphasizes the drama of the plot despite its relative simplicity. The book is admired for the artfulness of its verse narrative as well as for its exploration of life, death, love, ennui, convention, and passion.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: In the 1820s, Eugene Onegin is a bored St. Petersburg dandy, whose life consists of balls, concerts, parties, and nothing more. Upon the death of a wealthy uncle, he inherits a substantial fortune and a landed estate. When he moves to the country, he strikes up a friendship with his neighbor, a starry-eyed young poet named Vladimir Lensky. Lensky takes Onegin to dine with the family of his fiancée, the sociable but rather thoughtless Olga Larina. At this meeting, he also catches a glimpse of Olga's sister Tatyana. A quiet, precocious romantic, and the exact opposite of Olga, Tatyana becomes intensely drawn to Onegin. Soon after, she bares her soul to Onegin in a letter professing her love. Contrary to her expectations, Onegin does not write back. When they meet in person, he rejects her advances politely but dismissively and condescendingly. This famous speech is often referred to as "Onegin's Sermon": he admits that the letter was touching, but says that he would quickly grow bored with marriage and can only offer Tatyana friendship; he coldly advises more emotional control in the future, lest another man take advantage of her innocence.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Later, Lensky mischievously invites Onegin to Tatyana's name day celebration, promising a small gathering with just Tatyana, Olga, and their parents. When Onegin arrives, he finds instead a boisterous country ball, a rural parody of and contrast to the society balls of St. Petersburg of which he has grown tired. Onegin is irritated with the guests who gossip about him and Tatyana, and with Lensky for persuading him to come. He decides to avenge himself by dancing and flirting with Olga. Olga is insensitive to her fiancé and apparently attracted to Onegin. Earnest and inexperienced, Lensky is wounded to the core and challenges Onegin to fight a duel; Onegin reluctantly accepts, feeling compelled by social convention. During the duel, Onegin unwillingly kills Lensky. Afterwards, he quits his country estate, traveling abroad to deaden his feelings of remorse.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Tatyana visits Onegin's mansion, where she looks through his books and his notes in the margins, and begins to question whether Onegin's character is merely a collage of different literary heroes, and if there is, in fact, no "real Onegin". Tatyana, still brokenhearted by the loss of Onegin, is convinced by her parents to live with her aunt in Moscow to find a suitor.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Several years pass, and the scene shifts to St. Petersburg. Onegin has come to attend the most prominent balls and interact with the leaders of old Russian society. He sees the most beautiful woman, who captures the attention of all and is central to society's whirl, and he realizes that it is the same Tatyana whose love he had once spurned. Now she is married to an aged prince (a general). Upon seeing Tatyana again, he becomes obsessed with winning her affection, despite her being married. His attempts are rebuffed. He writes her several letters, but receives no reply. Eventually, Onegin manages to see Tatyana and offers her the opportunity to finally elope after they have become reacquainted. She recalls the days when they might have been happy, but concludes that that time has passed. Onegin repeats his love for her. Faltering for a moment, she admits that she still loves him, but she will not allow him to ruin her and declares her determination to remain faithful to her husband. She leaves him regretting his bitter destiny.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: One of the main themes of "Eugene Onegin" is the relationship between fiction and real life. People are often shaped by art, and the work is packed with allusions to other major literary works.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Another major element is Pushkin's creation of a woman of intelligence and depth in Tatyana, whose vulnerable sincerity and openness on the subject of love has made her the heroine of countless Russian women, despite her apparent naïveté. Pushkin, in the final chapter, fuses his Muse and Tatyana's new 'form' in society after a lengthy description of how she has guided him in his works.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Perhaps the darkest theme – despite the light touch of the narration – is Pushkin's presentation of the deadly inhumanity of social convention. Onegin is its bearer in this work. His induction into selfishness, vanity, and indifference occupies the introduction, and he is unable to escape it when he moves to the country. His inability to relate to the feelings of others and his entire lack of empathy – the cruelty instilled in him by the "world" – is epitomized in the very first stanza of the first book by his stunningly self-centered thoughts about being with the dying uncle whose estate he is to inherit:


title: Eugene Onegin

text: However, the "devil comes for Onegin" when he both literally and figuratively kills innocence and sincerity in shooting Lensky in the duel and rejecting Tatyana. Tatyana learns her lesson: armored against feelings and steeped in convention, she crushes his later sincerity and remorse. (This epic reversal of roles, and the work's broad social perspectives, provide ample justification for its subtitle "a novel in verse".)


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Tatyana's nightmare illustrates the concealed aggression of the "world". In the dream, she is chased over a frozen winter landscape by a terrifying bear (representing the ferocity of Onegin's inhuman persona) and confronted by demons and goblins in a hut she hopes will provide shelter. This nightmare is contrasted to the open vitality of the "real" people at the country ball, giving dramatic emphasis to the war of warm human feelings against the chilling artificiality of society.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Thus, Onegin has lost his love, killed his only friend, and found no satisfaction in his life. He is a victim of his own pride and selfishness. "He is doomed to loneliness, and this is his tragedy".


title: Eugene Onegin

text: The conflict between art and life was no mere fiction in Russia, but is in fact illustrated by Pushkin's own fate: he too was killed in a duel, falling victim to the social conventions of Russian high society.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: As with many other 19th-century novels, "Onegin" was written and published serially, with parts of each chapter often appearing in magazines before the first printing of each chapter. Many changes, some small and some large, were made from the first appearance to the final edition during Pushkin's lifetime. The following dates mostly come from Nabokov's study of the photographs of Pushkin's drafts that were available at the time, as well as other people's work on the subject.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: The first stanza of chapter 1 was started on May 9, 1823, and except for three stanzas (XXXIII, XVIII, and XIX), the chapter was finished on October 22. The remaining stanzas were completed and added to his notebook by the first week of October 1824. Chapter 1 was first published as a whole in a booklet on February 16, 1825, with a foreword which suggests that Pushkin had no clear plan on how (or even whether) he would continue the novel.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Chapter 2 was started on October 22, 1823 (the date when most of chapter 1 had been finished), and finished by December 8, except for stanzas XL and XXXV, which were added sometime over the next three months. The first separate edition of chapter 2 appeared on October 20, 1826.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Many events occurred which interrupted the writing of chapter 3. In January 1824, Pushkin stopped work on "Onegin" to work on "The Gypsies". Except for XXV, stanzas I–XXXI were added on September 25, 1824. Nabokov guesses that Tatyana's Letter was written in Odessa between February 8 and May 31, 1824. Pushkin incurred the displeasure of the Tsarist regime in Odessa and was restricted to his family estate Mikhaylovskoye in Pskov for two years. He left Odessa on July 21, 1824, and arrived on August 9. Writing resumed on September 5, and chapter 3 was finished (apart from stanza XXXVI) on October 2. The first separate publication of chapter 3 was on October 10, 1827.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Chapter 4 was started in October 1824. By the end of the year, Pushkin had written 23 stanzas and had reached XXVII by January 5, 1825, at which point he started writing stanzas for Onegin's Journey and worked on other pieces of writing. He thought that it was finished on September 12, 1825, but later continued the process of rearranging, adding, and omitting stanzas until the first week of 1826. The first separate edition of chapter 4 appeared with chapter 5 in a publication produced between January 31 and February 2, 1828.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: The writing of chapter 5 began on January 4, 1826, and 24 stanzas were complete before the start of his trip to petition the Tsar for his freedom. He left for this trip on September 4 and returned on November 2, 1826. He completed the rest of the chapter in the week November 15 to 22, 1826. The first separate edition of chapter 5 appeared with chapter 4 in a publication produced between January 31 and February 2, 1828.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: When Nabokov carried out his study on the writing of "Onegin", the manuscript of chapter 6 was lost, but it is known that Pushkin started chapter 6 before finishing chapter 5. Most of chapter 6 appears to have been written before the beginning of December 19, 1826, when Pushkin returned to Moscow after exile on his family estate. Many stanzas appeared to have been written between November 22 and 25, 1826. On March 23, 1828, the first separate edition of chapter 6 was published.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Pushkin started writing chapter 7 in March 1827, but aborted his original plan for the plot of the chapter and started on a different tack, completing the chapter on November 4, 1828. The first separate edition of chapter 7 was first printed on March 18, 1836.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Pushkin intended to write a chapter called "Onegin's Journey", which occurred between the events of chapters 7 and 8, and in fact was supposed to be the eighth chapter. Fragments of this incomplete chapter were published, in the same way that parts of each chapter had been published in magazines before each chapter was first published in a separate edition. When Pushkin completed chapter 8, he published it as the final chapter and included within its denouement the line "nine cantos I have written", still intending to complete this missing chapter. When Pushkin finally decided to abandon this chapter, he removed parts of the ending to fit with the change.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Chapter 8 was begun before December 24, 1829, while Pushkin was in St. Petersburg. In August 1830, he went to Boldino (the Pushkin family estate) where, due to an epidemic of cholera, he was forced to stay for three months. During this time, he produced what Nabokov describes as an "incredible number of masterpieces" and finished copying out chapter 8 on September 25, 1830. During the summer of 1831, Pushkin revised and completed chapter 8 apart from "Onegin's Letter", which was completed on October 5, 1831. The first separate edition of chapter 8 appeared on January 10, 1832.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Pushkin wrote at least 18 stanzas of a never-completed tenth chapter. It contained many satires and even direct criticism on contemporary Russian rulers, including the Emperor himself. Afraid of being prosecuted for dissidence, Pushkin burnt most of the tenth chapter. Very little of it survived in Pushkin's notebooks.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: The first complete edition of the book was published in 1833. Slight corrections were made by Pushkin for the 1837 edition. The standard accepted text is based on the 1837 edition with a few changes due to the Tsar's censorship restored.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: In Pushkin's time, the early 19th century, duels were very strictly regulated. A second's primary duty was to prevent the duel from actually happening, and only when both combatants were unwilling to stand down were they to make sure that the duel proceeded according to formalised rules. A challenger's second should therefore always ask the challenged party if he wants to apologise for the actions that have led to the challenge.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: In "Eugene Onegin", Lensky's second, Zaretsky, does not ask Onegin even once if he would like to apologise, and because Onegin is not allowed to apologise on his own initiative, the duel takes place, with fatal consequences. Zaretsky is described as "classical and pedantic in duels" (chapter 6, stanza XXVI), and this seems very out of character for a nobleman. In effect, he is enthusiastic at the prospect of a duel and callous about its deadly possibilities. Zaretsky's first chance to end the duel is when he delivers Lensky's written challenge to Onegin (chapter 6, stanza IX). Instead of asking Onegin if he would like to apologise, he apologises for having much to do at home and leaves as soon as Onegin (obligatorily) accepts the challenge.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: On the day of the duel, Zaretsky gets several more chances to prevent the duel from happening. Because dueling was forbidden in the Russian Empire, duels were always held at dawn. Zaretsky urges Lensky to get ready shortly after 6 o'clock in the morning (chapter 6, stanza XXIII), while the sun only rises at 20 past 8, because he expects Onegin to be on time. However, Onegin oversleeps (chapter 6, stanza XXIV), and arrives on the scene more than an hour late. According to the dueling codex, if a duelist arrives more than 15 minutes late, he automatically forfeits the duel. Lensky and Zaretsky have been waiting all that time (chapter 6, stanza XXVI), even though it was Zaretsky's duty to proclaim Lensky as winner and take him home.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: When Onegin finally arrives, Zaretsky is supposed to ask him a final time if he would like to apologise. Instead, Zaretsky is surprised by the apparent absence of Onegin's second. Onegin, against all rules, appoints his servant Guillot as his second (chapter 6, stanza XXVII), a blatant insult for the nobleman Zaretsky. Zaretsky angrily accepts Guillot as Onegin's second. By his actions, Zaretsky does not act as a nobleman should; in the end Onegin wins the duel.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Onegin himself, however, tried as he could to prevent the fatal outcome, and killed Lensky unwillingly and almost by accident. As the first shooter, he couldn't show that he was deliberately trying to miss the opponent, because this was considered as a serious insult and could create a formal reason to appoint another duel. Instead, he tried to minimize his chances of hitting Lensky by shooting without precise aiming, from the maximal possible distance, not even trying to come closer and get a clear shot.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Translators of "Eugene Onegin" have all had to adopt a trade-off between precision and preservation of poetic imperatives. This particular challenge and the importance of "Eugene Onegin" in Russian literature have resulted in an impressive number of competing translations.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Walter W. Arndt's 1963 translation () was written keeping to the strict rhyme scheme of the Onegin stanza and won the Bollingen Prize for translation. It is still considered one of the best translations.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Vladimir Nabokov severely criticised Arndt's translation, as he had criticised many previous (and later) translations. Nabokov's main criticism of Arndt's and other translations is that they sacrificed literalness and exactness for the sake of preserving the melody and rhyme.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Accordingly, in 1964 he published his own translation, consisting of four volumes, which conformed scrupulously to the sense while completely eschewing melody and rhyme. The first volume contains an introduction by Nabokov and the text of the translation. The Introduction discusses the structure of the novel, the Onegin stanza in which it is written, and Pushkin's opinion of Onegin (using Pushkin's letters to his friends); it likewise gives a detailed account of both the time over which Pushkin wrote Onegin and of the various forms in which the various parts of it appeared in publication before Pushkin's death (after which there is a huge proliferation of the number of different editions). The second and third volumes consist of very detailed and rigorous notes to the text. The fourth volume contains a facsimile of the 1837 edition. The discussion of the Onegin stanza in the first volume contains the poem "On Translating "Eugene Onegin"", which first appeared in print in "The New Yorker" on January 8, 1955, and is written in two Onegin stanzas. Nabokov reproduces the poem both so that the reader of his translation would have some experience of this unique form, and also to act as a further defence of his decision to write his translation in prose.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Nabokov's previously close friend Edmund Wilson reviewed Nabokov's translation in the "New York Review of Books", which sparked an exchange of letters and an enduring falling-out between them.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: John Bayley has described Nabokov's commentary as '"by far the most erudite as well as the most fascinating commentary in English on Pushkin's poem", and "as scrupulously accurate, in terms of grammar, sense and phrasing, as it is idiosyncratic and Nabokovian in its vocabulary". It is generally agreed that Nabokov's translation is extremely accurate.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: The Pushkin Press published a translation in 1937 (reprinted 1943) by the Oxford scholar Oliver Elton, with illustrations by M. V. Dobujinsky.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: In 1977, Charles Johnston published another translation trying to preserve the Onegin stanza, which is generally considered to surpass Arndt's. Johnston's translation is influenced by Nabokov. Vikram Seth's novel "The Golden Gate" was in turn inspired by this translation.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: James E. Falen (the professor of Russian at the University of Tennessee) published a translation in 1995 which was also influenced by Nabokov's translation, but preserved the Onegin stanzas (). This translation is considered to be the most faithful to Pushkin's spirit according to Russian critics and translators.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Douglas Hofstadter published a translation in 1999, again preserving the Onegin stanzas, after having summarised the controversy (and severely criticised Nabokov's attitude towards verse translation) in his book "Le Ton beau de Marot". Hofstadter's translation employs a unique lexicon of both high and low register words, as well as unexpected and almost reaching rhymes that give the work a comedic flair.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Wordsworths Classics in 2005 published an English prose translation by Roger Clarke, which sought to retain the lyricism of Pushkin's Russian.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: In September 2008, Stanley Mitchell, emeritus professor of aesthetics at the University of Derby, published, through Penguin Books, a complete translation, again preserving the Onegin stanzas in English. ()


title: Eugene Onegin

text: There are at least eight published French translations of "Eugene Onegin". The most recent appeared in 2005: the translator, André Markovicz, respects Pushkin's original stanzas. Other translations include those of Paul Béesau (1868), Gaston Pérot (1902, in verse), Nata Minor (who received the Prix Nelly Sachs, given to the best translation into French of poetry), Roger Legras, Maurice Colin, Michel Bayat, and Jean-Louis Backès (who does not preserve the stanzas).


title: Eugene Onegin

text: As a 20-year-old, former French President Jacques Chirac also wrote a translation, which was never published.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: There are several Italian translations of "Onegin". One of the earliest was published by G. Cassone in 1906. Ettore Lo Gatto translated the novel twice, in 1922 in prose and in 1950 in hendecasyllables.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: More recent translations are those by Giovanni Giudici (a first version in 1975, a second one in 1990, in lines of unequal length) and by Pia Pera (1996).


title: Eugene Onegin

text: There are 6 or more Japanese translations of "Eugene Onegin". The first two versions were published in 1921, but the most popular version was a prose translation by Kentaro Ikeda in 1964. The latest translation was one by Masao Ozawa, published in 1996, in which Ozawa attempted to translate "Onegin" into the form of Japanese poetry.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Since the first Chinese version translated by Su Fu in 1942 and the first translation from original Russian version in 1944 by Lu Yin, there have been more that 10 versions translated into Chinese. In the 21st century there are still new Chinese versions being published.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: The 1879 opera "Eugene Onegin", by Tchaikovsky, based on the story, is perhaps the version that most people are familiar with. There are many recordings of the score, and it is one of the most commonly performed operas in the world.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: John Cranko choreographed a three-act ballet using Tchaikovsky's music in an arrangement by Kurt-Heinz Stolze. However, Stolze did not use any music from Tchaikovsky's opera of the same name. Instead, he orchestrated some little-known piano works by Tchaikovsky such as "The Seasons", along with themes from the opera "Cherevichki" and the latter part of the symphonic fantasia "Francesca da Rimini".


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Choreographer Boris Eifman staged a modern rendition of "Eugene Onegin" as a ballet taking place in modern Moscow. The ballet was performed by Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg, with music by Alexander Sitkovetsky and with excerpts from Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin".


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Most recently Lera Auerbach created a ballet score titled "Tatiana", with a libretto written by John Neumeier for his choreographic interpretation and staging of Alexander Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", for a co-production by the Hamburg State Opera and the Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre in Moscow.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: A staged version was adapted by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and slated for production in the Soviet Union in 1936, directed by Alexander Tairov and with incidental music by Sergei Prokofiev, as part of the centennial celebration of Pushkin's death. However, due to threats of Stalinist repercussions for artistic liberties taken during the production and artistic differences between Tairov and Krzhizhanovsky, rehearsals were abandoned and the production was never put on.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Christopher Webber's play "Tatyana" was written for Nottingham Playhouse in 1989. It successfully combines spoken dialogue and narration from the novel, with music arranged from Tchaikovsky's operatic score, and incorporates some striking theatrical sequences inspired by Tatyana's dreams in the original. The title role was played by Josie Lawrence, and the director was Pip Broughton.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: In 2016, the legendary Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia put on a production of "Onegin" starring Sergei Makovetsky, described as "exuberant, indelible, and arrestingly beautiful" by the "New York Times".


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Opening in 2016 for its world premiere, the Arts Club Theatre Company in Vancouver, Canada, staged a musical version called "Onegin" by Amiel Gladstone and Veda Hille. Rather than being based solely on Pushkin's verse narrative, the musical takes equal inspiration from Tchaikovsky's opera, subtly incorporating musical motifs from the opera and even using its structure as a template. In fact, it was Gladstone's time as assistant director for Vancouver Opera’s last production of Tchaikovsky’s "Eugene Onegin" that opened his eyes to the story’s potential for musical adaptation.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: However, the overall musical style of Gladstone and Hille’s "Onegin" is distinctly non-operatic, being instead "an indie-rock musical with a modern flair" that carries over into the costumes and the interactive staging, as well as the ironic and self-referential humour and the titular character's "bored hipster persona".


title: Eugene Onegin

text: After opening to general acclaim in 2016, "Onegin" took home a historic 10 Jessie Awards, winning all but one award in its category, including the awards for outstanding production, direction (Gladstone), original composition (Gladstone and Hille), lead actor (Alessandro Juliani as Onegin), lead actress (Meg Roe as Tatyana), and supporting actor (Josh Epstein as Lensky).


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Since then, throughout new productions and casting changes, "Onegin" has garnered generally favourable reviews; for example, Louis B. Hobson of "The Calgary Herald" writes, ""Onegin" is not just good, but totally enthralling and deserves all the hype and all the awards it received in Vancouver back in 2016 when it premiered and again in 2017 during its return visit". Nevertheless, others have criticized the show for artificiality of characterization and "inconsistent dramaturgy", claiming that "Onegin" fails to "come to life".


title: Eugene Onegin

text: Furthermore, several critics have pointed out similarities to the smash hit "Hamilton" and especially to "Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812", a sung-through musical likewise inspired by a classic of Russian literature (in this case, a sliver of Leo Tolstoy’s "War and Peace"), usually to "Onegin"’s disadvantage.


title: Eugene Onegin

text: In 2017, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a five-part adaptation by Duncan Macmillan, directed by Abigail le Fleming, as part of their "15-Minute Drama" series, with Geoffrey Streatfeild as Pushkin, David Dawson as Onegin, Zoë Tapper as Natalya, Alix Wilton Regan as Tatyana, Joshua McGuire as Lensky, and Sean Murray as Zaretsky.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Brooklyn drill is a regional subgenre of drill music, centered in Brooklyn, New York, that began as derivative of the drill music scene in Chicago and later became derivative of UK drill with its 808 percussion and sliding notes by producers from the UK drill scene. Brooklyn drill emerged around 2014 with the single "Hot Nigga" from the rapper Bobby Shmurda. Other early pioneers were rappers Rowdy Rebel, Bam Bino, Money Millz, Dah Dah and Curly Savv. It was again made popular in the mainstream in 2019 by the late Pop Smoke. With the success of his mixtapes "Meet the Woo" (2019) and "Meet the Woo 2" (2020), Pop Smoke introduced Brooklyn drill into the mainstream music industry. Other notable Brooklyn drill artists include Fivio Foreign, 22Gz, Sheff G, Sleepy Hallow, and Dusty Locane.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Brooklyn drill music first gained attention with the 2014 single "Hot Nigga" from the rapper Bobby Shmurda. Other early pioneers were rappers Bam Bino, Dah Dah and Curly Savv. The genres is agreed to have been pioneered by 22Gz and Sheff G, largely scaling the potential of the movement. The music became more popular and associated with UK drill production (from producers such as 808Melo, AXL Beats, and Ghosty) with the releases of 22Gz's "Suburban" in 2016 and Sheff G's "No Suburban" in 2017. Both songs went viral and were credited for the rise of Brooklyn drill.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Brooklyn drill music reached mainstream Billboard Hot 100 success with tracks from Pop Smoke ("Welcome to the Party," "Dior," and "Gatti") and Fivio Foreign ("Big Drip" and "Demons"). Pop Smoke was nominated for a 2021 Grammy Award for "Dior." In 2020, Pop Smoke was murdered during a home invasion in Hollywood Hills, California.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Over time, Brooklyn drill has evolved into a broader New York drill scene. One example is Staten Island rapper CJ, whose hit song "Whoopty" is reminiscent of the Brooklyn drill sound.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Brooklyn drill music has been described as influential among protestors for social change, including some associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: The Brooklyn drill sound is a combination of trap music and Chicago and UK drill music (the latter of which brings production influences from grime and UK garage). Characteristic features of Brooklyn drill production include 808 percussion with manipulated vocal samples. The lyrical content of Brooklyn drill music tends to be dark, violent, and aggressive, often discussing gang-related topics.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: In 2022, some individuals drew connections between the pro-gun content of the genre to real-world gun violence on the streets of New York that had rapidly and recently killed a number of young drill artists, mostly those with origins of Brooklyn and the Bronx.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: In early 2022, in response to the large and rising number of dead young people connected to the music scene, a number of prominent New York DJs and music influencers, including DJ Drewski at Hot 97, Joe Budden, Ebro Darden of "Ebro in the Morning" on Hot 97, D Teck, either vowed to stop playing gang/diss records or re-iterated their refusal.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: In February 2022, NYC mayor Eric Adams had set to ban music videos associated with the drill scene after learning about the killing of 18-year-old rapper C-HII Wvttz. There was a lot of backlash met with this statement. As a result, Adams met with musicians for a conversation on how to approach concerns about drill culture's connections, if any, to gun violence. Artists at the meeting included Maino, Fivio Foreign, B-Lovee, CEO Slow, Bucksy Luciano and Bleezy.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Sample drill, also sometimes called Bronx drill, is a subgenre of Brooklyn drill music, which originated in the early 2020s in The Bronx and prominently uses uncleared samples of older records instead of synthesizers in classic Brooklyn drill.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Sample drill originated during the early 2020s in New York (most prominently, in The Bronx), where producers such as Cash Cobain, EPondabeat, WAR, EvilGiane, and others, started re-using older funk and soul, and pop music songs to create modern yet nostalgic sound. A number of rappers subsequently joined the scene, most prominently, Kay Flock, B-Lovee, Shawny Binladen, Big Yaya, and others.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: The easily recognizable samples in sample drill are also said to increase its viral potential. Songs, such as B-Lovee's "My Everything" (sampling "Everything" by Mary J. Blige) gained over 400,000 uses on TikTok and produced two remixes, featuring A Boogie wit da Hoodie and G Herbo. Another early TikTok viral sample drill hit was "Deep End Freestyle" (sampling Fousheé's "Deep End") by Brooklyn native Sleepy Hallow. Despite playing a huge role in genre's spread, Cash Cobain refused to acknowledge that sample drill musicians mostly do songs for TikTok. EPondabeat, another producer involved in the scene, claimed that sampling in used for marketing purpose to invoke listener's relatability.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Sample drill rappers employ a rather wide variety of rapping flows. As Cash Cobain put it, "These little kids from the Bronx are wild. They on demon time. They’re angrier with their shit.", implying that sample drill musicians often use aggressive flows, although Shawny Binladen is known for his whispering flow.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Samples for sample drill come from a variety of sources and these sources may differ depending on producer. Bronx-based Cash Cobain mainly uses round-the-century contemporary R&B and hip hop music sources; meanwhile, EPondabeat, EvilGiane prefer to use soul music and funk recordings for sampling; other producers, such as WAR, don't limit themselves among sampling sources.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Most sample drill songs don't get cleared; sample clearance only happens post-factum when the song in the subgenre becomes viral. Cash Cobain claimed he doesn't care to clear samples for his beats.


title: Brooklyn drill

text: Sample drill, since its inception around 2020, already had a mainstream crossover, when Cardi B performed on "Shake It" by Kay Flock. Sample drill has also influenced Jersey drill sound and more commercial drill sound, most particularly the influence can be heard on "B.I.B.L.E." by Fivio Foreign, where he sampled "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child.


title: Russification

text: Russification (), or Russianization, is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians, whether involuntarily or voluntarily, give up their culture and language in favor of the Russian culture and the Russian language.


title: Russification

text: In a historical sense, the term refers to both official and unofficial policies of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union with respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in Russia, aimed at Russian domination and hegemony.


title: Russification

text: The major areas of Russification are politics and culture. In politics, an element of Russification is assigning Russian nationals to leading administrative positions in national institutions. In culture, Russification primarily amounts to the domination of the Russian language in official business and the strong influence of the Russian language on national idioms. The shifts in demographics in favour of the ethnic Russian population are sometimes considered as a form of Russification as well.


title: Russification

text: Analytically, it is helpful to distinguish "Russification", as a process of changing one's ethnic self-label or identity from a non-Russian ethnonym to Russian, from "Russianization", the spread of the Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions, distinct also from Sovietization or the imposition of institutional forms established by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the territory ruled by that party. In this sense, although Russification is usually conflated across Russification, Russianization, and Russian-led Sovietization, each can be considered a distinct process. Russianization and Sovietization, for example, did not automatically lead to Russification – change in language or self-identity of non-Russian peoples to being Russian. Thus, despite long exposure to the Russian language and culture, as well as to Sovietization, at the end of the Soviet era non-Russians were on the verge of becoming a majority of the population in the Soviet Union.


title: Russification

text: An early case of Russification took place in the 16th century in the conquered Khanate of Kazan (medieval Tatar state which occupied the territory of former Volga Bulgaria) and other Tatar areas. The main elements of this process were Christianization and implementation of the Russian language as the sole administrative language.


title: Russification

text: After the Russian defeat in the Crimean War in 1856 and the Polish rebellion of 1863, Tsar Alexander II increased Russification to reduce the threat of future rebellions. Russia was populated by many minority groups, and forcing them to accept the Russian culture was an attempt to prevent self-determination tendencies and separatism. In the 19th century, Russian settlers on traditional Kazakh land (misidentified as Kyrgyz at the time) drove many of the Kazakhs over the border to China.


title: Russification

text: Russian was introduced to the South Caucasus following its colonisation in the first half of the nineteenth century after Qajar Iran was forced to cede its Caucasian territories per the Treaty of Gulistan and Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1813 and 1828 respectively to Russia. By 1830 there were schools with Russian as the language of instruction in the cities of Shusha, Baku, Yelisavetpol (Ganja), and Shemakha (Shamakhi); later such schools were established in Kuba (Quba), Ordubad, and Zakataly (Zaqatala). Education in Russian was unpopular amongst ethnic Azerbaijanis until 1887 when Habib bey Mahmudbeyov and Sultan Majid Ganizadeh founded the first Russian–Azerbaijani school in Baku. A secular school with instruction in both Russian and Azeri, its programs were designed to be consistent with cultural values and traditions of the Muslim population. Eventually 240 such schools for both boys and girls, including a women's college founded in 1901, were established prior to the "Sovietization" of the South Caucasus. The first Russian-Azeri reference library opened in 1894. In 1918, during the short period of the Azerbaijan's independence, the government declared Azeri the official language, but the use of Russian in government documents was permitted until all civil servants mastered the official language.


title: Russification

text: In the Soviet era, the large Russian population of Baku, the quality and prospects of education in Russian, increased access to Russian literature, and other factors contributed to the intensive Russification of the Baku's population. Its direct result by the mid-twentieth century was the formation of a supra-ethnic urban Baku subculture, uniting people of Russian, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Jewish, and other origins and whose special features were being cosmopolitan and Russian-speaking. The widespread use of Russian resulted in a phenomenon of 'Russian-speaking Azeris', i.e. an emergence of an urban community of Azerbaijani-born ethnic Azeris who considered Russian their native language. In 1970, 57,500 Azeris (1.3%) identified Russian as their native language.


title: Russification

text: Russian and Soviet authorities conducted policies of Russification of Belarus from 1772 to 1991, interrupted by the Belarusization policy in the 1920s.


title: Russification

text: With the gaining to the power of pro-Russian president Alexander Lukashenko in 1994, the Russification policy was renewed.


title: Russification

text: The Russification of Finland (1899–1905, 1908–1917), "sortokaudet" ("times of oppression" in Finnish) was a governmental policy of the Russian Empire aimed at the termination of Finland's autonomy. Finnish opposition to Russification was one of the main factors that ultimately led to Finland's declaration of independence in 1917.


title: Russification

text: On September 14, 1885, an ukaz was signed by Alexander III setting the mandatory use of Russian for Baltic governorate officials. In 1889, it was extended to apply to official proceedings of the Baltic municipal governments as well. By the beginning of 1890s, Russian was enforced as the language of instruction in Baltic governorate schools.


title: Russification

text: After Soviet re-occupation of Latvia in 1944, Russian became the language of State business, and Russian served as the language of inter-ethnic communication among the increasingly urbanized non-Russian ethnic groups, making cities major centres for the use of Russian language and made functional bilingualism in Russian a minimum necessity for the local population.


title: Russification

text: In an attempt to partially reverse the Soviet Russification policies and give the Latvian language more equal positions to Russian, the so-called Latvian national communist faction within the Communist Party of Latvia passed a bill in 1957 that made the knowledge of both Latvian and Russian obligatory for all Communist Party employees, government functionaries and service sector staff. The law included a 2-year deadline for gaining proficiency in both languages.


title: Russification

text: In 1958, as the two-year deadline for the bill was approaching, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union set out to enact an education reform, a component of which, the so-called Thesis 19, would give parents in all of the Soviet Republics, with the exception of Russian SSR, a choice for their children in public schools to study either the language of the republic's titular nation (in this case Latvian) or Russian, as well as one foreign language, in contrast, to the previous education system, where it was mandatory for school children to learn all three languages.


title: Russification

text: Due to strong opposition from the Latvian national communists and the Latvian public, Latvian SSR was only one of two of the 12 Soviet Republics that did not yield to the increasing pressure to adopt Thesis 19 and excluded its contents from their ratified statutes. This led to the eventual purge of the Latvian national communists from the Communist Party ranks between 1959 and 1962. A month after the removal of the Latvian National Communist leader Eduards Berklavs All-Union legislation was implemented in Latvia by Arvīds Pelše.


title: Russification

text: In an attempt to further widen the use of Russian and reverse the work of the national communists, a bilingual school system was established in Latvia, with parallel classes being taught in both Russian and Latvian. The number of such schools increased dramatically, including regions where the Russian population was minimal, and by July 1963 there were already 240 bilingual schools.


title: Russification

text: The effect of the reform was the gradual decline in the number of assigned hours for learning Latvian in Russian schools and the increase of hours allocated for learning Russian in Latvian schools. In 1964–1965 the total weekly average of Latvian language classes and Russian language and literature classes in Latvian schools across all grades was reported to be 38.5 and 72.5 hours respectively, in comparison with 79 hours being devoted to Russian language and 26 hours being devoted to Latvian language and literature in Russian schools. The reform has been attributed to the persistence of poor Latvian language knowledge among Russians living in Latvia and the increasing language gap between Latvians and Russians.


title: Russification

text: In 1972, the Letter of 17 Latvian communists, was smuggled outside the Latvian SSR and circulated in the Western world, accusing Communist Party of the Soviet Union of "Great Russian chauvinism" and "progressive Russification of all life in Latvia":


title: Russification

text: In 19th century, the Russian Empire strove to replace the Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Belarusian languages and dialects by Russian in those areas, which were annexed by the Russian Empire after the Partitions of Poland (1772–1795) and the Congress of Vienna (1815). Imperial Russia faced a crucial critical cultural situation by 1815:


title: Russification

text: Large sections of Russian society had come under foreign influence as a result of the Napoleonic wars and appeared open to change. As a consequence of absorbing so much Polish territory, by 1815 no less than 64 per cent of the nobility of the Romanov realm was of Polish descent, and since there were more literate Poles than Russians, more people within it could read and write Polish than Russian. The third largest city, Vilnius, was entirely Polish in character and its university was the best in the Empire.


title: Russification

text: Russification in Congress Poland intensified after the November Uprising of 1831, and in particular after the January Uprising of 1863. In 1864, the Polish and Belarusian languages were banned in public places; in the 1880s, Polish was banned in schools, on school grounds and in the offices of Congress Poland. Research and teaching of the Polish language, of Polish history or of Catholicism were forbidden. Illiteracy rose as Poles refused to learn Russian. Students were beaten for resisting Russification. A Polish underground education network formed, including the famous Flying University. According to Russian estimates, by 1901 one-third of the inhabitants in the Congress Poland was involved in clandestine education based on Polish literature.


title: Russification

text: Starting in the 1840s, Russia considered introducing Cyrillic script for spelling the Polish language, with the first school books printed in the 1860s; the reform was eventually deemed unnecessary because of introduction of school education in the Russian language.


title: Russification

text: A similar development took place in Lithuania. Its Governor General, Mikhail Muravyov (in office 1863–1865), prohibited the public use of spoken Polish and Lithuanian and closed Polish and Lithuanian schools; teachers from other parts of Russia who did not speak these languages were moved in to teach pupils. Muravyov also banned the use of Latin and Gothic scripts in publishing. He was reported as saying, "What the Russian bayonet didn't accomplish, the Russian school will." ("Что не додѣлалъ русскій штыкъ – додѣлаетъ русская школа.") This ban, lifted only in 1904, was disregarded by the "Knygnešiai", the Lithuanian book smugglers, who brought Lithuanian publications printed in the Latin alphabet, the historic orthography of the Lithuanian language, from Lithuania Minor (part of East Prussia) and from the United States into the Lithuanian-speaking areas of Imperial Russia. The knygnešiai came to symbolise the resistance of Lithuanians against Russification.


title: Russification

text: The Russification campaign also promoted the Russian Orthodox faith over Catholicism. The measures used included closing down Catholic monasteries, officially banning the building of new churches and giving many of the old ones to the Russian Orthodox church, banning Catholic schools and establishing state schools which taught only the Orthodox religion, requiring Catholic priests to preach only officially approved sermons, requiring that Catholics who married members of the Orthodox church convert, requiring Catholic nobles to pay an additional tax in the amount of 10% of their profits, limiting the amount of land a Catholic peasant could own, and switching from the Gregorian calendar (used by Catholics) to the Julian one (used by members of the Orthodox church).


title: Russification

text: Most of the Orthodox Church property in the 19th century Congress Poland was acquired at the expense of the Catholic Church of both rites (Roman and Greek Catholic).


title: Russification

text: After the 1863 January Uprising, many manors and great chunks of land were confiscated from nobles of Polish and Lithuanian descent who were accused of helping the uprising; these properties were later given or sold to Russian nobles. Villages where supporters of the uprising lived were repopulated by ethnic Russians. Vilnius University, where the language of instruction had been Polish rather than Russian, closed in 1832. Lithuanians and Poles were banned from holding any public jobs (including professional positions, such as teachers and doctors) in Lithuania; this forced educated Lithuanians to move to other parts of the Russian Empire. The old legal code was dismantled and a new one based on the Russian code and written in the Russian language was enacted; Russian became the only administrative and juridical language in the area. Most of these actions ended at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, but others took longer to be reversed; Vilnius University re-opened only after Russia had lost control of the city in 1919.


title: Russification

text: Bessarabia was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. In 1816 Bessarabia became an autonomous state, but only until 1828. In 1829, the use of the Romanian language was forbidden in the administration. In 1833, the use of the Romanian language was forbidden in churches. In 1842, teaching in Romanian was forbidden in secondary schools; it was forbidden in elementary schools in 1860.


title: Russification

text: The Russian authorities encouraged the migration of Moldovans to other provinces of the Russian Empire (especially in Kuban, Kazakhstan and Siberia), while foreign ethnic groups (especially Russians and Ukrainians, called in the 19th century "Little Russians") were encouraged to settle there. Though the 1817 census did not record ethnicity, Romanian authors have claimed that Bessarabia was populated at the time by 86% Moldovans, 6.5% Ukrainians, 1.5% Russians (Lipovans) and 6% other ethnic groups. 80 years later, in 1897, the ethnic structure was very different: only 56% Moldovans, but 11.7% Ukrainians, 18.9% Russians and 13.4% other ethnic groups. During 80 years, between 1817 and 1897, the share of the Moldovan population dropped by 30%.


title: Russification

text: After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia in 1940, the Romanian population of Bessarabia was persecuted by Soviet authorities, especially in the years following the annexation, based mostly on social, educational, and political grounds; because of this, Russification laws were imposed again on the Romanian population. The Moldovan language promoted during the Interwar period by the Soviet authorities first in the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and after 1940 taught in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, was actually the Romanian language but written with a version of the Cyrillic script derived from the Russian alphabet. Proponents of Cyrillic orthography argue that the Romanian language was historically written with the Cyrillic script, albeit a different version of it (see Moldovan alphabet and Romanian Cyrillic alphabet for a discussion of this controversy).


title: Russification

text: The cultural and linguistic effects of Russification manifest themselves in persistent identity questions. During the breakup of the Soviet Union, this led to the separation of a large and industrialized portion of the country, becoming the de facto independent state of Transnistria, whose main official language is Russian.


title: Russification

text: Russian and Soviet authorities conducted policies of Russification of Ukraine from 1709 to 1991, interrupted by the Korenizatsiya policy in the 1920s. Since Ukraine's independence, its government has implemented Ukrainization policies to decrease the use of Russian and favour Ukrainian.


title: Russification

text: A number of Ukrainian activists died by suicide in protest against Russification, including Vasyl Makukh in 1968 and Oleksa Hirnyk in 1978.


title: Russification

text: After the 2014 Russian Annexation of Crimea and establishment of unrecognized Russian-supported militants in eastern Ukraine, Russification was imposed on people in these areas.


title: Russification

text: Indigenous to large parts of western and central Russia are speakers of the Uralic languages, such as the Vepsians, Mordvins, Maris and Permians. Historically, the Russification of these peoples begins already with the original eastward expansion of the East Slavs. Written records of the oldest period are scarce, but toponymic evidence indicates that this expansion was accomplished at the expense of various Volga-Finnic peoples, who were gradually assimilated by Russians; beginning with the Merya and the Muroma in the early 2nd millennium AD.


title: Russification

text: The Russification of the Komi began in the 13th to 14th centuries but did not penetrate into the Komi heartlands until the 18th century. Komi-Russian bilingualism has become the norm over the 19th and has led to increasing Russian influence in the Komi language.


title: Russification

text: The enforced Russification of Russia's remaining indigenous minorities has intensified particularly during the Soviet era and continues unabated in the 21st century, especially in connection to urbanization and the dropping population replacement rates (particularly low among the more western groups). As a result, several of Russia's indigenous languages and cultures are currently considered endangered. E.g. between the 1989 and 2002 censuses, the assimilation numbers of the Mordvins have totalled over 100,000, a major loss for a people totalling less than one million in number.


title: Russification

text: After the 1917 revolution, authorities in the USSR decided to abolish the use of the Arabic alphabet in native languages in Soviet-controlled Central Asia, in the Caucasus, and in the Volga region (including Tatarstan). This detached the local Muslim populations from exposure to the language and writing system of the Quran. The new alphabet for these languages was based on the Latin alphabet and was also inspired by the Turkish alphabet. However, by the late 1930s, the policy had changed. In 1939–1940 the Soviets decided that a number of these languages (including Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Azerbaijani, and Bashkir) would henceforth use variations of the Cyrillic script. It was claimed that the switch was made "by the demands of the working class."


title: Russification

text: Stalin's "Marxism and the National Question" (1913) provided the basic framework for nationality policy in the Soviet Union. The early years of said policy, from the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, were guided by the policy of korenizatsiya ("indigenization"), during which the new Soviet regime sought to reverse the long-term effects of Russification on the non-Russian populations. As the regime was trying to establish its power and legitimacy throughout the former Russian empire, it went about constructing regional administrative units, recruiting non-Russians into leadership positions, and promoting non-Russian languages in government administration, the courts, the schools, and the mass media. The slogan then established was that local cultures should be "socialist in content but national in form." That is, these cultures should be transformed to conform with the Communist Party's socialist project for the Soviet society as a whole but have active participation and leadership by the indigenous nationalities and operate primarily in the local languages.


title: Russification

text: Early nationalities policy shared with later policy the object of assuring control by the Communist Party over all aspects of Soviet political, economic, and social life. The early Soviet policy of promoting what one scholar has described as "ethnic particularism" and another as "institutionalized multinationality", had a double goal. On the one hand, it had been an effort to counter Russian chauvinism by assuring a place for non-Russian languages and cultures in the newly formed Soviet Union. On the other hand, it was a means to prevent the formation of alternative ethnically based political movements, including pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism. One way of accomplishing this was to promote what some regard as artificial distinctions between ethnic groups and languages rather than promoting amalgamation of these groups and a common set of languages based on Turkish or another regional language.


title: Russification

text: The Soviet nationalities policy from its early years sought to counter these two tendencies by assuring a modicum of cultural autonomy to non-Russian nationalities within a federal system or structure of government, though maintaining that the ruling Communist Party was monolithic, not federal. A process of "national-territorial delimitation" () was undertaken to define the official territories of the non-Russian populations within the Soviet Union. The federal system conferred highest status to the titular nationalities of union republics, and lower status to the titular nationalities of autonomous republics, autonomous provinces, and autonomous okrugs. In all, some 50 nationalities had a republic, province, or okrug of which they held nominal control in the federal system. Federalism and the provision of native-language education ultimately left as a legacy a large non-Russian public that was educated in the languages of their ethnic groups and that identified a particular homeland on the territory of the Soviet Union.


title: Russification

text: By the late 1930s, however, there was a notable policy shift. Purges in some of the national regions, such as Ukraine, had occurred already in the early 1930s. Before the turnabout in Ukraine in 1933, a purge of Veli Ibrahimov and his leadership in the Crimean ASSR in 1929 for "national deviation" led to the Russianization of government, education, and the media and to the creation of a special alphabet for Crimean Tatar to replace the Latin alphabet. Of the two dangers that Joseph Stalin had identified in 1923, now bourgeois nationalism (local nationalism) was said to be a greater threat than Great Russian chauvinism (great power chauvinism). In 1937, Faizullah Khojaev and Akmal Ikramov were removed as leaders of the Uzbek SSR and in 1938, during the third great Moscow show trial, convicted and subsequently put to death for alleged anti-Soviet nationalist activities.


title: Russification

text: After Stalin, a Russified Georgian, became the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union, the Russian language gained greater emphasis. In 1938, Russian became a required subject of study in every Soviet school, including those in which a non-Russian language was the principal medium of instruction for other subjects (e.g., mathematics, science, and social studies). In 1939, non-Russian languages that had been given Latin-based scripts in the late 1920s were given new scripts based on the Cyrillic script. One likely rationale for these decisions was the sense of impending war and that Russian was the language of command in the Red Army.


title: Russification

text: Before and during World War II, Joseph Stalin deported to Central Asia and Siberia several entire nationalities for their suspected collaboration with the German invaders: Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, and others. Shortly after the war, he deported many Ukrainians, Balts and Estonians to Siberia as well.


title: Russification

text: After the war, the leading role of the Russian people in the Soviet family of nations and nationalities was promoted by Stalin and his successors. This shift was most clearly underscored by Communist Party General Secretary Stalin's Victory Day toast to the Russian people in May 1945:


title: Russification

text: Naming the Russian nation the primus inter pares was a total turnabout from Stalin's declaration 20 years earlier (heralding the korenizatsiya policy) that "the first immediate task of our Party is vigorously to combat the survivals of Great-Russian chauvinism." Although the official literature on nationalities and languages in subsequent years continued to speak of there being 130 equal languages in the USSR, in practice a hierarchy was endorsed in which some nationalities and languages were given special roles or viewed as having different long-term futures.


title: Russification

text: An analysis of textbook publishing found that education was offered for at least one year and for at least the first class (grade) in 67 languages between 1934 and 1980. However, the educational reforms undertaken after Nikita Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in the late 1950s began a process of replacing non-Russian schools with Russian ones for the nationalities that had lower status in the federal system or whose populations were smaller or displayed widespread bilingualism already. Nominally, this process was guided by the principle of "voluntary parental choice." But other factors also came into play, including the size and formal political status of the group in the Soviet federal hierarchy and the prevailing level of bilingualism among parents. By the early 1970s schools in which non-Russian languages served as the principal medium of instruction operated in 45 languages, while seven more indigenous languages were taught as subjects of study for at least one class year. By 1980, instruction was offered in 35 non-Russian languages of the peoples of the USSR, just over half the number in the early 1930s.


title: Russification

text: Moreover, in most of these languages schooling was not offered for the complete 10-year curriculum. For example, within the RSFSR in 1958–59, full 10-year schooling in the native language was offered in only three languages: Russian, Tatar, and Bashkir. And some nationalities had minimal or no native-language schooling. By 1962–1963, among non-Russian nationalities that were indigenous to the RSFSR, whereas 27% of children in classes I-IV (primary school) studied in Russian-language schools, 53% of those in classes V-VIII (incomplete secondary school) studied in Russian-language schools, and 66% of those in classes IX-X studied in Russian-language schools. Although many non-Russian languages were still offered as a subject of study at a higher class level (in some cases through complete general secondary school – the 10th class), the pattern of using the Russian language as the main medium of instruction accelerated after Khrushchev's parental choice program got under way.


title: Russification

text: Pressure to convert the main medium of instruction to Russian was evidently higher in urban areas. For example, in 1961–62, reportedly only 6% of Tatar children living in urban areas attended schools in which Tatar was the main medium of instruction. Similarly in Dagestan in 1965, schools in which the indigenous language was the medium of instruction existed only in rural areas. The pattern was probably similar, if less extreme, in most of the non-Russian union republics, although in Belarus and Ukraine schooling in urban areas was highly Russianized.


title: Russification

text: The promotion of federalism and of non-Russian languages had always been a strategic decision aimed at expanding and maintaining rule by the Communist Party. On the theoretical plane, however, the Communist Party's official doctrine was that eventually nationality differences and nationalities as such would disappear. In official party doctrine as it was reformulated in the Third Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union introduced by Nikita Khrushchev at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, although the program stated that ethnic distinctions would eventually disappear and a single common language would be adopted by all nationalities in the Soviet Union, "the obliteration of national distinctions, and especially language distinctions, is a considerably more drawn-out process than the obliteration of class distinctions." At that time, however, Soviet nations and nationalities were undergoing a dual process of further flowering of their cultures and of rapprochement or drawing together (сближение – sblizhenie) into a stronger union. In his Report on the Program to the Congress, Khrushchev used even stronger language: that the process of further rapprochement (sblizhenie) and greater unity of nations would eventually lead to a merging or fusion (слияние – sliyanie) of nationalities.


title: Russification

text: Khrushchev's formula of rapprochement-fusing was moderated slightly, however, when Leonid Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1964 (a post he held until his death in 1982). Brezhnev asserted that rapprochement would lead ultimately to the complete "unity" of nationalities. "Unity" was an ambiguous term because it could imply either the maintenance of separate national identities but a higher stage of mutual attraction or similarity between nationalities, or the total disappearance of ethnic differences. In the political context of the time, "rapprochement-unity" was regarded as a softening of the pressure towards Russification that Khrushchev had promoted with his endorsement of sliyanie.


title: Russification

text: The 24th Party Congress in 1971, however, launched the idea that a new "Soviet people" was forming on the territory of the USSR, a community for which the common language – the language of the "Soviet people" – was the Russian language, consistent with the role that Russian was playing for the fraternal nations and nationalities in the territory already. This new community was labeled a people (народ – "narod"), not a nation (нация – "natsiya"), but in that context the Russian word "narod" ("people") implied an "ethnic" community, not just a civic or political community.


title: Russification

text: Thus, until the end of the Soviet era, doctrinal rationalization had been provided for some of the practical policy steps that were taken in the areas of education and the media. First of all, the transfer of many "national schools" (schools based on local languages) to Russian as a medium of instruction accelerated under Khrushchev in the late 1950s and continued into the 1980s.


title: Russification

text: Second, the new doctrine was used to justify the special place of the Russian language as the "language of inter-nationality communication" (язык межнационального общения) in the USSR. Use of the term "inter-nationality" (межнациональное) rather than the more conventional "international" (международное) focused on the special "internal" role of Russian language rather than on its role as a language of international discourse. That Russian was the most widely spoken language, and that Russians were the majority of the population of the country, were also cited in justification of the special place of the Russian language in government, education, and the media.


title: Russification

text: At the 27th CPSU Party Congress in 1986, presided over by Mikhail Gorbachev, the 4th Party Program reiterated the formulas of the previous program:


title: Russification

text: Progress in the spread of the Russian language as a second language and the gradual displacement of other languages was monitored in Soviet censuses. The Soviet censuses of 1926, 1937, 1939, and 1959, had included questions on "native language" (родной язык) as well as "nationality." The 1970, 1979, and 1989 censuses added to these questions one on "other language of the peoples of the USSR" that an individual could "use fluently" (свободно владеть). It is speculated that the explicit goal of the new question on the "second language" was to monitor the spread of Russian as the language of internationality communication.


title: Russification

text: Each of the official homelands within the Soviet Union was regarded as the only homeland of the titular nationality and its language, while the Russian language was regarded as the language for interethnic communication for the whole Soviet Union. Therefore, for most of the Soviet era, especially after the korenizatsiya (indigenization) policy ended in the 1930s, schools in which non-Russian Soviet languages would be taught were not generally available outside the respective ethnically based administrative units of these ethnicities. Some exceptions appeared to involve cases of historic rivalries or patterns of assimilation between neighboring non-Russian groups, such as between Tatars and Bashkirs in Russia or among major Central Asian nationalities. For example, even in the 1970s schooling was offered in at least seven languages in Uzbekistan: Russian, Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and Karakalpak.


title: Russification

text: While formally all languages were equal, in almost all Soviet republics the Russian/local bilingualism was "asymmetric": the titular nation learned Russian, whereas immigrant Russians generally did not learn the local language.


title: Russification

text: In addition, many non-Russians who lived outside their respective administrative units tended to become Russified linguistically; that is, they not only learned Russian as a second language but they also adopted it as their home language or mother tongue – although some still retained their sense of "ethnic" identity or origins even after shifting their native language to Russian. This includes both the traditional communities (e.g., Lithuanians in the northwestern Belarus ("see Eastern Vilnius region") or the Kaliningrad Oblast ("see Lithuania Minor")) and the communities that appeared during Soviet times such as Ukrainian or Belarusian workers in Kazakhstan or Latvia, whose children attended primarily the Russian-language schools and thus the further generations are primarily speaking Russian as their native language; for example, 57% of Estonia's Ukrainians, 70% of Estonia's Belarusians and 37% of Estonia's Latvians claimed Russian as the native language in the last Soviet census of 1989. Russian replaced Yiddish and other languages as the main language of many Jewish communities inside the Soviet Union as well.


title: Russification

text: Another consequence of the mixing of nationalities and the spread of bilingualism and linguistic Russification was the growth of ethnic intermarriage and a process of "ethnic" Russification—coming to call oneself Russian by nationality or ethnicity, not just speaking Russian as a second language or using it as a primary language. In the last decades of the Soviet Union, ethnic Russification (or ethnic assimilation) was moving very rapidly for a few nationalities such as the Karelians and Mordvinians. However, whether children born in mixed families where one of the parents was Russian were likely to be raised as Russians depended on the context. For example, the majority of children in families where one parent was Russian and the other Ukrainian living in North Kazakhstan chose Russian as their nationality on their internal passport at age 16. However, children of mixed Russian and Estonian parents living in Tallinn (the capital city of Estonia), or mixed Russian and Latvian parents living in Riga (the capital of Latvia), or mixed Russian and Lithuanian parents living in Vilnius (the capital of Lithuania) most often chose as their own nationality that of the titular nationality of their republic – not Russian.


title: Russification

text: More generally, patterns of linguistic and ethnic assimilation (Russification) were complex and cannot be accounted for by any single factor such as educational policy. Also relevant were the traditional cultures and religions of the groups, their residence in urban or rural areas, their contact with and exposure to the Russian language and to ethnic Russians, and other factors.


title: Russification

text: On 19 June 2018, the Russian State Duma adopted a bill that made education in all languages but Russian optional, overruling previous laws by ethnic autonomies, and reducing instruction in minority languages to only two hours a week. This bill has been likened by some commentators, such as in "Foreign Affairs", to a policy of Russification.


title: Russification

text: When the bill was still being considered, advocates for minorities warned that the bill could endanger their languages and traditional cultures. The law came after a lawsuit in the summer of 2017, where a Russian mother claimed that her son had been "materially harmed" by learning the Tatar language, while in a speech Putin argued that it was wrong to force someone to learn a language that is not their own. The later "language crackdown" in which autonomous units were forced to stop mandatory hours of native languages was also seen as a move by Putin to "build identity in Russian society".


title: Russification

text: Protests and petitions against the bill by either civic society, groups of public intellectuals or regional governments came from Tatarstan (with attempts for demonstrations suppressed), Chuvashia, Mari El, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, the Karachays, the Kumyks, the Avars, Chechnya, and Ingushetia. Although the Duma representatives from the Caucasus did not oppose the bill, it prompted a large outcry in the North Caucasus with representatives from the region being accused of cowardice. The law was also seen as possibly destabilizing, threatening ethnic relations and revitalizing the various North Caucasian nationalist movements. The International Circassian Organization called for the law to be rescinded before it came into effect. Twelve of Russia's ethnic autonomies, including five in the Caucasus called for the legislation to be blocked.


title: Russification

text: On 10 September 2019, Udmurt activist Albert Razin self-immolated in front of the regional government building in Izhevsk as it was considering passing the controversial bill to reduce the status of the Udmurt language. Between 2002 and 2010 the number of Udmurt speakers dwindled from 463,000 to 324,000. Other languages in the Volga region recorded similar declines in the number of speakers; between the 2002 and 2010 censuses the number of Mari speakers declined from 254,000 to 204,000 while Chuvash recorded only 1,042,989 speakers in 2010, a 21.6% drop from 2002. This is attributed to a gradual phasing out of indigenous language teaching both in the cities and rural areas while regional media and governments shift exclusively to Russian.


title: Russification

text: In the North Caucasus, the law came after a decade in which educational opportunities in the indigenous languages was reduced by more than 50%, due to budget reductions and federal efforts to decrease the role of languages other than Russian. During this period, numerous indigenous languages in the North Caucasus showed significant decreases in their numbers of speakers even though the numbers of the corresponding nationalities increased, leading to fears of language replacement. The numbers of Ossetian, Kumyk and Avar speakers dropped by 43,000, 63,000 and 80,000 respectively. As of 2018, it has been reported that the North Caucasus is nearly devoid of schools that teach in mainly their native languages, with the exception of one school in North Ossetia, and a few in rural regions of Dagestan; this is true even in largely monoethnic Chechnya and Ingushetia. Chechen and Ingush are still used as languages of everyday communication to a greater degree than their North Caucasian neighbours, but sociolinguistics argue that the current situation will lead to their degradation relative to Russian as well.


title: Russification

text: In 2020, a set of amendments to the Russian constitution was approved by the State Duma and later the Federation Council. One of the amendments is to enshrine Russian as the “language of the state-forming nationality” and the Russian people as the ethnic group that created the nation. The amendment has been met with criticism from Russia's minorities who argue that it goes against the principle that Russia is a multinational state and will only marginalize them further.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: The Uzbekistan national football team ( / ) represents Uzbekistan in international football and is controlled by the Uzbekistan Football Association, the governing body for football in Uzbekistan.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Uzbekistan holds the highest competitive results among teams from Central Asia. Although they have never qualified to the World Cup, the team has qualified to every AFC Asian Cup since post-independence formation. At the 2011 Asian Cup, Uzbekistan reached the semi-finals of the tournament for the first time. At other competitions such as the Asian Games, Uzbekistan won the gold medal in 1994 in Japan, while finishing as the runners-up at the Afro-Asian Cup of Nations in 1995.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: The year of birth of football in Uzbekistan is 1912 (read more in this article), since it was then that football teams were created in Kokand, a little later in Ferghana, Andijan, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Urganch, between which began to be held long-distance matches. The first championship of Ferghana valley was held in 1914, the Championship of the Uzbekistan SSR began to be played since 1926, and the drawing of the began to be carried out since 1939. From 1924 to 1991 Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union (USSR) as the Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic (UzSSR).


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In 1928, the national team of Uzbekistan was created for the first time, which took part in the Spartakiade, which included representatives of some European countries. At this tournament, the national team of Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic held its first international match against team of jobs Switzerland and won with a score of 8:4. Until mid-1991, Uzbekistan was part of the USSR and had its own national team as well as the rest of the Union republics, which mostly played matches within teams and teams of the USSR, in particular in football tournaments of the Spartakiad of Peoples of the USSR. The national team of the Uzbekistan SSR participated in all draws of the football tournament of the Spartakiad of Peoples of the USSR, and in the 1986 tournament reached the final, lost to the Ukrainian SSR (modern Ukraine) team with a score of 0–1, thereby winning the silver medal of the tournament. Throughout the history of Soviet Union, Uzbekistan SSR was one of five main center of football development in the country, alongside Russia SFSR, Ukraine SSR, Belarus SSR and Georgia SSR.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: The most powerful football clubs, as well as semi-professional and professional clubs of the Uzbekistan SSR participated in the USSR Football League (Higher League, First League, Second League and Second League B) and USSR Cup. Nonprofessional clubs of the Uzbekistan SSR participated in the Uzbekistan SSR Championship and the .


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Uzbekistan gained independence, the national team of Uzbekistan of the new convocation was organized. The national team held its first matches in 1992. The first game of the national team of Uzbekistan was a match against Tajikistan, in the framework of the (the tournament was held once) initiated by FIFA. These matches are officially registered by FIFA on the basis of the fact that the national team of Uzbekistan has been allowed since 1992 to participate in tournaments held under the auspices of FIFA. At the drawing of this tournament in the format of the league, the national team of Uzbekistan was the second after the national team of Kazakhstan. In the first year of existence, the national team of Uzbekistan held matches only with the teams of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In 1993, the team has not played a single match.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In 1992, Uzbekistan was also a member of the CIS national football team, which existed for one year and replaced the USSR national football team and instead participated in the Euro 1992.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Most of the former Soviet republics became members of UEFA (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), and Uzbekistan also wanted to become a member of UEFA. But like the rest of the republics of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan), chose AFC. In 2002, Kazakhstan became a member of UEFA for better development of its football, but Uzbekistan chose to remain in the AFC. Anyway, there are many supporters of Uzbekistan's membership in UEFA. Since they believe that Uzbekistan shows European football, and Soviet Uzbekistan, which was part of the USSR, has long been a member of UEFA.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In 1994, the Uzbekistan Football Federation was officially adopted by the AFC and FIFA. In the same year Uzbekistan won in the international tournament the , and at the end of the year the national team won in the ending the national team of China with the score 4:2, became the winner of football tournament of the Asian Games of 1994 which took place in the Japanese city of Hiroshima.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: The 1994 Asian Games tournament was considered as the shocking successful birth of Uzbekistan, and gives prelude for the rise of Uzbekistan as a serious Asian contender. The tournament would go on remembered as "Miracle of 1994".


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Although the tournament was mostly for amateur players at the time (the under-23 competed only since 2002), Uzbekistan however was regarded very low. In addition, the Uzbek perpetration was rigorous, with only 17 players and a budget below $14.000 for the new born Football Federation. Conflict also emerged within as Rustam Akramov was appointed as the first coach of Uzbekistan while the more popular Berador Abduraimov became assistant, which Abduraimov resented greatly. Not just that, many of its players, mostly Russian-ethnic based players, chose to represent Russia or Ukraine, or some to Nigeria, following the fall of USSR. The two major clubs, Pakhtakor and Neftchi, formed majority of their players for Uzbek team, traveling to Japan with little expectation.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Nonetheless, Uzbekistan would mark the tournament with an outstanding performance. Grouped with powerhouse Saudi Arabia, two Southeast Asian sides Thailand and Malaysia, alongside Hong Kong, the Uzbeks shocked Hiroshima with a 4–1 victory over the Saudis. It was followed by 5–0 victory over Malaysia, hard-fought 1–0 win over Hong Kong before sealing its first place in a 5–4 thriller over Thailand. In quarter-finals, Uzbekistan taunted neighbor Turkmenistan 3–0 to advance to semi-finals where they faced South Korea. The Koreans sent up nine players that already participated in the 1994 FIFA World Cup and was expected to steamroll Uzbekistan easily, having beaten hosts Japan thanked for a controversial late penalty. Yet, Japanese fans held this grief, cheered Uzbekistan against South Korea and with Japanese support, Uzbekistan shocked South Korea with a 1–0 victory to advance to the final, its first ever final since becoming independence from the Soviet Union.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In their final game against China, Uzbekistan created its miracle, beating the rising Chinese 4–2 to capture its first, and only, Asian honor two years after its existence. This miraculous conquest gave Uzbekistan a new freshing image, and would boost Uzbekistan's position as a serious contender for future Asian competitions.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Uzbekistan overcame its rival and neighbor Tajikistan in an insane comeback. Having been beaten 0–4 away in Dushanbe, Uzbekistan looked like would miss its debut. Yet, Uzbekistan overturned the game at home, destroying Tajikistan 5–0 to win 5–4 on aggregate, thus gave Uzbekistan its first ever debut in the tournament.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In 1996 AFC Asian Cup, Uzbekistan was grouped with Japan, China and Syria. Unlike the Asian Games, the Asian Cup was regarded as tougher because it was for main team squad. Under these conditions, Uzbekistan, which only appeared in the 1994 Asian Games, was regarded very low.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Yet, in their opening game against China, Uzbekistan stunned all predictions. Despite rampant Chinese pressure, Uzbekistan held their nerves and overcame China with two shock late goals to give them a 2–0 win and its first ever points in the tournament. This shock victory of Uzbekistan, however, raised alarms for other opponents, Japan and Syria didn't tolerate Uzbekistan, and destroyed the Uzbeks in the two decisive matches. Because of it, Uzbekistan stood bottom in their group and failed to make it through the first round.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Uzbekistan put a decent performance in the country's first-ever attempt to qualify for World Cup, at the 1998 World Cup qualifiers. Grouped with Yemen, Cambodia and Indonesia in the first stage, Uzbekistan proved to be too strong for the rest, with the team only failed to win once, an away draw to the Indonesians. Shortly after, the Uzbeks gallantly marched into the final stage, however, things would prove to be more difficult, with Uzbekistan did not have luck in facing with more powerful South Korea, Japan and the UAE. The only win for Uzbekistan came after the match against neighbor Kazakhstan. Little to know for many Uzbek supporters, this would begin to make the country as the choker of every major World Cup qualifications, with the team often fell short in their final quest.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: The 2000 AFC Asian Cup for Uzbekistan was a whitewashed moment, in a terrible way as it became Uzbekistan's worst ever performance in many major competition. Grouped again with Japan, Saudi Arabia and the new opponent Qatar, Uzbekistan was dumped in the bottom once more, with two devastating losses to Saudi Arabia and Japan, alongside its 1–1 draw to Qatar.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Uzbekistan participated in the first round in order to qualify for the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Japan and South Korea. As thing stood, Uzbekistan were able to dominate the group stage and qualify for the second round. The group contained themselves with China, the UAE, Oman and Qatar. The Uzbeks were unable to make any major breakthrough in the second round, losing twice to the Emirates, two away defeats toward China and Oman and an away draw to Qatar confirmed Uzbekistan's failure to qualify, despite a late win over already qualified China in the final match.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Uzbekistan failed to make further impact on the continental stage until they reached the last eight of the 2004 Asian Cup, topping their group after winning all matches, where they were beaten by Bahrain after a penalty shoot-out.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: That performance was followed by a victory over Iraq in the second qualifying round for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, with goals from Maksim Shatskikh and Alexander Geynrikh sending them through to the last eight.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: They were knocked out in the final stage of the Asian qualification to the 2006 World Cup after losing on the away goals rule to Bahrain. The result was subject to controversy as actually three games were played; the first, a 1–0 win for Uzbekistan, was wiped out after FIFA declared the result void after a mistake by Toshimitsu Yoshida, a Japanese referee. The replay ended 1–1, and after the return finished 0–0, Uzbekistan were eliminated.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In the 2007 Asian Cup, Uzbekistan was able to get past the group stage by beating Malaysia 5–0 and China PR 3–0. However, Uzbekistan was knocked out of the tournament in the quarter-finals by losing to Saudi Arabia 2–1.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: After having three foreign coaches (German Hans-Jürgen Gede, Englishman Bob Houghton and Russian Valeri Nepomniachi) in three years, Uzbekistan turned to former Uzbekistan Olympic team coach Rauf Inileev. During qualification for the 2010 World Cup, Uzbekistan advanced to the fourth round of the Asian qualifiers after winning their first four matches, but finished last in Group A of the final round behind favorites Australia, Japan, Bahrain and Qatar, with four points from eight matches.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Four years later, in the 2011 Asian Cup, Uzbekistan ended in fourth place, their best result in the tournament so far. After getting past the group stage and quarter-finals, the Uzbek team lost what it might have been their first Asian Cup final when Australia thrashed the team 0–6 in their semi-final game. Some days later, they were defeated again by South Korea in the third place playoff.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In qualification for the 2014 World Cup, Uzbekistan advanced to the fourth round of the Asian qualifiers after winning their group in the third round over perennial favorites Japan. Uzbekistan finished with 16 points (five wins and one draw), which was more than any other team in the third round, including an impressive 1–0 away win against Japan.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In the fourth round of the qualifiers, Uzbekistan finished third in Group A behind Iran and South Korea. Uzbekistan had the same number of points as South Korea (14 points), who had a better goal difference by one goal.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: The two teams who finished third in the fourth round groups (Jordan and Uzbekistan) played each other in the fifth round to determine the AFC participant in the intercontinental play-off. The games took place on 6 and 10 September 2013. With the two teams still evenly matched at full-time in the second leg, Jordan eventually progressed to the intercontinental play-off after winning 9–8 on penalties.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In the 2015 Asian Cup, Uzbekistan advanced to the quarter-finals after finishing as runners-up in the tough Group B, which was won by China, while Saudi Arabia and North Korea were eliminated. However, the team was knocked out of the tournament in the quarter-finals after losing 2–0 in extra time to South Korea.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Uzbekistan continued their quest to head to the World Cup during 2018 FIFA World Cup qualification in Russia, but their campaign had been shattered with a humiliating 2–4 defeat to North Korea. However, the Uzbeks soon bounced back and won the last remaining matches to top the group and qualified to the 2019 AFC Asian Cup as well as the last round. Once again, Uzbekistan in the last round, missed an opportunity when they finished fourth, behind Iran, South Korea and Syria, when Uzbekistan could only manage a 0–0 draw to the South Koreans last match.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: Uzbekistan started their 2019 Asian Cup campaign with a 2–1 victory over Oman and continued with a 4–0 win over neighbor Turkmenistan, which guaranteed Uzbekistan to progress from the group stage for the fifth consecutive time, despite ending with a 1–2 defeat to Japan in the last match. However, they had to face Australia, then-champions of Asia. Despite playing well, Uzbekistan could not break the deadlock as it ended 0–0 after 120 minutes. In the penalty shootout, Australia prevailed with a 4–2 win, thus Uzbekistan's dream was crushed in the round of sixteen.


title: Uzbekistan national football team

text: In the second qualifying round for the 2022 World Cup, Uzbekistan suffered another disappointment by failing to qualify for the final round, a first since the Central Asian team had always reached the final round since it took part in the qualifying rounds of a World Cup, the first time being the 1998 edition. The "White Wolves" did not manage to finish among the five best runners-up, with a record of 5 wins against 3 defeats (in the first and second leg against Saudi Arabia, leader of group D, as well as in the first leg away against Palestine).