title: Kagura

text: Around the time of the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), performances derived from this emerged in Edo as a major form of entertainment. In connection with the celebrations surrounding the beginning of the shogunate, lion dances, acrobatics, juggling, and a great variety of other entertainments were performed on stages across the city, all nominally under the auspices of . Over the course of the period, these came to be more closely associated with storytelling and other forms of popular entertainment. continues to be performed to this day and include many elements of street entertainment.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue is a 1990 American animated television film starring many characters from several animated television series at the time of its release. Financed by McDonald's, Ronald McDonald Children's Charities, it was originally simulcast for a limited time on April 21, 1990 on all four major American television networks (by supporting their Saturday morning characters): ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, and most independent stations, as well as various cable networks. McDonald's released a VHS home video edition of the special distributed by Buena Vista Home Video, which opened with an introduction from President George H. W. Bush, First Lady Barbara Bush and their dog, Millie. It was produced by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation and Southern Star Productions, and was animated overseas by Wang Film Productions. The musical number "Wonderful Ways to Say No" was written by Academy Award-winning composer, Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, who also wrote the songs for Disney's "The Little Mermaid", "Beauty and the Beast", and "Aladdin".


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: The plot chronicles the exploits of Michael, a young teenage boy who is using marijuana as well as stealing, and drinking alcohol. His younger sister, Corey, is worried about him because he started acting differently which becomes a concern for their parents (who are also starting to notice his changes). When Corey's piggy bank goes missing one morning, her cartoon toys come to life to help her find it. After discovering it in Michael's room along with his stash of drugs, they proceed to work together to do an intervention and take him on a fantasy journey to teach him the risks and consequences a life of drug abuse can bring.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: In Corey's room, an unseen person steals her piggy bank off her dresser. The theft is witnessed by Papa Smurf, who emerges from a Smurfs comic book with the other Smurfs and alerts the other cartoon characters in the room ( from a framed picture, Garfield from a lamp, Alvin and the Chipmunks from a record sleeve, Winnie the Pooh from a stuffed animal, Baby Kermit from an alarm clock, and Slimer who passes through a wall).


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: Alf, Garfield, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore track down the thief and discover that it is Michael, Corey's brother. Alvin opens a box under his bed and Simon identifies its contents as marijuana. Meanwhile, Corey expresses her concerns about his change in behavior, causing him to storm out of the house. The cartoon characters realize that something must be done about his addiction and they set off after him, leaving Pooh behind to look after Corey.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: At the arcade, Michael smokes pot with his old "friends" and "Smoke", an anthropomorphic cloud of smoke, who try to convince him to try harder drugs. They run out and are chased into an alley by a police officer, who is revealed to be Bugs Bunny wearing a police officer's hat. He traps Smoke in a garbage can and uses a time machine to see when and how Michael's addiction started. It turns out that it did so through peer pressure by some older high school kids. After he has returned to the present, he meets up with his "friends" and they decide they want to do some crack. He is hesitant until one of them steals his wallet. He and Smoke chase after her, until they fall down a manhole and meet up with Michelangelo, who tells them that the drugs are messing up his brain. Baby Kermit, Baby Miss Piggy, and Baby Gonzo take him on a tour of the human brain. There, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and Tigger join the rest of the cartoon characters in trying to teach him the many "Wonderful Ways to Say No".


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: Michael wakes up in his room, believing the whole thing to be nothing but a nightmare. Corey walks in and tries to talk to him, but he loses his temper and angrily yells at her, nearly breaking her arm and hurling her to a wall. He comes to his senses and tries to apologize to her, but she runs out frightened. Smoke appears and tells him he did the right thing, but he is not sure. Saddened, he looks at himself in a small mirror and is shocked to see Alf looking at him. Alf grabs him and pulls him into the mirror. Inside a hall of mirrors, Alf shows him his reflection of how he is today, then the one if he does not stop taking drugs: an aged, corpse-like version of himself. When he insists that he could quit if he wants to and that he is in charge of his own life, Alf takes him to see the "man in charge". He is horrified to see that it is Smoke.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: Corey and Pooh go back into Michael's room and find his box of marijuana. Smoke appears, throws Pooh into a cabinet, and starts tempting Corey into trying it. She believes that if she does so, then maybe she and Michael could have fun together like they used to before he started doing drugs.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: Meanwhile, the drug-induced carnival in Michael's mind leads him to Daffy Duck who reads his future in his crystal ball - which proves to be a bowling ball - and it is a sicklier version of himself than before. After one last warning from the cartoon characters, he, now ashamed of himself and his drug addiction, comes back into his room just in time to stop Corey from using the drugs herself. He tells her that he never wants to see her end up like him, and admits he was wrong for using them in the first place, though he is unsure if he can change despite his obvious desire to do so. She advises him to talk about his problems with her and their parents. Smoke tries to persuade him otherwise, but he grabs him and throws him out the window, as he feels that he has "listened to {him} long enough". After falling in a garbage truck, Smoke vows to return, but all of the cartoon characters appear on a poster on Michael's wall as a reminder to always say no when confronted by drugs. He releases Pooh from the cabinet and smiles down at Corey as they go talk to their parents about his drug addiction.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: The various characters' owners licensed them for free because of the public service aspect of the special.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: The special marked the first time Warner Bros. characters Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were voiced by someone other than Mel Blanc. This is because he had died shortly before the production, and Jeff Bergman substituted.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: The special was screened in Australia in November 1990. Like the U.S. broadcast, it aired simultaneously on Australia's major commercial networks (Seven Network, Nine Network and Network Ten). Prime Minister Bob Hawke introduced the Australian screening. It was screened in New Zealand in December on both TV One and Channel 2 simultaneously. Prime Minister Jim Bolger introduced it instead of the U.S. president. It was screened in Canada on the CBC, CTV, and Global Television Networks and most independent stations shortly after its original U.S. broadcast, although all of the characters had their respective shows aired on either CTV or Global but not CBC. Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney introduced it. The special was broadcast in Brazil 1994, as Rede Manchete made Portuguese Brazilian dubbing in Herbert Richers Dubbing Studios.


title: Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

text: In the United States, all superstations and a handful of independent stations (mainly in selected cities) aired the special, but some stations aired the special at a different period during the week the special aired on the Big Four stations and a number of cable networks. Superstations WPIX in New York City, WGN-TV in Chicago, KTLA in Los Angeles, KTVT in Dallas, WKBD-TV in Detroit, KHTV in Houston, WVTV in Milwaukee, KSTW in Tacoma/Seattle, and KWGN in Denver premiered the special at the same time the big four networks and cable systems premiered, with St. Louis' KPLR-TV premiered the special two hours later after its television premiere. New York's WWOR-TV and Boston's WSBK-TV would later premiere the special the following morning on April 22.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Soviet partisans were members of resistance movements that fought a guerrilla war against Axis forces during World War II in the Soviet Union, the previously Soviet-occupied territories of interwar Poland in 1941–45 and eastern Finland. The activity emerged after Nazi Germany's Operation Barbarossa was launched from mid-1941 on. It was coordinated and controlled by the Soviet government and modeled on that of the Red Army.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The partisans made a significant contribution to the war by countering German plans to exploit occupied Soviet territories economically, gave considerable help to the Red Army by conducting systematic attacks against Germany's rear communication network, disseminated political rhetoric among the local population by publishing newspapers and leaflets, and succeeded in creating and maintaining feelings of insecurity among Axis forces.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Soviet partisans also operated on interwar Polish and Baltic territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939–1940, but they had significantly less support there and often clashed with local national partisan groups, as well as German-controlled auxiliary police.


title: Soviet partisans

text: After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union invaded the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic (referred to as the "Kresy") and annexed the lands totalling with a population of 13,299,000 inhabitants including ethnic Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Czechs and others. Soviet era sources state that in 1939, Soviet forces took control of regions of the Polish Republic that had "a population of more than 12 million, including more than 6 million Ukrainians and about 3 million Belarusians."


title: Soviet partisans

text: The program of the partisan war was outlined in Moscow after the German attack in 1941 against the USSR. Directives issued on July 29, 1941 and in further documents by the Soviet People's Commissaries Council and Communist Party called for the formation of partisan detachments and 'diversionist' groups in the German-occupied territories. Joseph Stalin iterated his commands and directives to the people in his radio speech on 3 July 1941, and appointed himself Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army on 20 July 1941.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In 1941, the core of the partisan movement were the remains of the Red Army units destroyed in the first phase of Operation Barbarossa, personnel of destruction battalions, and the local Communist Party and Komsomol activists who chose to remain in Soviet-occupied prewar Poland. The most common unit of the period was a "detachment". The first detachments commanded by Red Army officers and local Communist Party activists were formed in the first days of the war between former allies Germany and the Soviet Union, including the "Starasyel'ski" detachment of Major Dorodnykh in the Zhabinka district (June 23, 1941) and the Pinsk detachment of Vasily Korzh on June 26, 1941. The first awards of the Hero of the Soviet Union order occurred on August 6, 1941 (detachment commanders Pavlovskiy and Bumazhkov). Some partisan detachments were parachuted into German-occupied territories in the summer of 1941. Urban underground groups were formed as a force complementing the activities of partisan units, operating in rural areas. The network of underground structures developed and received a steady influx of specially chosen party activists. By the end of 1941, more than 2,000 partisan detachments (with more than 90,000 personnel) operated in German-occupied territories.


title: Soviet partisans

text: However, the activity of partisan forces was not centrally coordinated and supplied until spring of 1942. In order to coordinate partisan operations the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement under Stavka, headed by Panteleimon Ponomarenko (Chief of Staff) and initially commanded by top Politburo member Kliment Voroshilov, was organized on May 30, 1942. The Staff had its liaison networks in the Military Councils of the Fronts and Armies. The territorial Staffs were subsequently created, dealing with the partisan movement in the respective Soviet Republics and in the occupied provinces of the Russian SFSR.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Some formations calling themselves Soviet partisans operated a long way outside Soviet territory – usually organized by former Soviet citizens who had escaped from Nazi camps. One such formation, "Rodina" (Motherland), acted in France. In 1944 Soviet partisans provided "proletarian internationalist" help to the people of German-occupied Central Europe, with seven united formations and 26 larger detachments operating in Poland, and 20 united formations and detachments operating in Czechoslovakia.


title: Soviet partisans

text: By Soviet estimates, in August 1941 about 231 detachments were operating already. Units formed and inserted into Belarus totalled 437 by the end of the 1941, comprising more than 7,200 personnel. However, as the front line moved further away, conditions steadily worsened for the partisan units, as resources ran out, and there was no large-scale support from beyond the front until March 1942. One particular difficulty was the lack of radio communication, which was not addressed until April 1942. The partisan unit also lacked the support of local people. For several months, partisan units in Belarus were virtually left to their own devices; especially difficult was the winter of 1941–42, with severe shortages in ammunition, medicine and supplies. The actions of partisans were generally uncoordinated.


title: Soviet partisans

text: German pacification operations in the summer and autumn 1941 were able to curb the partisan activity significantly. Many units went underground, and generally, in late 1941 to early 1942, the partisan units were not undertaking significant military operations, but limiting themselves to sorting out organizational problems, building up support and establishing an influence over the local people. Although data is incomplete, at the end of 1941, 99 partisan detachments and about 100 partisan groups are known to have operated in Belarus. In winter 1941–42, 50 partisan detachments and about 50 underground organisations and groups operated in Belarus. During December 1941, German guard forces in the Army Group Center rear comprised 4 security divisions, 1 SS Infantry Brigade, 2 SS Infantry Brigades, and 260 companies from different branches of service.


title: Soviet partisans

text: By the end of 1943, partisans controlled more than 100 thousand square km. of Belarus, which was about 60 percent of the republic's territory. The partisans controlled more than 20 regional centers and thousands of villages. By the time of the return of the Soviet Army, most of the Byelorussian SSR was in the hands of the partisan groups and the actual size of the republic controlled by the Germans was small.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The turning point in the development of the Soviet partisan movement came with the opening of the Vitsyebsk gate, a corridor connecting Soviet-controlled and German-occupied territories, in February 1942. Soviet strategists started taking the partisan units into account after that. The Red Army organized centralized administrative and logistical support, and the Gate proved an important factor in assisting partisan detachments in occupied territory with weapons. As a result, the partisans were able to effectively undermine German troops and significantly hamper their operations in the region from April 1942 until the end of the year. Some Jews and lower-rank Soviet activists felt more secure in the partisan ranks than in civilian life under Soviet rule.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In spring 1942, the concentration of smaller partisan units into brigades began, prompted by the experience of the first year of war. The coordination, numerical buildup, structural reworking and established supply lines all translated into greatly increased partisan capability, which showed in the increased instances of sabotage on the railroads, with hundreds of engines and thousands of cars destroyed by the end of the year.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In 1942 terror campaigns against the territorial administration staffed by local "collaborators and traitors" received extra emphasis. This resulted, however, in definite divisions within the local civilian population, resulting in the beginning of the organisation of anti-partisan units with native personnel in 1942. By November 1942, Soviet partisan units in Belarus numbered about 47,000 persons.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In January 1943, out of 56,000 partisan personnel, 11,000 operated in western Belarus, 3.5 fewer per 10,000 local people than in the east, and even more so (up to a factor of 5 to 6) if one accounts for much more efficient Soviet evacuation measures in the east during 1941. Smallholders in the west showed "surprising" sympathies to the partisans.


title: Soviet partisans

text: There is strong evidence that the central Soviet authorities deliberately refrained from a larger accumulation of partisan forces in western Belarus and let Polish underground military structures grow in these lands during 1941–42 in order to strengthen Moscow's relations with the Polish government-in-exile of Władysław Sikorski. A certain level of military cooperation, imposed by the command headquarters, was noted between Soviet partisans and the Polish Home Army, "Armia Krajowa" (AK). Soviet partisans avoided to some extent attacking people of Polish nationality during the terror campaigns in 1942. After the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the Polish government-in-exile in April 1943 resulting from the discovery of the Katyn massacre (which the Katyn Commission of April–May 1943 attributed to the Soviets), the situation changed radically. From this moment on, Moscow treated the AK as a hostile military force.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The buildup of the Soviet partisan force in western Belarus was ordered and implemented during 1943, with nine brigades, 10 detachments and 15 operational groups transferred from east to west, effectively tripling the partisan force there (reaching 36,000 troops in December 1943). It is estimated that 10–12,000 personnel were transferred, and about the same number came from local volunteers. The buildup of the military force was complemented by the intensification of the underground Communist Party structures and propaganda activity.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The Soviet victory at Stalingrad, a certain lessening of the terror campaign ("de facto" from December 1942, formally permitted in February 1943) and an amnesty promised to collaborators who wished to return to the Soviet camp were significant factors in the 1943 growth of Soviet partisan forces. Desertions from the ranks of the German-controlled police and military formations strengthened units, with sometimes whole detachments coming over to the Soviet camp, including the Volga Tatar battalion (900 personnel, February 1943), and Gil-Rodionov's 1st Russian People's Brigade of the SS (2,500 personnel, August 1943). In all, about 7,000 people of different anti-Soviet formations joined the Soviet partisan force, while about 1,900 specialists and commanders were dropped into occupied Belarus in 1943. However, local people mainly accounted for most increases in the Soviet partisan force.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The first year of the war was devastating for the Soviet partisans of Ukraine. Nevertheless, between August 1941 and the beginning of March 1942, 30,000 partisans had been organised into more than 1,800 detachments; by the beginning of May 1942, there were just 37 detachments, consisting of 1,918 individuals, that were operational and communicating with the Soviet Union.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In 1942–43, Putivl' partisan detachment led by Sydir Kovpak carried out a raid from the Briansk forests to eastern Ukraine through Pinsk, Volyn', Rovno, Zhitomir, and Kiev oblasts. In 1943, they carried out operations in the Carpathians. Kovpak's Sumy partisan unit covered a distance of more than 10,000 kilometers in fighting at the rear of German troops and destroyed garrisons in 39 populated areas. Kovpak's operations played an important role in the development of the partisan movement against German occupying forces. This precipitous growth in the strength and activity level of partisan units prompted members of the German General Staff to suggest that Hitler consider the use of poison gas as a possible remedy to deal with the growing partisan menace.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Partisans in regions of Ukraine assisted the Soviet Army in battles in Kiev, where the first partisan regiment under the command of E.K. Chekhov was formed by forces from the NKVD, the local Communist Party and Komsomol. Partisans in Dnipropetrovsk province provided significant assistance to troops on the southern and southwestern fronts, who helped restrain the German offensive in the Donbass in October–November 1941. Partisan detachments operating in the Novomoskovsk region under the command of P. Zuchenko raided a prisoner of war camp where Soviets were held, and having defeated the guards of the camp, released 300 prisoners.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The partisan struggle was noteworthy in Odessa province, with partisan forces led by V. Molodtsov-Badaev. Occupation forces testified that "During the two years of occupation, carried out mainly by Romanians, the city turned into a fortress of the partisan movement. Withdrawing from Odessa in the autumn of 1941, the Russians created a reliable partisan core in the city. The partisans settled in catacombs, the extensive network of which at 100 kilometers had no equal in Europe. It was a real underground fortress with staffs, shelters, logistical facilities of all kinds, right up to its own bakery and printing house, in which leaflets were printed."


title: Soviet partisans

text: According to historian Alexander Gogun, the partisans overstated their effectiveness in their reports. These inflated figures were passed back up the chain of command to Stalin, even finding their way into Soviet history books. Gogun says that the primary partisan targets in 1941–42 were not the German invaders but rather the local police, who were under German direction, and civilian collaborators. Gogun argues that the years 1943–44 were the peak of partisan activity within the territory of present-day Ukraine, as the Soviets battled the far-right, nationalistic OUN and the UPA, both of whom collaborated with the Nazis. According to Gogun, reprisal measures for attacks on Soviet partisans or support for Ukrainian nationalists included burning down villages and executions. Gogun cites sources stating that whole families were killed, and children, even babies, were sometimes bayoneted or burned alive.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In the Bryansk region, Soviet partisans controlled large areas behind the German lines. In the summer of 1942 they effectively held more than with a population of over 200,000 people. Soviet partisans in the region were led by Oleksiy Fedorov, Alexander Saburov and others and numbered over 60,000 men. The Belgorod, Oryol, Kursk, Novgorod, Leningrad, Pskov and Smolensk regions also had significant partisan activity during the occupation period. In the Oryol and Smolensk regions, partisans were led by Dmitry Medvedev.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Territories liberated or under partisan authority were important during the war. There were major partisan areas and zones in Leningrad, Kalinin, Smolensk, and Orel oblasts. In Kalinin Oblast, for example, the partisans held . Partisan zones and areas made it difficult for the German-led occupation forces to carry out re-groupings and pinned down a considerable portion of their forces. During offensives by Soviet troops, German-led forces were often unable to organize strong defenses in the partisan zones. As a result, the German forces was forced to group forces only along the roads. Partisan areas were frequently used by regular Soviet troops to reach the flanks and rear of German groupings rapidly, to drop (land) airborne forces, and to disrupt organized enemy withdrawal.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The partisan and underground struggle in the German-occupied territories influenced the reduction of morale and combat effectiveness of the German-led armed forces and contributed to Soviet Army victories. There was a collapse of German military and political leadership in the occupied Soviet territories that deprived German forces of raw materials, food, and labor. The political work of the partisans and underground forces was a powerful force in the struggle against occupation. According to the commander of garrisons belonging to German Army Group Center, the partisan movement was combined with "efficient and skillful propaganda, which calls on people of the occupied areas to fight against invaders." This led to more reluctance to collaborate with German occupation forces.


title: Soviet partisans

text: According to the memoirs of Marshal G.K. Zhukov, the partisan fighters operating in Smolensk and Orel districts contributed significantly to Soviet Army victories in the summer of 1943 in Kursk and Orel. Further, as in the case of the earlier Soviet victories at Moscow and Stalingrad, the Kursk victory too stimulated strong new growth of the partisan movement overall.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Because of the aggressive partisan attacks on rail communications, German Army Group North was forced to use truck transport to move reinforcements to the crucial sectors of the front where combat raged. German occupation leader Ziemke discussed the intensity of partisan fighting in northwestern Russia, stating: "Meanwhile, the partisans had so thoroughly disrupted the railroads that the other two reserve divisions had to be routed to Pskov, 130 miles north of Nevel, and there loaded in trucks, not enough of which were available. On 9 October Kuchler decided to wait until the reinforcements were assembled before trying again to close the gap."


title: Soviet partisans

text: According to German estimates, in August 1941, 10 percent of the Nazi rear area was full of Soviet partisans. By October 1942 this figure had risen to 75 percent, and by the autumn of the same year, fully 10 per cent of all German field divisions in Russia were engaged in fighting with partisans.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In 1943, after the Red Army started to liberate western Russia and north-east Ukraine, many partisans, including units led by Fedorov, Medvedev and Saburov, were ordered to re-locate their operations into central and western Ukraine still occupied by Nazis. Partisans of the Leningrad and Kalinin (Pskov and Novgorod) regions operated against German forces for as many as three years before liberation by the Red Army.


title: Soviet partisans

text: There was a large scale sign up by women to participate. S.V. Grishin led in Smolensk the partisan brigade "Thirteen" which had an all female reconnaissance including Evdokiya Karpechkina. Due to lack of respect by men towards women, a rejection was made by Nina when a platoon made out of men was proposed to be put under the leadership of Nina Zevrova in Leningrad.


title: Soviet partisans

text: While Soviet sources claim that thousands of partisans were operating in the Baltic region, they only operated in the Latgale region of Latvia and the Vilnius district. Thus Estonia remained partisan free throughout most of the war. By 1944 only 234 partisans were fighting in Estonia and none were native volunteers, all being either NKVD or Red Army personnel parachuted in from the Soviet-controlled territories. A very small pro-Soviet underground, however, did exist. In Latvia, the partisans were first under Russian and Belarusian command, and from January 1943, directly subordinated to the central Headquarters in Moscow, under the leadership of Arturs Sproģis.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Partisan groups in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia made a significant contribution to the Soviet victory. According to Alexander Chapenko, history professor at Murmansk State University, Latvia had the most number of partisan formations. There were large partisan units led by Vilis Samsons, which carried out large military activities. In Lithuania, there were two underground forces – these are quite large subdivisions – and by mid-1944, about 220 underground Communist organizations were operating. By the end of the war, there were 2 partisan brigades and 11 detachments. Two brigades took part in the liberation of Vilnius and provided assistance to Soviet troops.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In 1941, the Soviet partisan movement in Lithuania began with the actions of a small number of Red Army soldiers left behind enemy lines, much like the beginning of partisan movements in Ukraine and Belarus. The movement grew throughout 1942, and in the summer of that year, the Lithuanian Soviet partisan movement began receiving material aid as well as specialists and instructors in guerrilla warfare from Soviet-held territory. On 26 November 1942, the Command of the Lithuanian Partisan Movement (Lietuvos partizaninio judėjimo štabas) was created in Moscow, headed by the First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party Antanas Sniečkus, who fled to Moscow in the wake of the German invasion in 1941. Although the Soviet partisans in Lithuania were nominally under the control of the Command of the Lithuanian Partisan Movement, the guerrilla warfare specialists and instructors sent by it reported directly to the Central Command of the Partisan Movement. Modern Lithuanian historians estimate that about half of the Soviet partisans in Lithuania were escapees from POW and concentration camps, Soviet activists and Red Army soldiers left behind the quickly advancing front line, while the other half was made up of airdropped special operations experts. It is estimated that in total, about 5,000 people engaged in pro-Soviet underground activities in Lithuania during the war. In general, the role of Soviet dissident groups in Lithuania in Second World War was minimal.


title: Soviet partisans

text: During the Finnish occupation of Eastern Karelia, many ethnic Russians and some Karelians supported the partisan attacks. Approximately 5,000 partisans altogether fought in the region, although the typical strength of the force was 1,500–2,300. Peculiarities of this front were that partisan units were not created inside occupied territory. Their personnel came from all over the Soviet Union and that they mainly operated from the Soviet side of the front line.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Partisans distributed propaganda newspapers, "Pravda" in the Finnish language and "Lenin's Banner" in the Russian language. One of the more notable leaders of the partisan movement in Finland and Karelia was the future leader of the USSR, Yuri Andropov.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In East Karelia, most partisans attacked Finnish military supply and communication targets, but inside Finland proper, and Finnish sources claim that almost two-thirds of the attacks targeted civilians, killing 200 and injuring 50, mostly women, children and elderly. Finnish sources claim that on one occasion in the small village the partisans murdered all civilians, leaving no witnesses to the atrocities. According to Russian historians, Finnish historians and especially the mass media have politicized the issue of relations between Soviet partisans and Finnish civilians. In particular, Finnish historians characterize actions of a sabotage group against a group of Finnish border guards in the village of Kuoska in eastern Lapland as an attack on civilians.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Russian views however differ, as according to Sergey Verigin, Director of the Institute of History in Petrozavodsk University, the allegation that partisans killed civilians in Finland is "an absolutely unreasonable point of view. It is contrary to international law and all documents and treaties concluded after the Second World War. The hype began during perestroika. There were publications about the death of peaceful Finnish civilians at the hands of partisans. The topic has been politicized. On Finnish territory, partisans entered villages searching for food. They had no goal of specifically destroying civilians. But it's clear that there were some conflicts. And the population of the border areas had weapons i.e. it had ceased to be peaceful."


title: Soviet partisans

text: Partisan operations against Finns were estimated as being highly ineffectual. The partisans did not have sufficient strength to attack military targets, and would often falsely report their raids to higher command, claiming attacks on German or Finnish military targets even if the victims were civilians. Already in the autumn of 1941, the report of Komissariat of Interior Affairs was highly critical, and it became only worse, as stated in the counter-intelligence agency's report of April 1944. The main explanations given for the operations' failures were the isolated headquarters at Belomorsk, which did not know what operative units were doing, personnel who had no local knowledge and were partly made up of criminals (10–20% of all personnel were conscripted from prisons) without knowledge of how to operate in harsh terrain and climate, efficient Finnish counter-partisan patrolling (more than two-thirds of the infiltrating small partisan groups were completely destroyed) and Finnish internment of the ethnic Russian civilian population in concentration camps from those regions with active partisan operations. Internees were released to secure areas, preventing partisans from receiving local supplies. In addition, many Soviet Karelians reported to the Finns the movements of the partisans and did not support the Soviet Partisans.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Between 1941 and 1944 forty groups were active behind the Axis front line in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, acting against the Romanian troops which took over the territory following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The partisan detachments distributed propaganda and attacked local industrial and military facilities, neutralizing around 14,000 enemy soldiers and officers and capturing extensive military equipment. With a maximum strength of 3,900, its loses amounted to 600 captured and up to 850 executed.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In the former eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic, attached to the Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Republics after the Soviet invasion of Poland, the organization and operation of Soviet partisans were similar to that in Ukrainian and Belarusian territories. However, there were notable differences in the interaction of partisans with Polish national forces and the local population. There were also Soviet-affiliated and controlled groups, namely Gwardia Ludowa, later transformed into Armia Ludowa, which while often described as parts of the Polish resistance, were de facto controlled by Soviets, and as such can also be seen as extensions of the Soviet partisans.


title: Soviet partisans

text: After an initial period of wary collaboration with the independent Polish resistance, the conflicts between Soviet-affiliated and independent groups intensified, especially as Poles were principally the victims of Soviet terror between 1939 and 1941, and Soviet diplomatic relations with the Polish exile government in London continued to worsen and were broken off completely by Soviet government in the aftermath of the discovery of the Katyn Massacre in 1943. As a result, Soviet partisans started extensive operations against both the Polish underground and the civilian population of the areas seized by the Soviets in 1939. The campaign of terror resulted in reports to London of horrifying looting, rape and murder. This made many local AK commanders consider the Soviets as just another enemy and eventually on June 22, 1943 Soviets partisans were ordered by Moscow to take on the Polish units as well. In addition to engaging German military and police targets, according to Bogdan Musial Soviet partisans also targeted the poorly armed and trained Belarusian and Polish self-defense units (some of these units were formed with Nazi encouragement and were viewed as collaborationist). Additionally, Soviet partisans were instructed to opportunistically use the Nazis against Polish non-communist resistance by feeding the German forces information on Poles.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The Soviet partisans were involved in several massacres of Polish civilians, including at Naliboki, on May 8, 1943 and at Koniuchy on 29 January 1944. Soviet partisans and Red Army Officers have also murdered members of Polish anti-Nazi resistance after inviting them to "negotiations" in 1943, and also denounced them to the Germans, who then killed the Poles.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Soviet partisans attacked Polish partisans, villages and small towns in order to weaken the Polish structures in the areas which Soviet Union claimed for itself. Frequent requisitions of food in local villages and brutal reprisal actions against villages considered disloyal to the Soviet Union sparked the creation of numerous self-defence units, often joining the ranks of the Armia Krajowa. Similar assaults on the Polish resistance organizations also took place in the Ukraine. Communist propaganda called the Polish resistance the "bands of White Poles", or "the protégés of the Gestapo." On 23 June 1943 the Soviet leaders ordered the partisans to denounce Polish partisan to the Nazis. The Soviet units were authorized to “shoot the [Polish] leaders” and “discredit, disarm, and dissolve” their units. Under pretences of cooperation, two sizable Polish partisan units were led to their destruction (a common strategy involved inviting the Polish commanders to negotiations, arresting or murdering them and attacking the Polish partisans by surprise).


title: Soviet partisans

text: To survive, resistance fighters largely relied on the civilian population. This included access to food, clothing and other supplies. Soviet partisans requisitioned food, livestock and clothes from local peasants, and when peasants did not share them willingly, they often did it by force. The results of such requisitioning were made more severe by the fact that Axis occupation forces had been already carrying out their own requisitions. This led to conflicts between Soviet partisans and local populace in areas less friendly to the Soviet Union, mostly in territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and the Baltic states annexed in 1940.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Partisans are accused of provoking brutal countermeasures from the Nazi occupiers that targeted civilians. Trying to limit partisan activities, German command employed mass killings of hostages among the residents of areas supporting partisan forces. In the case of partisan attack or sabotage, a number of locals would be executed. Such hostage operations happened in the form of preliminary arrests, post-attack retaliation actions, and/or compulsory "watch-groups" deployed on vulnerable sites and killed if they did not avert the attack. In Belarus alone, according to historian Christian Gerlach, German anti-partisan actions killed an estimated 345,000 people, mostly civilians.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Numerous accounts of Soviet partisan operations in former Polish territories discuss their strained relations with local peasants. Polish peasants often refused to voluntarily support the Soviet partisans, which in turn lead to the Soviets forcefully acquiring supplies.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Chodakiewicz reported that a high ranking Soviet commander said, “Most partisan units feed, clothe, and arm themselves at the expense of the local population and not by capturing booty in the struggle against fascism. That arouses in the people a feeling of hostility, and they say, ‘The Germans take everything away and one must also give something to the partisans’.”


title: Soviet partisans

text: Among the targets of Soviet partisans were not only Axis military and their collaboration units, but also civilians accused of being collaborators or sometimes even those who were considered not to support the partisans strongly enough. In some cases, Germans allowed peasants to form self-defense units against Soviet raids, which in extreme cases led to violent clashes between the Soviet partisans and local peasants, resulting in civilian casualties, as was the case with the Koniuchy and Naliboki massacres in Polish-Lithuanian borderland in 1943–44.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In territories that were a part of the Soviet Union before the war, their relations with the locals were much better. There, Soviet partisans often had the support of civilians and the unity of partisans and the local population had a positive effect on partisan activities. Elderly men and women and children often put themselves in mortal danger. A number of Soviet sources extol the level of cooperation between the partisans and the populace, for example, a leader of the Minsk underground Communist Party committee reported: "The local people helped us in the search for weapons. From rivers, swamps, and forests, people located rifles, ammunition, shells, and all this was delivered to us." The local population provided food and clothing to partisans voluntarily. Local civilians organized into self-defense detachments, delivered food, collected weapons from past battles, and prepared lodging for partisans. Residents cared for sick and wounded fighters. Self-defense groups assisted partisans to secure areas and conduct reconnaissance. Communist Party leadership in partisan organizations was significant and had a positive influence. Commissars were responsible for ensuring discipline and supervised all partisan activities to ensure they followed guiding principles of the partisan movement. Political commissars insisted that partisan fighters enhance their ideological and political awareness and maintain close and friendly relations with the local population. In territories freed by the partisans, the partisans accumulated and trained reserves, provided care to the sick and wounded, built airfields to receive planes from the rest of the Soviet Union. Large numbers of Soviet citizens fleeing destruction from German-occupied areas were provided relief by partisans.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In Belarus, workers and employees of Minsk, Brest, Grodno, Borisov and other cities that were occupied by Germany transferred weapons to partisan detachments that were sometimes stationed far away from large settlements. Weapons were bought, exchanged, or taken directly from garrisons, warehouses and then taken secretly to the woods. In 1942 and in the first half of 1943, residents of the Ushachsky district in Vitebsk region handed over 260 tons of bread to partisans. On the eve of the Soviet offensive into Belarus, partisan intelligence reported on German plans to deport a portion of the population to Ostrovets and to shoot the rest of the citizens. On 3 July 1944, the partisans seized the town and held it for several days until they were relieved by advancing Soviet forces. Belorussian partisans alone managed to rescue 15,000 Soviet citizens from German hands and moved another 80,000 inhabitants from German-occupied territory to the Soviet rear.


title: Soviet partisans

text: According to Alexander Statiev,"Despite the ruthless procurement policy sanctioned at the top level and numerous abuses by commanders that aggravated this policy, most requisitions in these regions still had a benign outcome: civilians perceived the loss of some of their assets to partisans as a fair price for the temporary absence of Germans and the eventual victory. However, most people in the borderlands, incorporated by the Soviet Union in 1939–1940, resented the Soviet regime and its representatives, the partisans."


title: Soviet partisans

text: At the same time, when pressed for supplies, partisans also engaged in significant amount of plunder:


title: Soviet partisans

text: Particularly in Crimea, the Soviet partisans relation with local populace, Crimean Tatars, was very bad. Having failed to properly provision the troops before the area was overrun by the Germans, partisans launched "in the words of the Crimean Provincial Party Committee, ‘violent confiscations of food in Tatar villages without distinguishing friends from foes'". This resulted in violent conflict between mostly Slavic partisans and local Tatars, encouraged by the Germans who allowed Tatar villages to raise self-defence militia. Being unable to obtain supplies, the Soviet partisans suffered major casualties, and the partisan resistance in the Crimea nearly vanished by the summer of 1942.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Vasily Korzh raid, Autumn 1941 – March 23, 1942. raid of a partisan formation in the Minsk and Pinsk Oblasts of Belarus.


title: Soviet partisans

text: From the very beginning of its existence, the partisan intelligence had been aimed chiefly at serving the Red Army operational purposes. It had frequently been asked to provide detailed information on enemy's whereabouts, strengths, armaments, movements and intentions. Yet, the partisans’ ability to meet the expectations of military consumers was limited. In 1941–1942, they relied chiefly on field intelligence – foot patrols, observation and questioning of local population – and only from late 1942 onwards succeeded in developing human intelligence capabilities. Unfortunately, the majority of their agents and collaborators were illiterate farmers and laborers unprepared for intelligence work. Technological means of collection such as communications interceptors and night vision devices were used by the partisans only on rare occasions. Besides, the wide scale deployment and high efficiency of the German security services limited the partisans’ gathering capabilities in the military field to the rural areas, almost completely preventing their access to the Wehrmacht's bases and decision making centers.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Partisan intelligence's contribution to the political leadership of the Soviet Union and its intelligence community appears to have been more significant, especially in collecting information on conditions in the occupied territories, as well as on the structure of the occupation administration, its everyday behavior, local collaborators and sympathizers. This contribution allowed the Soviet regime to maintain its authority and control behind the German lines and reinforced its anti-Nazi propaganda effort in the occupied territories and in the West. The Soviet intelligence and security services used the information obtained by the partisans for improving their operational capabilities in the German-controlled territories and preparing the measures for reoccupation of Eastern Poland and the Baltic States.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The partisan propaganda means had developed over the occupation period. In its early stage, the partisan messages were mainly short and unsophisticated and used simple spreading channels, such as verbal communication and leaflets. Consequently, some of the big-sized and mighty partisan detachments succeeded in establishing their own print houses that published periodic ‘partisan newspapers’ based on the propaganda broadcasts from Moscow and local reality.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The effect of the partisan psychological warfare is hard to evaluate. Nevertheless, it appears that at least a part of the defections from the Wehrmacht and other Axis troops, that occurred on the Eastern front in 1942–1944, might be attributed to the partisan propaganda effort, as well as the relatively high number of the local volunteers to the Soviet guerrilla detachments starting from the summer of 1943. Furthermore, in many occupied areas the very presence of anti-German irregulars emphasized the continued presence of ‘Kremlin’s watchful eye’, unnerved occupying forces and their collaborators and thus undermined the enemy's attempt to ‘pacify’ the local populace.


title: Soviet partisans

text: A significant number of Soviet citizens were outside Soviet borders during the war and many took part in numerous partisan formations and saboteur groups in France, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. More than 40,000 Soviet citizens joined partisan formations in these countries. For example, about 25,000 Soviet partisans fought in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Some of these perished in the resistance and have become national heroes in the countries they fought in, including M. Gusein-Zade in Yugoslavia, F. Poletaev in Italy, and V. Porik in France. More than 12,000 Soviet partisans operated in Poland alone, the most notable of which were P. Vershigora's 1st Ukrainian Partisan division and other partisan brigades and units commanded by I. Banov, V. Karasev, G. Kovalev, S. Sankov, and several others. Many of these partisans, together with 600,000 Red Army soldiers, died on Polish soil.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Able-bodied male Jews were usually welcomed by the partisans (sometimes only if they brought their own weapons). More than 10% of the Soviet partisan movement were Jews. However, Jewish women, children, and the elderly were usually not welcome. Often, however, separate Jewish groups, both guerrilla units and mixed family groups of refugees (like the Bielski partisans), were subordinated to the communist partisan leadership and considered as Soviet allies.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The Soviet Ukrainian partisans achieved some success only in Slovakia, a nominally independent country under German tutelage. The Slovakian countryside and mountains became a ‘hotbed’ for the Soviet guerrillas in the second half of 1944. Dozens of the partisan detachments that came from Soviet Ukraine and formerly Soviet-occupied Poland conducted sabotage acts against German communication lines, harassed the local German community and finally took an active part in the Slovak National Uprising launched by the Slovak resistance movement on 29 August 1944. The insurgents established their headquarters in the central-Slovakian town Banská Bystrica, conducted contacts with the Allied powers, managed to hold out for two months against the German and the Slovak collaborationist troops, and even dispatched sabotage and intelligence units to Hungary and Moravia.


title: Soviet partisans

text: However, due to the Red Army's inability or possibly unwillingness to support the rebels, many of whom were loyal to the London-based Czechoslovak government-in-exile, the Slovak National Uprising was brutally suppressed in late October 1944. The attempt of the Soviet Ukrainian partisans to continue the guerrilla war in the Carpathian Mountains during the winter of 1944–1945 had little effect on the Germans but led to severe losses among the partisans. Most returned to the Soviet-controlled territory without being able to assist the Red Army war effort. Nonetheless, the remnants of the Soviet Ukrainian partisan networks remained active in Slovakia and Moravia, mostly in the intelligence field, until early May.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In addition to fighting the Nazis, Soviet partisans fought against organizations that sought to establish independent non-communist states of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine. Most of the resistance groups in the Baltic States and Poland sought to re-establish independent states free of Soviet domination.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Soviet partisans are therefore a controversial issue in those countries. In Latvia, former Soviet partisan Vasiliy Kononov was prosecuted and convicted for war crimes against locals. The conviction was ultimately upheld by European Court of Human Rights.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In the early years of the war, following German invasion of the Soviet Union, many Polish and Soviet partisans saw Germans as the common enemy, and hostility between the two groups was limited. However, by mid-1943, as the Soviets gained the upper hand and started to push German forces westwards, and following the breakdown of diplomatic relationship between Polish government in exile and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the revelations about the Katyn massacre on June 22, 1943, Soviet partisans received orders to engage non-communist Polish partisans of Armia Krajowa, and the hostilities between the two groups escalated. On numerous occasions in the years 1943–1944, the Soviets would invite Polish partisans to talks, then disarm them and some times execute the Polish partisan leaders.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) formed in 1942 as a military arm of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists engaged in armed conflicts with Soviet partisans and the Polish resistance. While the UPA initially attempted to find a common anti-Soviet ground with Nazi Germany against the USSR, it soon was driven underground as it became apparent that the Germans' intentions for Ukraine were to establish a German colony with a subjugated local population, not an independent country as the UPA hoped for. As such, the UPA was driven underground and fought both the Nazi occupiers and the Soviet forces (including partisans) at the same time.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Later, the UPA and Soviet partisan leaders tried to negotiate a temporary alliance, but Moscow's NKVD Headquarters began harshly suppressing such moves by its local commanders. With both sides becoming established enemies, the Ukrainian civil population was primarily concerned with their survival.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Soviet partisan relations with the population of the Baltic countries were complex. The Soviet government annexed these territories in June 1940 and faced increasing resistance after repressive actions against the Baltic populations. The German offensive in the Baltic was swift and effectively defeated the Soviet forces stationed there. But over time, the number of Soviet underground workers increased. Their ranks, as in the other occupied territories, grew at the expense of the NKVD sabotage groups that were being abandoned, escaped prisoners of war. The local population also became increasingly dissatisfied with Nazi Germany.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Soviet forces focused on communicating with the local population. In August 1941, regular radio programs began in Latvian from Moscow. The newspaper "For Soviet Latvia” began to be published.


title: Soviet partisans

text: According to the Daugavpils Regional Commissioner in his report of 20 May 1942:“The activities of the partisans in the Latgale region are rampant. There are daily reports that clashes with guerrilla groups occur in different places, which are partially parachuted or crossed the border or consist of prisoners of war who escaped from camps and armed by local residents. The number of fleeing increases every day. The guerrillas do not seek more shelter from the population, but organize their bases in impassable forests and wetlands, from where they are attacking settlements."In November and December 1943, punitive expeditions were organized against Oshkaln partisans, and police from Riga province were mobilized. Partisans maneuvred and retreated to the Zalveskie forests (40 km west of Jekabpils). Due to the support of the local population, the Oshkaln partisans withstood difficulties of the winter of 1943/44.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Latvian headquarters of the partisan movement reported that in the summer of 1944, partisans of eastern and central Latvia directly rescued more than 3,220 from being transferred to western Latvia, and also 278 Soviet soldiers were liberated from captivity, and they immediately joined partisan detachments. In the woodlands in the north-east of Latvia, about 1,500 families of civilians were hiding under the direct protection of the detachments of the 1st Partisan brigade.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Their involvement in actions that affected the civilian population (for example, the killing of the Polish civilians in Kaniūkai and the destruction of the village of Bakaloriškės). The anti-Soviet resistance movements in the Baltic states, known as the [[Latvian national partisans|Latvian]] or [[Lithuanian partisans]], (established before the Soviet re-occupation in 1944), and [[Local Self-Defence in Lithuania during the Nazi German occupation (1941–1944)|local self-defence]] units often came into conflict with Soviet partisan groups. In Estonia and Latvia, almost all the Soviet partisan units, dropped by air, were either destroyed by the German forces or the local self-defense units.


title: Soviet partisans

text: In eastern and south-eastern Lithuania, Soviet partisans constantly clashed with Polish [[Armia Krajowa]] ("Home Army") partisans; AK did not recognise any territorial changes after 1939 and considered this region as a legal part of Poland, while the Soviets planned to annex it into the Soviet Union after the war. Only in April 1944 did Polish and Soviet partisans start coordinating their actions against the Germans.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Some historians assert that the Soviet reactions to returning partisans were not better than for Soviet POWs. However, most of the partisans were included in Soviet regular forces. A lot of former POWs avoided repressions because of joining the partisan units after the escape. In 1955, a pardon was given to all returned prisoners of war and Nazi collaborators.


title: Soviet partisans

text: With the German supply lines already over-extended, the partisan operations in the rear of the front lines were able to severely disrupt the flow of supplies to the army that acted deep into Soviet territory. In the second half of the war, major partisan operations were coordinated with Soviet offensives. Upon liberation of parts of the Soviet territory, the corresponding partisan detachments usually joined the regular Army. According to Soviet sources, the partisans were a vital force of the war. From 90,000 men and women by the end of 1941 (including underground) they grew to 220,000 in 1942, and to more than 550,000 in 1943.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The Soviet partisan activity was a strategic factor in the defeat of the German forces on the Soviet-German front. During the summer and autumn of 1942, when partisan warfare did not reach its highest peak, the German Army devoted about 10 percent of its overall strength in fighting partisans, including 15 regular and security divisions and 144 security and police battalions. At the same time, the total strength of German and Italian forces in North Africa was 12 divisions. The partisans made significant contributions to the war effort by interrupting German plans to exploit Soviet territories economically. German forces obtained only one-seventh of what they looted from other European countries. While about $1 billion worth of food and other products were expropriated from Soviet territories by the Germans, more than $26 billion worth of goods and services were extracted from other European countries.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The partisans rendered substantial help to Soviet Army forces operating at the front by conducting damaging strikes against the German rear area communication network. Partisan activities combined with the Soviet Army's increasing offensive success helped to inspire the local population in occupied territories to join or support the struggle against the German occupation. According to historian Leonid Grenkevich, This partisan warfare on so vast a scale was unprecedented in Russian history. In the end, it was a genuine people's war. In general, the populace supported the partisan fighters by providing them not only moral support, and care and attention, but also food and masses of intelligence information.


title: Soviet partisans

text: According to historian Geoffrey Hosking, "All in all, the Soviet peoples displayed between 1941 and 1945 endurance, resourcefulness and determination which may be well beyond the capacities of economically more advanced nations. They won the war partly because of, partly in spite of, their leaders . . . The war showed the Soviet system at its best and at its worst."


title: Soviet partisans

text: Historian Matthew Cooper argued that, "The guerrilla was not simply a man fighting for his country; he was a political being struggling for a powerful and pervasive cause, against his own race as well as against the enemy. Militarily, he was to assist the progress of the Red Army by creating unbearable conditions in the enemy’s rear; politically he was to be the champion of the class struggle in the furtherance of the Communist millennium. The Soviet partisans were representatives of the Soviet regime and evidence that neither it nor ideology was defeated."


title: Soviet partisans

text: The partisan movement succeeded in accomplishing its ideological tasks. US Air Force historians N. F. Parrish, L. B. Atkinson, and A. F. Simpson remarked, "Aside from direct or indirect damage to the German war machine, the Moscow-controlled partisan movement was the sole effective means by which the Soviet government could maintain a measure of control of, and extract varying degrees of loyalty from, the Soviet populations behind the German lines." The historian J. Armstrong also highly praised Soviet partisans ’efforts in this field, stating, "The great accomplishment of the partisans in the psychological field was their major contribution in turning the population of the occupied territories against the Germans."


title: Soviet partisans

text: Polish historian [[Marek Jan Chodakiewicz]]: alleges that the "Soviet-allied guerrillas routinely engaged in plundering peasants. He argues that they "lacked popular support" and claims that such allegations have been "eliminated from the standard Soviet narrative about them". The book "Soviet partisans in 1941–1944" by Polish author [[Bogdan Musiał|Bogdan Musial]] was criticized by Belarusian media for denigrating the partisan movement.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Partisans and Underground Fighters Day () is a holiday in Russia, celebrated on June 29 since 2010, celebrating the veterans of Partisan units throughout the USSR. It was established by the [[State Duma]] in March 2009 at the initiative of the [[Bryansk]] Regional Duma. On 11 April 2009, President [[Dmitry Medvedev]] made the act into law. It officially marks the anniversary 1941 directive of the Council of People's Commissars signed on this date declaring the intention to create partisan detachments.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The Day of Partisan Glory () is celebrated in [[Ukraine]] on 22 September, first appearing on the Ukrainian calendar in October 2001 after an order came from President [[Leonid Kuchma]]. In 2011, the main celebrations dedicated to the Day of Partisan Glory and the 70th anniversary of the partisan movement were held in the city of Putivl in the [[Sumy Oblast]] of Ukraine.


title: Soviet partisans

text: The [[Medal "To a Partisan of the Patriotic War"]] was a Soviet award with two classes on introduced on 2 February 1943 for partisans who demonstrate exemplary performance in war.


title: Soviet partisans

text: Today, reenactments of the famous [[Partisans Parade]] are currently held every year by youth unions, university students and reenactment groups. Every five years, reenactors from the [[Armed Forces of Belarus]] take part in the [[Minsk Independence Day Parade]] as part of its historical part, dressed in the uniforms of Partisan formations and marching under with weapons from that era. Both the uniforms and the weapons are provided by the [[Belarusfilm]] studio. This was done at the 2014 and 2019 jubilee parade editions was done for the first time in 2020 for the [[Victory Day Parade]]. During the [[2020 Moscow Victory Day Parade]], the banners of the [[Zheleznyak]] Partisan Detachment and three Red Army units who participated in the [[Minsk Offensive]] were carried by personnel of the [[Honor Guard Company (Belarus)|Honor Guard Company of the Armed Forces of Belarus]] on [[Red Square]].


title: Kurt Wimmer

text: He attended the University of South Florida and graduated with a BFA degree in Art History. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for 12 years as a screenwriter before directing the 2002 film "Equilibrium". In numerous interviews, he cites "Equilibrium" as his directorial debut and first film, although his actual directorial debut was the 1995 action film "One Tough Bastard" starring Brian Bosworth and Bruce Payne. However, "Equilibrium" was his first theatrically released film.


title: Palmanova

text: Palmanova () is a town and comune in northeast Italy. The town is an example of a star fort of the late Renaissance, built up by the Venetian Republic in 1593.


title: Palmanova

text: Found in the southeast part of the autonomous region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, it is from Udine, from Gorizia and from Trieste, near the junction of the motorways A23 and A4.


title: Palmanova

text: On 7 October 1593, the superintendent of the Venetian Republic founded a revolutionary new kind of settlement: Palmanova. The city’s founding date commemorated the victory of the Christian forces (supplied primarily by the Italian states and the Spanish kingdom) over the Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, during the War of Cyprus. Also honored on 7 October was Saint Justina, chosen as the city's patron saint. Using all the latest military innovations of the 16th century, this small town was a fortress in the shape of a nine-pointed star, designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi. Between the points of the star, ramparts protruded so that the points could defend each other. A moat surrounded the town, and three large, guarded gates allowed entry. The construction of the first circle, with a total circumference of , took 30 years. Marcantonio Barbaro headed a group of Venetian noblemen in charge of building the town, Marcantonio Martinego was in charge of construction, and Giulio Savorgnan acted as an adviser. The second phase of construction took place between 1658 and 1690, and the outer line of fortifications was completed between 1806 and 1813 under the Napoleonic domination. The final fortress consists of: nine ravelins, nine bastions, nine lunettes, and eighteen cavaliers.


title: Palmanova

text: In 1815 the city came under Austrian rule until 1866, when it was annexed to Italy together with Veneto and the western Friuli. Until 1918, it was the one of easternmost towns along the Italian-Austro Hungarian border and during the first world war the city worked as a military zone hosting even a hospital for the royal army. In 1960 Palmanova was declared a national monument.


title: Palmanova

text: American professor Edward Wallace Muir Jr. said of Palmanova, "The humanist theorists of the ideal city designed numerous planned cities that look intriguing on paper but were not especially successful as livable spaces. Along the northeastern frontier of their mainland empire, the Venetians began to build in 1593 the best example of a Renaissance planned town: Palmanova, a fortress city designed to defend against attacks from the Ottomans in Bosnia. Built ex nihilo according to humanist and military specifications, Palmanova was supposed to be inhabited by self-sustaining merchants, craftsmen, and farmers. However, despite the pristine conditions and elegant layout of the new city, no one chose to move there, and by 1622 Venice was forced to pardon criminals and offer them free building lots and materials if they would agree to settle the town."


title: Palmanova

text: Palmanova was built following the ideals of a utopia. It is a concentric city with the form of a star, with three nine-sided ring roads intersecting in the main military radiating streets. It was built at the end of the 16th century by the Venetian Republic which was, at the time, a major center of trade. It is actually considered to be a fort, or citadel, because the military architect Giulio Savorgnan designed it to be a Venetian military station on the eastern frontier as protection from the Ottoman Empire.


title: Palmanova

text: During the renaissance many ideas of a utopia, both as a society and as a city, surfaced. Utopia was considered to be a place where there was perfection in the whole of its society. This idea was started by Sir Thomas More, when he wrote the book "Utopia". The book described the physical features of a city as well as the life of the people who lived in it. His book sparked a flame in literary circles. A great many other books of similar nature were written in short order. They all followed a major theme: equality. Everyone had the same amount of wealth, respect, and life experiences. Society had a calculated elimination of variety and a monotonous environment. The city where they lived was always geometric in shape and was surrounded by a wall. These walls provided military strength but also protected the city by preserving and passing on man’s knowledge. The knowledge, learning, and science gave form to the daily life of the people living inside the walls. The knowledge of each person was shared by the entire society, and there was no way to let any information either in or out. As Thomas More said in his book, "He that knows one knows them all, they are so alike one another."


title: Palmanova

text: Alberti, followed by Filarete, were the first to develop the ideas of Utopia into the plan of a city. Filarete designed a concentric city, with peaks and radiating streets, which he called Sforzinda. His geometry was the imitation of a schema representing the work. It is believed to have derived from two overlaying squares. Sforzinda later became the most influential plan in the design of Palmanova. Since Palmanova was built during the renaissance, it imposed geometrical harmony and followed the idea that beauty reinforces the wellness of a society. Each road and move was carefully calibrated and each part of the plan had a reason for being. Each person would have the same amount of responsibility and land, and each person had to serve a specific purpose. The concentric shape was the most prominent design move and had many reasons for being.


title: Palmanova

text: The circular shape of Palmanova was greatly influenced by the fact that it needed to be a fort. At the time of its construction, many other urban theoreticians found the checkerboard was more useful, but it could not provide the protection that military architects desired. The walls of a practical fort are run at angles so that enemy soldiers could not approach it easily because the angles made it possible to establish overlapping fields of fire.


title: Palmanova

text: The Duomo is located in front of the town hall of Palmanova (formerly the "Palace of Provveditore"). Commissioned in 1603, the construction started later that year under Inspector Girolamo Cappello and was completed in 1636. The identities of any architects are uncertain, but may have been Vincenzo Scamozzi and Baldassare Longhena. The Duomo was not consecrated until 1777 after the town had been included into the Archbishopric of Udine.


title: Palmanova

text: The bell tower of the Duomo, erected in 1776, was deliberately made short because enemies attacking the city should not be able to see the Duomo from outside the city walls.


title: Palmanova

text: The niches in the façade contain statues representing the saints Justina of Padua, one of Padua's patron saints, and Mark, as well as a statue of Christ, the Redeemer. The façade itself is made of stone from Istria, and was restored in 2000.


title: Palmanova

text: Palmanova can be reached from the nearby motorways, A23 (Udine-Tarvisio) and A4 (Turin-Trieste) and by the railway between Udine and Cervignano There are also bus connections.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA (; 11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of law.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott was the son of Joseph Francis Oakeshott, a civil servant (latterly divisional head in the Inland Revenue) and member of the Fabian Society, and Frances Maude, daughter of George Thistle Hellicar, a well-off Islington silk-merchant. Though there is no evidence that he knew her, he was related by marriage to the women's rights activist Grace Oakeshott, and to the economist and social reformer Gilbert Slater. The life peer Matthew Oakeshott is of the same family; also the political journalist Isabel Oakeshott.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Michael Oakeshott attended St George's School, Harpenden, a new co-educational and 'progressive' boarding school from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster, the Rev. Cecil Grant, a disciple of Maria Montessori, later became a friend. In 1920, Oakeshott matriculated with a Scholarship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read history, taking the Political Science options in both parts of the Tripos (Cambridge degree examinations). He graduated in 1923 with a first-class degree, subsequently (as is still normal at Cambridge) took an unexamined MA, and was elected a Fellow of Caius in 1925. While at Cambridge he admired the British idealist philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and John Grote, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke. He said that McTaggart's introductory lectures were the only formal philosophical training he ever received. The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary, friend and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: After graduation in 1923 he pursued his interests in theology and German literature in a summer course at the Universities of Marburg and Tuebingen, and again in 1925. In between, for a year, he taught literature as Senior English Master at King Edward VII Grammar School, Lytham St Anne's, while simultaneously writing his (successful) Fellowship dissertation, which he said was a 'dry run' for his first book, "Experience and its Modes".


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott was dismayed by the political extremism that occurred in Europe during the 1930s, and his surviving lectures from this period reveal a dislike of Nazism and Marxism. He is said to have been the first at Cambridge to lecture on Marx. At the suggestion of Sir Ernest Barker, who wished to see Oakeshott succeed to his own Cambridge Chair of Political Science, in 1939 he produced an anthology, with commentary, of "The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe". For all its muddle and incoherence (as he saw it), he found Representative Democracy the least unsatisfactory, in part because 'the imposition of a universal plan of life on a society is at once stupid and immoral'.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Although in his essay "The Claim of Politics" (1939), Oakeshott defended individuals' right to eschew political commitment, he joined the British Army after the fall of France in 1940, when he could have avoided conscription on grounds of age. He volunteered for the virtually suicidal Special Operations Executive (SOE), where the average life expectancy was about six weeks, and was interviewed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, but it was decided that he was "too unmistakably English" to conduct covert operations on the Continent. He saw active service in Europe with the battlefield intelligence unit Phantom, a semi-freelance quasi-Signals organisation which also had connections with the Special Air Service (SAS). Though always at the front, the unit was seldom directly involved in any actual fighting. Oakeshott's military competence did not go unnoticed, and he ended the war as Adjutant of Phantom's 'B' Squadron and acting major.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: In 1945 Oakeshott was demobilised and returned to Cambridge. In 1949 he left Cambridge for Nuffield College, Oxford, but after only two years, in 1951, he was appointed Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics (LSE), succeeding the leftist Harold Laski, an appointment noted by the popular press. Oakeshott was deeply unsympathetic to the student activism at LSE during the late 1960s, and highly critical of (as he saw it) the authorities' insufficiently robust response. He retired from the LSE in 1969, but continued teaching and conducting seminars until 1980.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: In his retirement he retreated to live quietly in a country cottage in Langton Matravers in Dorset with his third wife. He was twice divorced and had numerous affairs, many of them with wives of his students, colleagues and friends, and even with his son Simon's girlfriend. He also had a son out of wedlock, whom he abandoned together with the mother when the child was two, and whom he did not meet again for nearly twenty years. Oakeshott's most famous lover was Iris Murdoch.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott lived long enough to experience increasing recognition, although he has become much more widely written about since his death. Oakeshott declined an offer to be made a Companion of Honour, for which he was proposed by Margaret Thatcher.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott's early work, some of which has been published posthumously as "What is History? and Other Essays" (2004) and "The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence" (2007), shows that he was more interested in the philosophical problems that derived from his historical studies than he was in the history, even though he was officially a historian. Some of his very early essays are on religion (of a Christian 'modernist' kind), though after his first marital break-up (c. 1934) he published no more on the topic except for a couple of pages in his "magnum opus" "On Human Conduct". However, his posthumously published and voluminous "Notebooks" (1919-) show a lifelong preoccupation with religion and questions of mortality. In his youth he had considered taking Holy Orders, but later inclined towards a non-specific Romantic mysticism.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott published his first book in 1933, "Experience and its Modes", when he was thirty-one. He acknowledged the influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and F. H. Bradley; commentators also noticed resemblances between this work and the ideas of thinkers such as R. G. Collingwood and Georg Simmel.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: The book argued that our experience is usually modal, in the sense that we almost always have a governing perspective on the world, be it practical or theoretical. One may take various theoretical approaches to the world: natural science, history and practice, for example, are quite separate, immiscible modes of experience. It is a mistake, he declared, to treat history on the model of the sciences, or to read into it one's current practical concerns.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Philosophy, however, is not a mode. At this stage of his career Oakeshott understood philosophy as the world seen, in Spinoza's phrase, ", literally "under the aspect of eternity", free from presuppositions, whereas science and history and the practical mode rely on certain assumptions. Later (there is disagreement about exactly when) Oakeshott adopted a pluralistic view of the various modes of experience, with philosophy just one voice among others, though it retained its self-critical character.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: According to Oakeshott, the dominating principles of scientific and historical thought are quantity (the world ') and pastness (the world ') respectively. Oakeshott distinguished the academic perspective on the past from the practical, in which the past is seen in terms of its relevance to our present and future. His insistence on the autonomy of history places him close to Collingwood, who also argued for the autonomy of historical knowledge.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: The practical world view (the world ") presupposes the ideas of will and value. It is only in terms of these that practical action, for example in politics, economics, and ethics, makes sense. Because all action is conditioned by presuppositions, Oakeshott saw any attempt to change the world as reliant upon a scale of values, which themselves presuppose a context in which "this" is preferable to "that". Even the conservative disposition to maintain the "status quo" (so long as the latter is tolerable) relies upon managing inevitable change, a point he later elaborated in his essay "On Being Conservative".


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: During this period, Oakeshott published what became his best known work during his lifetime, the collection entitled "Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays" (1962), and notable for its elegance of style. Some of his near-polemics against the direction that Britain was taking, in particular towards socialism, gained Oakeshott a reputation as a traditionalist conservative, sceptical about rationalism and rigid ideologies. Bernard Crick described him as a "lonely nihilist".


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott's opposition to political utopianism is summed up in his analogy (possibly borrowed from a pamphlet by the 17th-century statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, "The Character of a Trimmer") of a ship of state that has "neither starting-place nor appointed destination...[and where] the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel". He was a severe critic of E. H. Carr, the Cambridge historian of Soviet Russia, claiming that Carr was fatally uncritical of the Bolshevik regime and took some of its propaganda at face value.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: In his essay "On Being Conservative" (1956) Oakeshott characterised conservatism as a disposition rather than a political stance: "To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott's political philosophy, as advanced in "On Human Conduct" (1975), is free of any recognisable party politics. The book's first part ("On the Theoretical Understanding of Human Conduct") develops a theory of human action as the exercise of intelligent agency in activities such as wanting and choosing, the second ("On the Civil Condition") discusses the formal conditions of association appropriate to such intelligent agents, described as "civil" or legal association, and the third ("On the Character of a Modern European State") examines how far this understanding of human association has affected politics and political ideas in post-Renaissance European history.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott suggests that there had been two major modes or understandings of political organization. In the first, which he calls "enterprise association" (or '), the state is (illegitimately) understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects. (As its name indicates, enterprise association is perfectly appropriate to the management of "enterprises"; however, except in emergencies such as war, where all resources must be commandeered into the pursuit of victory, the state is not an enterprise, properly so called.) By contrast, "civil association" (or ') is primarily a legal relationship in which laws impose obligatory conditions of action but do not require the associates to choose one action rather than another. (Compare Robert Nozick on 'side-constraints'.)


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: The complex, technical and often rebarbative style of "On Human Conduct" found few readers, and its initial reception was mostly one of bafflement. Oakeshott, who rarely responded to critics, replied sardonically in "Political Theory" to some of the contributions made in a symposium on the book in the same journal.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: In his posthumously published "The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism" Oakeshott describes enterprise associations and civil associations in different terms. In politics, an enterprise association is based on a fundamental faith in human ability to ascertain and grasp some universal good (leading to the Politics of Faith), and civil association is based on a fundamental scepticism about human ability to either ascertain or achieve this good (leading to the Politics of Scepticism). Oakeshott considers power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because it allows people to believe that they can achieve something great and to implement the policies necessary to achieve their goal. The Politics of Scepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening, rather than enabling ambiguously good events. Oakeshott was presumably dissatisfied with this book, which, like much of what he wrote, he never published. It was evidently written well before "On Human Conduct".


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: In the latter book Oakeshott employs the analogy of the adverb to describe the kind of restraint that law involves. Laws prescribe "adverbial conditions": they condition our actions, but they do not determine their substantive chosen ends. For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing "murderously". Or, to choose a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I must drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasts with the rules of enterprise associations, in which the actions required by the management are made compulsory for all.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: In the final work that Oakeshott published in his lifetime, "On History" (1983), he returned to the idea that history is a distinct mode of experience, but this time building on the theory of action developed in "On Human Conduct". Much of "On History" had emerged from Oakeshott's post-retirement graduate seminars at LSE, and had been written at the same time as "On Human Conduct", in the early 1970s.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: During the mid-1960s Oakeshott declared an admiration for Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the pioneers of hermeneutics. "On History" can be interpreted as an essentially neo-Kantian enterprise of working out the conditions of the possibility of historical knowledge, work that Dilthey had begun.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: The first three essays set out the distinction between the present of historical experience and the present of practical experience, as well as the concepts of historical situation, historical event, and what is meant by change in history. "On History" includes an essay on jurisprudence ("The Rule of Law"). It also includes a retelling of "The Tower of Babel" in a modern setting in which Oakeshott expresses disdain for human willingness to sacrifice individuality, culture, and quality of life for grand collective projects. He attributes this behaviour to fascination with novelty, persistent dissatisfaction, greed, and lack of self-reflection.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott's other works included a reader, already mentioned, on "The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe". It consisted of selected texts illustrating the main doctrines of liberalism, national socialism, fascism, communism, and Roman Catholicism (1939). He edited Thomas Hobbes's "Leviathan" (1946), with an introduction that has been recognised as a significant contribution to the literature by some later scholars. Several of Oakeshott's writings on Hobbes were collected and published in 1975 as "Hobbes on Civil Association".


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: With his Cambridge colleague Guy Thompson Griffith Oakeshott wrote "A Guide to the Classics, or How to Pick The Derby Winner" (1936), a guide to the principles of successful betting on horse-racing. This was his only published non-academic work.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Oakeshott was the author of well over 150 essays and reviews, most of which have now been republished.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: Just before he died Oakeshott approved two edited collections of his works, "The Voice of Liberal Learning" (1989), a collection of his essays on education, and a second, revised and expanded edition of "Rationalism in Politics" (1991). Posthumous collections of his writings include "Morality and Politics in Modern Europe" (1993), a lecture series he gave at Harvard in 1958; "Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life" (1993), essays mostly from his early and middle periods; and "The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism" (1996), an already-mentioned manuscript from the 1950s contemporary with much of "Rationalism in Politics" but written in a more considered tone.


title: Michael Oakeshott

text: The bulk of his papers are now in the Oakeshott Archive at the London School of Economics. Further volumes of posthumous writings are in preparation, as is a biography, and a series of monographs devoted to his work were published during the first decade of the 21st century, and continue to be produced.


title: Abu Azrael

text: Ayoub Falih Hasan Al-Raie (), born 1978, known by his nom de guerre Abu Azrael, also known as the Angel of Death, is an Iraqi Commander in the popular crowd of the Kataib al-Imam Ali, an Iraqi Shi'a militia group of the Popular Mobilization Forces that is fighting ISIS in Iraq. He has become a public icon of resisting ISIS in Iraq among Shia Iraqis with a large following on social media. His motto and catchphrase is "Ella Tahin", literally meaning "Until/into dust" interpreted to mean "Grind you to dust."


title: Abu Azrael

text: Abu Azrael was a former member in Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army which fought against the U.S./Coalition forces during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.


title: Abu Azrael

text: Abu Azrael is described in various sources as a Shia Muslim who is a 40-year-old former university lecturer and a one-time Taekwondo champion. According to an Iranian source, Reports from March 2015 claimed that Azrael is a father of five, and lives an "ordinary life" when not on the battlefield.


title: Abu Azrael

text: Following incidents where he was filmed desecrating the corpses of ISIS fighters, Azrael stated that he had been told by a senior imam in Najaf that he should pray for penance and "never do such a thing again".


title: Abu Azrael

text: Abu Azrael fought against ISIS, although he has also fought against other militant groups. He has attracted attention in the Middle East, but by the spring of 2015, he had also made front-page appearances on international news websites in England, France and the United States.


title: Abu Azrael

text: He has received a medal of honor from the Representative of the Supreme Religious Authority Sayyid Ahmad al-Safi.


title: Perry

text: Perry, also known as pear cider, is an alcoholic beverage made from fermented pears, traditionally the perry pear. It has been common for centuries in England, particularly in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire. It is also made in parts of South Wales and France, especially Normandy and Anjou, and in Commonwealth countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.


title: Perry

text: Perry pears are thought to be descended from wild hybrids, known as "wildings", between the cultivated pear "Pyrus communis" subsp. "communis" and the now-rare wild pear "Pyrus communis" subsp. "pyraster". The cultivated pear "P. communis" was brought to northern Europe by the Romans. In the fourth century CE Saint Jerome referred to perry as "piracium". Wild pear hybrids were, over time, selected locally for desirable qualities and by the 1800s, many regional varieties had been identified.


title: Perry

text: The majority of perry pear varieties in the UK originate from the counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire in the west of England; perry from these counties made from traditional recipes now forms a European Union Protected Geographical Indication. Of these perry pear varieties, most originate in parishes around May Hill on the Gloucestershire/Herefordshire border. The standard reference work on perry pears was published in 1963 by the Long Ashton Research Station; since then, many varieties have become critically endangered or lost. Over 100 varieties, known by over 200 local names, were in Gloucestershire alone. These local pears are particularly known for their picturesque names, such as the various "Huffcap" varieties ('Hendre Huffcap', 'Red Huffcap', 'Black Huffcap', all having an elliptical shape), those named for the effects of their product ('Merrylegs', 'Mumblehead'), pears commemorating an individual ('Stinking Bishop', named for the man who first grew it, or 'Judge Amphlett', named for Assizes court judge Richard Amphlett), or those named for the place they grew ('Hartpury Green', 'Bosbury Scarlet', 'Bartestree Squash'). The perry makers of Normandy grew their own distinctive varieties such as "Plant de Blanc", "Antricotin" and "Fausset"; the perry of Domfront, which has been recognised with AOC status since 2002 and PDO status since 2006, must be made with a minimum of 40% "Plant de Blanc".


title: Perry

text: Pear cultivars used for perry-making tend to be small in size, turbinate or pyriform in shape, and too astringent for culinary use. Specific perry pear cultivars are regularly used to make single-variety perries; this was formerly the usual practice in traditional perry making, meaning that in the past, each parish would have produced its own characteristic and distinctive perries due to the very restricted distribution of many varieties. Blended perries, made from the juices of several varieties, were traditionally disregarded as they tended to throw a haze, though in modern commercial production, this is overcome with filtration and use of a centrifuge.


title: Perry

text: Good perry pears should have higher concentrations of tannins, acids, and other phenolic compounds. Some of the pears considered to produce consistently excellent perry include the 'Barland', 'Brandy', 'Thorn,' and 'Yellow Huffcap' cultivars. Compared to cider apples, perry pears have fewer volatile components and consequently fewer aromatics in the finished product. Their tannin profile is very different from that of cider apples, with a predominance of astringent over bitter flavours. They do, however, contain a high concentration of deca-2,4-dienoate, a group of esters that affords them their prominent pear aroma. Another important attribute of perry pears that distinguishes them from cider apples is their relatively higher content ratio of sorbitol to other sugars, such as fructose. Because sorbitol is not readily fermented by yeast, it is not converted to ethanol, so perry tends to have more residual sugar than cider produced from the fermentation of apples. In addition to producing a sweeter beverage, sorbitol also contributes to increased body and a softer mouthfeel in the finished perry. Compared to apples, pear pressing is made more difficult by the additional presence of specialized cells known as sclereids, which have thick cell walls that provide extra support and strength to the pear tissue. Because of this inherent perry pear attribute, the addition of enzymes and pressing aids is a commonly used practice for improving perry production.


title: Perry

text: While cultivation of pears has been to some extent modernised, they remain a difficult crop to grow. Perry pear trees can live to a great age, and can be fully productive for 250 years. Pear trees, both domestic and perry varieties, grow incredibly slowly, taking up to, if not over, a decade before they bear enough fruit for harvest. They also grow to a considerable height and can have very large canopies; the largest recorded, a tree at Holme Lacy, which still partly survives, covered three-quarters of an acre and yielded a crop of 5–7 tons in 1790. Given the long maturing period of pear trees, they can be difficult to manage against diseases. Their size makes it difficult to apply pesticides, which makes preventing fire blight, a disease caused by the bacterium "Erwinia amylovora" that pears are even more susceptible to than cider apples, quite challenging. These difficulties, along with demand for perry pears having (until recently) taken a decline, have prompted a national collection of perry pear cultivars to be gathered, housed, and cared for at the Three Counties Agricultural Showground at Malvern in Worcestershire, to maintain genetic resources, which has now become the National Perry Pear Centre at Hartpury. Similar germplasm repositories can be found at the National Clonal Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon.


title: Perry

text: Also, key differences between cider and perry production exist in the harvesting and growing processes. Perry trees famously take more time to mature than cider trees. While cider trees may come to bear fruit in three to five years, traditionally managed perry trees typically take much longer, so much so that people say that one plants "pears for your heirs".