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Which employer did Denis Pétau work for in 07/28/1630? | July 28, 1630 | {
"text": [
"Lycée Louis-le-Grand"
]
} | L2_Q1187608_P108_3 | Denis Pétau works for Jesuit College of Reims from Jan, 1609 to Jan, 1613.
Denis Pétau works for collège Henri-IV de La Flèche from Jan, 1613 to Jan, 1618.
Denis Pétau works for University of Bourges from Jan, 1603 to Jan, 1605.
Denis Pétau works for Lycée Louis-le-Grand from Jan, 1618 to Jan, 1643. | Denis PétauDenis Pétau (August 21, 1583December 11, 1652), also known as Dionysius Petavius, was a French Jesuit theologian.Pétau was born at Orléans, where he had his initial education; he then attended the University of Paris, where he successfully defended his theses for the degree of Master of Arts, not in Latin, but in Greek. After this he followed the theological lectures at the Sorbonne, and, on the advice of Nicolas Ysambert, successfully applied for the chair of philosophy at Bourges. At Paris he formed a friendship with Isaac Casaubon, then librarian at the royal library, where he spent all his spare time studying the ancient Greek manuscripts. At Orléans he was ordained deacon and presented with a canonry. In 1603 he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Bourges, but resigned his place two years later, in order to enter the Society of Jesus.After spending two years at Bourges he returned to Paris, and began a correspondence with Fronton du Duc, the editor of John Chrysostom. In 1605 he became a Jesuit, taught rhetoric at Reims (1609), La Flèche (1613), and at the Collège de Clermont (1618). During this last period he began a correspondence with the Bishop of Orléans, Gabriel de Laubépine (Albaspinaeus), on the first year of the primitive Church. Beginning in 1622, he taught positive theology for twenty-two years, and during this time he left France on only two occasions: first in 1629, to teach ecclesiastical history at Madrid at the invitation of Philip IV; second in 1639 to become a cardinal at Rome where Pope Urban VIII wanted him. At sixty years of age he stopped teaching, but retained his office of librarian, in which he had succeeded Fronton du Duc (1623), and devoted the rest of his life to his great work, the "Dogmata theologica". He died in Paris.He was one of the most brilliant scholars in a learned age. Carrying on and improving the chronological labours of Joseph Justus Scaliger, he published in 1627 an "Opus de doctrina temporum", which has been often reprinted. An abridgment of this work, "Rationarium temporum", was translated into French and English, and has been brought down to the year 1849.The complete list of his works fills twenty-five columns in Sommervogel: he treats of chronology, history, philosophy, polemics, patristics, and the history of dogma. His first edition of the works of Synesius appeared in 1612, undertaken ten years earlier at the advice of Casaubon ("Synesii episcopi Cyrenensis opera", new ed., 1633); in 1613 and 1614 the discourses of Themistius and Julian (new ed., 1630); in 1616 the "Breviarium historicum Nicephori"; then, after some poetical and oratorical works, an edition of Epiphanius in two volumes (1622; new ed., 1632), which had been undertaken at the advice of Jacques Gretser, S.J., and was originally intended only as a revised translation of Janus Cornarius. In 1622 and 1623 appeared the "Mastigophores", three pamphlets, and the notes dealing with Saumaise's "Tertullian", a bitter polemical work.Among his previous writings, Pétau had inserted some masterly dissertations on chronology; in 1627 he brought out his "De doctrina temporum", and later the "Tabulae chronologicae" (1628, 1629, 1633, 1657). It surpassed Scaliger's "De Emendatione temporum" (Paris, 1583), and prepared the ground for the works of the Benedictines. A summary of it appeared in 1633 (1635, 1641, etc.) under the title of "Rationarium temporum", of which numerous reprints and translations into French, English, and Italian have been made.About the same time he wrote poetical works in Greek and in Latin and dissertations (often of a polemical nature) against Grotius, Saumaise, Arnauld, and others. His paraphrase of the "Psalms" in Greek verse was dedicated in 1637 to Pope Urban VIII. Finally there appeared in 1643 the first three volumes of the "Dogmata theologica" (dated 1644); the fourth and fifth volumes were published in 1650; the work was incomplete at Pétau's death, and despite several attempts was never continued. Numerous editions of the "Dogmata theologica" have been published, including that by the Calvinist Jean Le Clerc, published in Antwerp in 1700; the last edition was brought out in eight volumes by J. B. Fournials (Paris, 1866–68). In 1757 F. A. Zaccaria, S.J., republished the work in Venice with notes and dissertations; in 1857 Passaglia and Schrader undertook a similar work, but they produced only the first volume. His letters, "Epistolarum libri tres", were published after his death; though far from being complete, they give an idea of his close acquaintance with the most famous men in Europe of his time; they also furnish valuable information on the composition of his works and his method.Petau's claim to fame chiefly rests on his vast, but unfinished, "De theologicis dogmatibus", the first systematic attempt ever made to treat the development of Christian doctrine from the historical point of view.The reputation Pétau enjoyed during his lifetime was especially due to his work on chronology. He boasted that he counted eight thousand mistakes in the "Annales Ecclesiastici" of Baronius. Eulogies were pronounced on him by his contemporaries, including Pierre Daniel Huet, Henri Valois, Hugh Grotius, Isaac Voss, F. Clericus, and Henry Noris. His chronological work has long since been surpassed.In his patristic works he had at hand only imperfect editions of the Fathers of the Church. What he wanted had already been outlined by Melchior Cano, in his work "De locis theologicis". Pétau's work has been questioned; it may have been inspired, it is said, by a similar treatise of Oregius (Agostino Oreggi, Cardinal), as Zöckler maintains, or by the "Confessio catholica" of John Gerhard (d. 1627), as conjectured by Eckstein. But the "Confessio catholica" has a different aim, stated on the first page; there are long historical developments in the sixteen books "De Incarnatione Verbi" of Pétau. The relationship with Oregius was examined in detail by François Oudin in the "Mémoires de Trévoux" (July, 1718, pp. 109–33). He declares his opinions with full liberty, for example concerning the opinion of Augustine of Hippo on the problem of predestination, or the ideas on the Trinity of the ante-Nicene writers.The work furnished a copious supply of documents. Pétau exaggerates the faults of Scholasticism; but he defends it against the accusations of Erasmus. In the "Dogmata", after giving the history of each dogma, he adds the refutation of new errors.In his polemical writings his style was bitter; he was more gentle in discussions with Grotius. The memory of Pétau was celebrated the day after his death by Henri Valois, one of his pupils, and by Leo Allatius in a Greek poem composed at the request of Pope Urban VIII.A crater on the Moon is named Petavius in his honour.Dionysius Petavius, "Opus de Doctrina Temporum", 1627Dionisius Petavius, "The History of the World or an Account of Time", 1659Denis Petau. Antonii Kerkoetii Aremorici Animadversorum Liber ad Claudii Salmasii Notas in Tertullianum De pallio, ristampa anastatica dell'edizione 1622 a c. di A. CAPONE, Clioedu, Lecce 2010. | [
"collège Henri-IV de La Flèche",
"Jesuit College of Reims",
"University of Bourges"
] |
|
Which employer did Denis Pétau work for in 28-Jul-163028-July-1630? | July 28, 1630 | {
"text": [
"Lycée Louis-le-Grand"
]
} | L2_Q1187608_P108_3 | Denis Pétau works for Jesuit College of Reims from Jan, 1609 to Jan, 1613.
Denis Pétau works for collège Henri-IV de La Flèche from Jan, 1613 to Jan, 1618.
Denis Pétau works for University of Bourges from Jan, 1603 to Jan, 1605.
Denis Pétau works for Lycée Louis-le-Grand from Jan, 1618 to Jan, 1643. | Denis PétauDenis Pétau (August 21, 1583December 11, 1652), also known as Dionysius Petavius, was a French Jesuit theologian.Pétau was born at Orléans, where he had his initial education; he then attended the University of Paris, where he successfully defended his theses for the degree of Master of Arts, not in Latin, but in Greek. After this he followed the theological lectures at the Sorbonne, and, on the advice of Nicolas Ysambert, successfully applied for the chair of philosophy at Bourges. At Paris he formed a friendship with Isaac Casaubon, then librarian at the royal library, where he spent all his spare time studying the ancient Greek manuscripts. At Orléans he was ordained deacon and presented with a canonry. In 1603 he was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Bourges, but resigned his place two years later, in order to enter the Society of Jesus.After spending two years at Bourges he returned to Paris, and began a correspondence with Fronton du Duc, the editor of John Chrysostom. In 1605 he became a Jesuit, taught rhetoric at Reims (1609), La Flèche (1613), and at the Collège de Clermont (1618). During this last period he began a correspondence with the Bishop of Orléans, Gabriel de Laubépine (Albaspinaeus), on the first year of the primitive Church. Beginning in 1622, he taught positive theology for twenty-two years, and during this time he left France on only two occasions: first in 1629, to teach ecclesiastical history at Madrid at the invitation of Philip IV; second in 1639 to become a cardinal at Rome where Pope Urban VIII wanted him. At sixty years of age he stopped teaching, but retained his office of librarian, in which he had succeeded Fronton du Duc (1623), and devoted the rest of his life to his great work, the "Dogmata theologica". He died in Paris.He was one of the most brilliant scholars in a learned age. Carrying on and improving the chronological labours of Joseph Justus Scaliger, he published in 1627 an "Opus de doctrina temporum", which has been often reprinted. An abridgment of this work, "Rationarium temporum", was translated into French and English, and has been brought down to the year 1849.The complete list of his works fills twenty-five columns in Sommervogel: he treats of chronology, history, philosophy, polemics, patristics, and the history of dogma. His first edition of the works of Synesius appeared in 1612, undertaken ten years earlier at the advice of Casaubon ("Synesii episcopi Cyrenensis opera", new ed., 1633); in 1613 and 1614 the discourses of Themistius and Julian (new ed., 1630); in 1616 the "Breviarium historicum Nicephori"; then, after some poetical and oratorical works, an edition of Epiphanius in two volumes (1622; new ed., 1632), which had been undertaken at the advice of Jacques Gretser, S.J., and was originally intended only as a revised translation of Janus Cornarius. In 1622 and 1623 appeared the "Mastigophores", three pamphlets, and the notes dealing with Saumaise's "Tertullian", a bitter polemical work.Among his previous writings, Pétau had inserted some masterly dissertations on chronology; in 1627 he brought out his "De doctrina temporum", and later the "Tabulae chronologicae" (1628, 1629, 1633, 1657). It surpassed Scaliger's "De Emendatione temporum" (Paris, 1583), and prepared the ground for the works of the Benedictines. A summary of it appeared in 1633 (1635, 1641, etc.) under the title of "Rationarium temporum", of which numerous reprints and translations into French, English, and Italian have been made.About the same time he wrote poetical works in Greek and in Latin and dissertations (often of a polemical nature) against Grotius, Saumaise, Arnauld, and others. His paraphrase of the "Psalms" in Greek verse was dedicated in 1637 to Pope Urban VIII. Finally there appeared in 1643 the first three volumes of the "Dogmata theologica" (dated 1644); the fourth and fifth volumes were published in 1650; the work was incomplete at Pétau's death, and despite several attempts was never continued. Numerous editions of the "Dogmata theologica" have been published, including that by the Calvinist Jean Le Clerc, published in Antwerp in 1700; the last edition was brought out in eight volumes by J. B. Fournials (Paris, 1866–68). In 1757 F. A. Zaccaria, S.J., republished the work in Venice with notes and dissertations; in 1857 Passaglia and Schrader undertook a similar work, but they produced only the first volume. His letters, "Epistolarum libri tres", were published after his death; though far from being complete, they give an idea of his close acquaintance with the most famous men in Europe of his time; they also furnish valuable information on the composition of his works and his method.Petau's claim to fame chiefly rests on his vast, but unfinished, "De theologicis dogmatibus", the first systematic attempt ever made to treat the development of Christian doctrine from the historical point of view.The reputation Pétau enjoyed during his lifetime was especially due to his work on chronology. He boasted that he counted eight thousand mistakes in the "Annales Ecclesiastici" of Baronius. Eulogies were pronounced on him by his contemporaries, including Pierre Daniel Huet, Henri Valois, Hugh Grotius, Isaac Voss, F. Clericus, and Henry Noris. His chronological work has long since been surpassed.In his patristic works he had at hand only imperfect editions of the Fathers of the Church. What he wanted had already been outlined by Melchior Cano, in his work "De locis theologicis". Pétau's work has been questioned; it may have been inspired, it is said, by a similar treatise of Oregius (Agostino Oreggi, Cardinal), as Zöckler maintains, or by the "Confessio catholica" of John Gerhard (d. 1627), as conjectured by Eckstein. But the "Confessio catholica" has a different aim, stated on the first page; there are long historical developments in the sixteen books "De Incarnatione Verbi" of Pétau. The relationship with Oregius was examined in detail by François Oudin in the "Mémoires de Trévoux" (July, 1718, pp. 109–33). He declares his opinions with full liberty, for example concerning the opinion of Augustine of Hippo on the problem of predestination, or the ideas on the Trinity of the ante-Nicene writers.The work furnished a copious supply of documents. Pétau exaggerates the faults of Scholasticism; but he defends it against the accusations of Erasmus. In the "Dogmata", after giving the history of each dogma, he adds the refutation of new errors.In his polemical writings his style was bitter; he was more gentle in discussions with Grotius. The memory of Pétau was celebrated the day after his death by Henri Valois, one of his pupils, and by Leo Allatius in a Greek poem composed at the request of Pope Urban VIII.A crater on the Moon is named Petavius in his honour.Dionysius Petavius, "Opus de Doctrina Temporum", 1627Dionisius Petavius, "The History of the World or an Account of Time", 1659Denis Petau. Antonii Kerkoetii Aremorici Animadversorum Liber ad Claudii Salmasii Notas in Tertullianum De pallio, ristampa anastatica dell'edizione 1622 a c. di A. CAPONE, Clioedu, Lecce 2010. | [
"collège Henri-IV de La Flèche",
"Jesuit College of Reims",
"University of Bourges"
] |
|
Who was the head of Soviet Union in Mar, 1947? | March 13, 1947 | {
"text": [
"Joseph Stalin"
]
} | L2_Q15180_P6_3 | Vladimir Lenin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jul, 1923 to Jan, 1924.
Vyacheslav Molotov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Dec, 1930 to May, 1941.
Nikita Khrushchev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1958 to Oct, 1964.
Nikolai Tikhonov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1980 to Sep, 1985.
Valentin Pavlov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jan, 1991 to Aug, 1991.
Alexei Rykov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1924 to Dec, 1930.
Nikolai Bulganin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1955 to Mar, 1958.
Nikolai Ryzhkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1985 to Jan, 1991.
Joseph Stalin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from May, 1941 to Mar, 1953.
Alexei Kosygin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1964 to Oct, 1980.
Georgy Malenkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1953 to Feb, 1955.
Ivan Silayev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1991 to Dec, 1991. | Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state that spanned most of Europe and Asia during its existence from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a federal union of multiple national republics; in practice its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years. The country was a one-party state prior to 1990 governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with Moscow as its capital within its largest and most populous republic, the Russian SFSR. Other major urban centers were Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk (Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR) and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over , and spanning eleven time zones. The Soviet Union's five biomes were tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, and mountains. Its diverse population was officially known as the Soviet people.The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the monarchy of the Russian Empire. They established the Russian Soviet Republic, beginning a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and many anti-Bolshevik forces across the former Empire, among whom the largest faction was the White Guard, which engaged in violent anti-communist repression against the Bolsheviks and their worker and peasant supporters known as the White Terror. The Red Army expanded and helped local Bolsheviks take power, establishing soviets, repressing their political opponents and rebellious peasants through Red Terror. By 1922, the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. The New Economic Policy (NEP), which was introduced by Lenin, led to a partial return of a free market and private property; this resulted in a period of economic recovery.Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin suppressed all political opposition to his rule inside the Communist Party and inaugurated a command economy. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, which led to significant economic growth, but also led to a man-made famine in 1932–1933 and expanded the Gulag labour camp system originally established in 1918. Stalin also fomented political paranoia and conducted the Great Purge to remove his actual and perceived opponents from the Party through mass arrests of military leaders, Communist Party members, and ordinary citizens alike, who were then sent to correctional labor camps or sentenced to death.On 23 August 1939, after unsuccessful efforts to form an anti-fascist alliance with Western powers, the Soviets signed the non-aggression agreement with Nazi Germany. After the start of World War II, the formally neutral Soviets invaded and annexed territories of several Eastern European states, including eastern Poland and the Baltic states. In June 1941 the Germans invaded, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the cost of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin and won World War II in Europe on 9 May 1945. The territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged in 1947 as a result of a post-war Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, where the Eastern Bloc confronted the Western Bloc that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period known as de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw occurred under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took an early lead in the Space Race with the first ever satellite and the first human spaceflight and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus. In the 1970s, there was a brief "détente" of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed when the Soviet Union deployed troops in Afghanistan in 1979. The war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters.In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to further reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of "glasnost" and "perestroika". The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing economic stagnation. The Cold War ended during his tenure and in 1989, Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective Marxist-Leninist regimes. Strong nationalist and separatist movements broke out across the USSR. Gorbachev initiated a referendum—boycotted by the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova—which resulted in the majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the Union as a renewed federation. In August 1991, a coup d'état was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a high-profile role in facing down the coup. The main result was the banning of the Communist Party. The republics led by Russia and Ukraine declared independence. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned. All the republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation (formerly the Russian SFSR) assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and is recognized as its continued legal personality in world affairs.The USSR produced many significant social and technological achievements and innovations regarding military power. It boasted the world's second-largest economy and the largest standing military in the world. The USSR was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states. It was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the OSCE, the WFTU and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.Before its dissolution, the USSR had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II. Sometimes also called "Soviet Empire", it exercised its hegemony in Eastern Europe and worldwide with military and economic strength, proxy conflicts and influence in developing countries and funding of scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The word "soviet" is derived from the Russian word "sovet" (), meaning "council", "assembly", "advice", ultimately deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of "vět-iti" ("to inform"), related to Slavic "věst" ("news"), English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or" (which came to English through French), or the Dutch "weten" ("to know"; cf. "wetenschap" meaning "science"). The word "sovietnik" means "councillor".Some organizations in Russian history were called "council" (). In the Russian Empire, the State Council which functioned from 1810 to 1917 was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905.During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union which he initially named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia (). Stalin initially resisted the proposal but ultimately accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), albeit all the republics began as "socialist soviet" and did not change to the other order until 1936. In addition, in the national languages of several republics, the word "council" or "conciliar" in the respective language was only quite late changed to an adaptation of the Russian "soviet" and never in others, e.g. Ukraine."СССР" (in Latin alphabet: "SSSR") is the abbreviation of USSR in Russian. It is written in Cyrillic letters. The Soviets used the Cyrillic abbreviation so frequently that audiences worldwide became familiar with its meaning. Notably, both Cyrillic letters used have homoglyphic (but transliterally distinct) letters in Latin alphabets. Because of widespread familiarity with the Cyrillic abbreviation, Latin alphabet users in particular almost always use the Latin homoglyphs "C" and "P" (as opposed to the transliteral Latin letters "S" and "R") when rendering the USSR's native abbreviation.After "СССР", the most common short form names for the Soviet state in Russian were "Советский Союз" (transliteration: "Sovetskiy Soyuz") which literally means "Soviet Union", and also "Союз ССР" (transliteration: "Soyuz SSR") which, after compensating for grammatical differences, essentially translates to "Union of SSR's" in English.In the English language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. In other European languages, the locally translated short forms and abbreviations are usually used such as "Union soviétique" and "URSS" in French, or "Sowjetunion" and "UdSSR" in German. In the English-speaking world, the Soviet Union was also informally called Russia and its citizens Russians, although that was technically incorrect since Russia was only one of the republics. Such misapplications of the linguistic equivalents to the term "Russia" and its derivatives were frequent in other languages as well.The Soviet Union covered an area of over , and was the world's largest country, a status that is retained by its successor state, Russia. It covered a sixth of Earth's land surface, and its size was comparable to the continent of North America. Its western part in Europe accounted for a quarter of the country's area and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and, except some areas in Central Asia, was much less populous. It spanned over east to west across eleven time zones, and over north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.The Soviet Union, similarly to Russia, had the world's longest border, measuring over , or circumferences of Earth. Two-thirds of it was a coastline. The country bordered Afghanistan, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Turkey from 1945 to 1991. The Bering Strait separated the country from the United States, while the La Pérouse Strait separated it from Japan.The Soviet Union's highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismoil Somoni Peak) in Tajik SSR, at . It also included most of the world's largest lakes; the Caspian Sea (shared with Iran), and Lake Baikal in Russia, the world's largest and deepest freshwater lake.Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament—the State Duma—was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but Tsar Nicholas II resisted attempts to move from absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities.A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to the wartime decay of Russia's economy and morale, culminated in the February Revolution and the toppling of Nicholas II and the imperial government in March 1917. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I.At the same time, workers' councils, known in Russian as "Soviets", sprang up across the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. On 7 November 1917, the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, ending the rule of the Provisional Government and leaving all political power to the Soviets. This event would later be officially known in Soviet bibliographies as the Great October Socialist Revolution. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets ended involvement in the war and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention, the execution of the former tsar and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million people. In March 1921, during a related conflict with Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly established republics of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania.On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the first Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky, and Alexander Chervyakov, on 30 December 1922. The formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of the country. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931. After the economic policy of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War, as a prelude to fully developing socialism in the country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s, and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax.From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The stated purpose was to prevent the return of capitalist exploitation, and that the principles of democratic centralism would be the most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. The debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a "troika" consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of the Ukrainian SSR, Lev Kamenev of the Russian SFSR, and Joseph Stalin of the Transcaucasian SFSR.On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the United Kingdom. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union. According to Archie Brown the constitution was never an accurate guide to political reality in the USSR. For example the fact that the Party played the leading role in making and enforcing policy was not mentioned in it until 1977. The USSR was a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities. However, the term "Soviet Russia"strictly applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republicwas often applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers.On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmanoeuvring his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the country and, by the end of the 1920s, established a totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin, forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country.Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor. Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the country developed a robust industrial economy in the years preceding World War II.Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two countries. In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new constitution that was praised by supporters around the world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many "Old Bolsheviks" who had participated in the October Revolution with Lenin. According to declassified Soviet archives, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot. Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a day.In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. The two countries concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement in August 1939. The former made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland, while the Soviets remained formally neutral. In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 starting what was known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Harry Hopkins, a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the USSR's decisive role in the war.In the same year, the USSR, in fulfilment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people. Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. During the war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four Allied powers, and later became the Four Policemen that formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council. It emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official relations with practically every country by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions.During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It took effective control over most of the countries of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania), turning them into satellite states. The USSR bound its satellite states in a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, and an economic organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon, a counterpart to the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991. The USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favor the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Communist Party of China, and its influence grew elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly in proxy wars.Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials initially opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy Malenkov. This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as the German invasion of 1941. For this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956.In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with the West, and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism, led to the Sino–Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist–Leninist movement, with the governments in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China.During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and technological exploits in the Space Race, rivaling the United States: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966; and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.Khrushchev initiated "The Thaw", a complex shift in political, cultural and economic life in the country. This included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing a dramatic rise in living standards while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. An agreement was made with the United States to remove nuclear missiles from both Cuba and Turkey, concluding the crisis. This event caused Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige, resulting in his removal from power in 1964.Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.In 1968, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt the Prague Spring reforms. In the aftermath, Brezhnev justified the invasion and previous military interventions as well as any potential military interventions in the future by introducing the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in a Warsaw Pact state as a threat to all Warsaw Pact states, therefore justifying military intervention.Brezhnev presided throughout "détente" with the West that resulted in treaties on armament control (SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of "standstill", with an ageing and ossified top political leadership. This period is also known as the Era of Stagnation, a period of adverse economic, political, and social effects in the country, which began during the rule of Brezhnev and continued under his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.In late 1979, the Soviet Union's military intervened in the ongoing civil war in neighboring Afghanistan, effectively ending a détente with the West.Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in "Beyond Oil" that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called "perestroika". His policy of "glasnost" freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-controlled regions came down.At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the "War of Laws". In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990.A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991.The remaining 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union. However, by December all except Russia and Kazakhstan had formally declared independence. During this time, Yeltsin took over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Moscow Kremlin. The final blow was struck on 1 December when Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine's secession ended any realistic chance of the country staying together even on a limited scale.On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place.The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body, voted both itself and the country out of existence. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state, and the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Army initially remained under overall CIS command but was soon absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states. The few remaining Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function by the end of 1991.Following the dissolution, Russia was internationally recognized as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed Soviet overseas properties as its own. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, Russia also agreed to receive all nuclear weapons remaining in the territory of other former Soviet republics. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations. Ukraine has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the USSR and claimed such status for Ukraine as well, which was codified in Articles 7 and 8 of its 1991 law On Legal Succession of Ukraine. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has continued to pursue claims against Russia in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property that was owned by the USSR.The dissolution was followed by a severe drop in economic and social conditions in post-Soviet states, including a rapid increase in poverty, crime, corruption, unemployment, homelessness, rates of disease, infant mortality and domestic violence, as well as demographic losses and income inequality and the rise of an oligarchical class, along with decreases in calorie intake, life expectancy, adult literacy, and income. Between 1988–1989 and 1993–1995, the Gini ratio increased by an average of 9 points for all former socialist countries. The economic shocks that accompanied wholesale privatization were associated with sharp increases in mortality. Data shows Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia saw a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between 1991 and 1994. In the following decades, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc.In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: "The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance." Before the dissolution, the country had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The analysis of the succession of states for the 15 post-Soviet states is complex. The Russian Federation is seen as the legal "continuator" state and is for most purposes the heir to the Soviet Union. It retained ownership of all former Soviet embassy properties, as well as the old Soviet UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council.Of the two other co-founding states of the USSR at the time of the dissolution, Ukraine was the only one that had passed laws, similar to Russia, that it is a state-successor of both the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR. Soviet treaties laid groundwork for Ukraine's future foreign agreements as well as they led to Ukraine agreeing to undertake 16.37% of debts of the Soviet Union for which it was going to receive its share of USSR's foreign property. Although it had a tough position at the time, due to Russia's position as a "single continuation of the USSR" that became widely accepted in the West as well as a constant pressure from the Western countries, allowed Russia to dispose state property of USSR abroad and conceal information about it. Due to that Ukraine never ratified "zero option" agreement that Russian Federation had signed with other former Soviet republics, as it denied disclosing of information about Soviet Gold Reserves and its Diamond Fund. The dispute over former Soviet property and assets between the two former republics is still ongoing:Similar situation occurred with restitution of cultural property. Although on 14 February 1992 Russia and other former Soviet republics signed agreement "On the return of cultural and historic property to the origin states" in Minsk, it was halted by Russian State Duma that had eventually passed "Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation" which made restitution currently impossible.There are additionally four states that claim independence from the other internationally recognised post-Soviet states but possess limited international recognition: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria. The Chechen separatist movement of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria lacks any international recognition.During his rule, Stalin always made the final policy decisions. Otherwise, Soviet foreign policy was set by the commission on the Foreign Policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or by the party's highest body the Politburo. Operations were handled by the separate Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was known as the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (or Narkomindel), until 1946. The most influential spokesmen were Georgy Chicherin (1872–1936), Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), Andrey Vyshinsky (1883–1954) and Andrei Gromyko (1909–1989). Intellectuals were based in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.The Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Soviet Union intensely debated foreign policy issues and change directions several times. Even after Stalin assumed dictatorial control in the late 1920s, there were debates, and he frequently changed positions.During the country's early period, it was assumed that Communist revolutions would break out soon in every major industrial country, and it was the Soviet responsibility to assist them. The Comintern was the weapon of choice. A few revolutions did break out, but they were quickly suppressed (the longest lasting one was in Hungary)—the Hungarian Soviet Republic—lasted only from 21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919. The Russian Bolsheviks were in no position to give any help.By 1921, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin realized that capitalism had stabilized itself in Europe and there would not be any widespread revolutions anytime soon. It became the duty of the Russian Bolsheviks to protect what they had in Russia, and avoid military confrontations that might destroy their bridgehead. Russia was now a pariah state, along with Germany. The two came to terms in 1922 with the Treaty of Rapallo that settled long-standing grievances. At the same time, the two countries secretly set up training programs for the illegal German army and air force operations at hidden camps in the USSR.Moscow eventually stopped threatening other states, and instead worked to open peaceful relationships in terms of trade, and diplomatic recognition. The United Kingdom dismissed the warnings of Winston Churchill and a few others about a continuing Marxist-Leninist threat, and opened trade relations and "de facto" diplomatic recognition in 1922. There was hope for a settlement of the pre-war Tsarist debts, but it was repeatedly postponed. Formal recognition came when the new Labour Party came to power in 1924. All the other countries followed suit in opening trade relations. Henry Ford opened large-scale business relations with the Soviets in the late 1920s, hoping that it would lead to long-term peace. Finally, in 1933, the United States officially recognized the USSR, a decision backed by the public opinion and especially by US business interests that expected an opening of a new profitable market.In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin ordered Marxist-Leninist parties across the world to strongly oppose non-Marxist political parties, labor unions or other organizations on the left. Stalin reversed himself in 1934 with the Popular Front program that called on all Marxist parties to join together with all anti-Fascist political, labor, and organizational forces that were opposed to fascism, especially of the Nazi variety.In 1939, half a year after the Munich Agreement, the USSR attempted to form an anti-Nazi alliance with France and Britain. Adolf Hitler proposed a better deal, which would give the USSR control over much of Eastern Europe through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In September, Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR also invaded later that month, resulting in the partition of Poland. In response, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II.There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislature represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the final policymaker in the country.At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. In turn, the Central Committee voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966), Secretariat and the General Secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the "de facto" highest office in the Soviet Union. Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941). They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state mainly through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin (1941–1953) and Khrushchev (1958–1964) were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership, but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.However, in practice the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party. Nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history, at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, its powers and functions were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers relating to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the government budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium (successor of the Central Executive Committee) to wield its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the Procurator General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.The state security police (the KGB and ) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Great Purge, but was brought under strict party control after Stalin's death. Under Yuri Andropov, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.The constitution, which was promulgated in 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers that represented executive and legislative branches of the government. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal, itself due to a decision by both the Politburo and the Central Committee. All leaders of the Communist Party before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party.Between 1988 and 1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, and much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government, now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.Tensions grew between the Union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and communist hardliners. On 19–21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt. The coup failed, and the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power "in the period of transition". Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Court) and applied the law as established by the constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defence attorney collaborate to establish the truth.Constitutionally, the USSR was a federation of constituent Union Republics, which were either unitary states, such as Ukraine or Byelorussia (SSRs), or federations, such as Russia or Transcaucasia (SFSRs), all four being the founding republics who signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR in December 1922. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were formed from parts of Russia's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan SSRs. In 1929, Tajikistan was split off from the Uzbekistan SSR. With the constitution of 1936, the Transcaucasian SFSR was dissolved, resulting in its constituent republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan being elevated to Union Republics, while Kazakhstan and Kirghizia were split off from Russian SFSR, resulting in the same status. In August 1940, Moldavia was formed from parts of Ukraine and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (SSRs) were also admitted into the union which was not recognized by most of the international community and was considered an illegal occupation. Karelia was split off from Russia as a Union Republic in March 1940 and was reabsorbed in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).While nominally a union of equals, in practice the Soviet Union was dominated by Russians. The domination was so absolute that for most of its existence, the country was commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as "Russia". While the RSFSR was technically only one republic within the larger union, it was by far the largest (both in terms of population and area), most powerful, most developed, and the industrial center of the Soviet Union. Historian Matthew White wrote that it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were usually called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show".Under the Military Law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Land Forces, the Air Force, the Navy, Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the Internal Troops. The OGPU later became independent and in 1934 joined the NKVD, and so its internal troops were under the joint leadership of the defense and internal commissariats. After World War II, Strategic Missile Forces (1959), Air Defense Forces (1948) and National Civil Defense Forces (1970) were formed, which ranked first, third, and sixth in the official Soviet system of importance (ground forces were second, Air Force Fourth, and Navy Fifth).The army had the greatest political influence. In 1989, there served two million soldiers divided between 150 motorized and 52 armored divisions. Until the early 1960s, the Soviet navy was a rather small military branch, but after the Caribbean crisis, under the leadership of Sergei Gorshkov, it expanded significantly. It became known for battlecruisers and submarines. In 1989 there served 500 000 men. The Soviet Air Force focused on a fleet of strategic bombers and during war situation was to eradicate enemy infrastructure and nuclear capacity. The air force also had a number of fighters and tactical bombers to support the army in the war. Strategic missile forces had more than 1,400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed between 28 bases and 300 command centers.In the post-war period, the Soviet Army was directly involved in several military operations abroad. These included the suppression of the uprising in East Germany (1953), Hungarian revolution (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). The Soviet Union also participated in the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied.At the end of the 1950s, with the help of engineers and technologies captured and imported from defeated Nazi Germany, the Soviets constructed the first satellite – Sputnik 1 and thus overtook the United States in terms of utilizing space. This was followed by other successful satellites, where test dogs flight was sent. On April 12, 1961, the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was sent to the space. He once flew around the Earth and successfully landed in the Kazakh steppe. At that time, the first plans for space shuttles and orbital stations were drawn up in Soviet design offices, but in the end personal disputes between designers and management prevented this.As for Lunar space program; USSR only had a program on automated spacecraft launches; with no manned spacecraft used; passing on the "Moon Race" part of Space Race.In the 1970s, specific proposals for the design of the space shuttle began to emerge, but shortcomings, especially in the electronics industry (rapid overheating of electronics), postponed the program until the end of the 1980s. The first shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988, but without a human crew. Another shuttle, "Ptichka", eventually ended up under construction, as the shuttle project was canceled in 1991. For their launch into space, there is today an unused superpower rocket, Energia, which is the most powerful in the world.In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union managed to build the "Mir" orbital station. It was built on the construction of "Salyut" stations and its only role was civilian-grade research tasks. The Soviet Union adopted a command economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of War communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate money circulation, private enterprises and free trade. After the severe economic collapse, Lenin replaced war communism by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, legalizing free trade and private ownership of small businesses. The economy quickly recovered as a result.After a long debate among the members of the Politburo about the course of economic development, by 1928–1929, upon gaining control of the country, Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which significantly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. The primary motivation for industrialization was preparation for war, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalist world. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. The war caused extensive devastation of the Soviet economy and infrastructure, which required massive reconstruction.By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of Comecon, only a tiny share of domestic products was traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. However, the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied for by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the USSR became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.From the 1930s until its dissolution in late 1991, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. However, in practice, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to "ad hoc" intervention by superiors. All critical economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were usually denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but widespread. The final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice they were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links (e.g. between producer factories) were widespread.A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and health care. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defence were prioritized over consumer goods. Consumer goods, particularly outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and limited variety. Under the command economy, consumers had almost no influence on production, and the changing demands of a population with growing incomes could not be satisfied by supplies at rigidly fixed prices. A massive unplanned second economy grew up at low levels alongside the planned one, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. The legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth difficult to estimate precisely, by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid-1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, it had comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West. However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock (the rate of capital increase was only surpassed by Japan).Overall, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1989 was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries). According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, growth could have been faster. By their calculation, per capita income in 1989 should have been twice higher than it was, considering the amount of investment, education and population. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital. Steven Rosenfielde states that the standard of living declined due to Stalin's despotism. While there was a brief improvement after his death, it lapsed into stagnation.In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of "perestroika". His policies relaxed state control over enterprises but did not replace it by market incentives, resulting in a sharp decline in output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and the property was still largely state-owned until after the country's dissolution. For most of the period after World War II until its collapse, Soviet GDP (PPP) was the second-largest in the world, and third during the second half of the 1980s, although on a per-capita basis, it was behind that of First World countries. Compared to countries with similar per-capita GDP in 1928, the Soviet Union experienced significant growth.In 1990, the country had a Human Development Index of 0.920, placing it in the "high" category of human development. It was the third-highest in the Eastern Bloc, behind Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the 25th in the world of 130 countries.The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s, both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6%. David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40% of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse. The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2–2.5% during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World.In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of for crude oil and another for natural gas. Petroleum and petroleum-based products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported. In the 1970s and 1980s, the USSR heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency. At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second-largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military. Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was upon its founding. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. In the early 1960s, the Soviets awarded 40% of chemistry PhDs to women, compared to only 5% in the United States. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World.Under the Reagan administration, Project Socrates determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different from what the US was using. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the USSR was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. This was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.Transport was a vital component of the country's economy. The economic centralization of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise. The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air. However, due to inadequate maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward compared to the First World.Soviet rail transport was the largest and most intensively used in the world; it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burdens from the railways and to improve the Soviet government budget. The street network and automotive industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common outside major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early-to-mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones. Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.The Soviet merchant navy was one of the largest in the world.Excess deaths throughout World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."The birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mainly due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The mortality rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanistion and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as mostly real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed, and researchers could delve into the real causes.Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in the 1930s), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms. However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a pronatalist era that lasted for decades.By 1917, Russia became the first great power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World War I and II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a 4:3 ratio. This contributed to the larger role women played in Russian society compared to other great powers at the time.Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar for Education of Soviet Russia. In the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. All left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand in the Soviet school system. Literate people were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. Throughout the 1930s, social mobility rose sharply, which has been attributed to reforms in education. In the aftermath of World War II, the country's educational system expanded dramatically, which had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in giving rise to the New Man. Citizens directly entering the workforce had the constitutional right to a job and to free vocational training.The education system was highly centralized and universally accessible to all citizens, with affirmative action for applicants from nations associated with cultural backwardness. However, as part of the general antisemitic policy, an unofficial Jewish quota was applied in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary. According to statistics from 1986, the number of higher education students per the population of 10,000 was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.The Soviet Union was an ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population of the country was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority of the population were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%).All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the father. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of Georgia, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who were all East Slavic and Orthodox, shared close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.Members of various ethnicities participated in legislative bodies. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality, ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the Soviet leadership, such as Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Podgorny or Andrei Gromyko. During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian "diaspora" in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million.In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet principle of health care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge, a revolutionary concept at the time. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. Before Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary, the Soviet healthcare system was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed, however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, during which the health care system was heavily criticized for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision. Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such successes as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the system's areas for improvement and felt that billions of Soviet rubles were squandered. After the revolution, life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic in itself was seen by some that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s when statistics indicated that the life expectancy briefly surpassed that of the United States. Life expectancy started to decline in the 1970s, possibly because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the matter. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was the highest while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.Soviet dental technology and dental health were considered notoriously bad. In 1991, the average 35-year-old had 12 to 14 cavities, fillings or missing teeth. Toothpaste was often not available, and toothbrushes did not conform to standards of modern dentistry.Under Lenin, the government gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was highly successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, it would attain "official language" status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore, their speakers were forced to have a second language. There are examples where the government retreated from this policy, most notably under Stalin where education was discontinued in languages that were not widespread. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During World War II, some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian "de facto" functioned as an official language, as the "language of interethnic communication" (), but only assumed the "de jure" status as the official national language in 1990.Christianity and Islam had the highest number of adherents among the religious citizens. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the largest Christian denomination. About 90% of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shias being concentrated in the Azerbaijan SSR. Smaller groups included Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant denominations (especially Baptists and Lutherans).Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the church of the monarchy and took part in carrying out official state functions. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a narrow interpretation of this right, and in fact utilized a range of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.The 1918 Council of People's Commissars decree establishing the Russian SFSR as a secular state also decreed that "the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general instruction are taught, is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may be taught religion privately." Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929 included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study. Both Christian and non-Christian establishments were shut down by the thousands in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, as many as 90% of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed.Under the doctrine of state atheism, a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism" was conducted. The government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organized religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the propaganda campaign. Accordingly, although personal expressions of religious faith were not explicitly banned, a strong sense of social stigma was imposed on them by the formal structures and mass media, and it was generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. While persecution accelerated following Stalin's rise to power, a revival of Orthodoxy was fostered by the government during World War II and the Soviet authorities sought to control the Russian Orthodox Church rather than liquidate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence before World War I.Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, and with the looming threat of war, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during World War II. Amid other accommodations to religious faith after the German invasion, churches were reopened. Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius of Moscow was held in 1943. Stalin had the support of the majority of the religious people in the USSR even through the late 1980s. The general tendency of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all faiths.Under Nikita Khrushchev, the state leadership clashed with the churches in 1958–1964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. During this period, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1959 to 1965, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade.Religious institutions remained monitored by the Soviet government, but churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were all given more leeway in the Brezhnev era. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexy I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as "active religious believers."The legacy of the USSR remains a controversial topic. The socio-economic nature of communist states such as the USSR, especially under Stalin, has also been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.The USSR implemented a broad range of policies over a long period of time, with a large amount of conflicting policies being implemented by different leaders. Some have a positive view of it whilst others are critical towards the country, calling it a repressive oligarchy. The opinions on the USSR are complex and have changed over time, with different generations having different views on the matter as well as on Soviet policies corresponding to separate time periods during its history. Leftists have largely varying views on the USSR. Whilst some leftists such as anarchists and other libertarian socialists, agree it did not give the workers control over the means of production and was a centralized oligarchy, others have more positive opinions as to the Bolshevik policies and Vladimir Lenin. Many anti-Stalinist leftists such as anarchists are extremely critical of Soviet authoritarianism and repression. Much of the criticism it receives is centered around massacres in the Soviet Union, the centralized hierarchy present in the USSR and mass political repression as well as violence towards government critics and political dissidents such as other leftists. Critics also point towards its failure to implement any substantial worker cooperatives or implementing worker liberation as well as corruption and the Soviet authoritarian nature.Many Russians and other former Soviet citizens have nostalgia for the USSR, pointing towards most infrastructure being built during Soviet times, increased job security, increased literacy rate, increased caloric intake and supposed ethnic pluralism enacted in the Soviet Union as well as political stability. The Russian Revolution is also seen in a positive light as well as the leadership of Lenin, Nikita Khrushchev and the later USSR, although many view Joseph Stalin's rule as positive for the country. In Armenia, 12% of respondents said the USSR collapse did good, while 66% said it did harm. In Kyrgyzstan, 16% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did good, while 61% said it did harm. In a 2018 Rating Sociological Group poll, 47% of Ukrainian respondents had a positive opinion of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982. Much of the admiration of the USSR comes from the failings of the modern post-Soviet governments such as the control by oligarchs, corruption and outdated Soviet-era infrastructure as well as the rise and dominance of organised crime after the collapse of the USSR all directly leading into nostalgia for it.The 1941–45 period of World War II is still known in Russia as the "Great Patriotic War". The war became a topic of great importance in cinema, literature, history lessons at school, the mass media, and the arts. As a result of the massive losses suffered by the military and civilians during the conflict, Victory Day celebrated on 9 May is still one of the most important and emotional dates in Russia.In some post Soviet republics, there is a more negative view of the USSR, although there is no unanimity on the matter. In large part due to the Holodomor, ethnic Ukrainians have a negative view of it. Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Ukraine's southern and eastern regions have a more positive view of the USSR. In some countries with internal conflict, there is also nostalgia for the USSR, especially for refugees of the post-Soviet conflicts who have been forced to flee their homes and have been displaced. This nostalgia is less an admiration for the country or its policies than it is a longing to return to their homes and not to live in poverty. The many Russian enclaves in the former USSR republics such as Transnistria have in a general a positive remembrance of it.The left's view of the USSR is complex. While some leftists regard the USSR as an example of state capitalism or that it was an oligarchical state, other leftists admire Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution.Council communists generally view the USSR as failing to create class consciousness, turning into a corrupt state in which the elite controlled society. Anarchists are critical of the country, labeling the Soviet system as "red fascism". Soviets actively destroyed anarchist organizations and anarchist communities, labeling anarchists as "enemies of the people". Factors contributing to the animosity towards the USSR included: the Soviet invasion of the anarchist Free Territory, the suppression of the anarchist Kronstadt rebellion and the response to the Norilsk uprising, in which prisoners created a radical system of government based on cooperatives and direct democracy in the Gulag. Anarchist organizations and unions were also banned during the Spanish Civil War under the Republican government by orders from the Soviet government. Due to this, anarchists generally hold a large animosity towards the USSR.The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's existence. During the first decade following the revolution, there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, such as Nikolay Gumilyov who was shot for alleged conspiring against the Bolshevik regime, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. As a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, films received encouragement from the state, and much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.During Stalin's rule, the Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.Following the Khrushchev Thaw, censorship was diminished. During this time, a distinctive period of Soviet culture developed, characterized by conformist public life and an intense focus on personal life. Greater experimentation in art forms was again permissible, resulting in the production of more sophisticated and subtly critical work. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. Underground dissident literature, known as "samizdat", developed during this late period. In architecture, the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch. In music, in response to the increasing popularity of forms of popular music like jazz in the West, many jazz orchestras were permitted throughout the USSR, notably the Melodiya Ensemble, named after the principle record label in the USSR.In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of "perestroika" and "glasnost" significantly expanded freedom of expression throughout the country in the media and the press.Founded on 20 July 1924 in Moscow, "Sovetsky Sport" was the first sports newspaper of the Soviet Union.The Soviet Olympic Committee formed on 21 April 1951, and the IOC recognized the new body in its 45th session. In the same year, when the Soviet representative Konstantin Andrianov became an IOC member, the USSR officially joined the Olympic Movement. The 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki thus became first Olympic Games for Soviet athletes. The Soviet Union was the biggest rival to the United States at the Summer Olympics, winning six of its nine appearances at the games and also topping the medal tally at the Winter Olympics six times. The Soviet Union's Olympics success has been attributed to its large investment in sports to demonstrate its superpower image and political influence on a global stage.The Soviet Union national ice hockey team won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament between 1954 and 1991 and never failed to medal in any International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) tournament in which they competed.The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession – in reality, the state paid many of these competitors to train on a full-time basis. Nevertheless, the IOC held to the traditional rules regarding amateurism.A 1989 report by a committee of the Australian Senate claimed that "there is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner...who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might well have been called the Chemists' Games".A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those from sixteen gold medalists, would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings had the tests been official. The results of Donike's unofficial tests later convinced the IOC to add his new technique to their testing protocols. The first documented case of "blood doping" occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics when a runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5000 m and 10,000 m.Documentation obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dated before the decision to boycott the 1984 Games, the document detailed the existing steroids operations of the program, along with suggestions for further enhancements. Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture prepared the communication, directed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field. Portugalov later became one of the leading figures involved in the implementation of Russian doping before the 2016 Summer Olympics.Official Soviet environmental policy has always attached great importance to actions in which human beings actively improve nature. Lenin's quote "Communism is Soviet power and electrification of the country!" in many respects summarizes the focus on modernization and industrial development. During the first five-year plan in 1928, Stalin proceeded to industrialize the country at all costs. Values such as environmental and nature protection have been completely ignored in the struggle to create a modern industrial society. After Stalin's death, they focused more on environmental issues, but the basic perception of the value of environmental protection remained the same.The Soviet media has always focused on the vast expanse of land and the virtually indestructible natural resources. This made it feel that contamination and uncontrolled exploitation of nature were not a problem. The Soviet state also firmly believed that scientific and technological progress would solve all the problems. Official ideology said that under socialism environmental problems could easily be overcome, unlike capitalist countries, where they seemingly could not be solved. The Soviet authorities had an almost unwavering belief that man could transcend nature. However, when the authorities had to admit that there were environmental problems in the USSR in the 1980s, they explained the problems in such a way that socialism had not yet been fully developed; pollution in a socialist society was only a temporary anomaly that would have been resolved if socialism had developed.The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. Unparalleled in the world, it resulted in a large number of radioactive isotopes being released into the atmosphere. Radioactive doses have scattered relatively far. 4,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were reported after the incident, but this led to a relatively low number of deaths (WHO data, 2005). However, the long-term effects of the accident are unknown. Another major accident is the Kyshtym disaster.After the fall of the USSR, it was discovered that the environmental problems were greater than what the Soviet authorities admitted. The Kola Peninsula was one of the places with clear problems. Around the industrial cities of Monchegorsk and Norilsk, where nickel, for example, is mined, all forests have been destroyed by contamination, while the northern and other parts of Russia have been affected by emissions. During the 1990s, people in the West were also interested in the radioactive hazards of nuclear facilities, decommissioned nuclear submarines, and the processing of nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. It was also known in the early 1990s that the USSR had transported radioactive material to the Barents Sea and Kara Sea, which was later confirmed by the Russian parliament. The crash of the K-141 Kursk submarine in 2000 in the west further raised concerns. In the past, there were accidents involving submarines K-19, K-8, and K-129. | [
"Georgy Malenkov",
"Alexei Kosygin",
"Nikolai Ryzhkov",
"Nikita Khrushchev",
"Alexei Rykov",
"Ivan Silayev",
"Vladimir Lenin",
"Nikolai Bulganin",
"Nikolai Tikhonov",
"Vyacheslav Molotov",
"Valentin Pavlov"
] |
|
Who was the head of Soviet Union in 1947-03-13? | March 13, 1947 | {
"text": [
"Joseph Stalin"
]
} | L2_Q15180_P6_3 | Vladimir Lenin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jul, 1923 to Jan, 1924.
Vyacheslav Molotov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Dec, 1930 to May, 1941.
Nikita Khrushchev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1958 to Oct, 1964.
Nikolai Tikhonov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1980 to Sep, 1985.
Valentin Pavlov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jan, 1991 to Aug, 1991.
Alexei Rykov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1924 to Dec, 1930.
Nikolai Bulganin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1955 to Mar, 1958.
Nikolai Ryzhkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1985 to Jan, 1991.
Joseph Stalin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from May, 1941 to Mar, 1953.
Alexei Kosygin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1964 to Oct, 1980.
Georgy Malenkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1953 to Feb, 1955.
Ivan Silayev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1991 to Dec, 1991. | Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state that spanned most of Europe and Asia during its existence from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a federal union of multiple national republics; in practice its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years. The country was a one-party state prior to 1990 governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with Moscow as its capital within its largest and most populous republic, the Russian SFSR. Other major urban centers were Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk (Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR) and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over , and spanning eleven time zones. The Soviet Union's five biomes were tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, and mountains. Its diverse population was officially known as the Soviet people.The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the monarchy of the Russian Empire. They established the Russian Soviet Republic, beginning a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and many anti-Bolshevik forces across the former Empire, among whom the largest faction was the White Guard, which engaged in violent anti-communist repression against the Bolsheviks and their worker and peasant supporters known as the White Terror. The Red Army expanded and helped local Bolsheviks take power, establishing soviets, repressing their political opponents and rebellious peasants through Red Terror. By 1922, the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. The New Economic Policy (NEP), which was introduced by Lenin, led to a partial return of a free market and private property; this resulted in a period of economic recovery.Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin suppressed all political opposition to his rule inside the Communist Party and inaugurated a command economy. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, which led to significant economic growth, but also led to a man-made famine in 1932–1933 and expanded the Gulag labour camp system originally established in 1918. Stalin also fomented political paranoia and conducted the Great Purge to remove his actual and perceived opponents from the Party through mass arrests of military leaders, Communist Party members, and ordinary citizens alike, who were then sent to correctional labor camps or sentenced to death.On 23 August 1939, after unsuccessful efforts to form an anti-fascist alliance with Western powers, the Soviets signed the non-aggression agreement with Nazi Germany. After the start of World War II, the formally neutral Soviets invaded and annexed territories of several Eastern European states, including eastern Poland and the Baltic states. In June 1941 the Germans invaded, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the cost of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin and won World War II in Europe on 9 May 1945. The territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged in 1947 as a result of a post-war Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, where the Eastern Bloc confronted the Western Bloc that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period known as de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw occurred under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took an early lead in the Space Race with the first ever satellite and the first human spaceflight and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus. In the 1970s, there was a brief "détente" of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed when the Soviet Union deployed troops in Afghanistan in 1979. The war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters.In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to further reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of "glasnost" and "perestroika". The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing economic stagnation. The Cold War ended during his tenure and in 1989, Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective Marxist-Leninist regimes. Strong nationalist and separatist movements broke out across the USSR. Gorbachev initiated a referendum—boycotted by the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova—which resulted in the majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the Union as a renewed federation. In August 1991, a coup d'état was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a high-profile role in facing down the coup. The main result was the banning of the Communist Party. The republics led by Russia and Ukraine declared independence. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned. All the republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation (formerly the Russian SFSR) assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and is recognized as its continued legal personality in world affairs.The USSR produced many significant social and technological achievements and innovations regarding military power. It boasted the world's second-largest economy and the largest standing military in the world. The USSR was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states. It was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the OSCE, the WFTU and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.Before its dissolution, the USSR had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II. Sometimes also called "Soviet Empire", it exercised its hegemony in Eastern Europe and worldwide with military and economic strength, proxy conflicts and influence in developing countries and funding of scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The word "soviet" is derived from the Russian word "sovet" (), meaning "council", "assembly", "advice", ultimately deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of "vět-iti" ("to inform"), related to Slavic "věst" ("news"), English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or" (which came to English through French), or the Dutch "weten" ("to know"; cf. "wetenschap" meaning "science"). The word "sovietnik" means "councillor".Some organizations in Russian history were called "council" (). In the Russian Empire, the State Council which functioned from 1810 to 1917 was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905.During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union which he initially named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia (). Stalin initially resisted the proposal but ultimately accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), albeit all the republics began as "socialist soviet" and did not change to the other order until 1936. In addition, in the national languages of several republics, the word "council" or "conciliar" in the respective language was only quite late changed to an adaptation of the Russian "soviet" and never in others, e.g. Ukraine."СССР" (in Latin alphabet: "SSSR") is the abbreviation of USSR in Russian. It is written in Cyrillic letters. The Soviets used the Cyrillic abbreviation so frequently that audiences worldwide became familiar with its meaning. Notably, both Cyrillic letters used have homoglyphic (but transliterally distinct) letters in Latin alphabets. Because of widespread familiarity with the Cyrillic abbreviation, Latin alphabet users in particular almost always use the Latin homoglyphs "C" and "P" (as opposed to the transliteral Latin letters "S" and "R") when rendering the USSR's native abbreviation.After "СССР", the most common short form names for the Soviet state in Russian were "Советский Союз" (transliteration: "Sovetskiy Soyuz") which literally means "Soviet Union", and also "Союз ССР" (transliteration: "Soyuz SSR") which, after compensating for grammatical differences, essentially translates to "Union of SSR's" in English.In the English language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. In other European languages, the locally translated short forms and abbreviations are usually used such as "Union soviétique" and "URSS" in French, or "Sowjetunion" and "UdSSR" in German. In the English-speaking world, the Soviet Union was also informally called Russia and its citizens Russians, although that was technically incorrect since Russia was only one of the republics. Such misapplications of the linguistic equivalents to the term "Russia" and its derivatives were frequent in other languages as well.The Soviet Union covered an area of over , and was the world's largest country, a status that is retained by its successor state, Russia. It covered a sixth of Earth's land surface, and its size was comparable to the continent of North America. Its western part in Europe accounted for a quarter of the country's area and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and, except some areas in Central Asia, was much less populous. It spanned over east to west across eleven time zones, and over north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.The Soviet Union, similarly to Russia, had the world's longest border, measuring over , or circumferences of Earth. Two-thirds of it was a coastline. The country bordered Afghanistan, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Turkey from 1945 to 1991. The Bering Strait separated the country from the United States, while the La Pérouse Strait separated it from Japan.The Soviet Union's highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismoil Somoni Peak) in Tajik SSR, at . It also included most of the world's largest lakes; the Caspian Sea (shared with Iran), and Lake Baikal in Russia, the world's largest and deepest freshwater lake.Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament—the State Duma—was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but Tsar Nicholas II resisted attempts to move from absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities.A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to the wartime decay of Russia's economy and morale, culminated in the February Revolution and the toppling of Nicholas II and the imperial government in March 1917. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I.At the same time, workers' councils, known in Russian as "Soviets", sprang up across the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. On 7 November 1917, the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, ending the rule of the Provisional Government and leaving all political power to the Soviets. This event would later be officially known in Soviet bibliographies as the Great October Socialist Revolution. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets ended involvement in the war and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention, the execution of the former tsar and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million people. In March 1921, during a related conflict with Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly established republics of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania.On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the first Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky, and Alexander Chervyakov, on 30 December 1922. The formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of the country. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931. After the economic policy of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War, as a prelude to fully developing socialism in the country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s, and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax.From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The stated purpose was to prevent the return of capitalist exploitation, and that the principles of democratic centralism would be the most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. The debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a "troika" consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of the Ukrainian SSR, Lev Kamenev of the Russian SFSR, and Joseph Stalin of the Transcaucasian SFSR.On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the United Kingdom. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union. According to Archie Brown the constitution was never an accurate guide to political reality in the USSR. For example the fact that the Party played the leading role in making and enforcing policy was not mentioned in it until 1977. The USSR was a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities. However, the term "Soviet Russia"strictly applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republicwas often applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers.On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmanoeuvring his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the country and, by the end of the 1920s, established a totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin, forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country.Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor. Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the country developed a robust industrial economy in the years preceding World War II.Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two countries. In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new constitution that was praised by supporters around the world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many "Old Bolsheviks" who had participated in the October Revolution with Lenin. According to declassified Soviet archives, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot. Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a day.In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. The two countries concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement in August 1939. The former made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland, while the Soviets remained formally neutral. In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 starting what was known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Harry Hopkins, a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the USSR's decisive role in the war.In the same year, the USSR, in fulfilment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people. Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. During the war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four Allied powers, and later became the Four Policemen that formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council. It emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official relations with practically every country by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions.During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It took effective control over most of the countries of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania), turning them into satellite states. The USSR bound its satellite states in a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, and an economic organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon, a counterpart to the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991. The USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favor the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Communist Party of China, and its influence grew elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly in proxy wars.Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials initially opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy Malenkov. This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as the German invasion of 1941. For this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956.In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with the West, and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism, led to the Sino–Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist–Leninist movement, with the governments in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China.During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and technological exploits in the Space Race, rivaling the United States: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966; and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.Khrushchev initiated "The Thaw", a complex shift in political, cultural and economic life in the country. This included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing a dramatic rise in living standards while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. An agreement was made with the United States to remove nuclear missiles from both Cuba and Turkey, concluding the crisis. This event caused Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige, resulting in his removal from power in 1964.Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.In 1968, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt the Prague Spring reforms. In the aftermath, Brezhnev justified the invasion and previous military interventions as well as any potential military interventions in the future by introducing the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in a Warsaw Pact state as a threat to all Warsaw Pact states, therefore justifying military intervention.Brezhnev presided throughout "détente" with the West that resulted in treaties on armament control (SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of "standstill", with an ageing and ossified top political leadership. This period is also known as the Era of Stagnation, a period of adverse economic, political, and social effects in the country, which began during the rule of Brezhnev and continued under his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.In late 1979, the Soviet Union's military intervened in the ongoing civil war in neighboring Afghanistan, effectively ending a détente with the West.Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in "Beyond Oil" that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called "perestroika". His policy of "glasnost" freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-controlled regions came down.At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the "War of Laws". In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990.A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991.The remaining 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union. However, by December all except Russia and Kazakhstan had formally declared independence. During this time, Yeltsin took over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Moscow Kremlin. The final blow was struck on 1 December when Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine's secession ended any realistic chance of the country staying together even on a limited scale.On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place.The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body, voted both itself and the country out of existence. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state, and the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Army initially remained under overall CIS command but was soon absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states. The few remaining Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function by the end of 1991.Following the dissolution, Russia was internationally recognized as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed Soviet overseas properties as its own. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, Russia also agreed to receive all nuclear weapons remaining in the territory of other former Soviet republics. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations. Ukraine has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the USSR and claimed such status for Ukraine as well, which was codified in Articles 7 and 8 of its 1991 law On Legal Succession of Ukraine. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has continued to pursue claims against Russia in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property that was owned by the USSR.The dissolution was followed by a severe drop in economic and social conditions in post-Soviet states, including a rapid increase in poverty, crime, corruption, unemployment, homelessness, rates of disease, infant mortality and domestic violence, as well as demographic losses and income inequality and the rise of an oligarchical class, along with decreases in calorie intake, life expectancy, adult literacy, and income. Between 1988–1989 and 1993–1995, the Gini ratio increased by an average of 9 points for all former socialist countries. The economic shocks that accompanied wholesale privatization were associated with sharp increases in mortality. Data shows Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia saw a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between 1991 and 1994. In the following decades, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc.In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: "The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance." Before the dissolution, the country had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The analysis of the succession of states for the 15 post-Soviet states is complex. The Russian Federation is seen as the legal "continuator" state and is for most purposes the heir to the Soviet Union. It retained ownership of all former Soviet embassy properties, as well as the old Soviet UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council.Of the two other co-founding states of the USSR at the time of the dissolution, Ukraine was the only one that had passed laws, similar to Russia, that it is a state-successor of both the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR. Soviet treaties laid groundwork for Ukraine's future foreign agreements as well as they led to Ukraine agreeing to undertake 16.37% of debts of the Soviet Union for which it was going to receive its share of USSR's foreign property. Although it had a tough position at the time, due to Russia's position as a "single continuation of the USSR" that became widely accepted in the West as well as a constant pressure from the Western countries, allowed Russia to dispose state property of USSR abroad and conceal information about it. Due to that Ukraine never ratified "zero option" agreement that Russian Federation had signed with other former Soviet republics, as it denied disclosing of information about Soviet Gold Reserves and its Diamond Fund. The dispute over former Soviet property and assets between the two former republics is still ongoing:Similar situation occurred with restitution of cultural property. Although on 14 February 1992 Russia and other former Soviet republics signed agreement "On the return of cultural and historic property to the origin states" in Minsk, it was halted by Russian State Duma that had eventually passed "Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation" which made restitution currently impossible.There are additionally four states that claim independence from the other internationally recognised post-Soviet states but possess limited international recognition: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria. The Chechen separatist movement of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria lacks any international recognition.During his rule, Stalin always made the final policy decisions. Otherwise, Soviet foreign policy was set by the commission on the Foreign Policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or by the party's highest body the Politburo. Operations were handled by the separate Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was known as the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (or Narkomindel), until 1946. The most influential spokesmen were Georgy Chicherin (1872–1936), Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), Andrey Vyshinsky (1883–1954) and Andrei Gromyko (1909–1989). Intellectuals were based in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.The Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Soviet Union intensely debated foreign policy issues and change directions several times. Even after Stalin assumed dictatorial control in the late 1920s, there were debates, and he frequently changed positions.During the country's early period, it was assumed that Communist revolutions would break out soon in every major industrial country, and it was the Soviet responsibility to assist them. The Comintern was the weapon of choice. A few revolutions did break out, but they were quickly suppressed (the longest lasting one was in Hungary)—the Hungarian Soviet Republic—lasted only from 21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919. The Russian Bolsheviks were in no position to give any help.By 1921, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin realized that capitalism had stabilized itself in Europe and there would not be any widespread revolutions anytime soon. It became the duty of the Russian Bolsheviks to protect what they had in Russia, and avoid military confrontations that might destroy their bridgehead. Russia was now a pariah state, along with Germany. The two came to terms in 1922 with the Treaty of Rapallo that settled long-standing grievances. At the same time, the two countries secretly set up training programs for the illegal German army and air force operations at hidden camps in the USSR.Moscow eventually stopped threatening other states, and instead worked to open peaceful relationships in terms of trade, and diplomatic recognition. The United Kingdom dismissed the warnings of Winston Churchill and a few others about a continuing Marxist-Leninist threat, and opened trade relations and "de facto" diplomatic recognition in 1922. There was hope for a settlement of the pre-war Tsarist debts, but it was repeatedly postponed. Formal recognition came when the new Labour Party came to power in 1924. All the other countries followed suit in opening trade relations. Henry Ford opened large-scale business relations with the Soviets in the late 1920s, hoping that it would lead to long-term peace. Finally, in 1933, the United States officially recognized the USSR, a decision backed by the public opinion and especially by US business interests that expected an opening of a new profitable market.In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin ordered Marxist-Leninist parties across the world to strongly oppose non-Marxist political parties, labor unions or other organizations on the left. Stalin reversed himself in 1934 with the Popular Front program that called on all Marxist parties to join together with all anti-Fascist political, labor, and organizational forces that were opposed to fascism, especially of the Nazi variety.In 1939, half a year after the Munich Agreement, the USSR attempted to form an anti-Nazi alliance with France and Britain. Adolf Hitler proposed a better deal, which would give the USSR control over much of Eastern Europe through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In September, Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR also invaded later that month, resulting in the partition of Poland. In response, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II.There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislature represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the final policymaker in the country.At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. In turn, the Central Committee voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966), Secretariat and the General Secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the "de facto" highest office in the Soviet Union. Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941). They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state mainly through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin (1941–1953) and Khrushchev (1958–1964) were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership, but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.However, in practice the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party. Nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history, at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, its powers and functions were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers relating to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the government budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium (successor of the Central Executive Committee) to wield its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the Procurator General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.The state security police (the KGB and ) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Great Purge, but was brought under strict party control after Stalin's death. Under Yuri Andropov, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.The constitution, which was promulgated in 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers that represented executive and legislative branches of the government. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal, itself due to a decision by both the Politburo and the Central Committee. All leaders of the Communist Party before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party.Between 1988 and 1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, and much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government, now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.Tensions grew between the Union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and communist hardliners. On 19–21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt. The coup failed, and the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power "in the period of transition". Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Court) and applied the law as established by the constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defence attorney collaborate to establish the truth.Constitutionally, the USSR was a federation of constituent Union Republics, which were either unitary states, such as Ukraine or Byelorussia (SSRs), or federations, such as Russia or Transcaucasia (SFSRs), all four being the founding republics who signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR in December 1922. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were formed from parts of Russia's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan SSRs. In 1929, Tajikistan was split off from the Uzbekistan SSR. With the constitution of 1936, the Transcaucasian SFSR was dissolved, resulting in its constituent republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan being elevated to Union Republics, while Kazakhstan and Kirghizia were split off from Russian SFSR, resulting in the same status. In August 1940, Moldavia was formed from parts of Ukraine and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (SSRs) were also admitted into the union which was not recognized by most of the international community and was considered an illegal occupation. Karelia was split off from Russia as a Union Republic in March 1940 and was reabsorbed in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).While nominally a union of equals, in practice the Soviet Union was dominated by Russians. The domination was so absolute that for most of its existence, the country was commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as "Russia". While the RSFSR was technically only one republic within the larger union, it was by far the largest (both in terms of population and area), most powerful, most developed, and the industrial center of the Soviet Union. Historian Matthew White wrote that it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were usually called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show".Under the Military Law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Land Forces, the Air Force, the Navy, Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the Internal Troops. The OGPU later became independent and in 1934 joined the NKVD, and so its internal troops were under the joint leadership of the defense and internal commissariats. After World War II, Strategic Missile Forces (1959), Air Defense Forces (1948) and National Civil Defense Forces (1970) were formed, which ranked first, third, and sixth in the official Soviet system of importance (ground forces were second, Air Force Fourth, and Navy Fifth).The army had the greatest political influence. In 1989, there served two million soldiers divided between 150 motorized and 52 armored divisions. Until the early 1960s, the Soviet navy was a rather small military branch, but after the Caribbean crisis, under the leadership of Sergei Gorshkov, it expanded significantly. It became known for battlecruisers and submarines. In 1989 there served 500 000 men. The Soviet Air Force focused on a fleet of strategic bombers and during war situation was to eradicate enemy infrastructure and nuclear capacity. The air force also had a number of fighters and tactical bombers to support the army in the war. Strategic missile forces had more than 1,400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed between 28 bases and 300 command centers.In the post-war period, the Soviet Army was directly involved in several military operations abroad. These included the suppression of the uprising in East Germany (1953), Hungarian revolution (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). The Soviet Union also participated in the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied.At the end of the 1950s, with the help of engineers and technologies captured and imported from defeated Nazi Germany, the Soviets constructed the first satellite – Sputnik 1 and thus overtook the United States in terms of utilizing space. This was followed by other successful satellites, where test dogs flight was sent. On April 12, 1961, the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was sent to the space. He once flew around the Earth and successfully landed in the Kazakh steppe. At that time, the first plans for space shuttles and orbital stations were drawn up in Soviet design offices, but in the end personal disputes between designers and management prevented this.As for Lunar space program; USSR only had a program on automated spacecraft launches; with no manned spacecraft used; passing on the "Moon Race" part of Space Race.In the 1970s, specific proposals for the design of the space shuttle began to emerge, but shortcomings, especially in the electronics industry (rapid overheating of electronics), postponed the program until the end of the 1980s. The first shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988, but without a human crew. Another shuttle, "Ptichka", eventually ended up under construction, as the shuttle project was canceled in 1991. For their launch into space, there is today an unused superpower rocket, Energia, which is the most powerful in the world.In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union managed to build the "Mir" orbital station. It was built on the construction of "Salyut" stations and its only role was civilian-grade research tasks. The Soviet Union adopted a command economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of War communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate money circulation, private enterprises and free trade. After the severe economic collapse, Lenin replaced war communism by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, legalizing free trade and private ownership of small businesses. The economy quickly recovered as a result.After a long debate among the members of the Politburo about the course of economic development, by 1928–1929, upon gaining control of the country, Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which significantly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. The primary motivation for industrialization was preparation for war, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalist world. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. The war caused extensive devastation of the Soviet economy and infrastructure, which required massive reconstruction.By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of Comecon, only a tiny share of domestic products was traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. However, the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied for by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the USSR became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.From the 1930s until its dissolution in late 1991, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. However, in practice, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to "ad hoc" intervention by superiors. All critical economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were usually denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but widespread. The final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice they were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links (e.g. between producer factories) were widespread.A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and health care. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defence were prioritized over consumer goods. Consumer goods, particularly outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and limited variety. Under the command economy, consumers had almost no influence on production, and the changing demands of a population with growing incomes could not be satisfied by supplies at rigidly fixed prices. A massive unplanned second economy grew up at low levels alongside the planned one, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. The legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth difficult to estimate precisely, by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid-1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, it had comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West. However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock (the rate of capital increase was only surpassed by Japan).Overall, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1989 was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries). According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, growth could have been faster. By their calculation, per capita income in 1989 should have been twice higher than it was, considering the amount of investment, education and population. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital. Steven Rosenfielde states that the standard of living declined due to Stalin's despotism. While there was a brief improvement after his death, it lapsed into stagnation.In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of "perestroika". His policies relaxed state control over enterprises but did not replace it by market incentives, resulting in a sharp decline in output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and the property was still largely state-owned until after the country's dissolution. For most of the period after World War II until its collapse, Soviet GDP (PPP) was the second-largest in the world, and third during the second half of the 1980s, although on a per-capita basis, it was behind that of First World countries. Compared to countries with similar per-capita GDP in 1928, the Soviet Union experienced significant growth.In 1990, the country had a Human Development Index of 0.920, placing it in the "high" category of human development. It was the third-highest in the Eastern Bloc, behind Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the 25th in the world of 130 countries.The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s, both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6%. David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40% of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse. The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2–2.5% during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World.In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of for crude oil and another for natural gas. Petroleum and petroleum-based products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported. In the 1970s and 1980s, the USSR heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency. At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second-largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military. Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was upon its founding. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. In the early 1960s, the Soviets awarded 40% of chemistry PhDs to women, compared to only 5% in the United States. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World.Under the Reagan administration, Project Socrates determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different from what the US was using. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the USSR was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. This was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.Transport was a vital component of the country's economy. The economic centralization of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise. The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air. However, due to inadequate maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward compared to the First World.Soviet rail transport was the largest and most intensively used in the world; it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burdens from the railways and to improve the Soviet government budget. The street network and automotive industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common outside major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early-to-mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones. Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.The Soviet merchant navy was one of the largest in the world.Excess deaths throughout World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."The birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mainly due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The mortality rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanistion and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as mostly real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed, and researchers could delve into the real causes.Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in the 1930s), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms. However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a pronatalist era that lasted for decades.By 1917, Russia became the first great power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World War I and II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a 4:3 ratio. This contributed to the larger role women played in Russian society compared to other great powers at the time.Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar for Education of Soviet Russia. In the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. All left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand in the Soviet school system. Literate people were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. Throughout the 1930s, social mobility rose sharply, which has been attributed to reforms in education. In the aftermath of World War II, the country's educational system expanded dramatically, which had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in giving rise to the New Man. Citizens directly entering the workforce had the constitutional right to a job and to free vocational training.The education system was highly centralized and universally accessible to all citizens, with affirmative action for applicants from nations associated with cultural backwardness. However, as part of the general antisemitic policy, an unofficial Jewish quota was applied in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary. According to statistics from 1986, the number of higher education students per the population of 10,000 was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.The Soviet Union was an ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population of the country was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority of the population were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%).All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the father. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of Georgia, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who were all East Slavic and Orthodox, shared close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.Members of various ethnicities participated in legislative bodies. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality, ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the Soviet leadership, such as Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Podgorny or Andrei Gromyko. During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian "diaspora" in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million.In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet principle of health care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge, a revolutionary concept at the time. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. Before Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary, the Soviet healthcare system was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed, however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, during which the health care system was heavily criticized for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision. Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such successes as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the system's areas for improvement and felt that billions of Soviet rubles were squandered. After the revolution, life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic in itself was seen by some that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s when statistics indicated that the life expectancy briefly surpassed that of the United States. Life expectancy started to decline in the 1970s, possibly because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the matter. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was the highest while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.Soviet dental technology and dental health were considered notoriously bad. In 1991, the average 35-year-old had 12 to 14 cavities, fillings or missing teeth. Toothpaste was often not available, and toothbrushes did not conform to standards of modern dentistry.Under Lenin, the government gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was highly successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, it would attain "official language" status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore, their speakers were forced to have a second language. There are examples where the government retreated from this policy, most notably under Stalin where education was discontinued in languages that were not widespread. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During World War II, some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian "de facto" functioned as an official language, as the "language of interethnic communication" (), but only assumed the "de jure" status as the official national language in 1990.Christianity and Islam had the highest number of adherents among the religious citizens. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the largest Christian denomination. About 90% of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shias being concentrated in the Azerbaijan SSR. Smaller groups included Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant denominations (especially Baptists and Lutherans).Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the church of the monarchy and took part in carrying out official state functions. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a narrow interpretation of this right, and in fact utilized a range of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.The 1918 Council of People's Commissars decree establishing the Russian SFSR as a secular state also decreed that "the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general instruction are taught, is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may be taught religion privately." Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929 included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study. Both Christian and non-Christian establishments were shut down by the thousands in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, as many as 90% of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed.Under the doctrine of state atheism, a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism" was conducted. The government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organized religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the propaganda campaign. Accordingly, although personal expressions of religious faith were not explicitly banned, a strong sense of social stigma was imposed on them by the formal structures and mass media, and it was generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. While persecution accelerated following Stalin's rise to power, a revival of Orthodoxy was fostered by the government during World War II and the Soviet authorities sought to control the Russian Orthodox Church rather than liquidate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence before World War I.Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, and with the looming threat of war, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during World War II. Amid other accommodations to religious faith after the German invasion, churches were reopened. Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius of Moscow was held in 1943. Stalin had the support of the majority of the religious people in the USSR even through the late 1980s. The general tendency of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all faiths.Under Nikita Khrushchev, the state leadership clashed with the churches in 1958–1964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. During this period, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1959 to 1965, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade.Religious institutions remained monitored by the Soviet government, but churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were all given more leeway in the Brezhnev era. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexy I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as "active religious believers."The legacy of the USSR remains a controversial topic. The socio-economic nature of communist states such as the USSR, especially under Stalin, has also been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.The USSR implemented a broad range of policies over a long period of time, with a large amount of conflicting policies being implemented by different leaders. Some have a positive view of it whilst others are critical towards the country, calling it a repressive oligarchy. The opinions on the USSR are complex and have changed over time, with different generations having different views on the matter as well as on Soviet policies corresponding to separate time periods during its history. Leftists have largely varying views on the USSR. Whilst some leftists such as anarchists and other libertarian socialists, agree it did not give the workers control over the means of production and was a centralized oligarchy, others have more positive opinions as to the Bolshevik policies and Vladimir Lenin. Many anti-Stalinist leftists such as anarchists are extremely critical of Soviet authoritarianism and repression. Much of the criticism it receives is centered around massacres in the Soviet Union, the centralized hierarchy present in the USSR and mass political repression as well as violence towards government critics and political dissidents such as other leftists. Critics also point towards its failure to implement any substantial worker cooperatives or implementing worker liberation as well as corruption and the Soviet authoritarian nature.Many Russians and other former Soviet citizens have nostalgia for the USSR, pointing towards most infrastructure being built during Soviet times, increased job security, increased literacy rate, increased caloric intake and supposed ethnic pluralism enacted in the Soviet Union as well as political stability. The Russian Revolution is also seen in a positive light as well as the leadership of Lenin, Nikita Khrushchev and the later USSR, although many view Joseph Stalin's rule as positive for the country. In Armenia, 12% of respondents said the USSR collapse did good, while 66% said it did harm. In Kyrgyzstan, 16% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did good, while 61% said it did harm. In a 2018 Rating Sociological Group poll, 47% of Ukrainian respondents had a positive opinion of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982. Much of the admiration of the USSR comes from the failings of the modern post-Soviet governments such as the control by oligarchs, corruption and outdated Soviet-era infrastructure as well as the rise and dominance of organised crime after the collapse of the USSR all directly leading into nostalgia for it.The 1941–45 period of World War II is still known in Russia as the "Great Patriotic War". The war became a topic of great importance in cinema, literature, history lessons at school, the mass media, and the arts. As a result of the massive losses suffered by the military and civilians during the conflict, Victory Day celebrated on 9 May is still one of the most important and emotional dates in Russia.In some post Soviet republics, there is a more negative view of the USSR, although there is no unanimity on the matter. In large part due to the Holodomor, ethnic Ukrainians have a negative view of it. Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Ukraine's southern and eastern regions have a more positive view of the USSR. In some countries with internal conflict, there is also nostalgia for the USSR, especially for refugees of the post-Soviet conflicts who have been forced to flee their homes and have been displaced. This nostalgia is less an admiration for the country or its policies than it is a longing to return to their homes and not to live in poverty. The many Russian enclaves in the former USSR republics such as Transnistria have in a general a positive remembrance of it.The left's view of the USSR is complex. While some leftists regard the USSR as an example of state capitalism or that it was an oligarchical state, other leftists admire Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution.Council communists generally view the USSR as failing to create class consciousness, turning into a corrupt state in which the elite controlled society. Anarchists are critical of the country, labeling the Soviet system as "red fascism". Soviets actively destroyed anarchist organizations and anarchist communities, labeling anarchists as "enemies of the people". Factors contributing to the animosity towards the USSR included: the Soviet invasion of the anarchist Free Territory, the suppression of the anarchist Kronstadt rebellion and the response to the Norilsk uprising, in which prisoners created a radical system of government based on cooperatives and direct democracy in the Gulag. Anarchist organizations and unions were also banned during the Spanish Civil War under the Republican government by orders from the Soviet government. Due to this, anarchists generally hold a large animosity towards the USSR.The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's existence. During the first decade following the revolution, there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, such as Nikolay Gumilyov who was shot for alleged conspiring against the Bolshevik regime, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. As a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, films received encouragement from the state, and much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.During Stalin's rule, the Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.Following the Khrushchev Thaw, censorship was diminished. During this time, a distinctive period of Soviet culture developed, characterized by conformist public life and an intense focus on personal life. Greater experimentation in art forms was again permissible, resulting in the production of more sophisticated and subtly critical work. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. Underground dissident literature, known as "samizdat", developed during this late period. In architecture, the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch. In music, in response to the increasing popularity of forms of popular music like jazz in the West, many jazz orchestras were permitted throughout the USSR, notably the Melodiya Ensemble, named after the principle record label in the USSR.In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of "perestroika" and "glasnost" significantly expanded freedom of expression throughout the country in the media and the press.Founded on 20 July 1924 in Moscow, "Sovetsky Sport" was the first sports newspaper of the Soviet Union.The Soviet Olympic Committee formed on 21 April 1951, and the IOC recognized the new body in its 45th session. In the same year, when the Soviet representative Konstantin Andrianov became an IOC member, the USSR officially joined the Olympic Movement. The 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki thus became first Olympic Games for Soviet athletes. The Soviet Union was the biggest rival to the United States at the Summer Olympics, winning six of its nine appearances at the games and also topping the medal tally at the Winter Olympics six times. The Soviet Union's Olympics success has been attributed to its large investment in sports to demonstrate its superpower image and political influence on a global stage.The Soviet Union national ice hockey team won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament between 1954 and 1991 and never failed to medal in any International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) tournament in which they competed.The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession – in reality, the state paid many of these competitors to train on a full-time basis. Nevertheless, the IOC held to the traditional rules regarding amateurism.A 1989 report by a committee of the Australian Senate claimed that "there is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner...who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might well have been called the Chemists' Games".A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those from sixteen gold medalists, would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings had the tests been official. The results of Donike's unofficial tests later convinced the IOC to add his new technique to their testing protocols. The first documented case of "blood doping" occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics when a runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5000 m and 10,000 m.Documentation obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dated before the decision to boycott the 1984 Games, the document detailed the existing steroids operations of the program, along with suggestions for further enhancements. Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture prepared the communication, directed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field. Portugalov later became one of the leading figures involved in the implementation of Russian doping before the 2016 Summer Olympics.Official Soviet environmental policy has always attached great importance to actions in which human beings actively improve nature. Lenin's quote "Communism is Soviet power and electrification of the country!" in many respects summarizes the focus on modernization and industrial development. During the first five-year plan in 1928, Stalin proceeded to industrialize the country at all costs. Values such as environmental and nature protection have been completely ignored in the struggle to create a modern industrial society. After Stalin's death, they focused more on environmental issues, but the basic perception of the value of environmental protection remained the same.The Soviet media has always focused on the vast expanse of land and the virtually indestructible natural resources. This made it feel that contamination and uncontrolled exploitation of nature were not a problem. The Soviet state also firmly believed that scientific and technological progress would solve all the problems. Official ideology said that under socialism environmental problems could easily be overcome, unlike capitalist countries, where they seemingly could not be solved. The Soviet authorities had an almost unwavering belief that man could transcend nature. However, when the authorities had to admit that there were environmental problems in the USSR in the 1980s, they explained the problems in such a way that socialism had not yet been fully developed; pollution in a socialist society was only a temporary anomaly that would have been resolved if socialism had developed.The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. Unparalleled in the world, it resulted in a large number of radioactive isotopes being released into the atmosphere. Radioactive doses have scattered relatively far. 4,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were reported after the incident, but this led to a relatively low number of deaths (WHO data, 2005). However, the long-term effects of the accident are unknown. Another major accident is the Kyshtym disaster.After the fall of the USSR, it was discovered that the environmental problems were greater than what the Soviet authorities admitted. The Kola Peninsula was one of the places with clear problems. Around the industrial cities of Monchegorsk and Norilsk, where nickel, for example, is mined, all forests have been destroyed by contamination, while the northern and other parts of Russia have been affected by emissions. During the 1990s, people in the West were also interested in the radioactive hazards of nuclear facilities, decommissioned nuclear submarines, and the processing of nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. It was also known in the early 1990s that the USSR had transported radioactive material to the Barents Sea and Kara Sea, which was later confirmed by the Russian parliament. The crash of the K-141 Kursk submarine in 2000 in the west further raised concerns. In the past, there were accidents involving submarines K-19, K-8, and K-129. | [
"Georgy Malenkov",
"Alexei Kosygin",
"Nikolai Ryzhkov",
"Nikita Khrushchev",
"Alexei Rykov",
"Ivan Silayev",
"Vladimir Lenin",
"Nikolai Bulganin",
"Nikolai Tikhonov",
"Vyacheslav Molotov",
"Valentin Pavlov"
] |
|
Who was the head of Soviet Union in 13/03/1947? | March 13, 1947 | {
"text": [
"Joseph Stalin"
]
} | L2_Q15180_P6_3 | Vladimir Lenin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jul, 1923 to Jan, 1924.
Vyacheslav Molotov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Dec, 1930 to May, 1941.
Nikita Khrushchev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1958 to Oct, 1964.
Nikolai Tikhonov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1980 to Sep, 1985.
Valentin Pavlov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jan, 1991 to Aug, 1991.
Alexei Rykov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1924 to Dec, 1930.
Nikolai Bulganin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1955 to Mar, 1958.
Nikolai Ryzhkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1985 to Jan, 1991.
Joseph Stalin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from May, 1941 to Mar, 1953.
Alexei Kosygin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1964 to Oct, 1980.
Georgy Malenkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1953 to Feb, 1955.
Ivan Silayev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1991 to Dec, 1991. | Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state that spanned most of Europe and Asia during its existence from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a federal union of multiple national republics; in practice its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years. The country was a one-party state prior to 1990 governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with Moscow as its capital within its largest and most populous republic, the Russian SFSR. Other major urban centers were Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk (Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR) and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over , and spanning eleven time zones. The Soviet Union's five biomes were tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, and mountains. Its diverse population was officially known as the Soviet people.The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the monarchy of the Russian Empire. They established the Russian Soviet Republic, beginning a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and many anti-Bolshevik forces across the former Empire, among whom the largest faction was the White Guard, which engaged in violent anti-communist repression against the Bolsheviks and their worker and peasant supporters known as the White Terror. The Red Army expanded and helped local Bolsheviks take power, establishing soviets, repressing their political opponents and rebellious peasants through Red Terror. By 1922, the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. The New Economic Policy (NEP), which was introduced by Lenin, led to a partial return of a free market and private property; this resulted in a period of economic recovery.Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin suppressed all political opposition to his rule inside the Communist Party and inaugurated a command economy. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, which led to significant economic growth, but also led to a man-made famine in 1932–1933 and expanded the Gulag labour camp system originally established in 1918. Stalin also fomented political paranoia and conducted the Great Purge to remove his actual and perceived opponents from the Party through mass arrests of military leaders, Communist Party members, and ordinary citizens alike, who were then sent to correctional labor camps or sentenced to death.On 23 August 1939, after unsuccessful efforts to form an anti-fascist alliance with Western powers, the Soviets signed the non-aggression agreement with Nazi Germany. After the start of World War II, the formally neutral Soviets invaded and annexed territories of several Eastern European states, including eastern Poland and the Baltic states. In June 1941 the Germans invaded, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the cost of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin and won World War II in Europe on 9 May 1945. The territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged in 1947 as a result of a post-war Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, where the Eastern Bloc confronted the Western Bloc that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period known as de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw occurred under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took an early lead in the Space Race with the first ever satellite and the first human spaceflight and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus. In the 1970s, there was a brief "détente" of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed when the Soviet Union deployed troops in Afghanistan in 1979. The war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters.In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to further reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of "glasnost" and "perestroika". The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing economic stagnation. The Cold War ended during his tenure and in 1989, Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective Marxist-Leninist regimes. Strong nationalist and separatist movements broke out across the USSR. Gorbachev initiated a referendum—boycotted by the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova—which resulted in the majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the Union as a renewed federation. In August 1991, a coup d'état was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a high-profile role in facing down the coup. The main result was the banning of the Communist Party. The republics led by Russia and Ukraine declared independence. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned. All the republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation (formerly the Russian SFSR) assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and is recognized as its continued legal personality in world affairs.The USSR produced many significant social and technological achievements and innovations regarding military power. It boasted the world's second-largest economy and the largest standing military in the world. The USSR was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states. It was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the OSCE, the WFTU and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.Before its dissolution, the USSR had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II. Sometimes also called "Soviet Empire", it exercised its hegemony in Eastern Europe and worldwide with military and economic strength, proxy conflicts and influence in developing countries and funding of scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The word "soviet" is derived from the Russian word "sovet" (), meaning "council", "assembly", "advice", ultimately deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of "vět-iti" ("to inform"), related to Slavic "věst" ("news"), English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or" (which came to English through French), or the Dutch "weten" ("to know"; cf. "wetenschap" meaning "science"). The word "sovietnik" means "councillor".Some organizations in Russian history were called "council" (). In the Russian Empire, the State Council which functioned from 1810 to 1917 was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905.During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union which he initially named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia (). Stalin initially resisted the proposal but ultimately accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), albeit all the republics began as "socialist soviet" and did not change to the other order until 1936. In addition, in the national languages of several republics, the word "council" or "conciliar" in the respective language was only quite late changed to an adaptation of the Russian "soviet" and never in others, e.g. Ukraine."СССР" (in Latin alphabet: "SSSR") is the abbreviation of USSR in Russian. It is written in Cyrillic letters. The Soviets used the Cyrillic abbreviation so frequently that audiences worldwide became familiar with its meaning. Notably, both Cyrillic letters used have homoglyphic (but transliterally distinct) letters in Latin alphabets. Because of widespread familiarity with the Cyrillic abbreviation, Latin alphabet users in particular almost always use the Latin homoglyphs "C" and "P" (as opposed to the transliteral Latin letters "S" and "R") when rendering the USSR's native abbreviation.After "СССР", the most common short form names for the Soviet state in Russian were "Советский Союз" (transliteration: "Sovetskiy Soyuz") which literally means "Soviet Union", and also "Союз ССР" (transliteration: "Soyuz SSR") which, after compensating for grammatical differences, essentially translates to "Union of SSR's" in English.In the English language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. In other European languages, the locally translated short forms and abbreviations are usually used such as "Union soviétique" and "URSS" in French, or "Sowjetunion" and "UdSSR" in German. In the English-speaking world, the Soviet Union was also informally called Russia and its citizens Russians, although that was technically incorrect since Russia was only one of the republics. Such misapplications of the linguistic equivalents to the term "Russia" and its derivatives were frequent in other languages as well.The Soviet Union covered an area of over , and was the world's largest country, a status that is retained by its successor state, Russia. It covered a sixth of Earth's land surface, and its size was comparable to the continent of North America. Its western part in Europe accounted for a quarter of the country's area and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and, except some areas in Central Asia, was much less populous. It spanned over east to west across eleven time zones, and over north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.The Soviet Union, similarly to Russia, had the world's longest border, measuring over , or circumferences of Earth. Two-thirds of it was a coastline. The country bordered Afghanistan, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Turkey from 1945 to 1991. The Bering Strait separated the country from the United States, while the La Pérouse Strait separated it from Japan.The Soviet Union's highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismoil Somoni Peak) in Tajik SSR, at . It also included most of the world's largest lakes; the Caspian Sea (shared with Iran), and Lake Baikal in Russia, the world's largest and deepest freshwater lake.Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament—the State Duma—was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but Tsar Nicholas II resisted attempts to move from absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities.A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to the wartime decay of Russia's economy and morale, culminated in the February Revolution and the toppling of Nicholas II and the imperial government in March 1917. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I.At the same time, workers' councils, known in Russian as "Soviets", sprang up across the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. On 7 November 1917, the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, ending the rule of the Provisional Government and leaving all political power to the Soviets. This event would later be officially known in Soviet bibliographies as the Great October Socialist Revolution. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets ended involvement in the war and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention, the execution of the former tsar and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million people. In March 1921, during a related conflict with Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly established republics of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania.On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the first Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky, and Alexander Chervyakov, on 30 December 1922. The formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of the country. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931. After the economic policy of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War, as a prelude to fully developing socialism in the country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s, and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax.From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The stated purpose was to prevent the return of capitalist exploitation, and that the principles of democratic centralism would be the most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. The debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a "troika" consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of the Ukrainian SSR, Lev Kamenev of the Russian SFSR, and Joseph Stalin of the Transcaucasian SFSR.On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the United Kingdom. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union. According to Archie Brown the constitution was never an accurate guide to political reality in the USSR. For example the fact that the Party played the leading role in making and enforcing policy was not mentioned in it until 1977. The USSR was a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities. However, the term "Soviet Russia"strictly applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republicwas often applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers.On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmanoeuvring his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the country and, by the end of the 1920s, established a totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin, forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country.Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor. Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the country developed a robust industrial economy in the years preceding World War II.Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two countries. In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new constitution that was praised by supporters around the world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many "Old Bolsheviks" who had participated in the October Revolution with Lenin. According to declassified Soviet archives, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot. Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a day.In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. The two countries concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement in August 1939. The former made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland, while the Soviets remained formally neutral. In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 starting what was known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Harry Hopkins, a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the USSR's decisive role in the war.In the same year, the USSR, in fulfilment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people. Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. During the war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four Allied powers, and later became the Four Policemen that formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council. It emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official relations with practically every country by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions.During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It took effective control over most of the countries of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania), turning them into satellite states. The USSR bound its satellite states in a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, and an economic organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon, a counterpart to the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991. The USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favor the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Communist Party of China, and its influence grew elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly in proxy wars.Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials initially opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy Malenkov. This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as the German invasion of 1941. For this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956.In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with the West, and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism, led to the Sino–Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist–Leninist movement, with the governments in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China.During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and technological exploits in the Space Race, rivaling the United States: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966; and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.Khrushchev initiated "The Thaw", a complex shift in political, cultural and economic life in the country. This included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing a dramatic rise in living standards while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. An agreement was made with the United States to remove nuclear missiles from both Cuba and Turkey, concluding the crisis. This event caused Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige, resulting in his removal from power in 1964.Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.In 1968, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt the Prague Spring reforms. In the aftermath, Brezhnev justified the invasion and previous military interventions as well as any potential military interventions in the future by introducing the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in a Warsaw Pact state as a threat to all Warsaw Pact states, therefore justifying military intervention.Brezhnev presided throughout "détente" with the West that resulted in treaties on armament control (SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of "standstill", with an ageing and ossified top political leadership. This period is also known as the Era of Stagnation, a period of adverse economic, political, and social effects in the country, which began during the rule of Brezhnev and continued under his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.In late 1979, the Soviet Union's military intervened in the ongoing civil war in neighboring Afghanistan, effectively ending a détente with the West.Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in "Beyond Oil" that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called "perestroika". His policy of "glasnost" freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-controlled regions came down.At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the "War of Laws". In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990.A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991.The remaining 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union. However, by December all except Russia and Kazakhstan had formally declared independence. During this time, Yeltsin took over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Moscow Kremlin. The final blow was struck on 1 December when Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine's secession ended any realistic chance of the country staying together even on a limited scale.On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place.The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body, voted both itself and the country out of existence. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state, and the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Army initially remained under overall CIS command but was soon absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states. The few remaining Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function by the end of 1991.Following the dissolution, Russia was internationally recognized as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed Soviet overseas properties as its own. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, Russia also agreed to receive all nuclear weapons remaining in the territory of other former Soviet republics. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations. Ukraine has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the USSR and claimed such status for Ukraine as well, which was codified in Articles 7 and 8 of its 1991 law On Legal Succession of Ukraine. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has continued to pursue claims against Russia in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property that was owned by the USSR.The dissolution was followed by a severe drop in economic and social conditions in post-Soviet states, including a rapid increase in poverty, crime, corruption, unemployment, homelessness, rates of disease, infant mortality and domestic violence, as well as demographic losses and income inequality and the rise of an oligarchical class, along with decreases in calorie intake, life expectancy, adult literacy, and income. Between 1988–1989 and 1993–1995, the Gini ratio increased by an average of 9 points for all former socialist countries. The economic shocks that accompanied wholesale privatization were associated with sharp increases in mortality. Data shows Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia saw a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between 1991 and 1994. In the following decades, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc.In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: "The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance." Before the dissolution, the country had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The analysis of the succession of states for the 15 post-Soviet states is complex. The Russian Federation is seen as the legal "continuator" state and is for most purposes the heir to the Soviet Union. It retained ownership of all former Soviet embassy properties, as well as the old Soviet UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council.Of the two other co-founding states of the USSR at the time of the dissolution, Ukraine was the only one that had passed laws, similar to Russia, that it is a state-successor of both the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR. Soviet treaties laid groundwork for Ukraine's future foreign agreements as well as they led to Ukraine agreeing to undertake 16.37% of debts of the Soviet Union for which it was going to receive its share of USSR's foreign property. Although it had a tough position at the time, due to Russia's position as a "single continuation of the USSR" that became widely accepted in the West as well as a constant pressure from the Western countries, allowed Russia to dispose state property of USSR abroad and conceal information about it. Due to that Ukraine never ratified "zero option" agreement that Russian Federation had signed with other former Soviet republics, as it denied disclosing of information about Soviet Gold Reserves and its Diamond Fund. The dispute over former Soviet property and assets between the two former republics is still ongoing:Similar situation occurred with restitution of cultural property. Although on 14 February 1992 Russia and other former Soviet republics signed agreement "On the return of cultural and historic property to the origin states" in Minsk, it was halted by Russian State Duma that had eventually passed "Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation" which made restitution currently impossible.There are additionally four states that claim independence from the other internationally recognised post-Soviet states but possess limited international recognition: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria. The Chechen separatist movement of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria lacks any international recognition.During his rule, Stalin always made the final policy decisions. Otherwise, Soviet foreign policy was set by the commission on the Foreign Policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or by the party's highest body the Politburo. Operations were handled by the separate Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was known as the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (or Narkomindel), until 1946. The most influential spokesmen were Georgy Chicherin (1872–1936), Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), Andrey Vyshinsky (1883–1954) and Andrei Gromyko (1909–1989). Intellectuals were based in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.The Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Soviet Union intensely debated foreign policy issues and change directions several times. Even after Stalin assumed dictatorial control in the late 1920s, there were debates, and he frequently changed positions.During the country's early period, it was assumed that Communist revolutions would break out soon in every major industrial country, and it was the Soviet responsibility to assist them. The Comintern was the weapon of choice. A few revolutions did break out, but they were quickly suppressed (the longest lasting one was in Hungary)—the Hungarian Soviet Republic—lasted only from 21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919. The Russian Bolsheviks were in no position to give any help.By 1921, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin realized that capitalism had stabilized itself in Europe and there would not be any widespread revolutions anytime soon. It became the duty of the Russian Bolsheviks to protect what they had in Russia, and avoid military confrontations that might destroy their bridgehead. Russia was now a pariah state, along with Germany. The two came to terms in 1922 with the Treaty of Rapallo that settled long-standing grievances. At the same time, the two countries secretly set up training programs for the illegal German army and air force operations at hidden camps in the USSR.Moscow eventually stopped threatening other states, and instead worked to open peaceful relationships in terms of trade, and diplomatic recognition. The United Kingdom dismissed the warnings of Winston Churchill and a few others about a continuing Marxist-Leninist threat, and opened trade relations and "de facto" diplomatic recognition in 1922. There was hope for a settlement of the pre-war Tsarist debts, but it was repeatedly postponed. Formal recognition came when the new Labour Party came to power in 1924. All the other countries followed suit in opening trade relations. Henry Ford opened large-scale business relations with the Soviets in the late 1920s, hoping that it would lead to long-term peace. Finally, in 1933, the United States officially recognized the USSR, a decision backed by the public opinion and especially by US business interests that expected an opening of a new profitable market.In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin ordered Marxist-Leninist parties across the world to strongly oppose non-Marxist political parties, labor unions or other organizations on the left. Stalin reversed himself in 1934 with the Popular Front program that called on all Marxist parties to join together with all anti-Fascist political, labor, and organizational forces that were opposed to fascism, especially of the Nazi variety.In 1939, half a year after the Munich Agreement, the USSR attempted to form an anti-Nazi alliance with France and Britain. Adolf Hitler proposed a better deal, which would give the USSR control over much of Eastern Europe through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In September, Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR also invaded later that month, resulting in the partition of Poland. In response, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II.There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislature represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the final policymaker in the country.At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. In turn, the Central Committee voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966), Secretariat and the General Secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the "de facto" highest office in the Soviet Union. Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941). They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state mainly through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin (1941–1953) and Khrushchev (1958–1964) were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership, but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.However, in practice the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party. Nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history, at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, its powers and functions were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers relating to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the government budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium (successor of the Central Executive Committee) to wield its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the Procurator General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.The state security police (the KGB and ) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Great Purge, but was brought under strict party control after Stalin's death. Under Yuri Andropov, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.The constitution, which was promulgated in 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers that represented executive and legislative branches of the government. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal, itself due to a decision by both the Politburo and the Central Committee. All leaders of the Communist Party before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party.Between 1988 and 1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, and much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government, now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.Tensions grew between the Union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and communist hardliners. On 19–21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt. The coup failed, and the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power "in the period of transition". Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Court) and applied the law as established by the constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defence attorney collaborate to establish the truth.Constitutionally, the USSR was a federation of constituent Union Republics, which were either unitary states, such as Ukraine or Byelorussia (SSRs), or federations, such as Russia or Transcaucasia (SFSRs), all four being the founding republics who signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR in December 1922. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were formed from parts of Russia's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan SSRs. In 1929, Tajikistan was split off from the Uzbekistan SSR. With the constitution of 1936, the Transcaucasian SFSR was dissolved, resulting in its constituent republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan being elevated to Union Republics, while Kazakhstan and Kirghizia were split off from Russian SFSR, resulting in the same status. In August 1940, Moldavia was formed from parts of Ukraine and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (SSRs) were also admitted into the union which was not recognized by most of the international community and was considered an illegal occupation. Karelia was split off from Russia as a Union Republic in March 1940 and was reabsorbed in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).While nominally a union of equals, in practice the Soviet Union was dominated by Russians. The domination was so absolute that for most of its existence, the country was commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as "Russia". While the RSFSR was technically only one republic within the larger union, it was by far the largest (both in terms of population and area), most powerful, most developed, and the industrial center of the Soviet Union. Historian Matthew White wrote that it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were usually called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show".Under the Military Law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Land Forces, the Air Force, the Navy, Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the Internal Troops. The OGPU later became independent and in 1934 joined the NKVD, and so its internal troops were under the joint leadership of the defense and internal commissariats. After World War II, Strategic Missile Forces (1959), Air Defense Forces (1948) and National Civil Defense Forces (1970) were formed, which ranked first, third, and sixth in the official Soviet system of importance (ground forces were second, Air Force Fourth, and Navy Fifth).The army had the greatest political influence. In 1989, there served two million soldiers divided between 150 motorized and 52 armored divisions. Until the early 1960s, the Soviet navy was a rather small military branch, but after the Caribbean crisis, under the leadership of Sergei Gorshkov, it expanded significantly. It became known for battlecruisers and submarines. In 1989 there served 500 000 men. The Soviet Air Force focused on a fleet of strategic bombers and during war situation was to eradicate enemy infrastructure and nuclear capacity. The air force also had a number of fighters and tactical bombers to support the army in the war. Strategic missile forces had more than 1,400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed between 28 bases and 300 command centers.In the post-war period, the Soviet Army was directly involved in several military operations abroad. These included the suppression of the uprising in East Germany (1953), Hungarian revolution (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). The Soviet Union also participated in the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied.At the end of the 1950s, with the help of engineers and technologies captured and imported from defeated Nazi Germany, the Soviets constructed the first satellite – Sputnik 1 and thus overtook the United States in terms of utilizing space. This was followed by other successful satellites, where test dogs flight was sent. On April 12, 1961, the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was sent to the space. He once flew around the Earth and successfully landed in the Kazakh steppe. At that time, the first plans for space shuttles and orbital stations were drawn up in Soviet design offices, but in the end personal disputes between designers and management prevented this.As for Lunar space program; USSR only had a program on automated spacecraft launches; with no manned spacecraft used; passing on the "Moon Race" part of Space Race.In the 1970s, specific proposals for the design of the space shuttle began to emerge, but shortcomings, especially in the electronics industry (rapid overheating of electronics), postponed the program until the end of the 1980s. The first shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988, but without a human crew. Another shuttle, "Ptichka", eventually ended up under construction, as the shuttle project was canceled in 1991. For their launch into space, there is today an unused superpower rocket, Energia, which is the most powerful in the world.In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union managed to build the "Mir" orbital station. It was built on the construction of "Salyut" stations and its only role was civilian-grade research tasks. The Soviet Union adopted a command economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of War communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate money circulation, private enterprises and free trade. After the severe economic collapse, Lenin replaced war communism by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, legalizing free trade and private ownership of small businesses. The economy quickly recovered as a result.After a long debate among the members of the Politburo about the course of economic development, by 1928–1929, upon gaining control of the country, Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which significantly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. The primary motivation for industrialization was preparation for war, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalist world. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. The war caused extensive devastation of the Soviet economy and infrastructure, which required massive reconstruction.By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of Comecon, only a tiny share of domestic products was traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. However, the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied for by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the USSR became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.From the 1930s until its dissolution in late 1991, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. However, in practice, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to "ad hoc" intervention by superiors. All critical economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were usually denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but widespread. The final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice they were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links (e.g. between producer factories) were widespread.A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and health care. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defence were prioritized over consumer goods. Consumer goods, particularly outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and limited variety. Under the command economy, consumers had almost no influence on production, and the changing demands of a population with growing incomes could not be satisfied by supplies at rigidly fixed prices. A massive unplanned second economy grew up at low levels alongside the planned one, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. The legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth difficult to estimate precisely, by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid-1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, it had comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West. However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock (the rate of capital increase was only surpassed by Japan).Overall, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1989 was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries). According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, growth could have been faster. By their calculation, per capita income in 1989 should have been twice higher than it was, considering the amount of investment, education and population. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital. Steven Rosenfielde states that the standard of living declined due to Stalin's despotism. While there was a brief improvement after his death, it lapsed into stagnation.In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of "perestroika". His policies relaxed state control over enterprises but did not replace it by market incentives, resulting in a sharp decline in output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and the property was still largely state-owned until after the country's dissolution. For most of the period after World War II until its collapse, Soviet GDP (PPP) was the second-largest in the world, and third during the second half of the 1980s, although on a per-capita basis, it was behind that of First World countries. Compared to countries with similar per-capita GDP in 1928, the Soviet Union experienced significant growth.In 1990, the country had a Human Development Index of 0.920, placing it in the "high" category of human development. It was the third-highest in the Eastern Bloc, behind Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the 25th in the world of 130 countries.The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s, both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6%. David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40% of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse. The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2–2.5% during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World.In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of for crude oil and another for natural gas. Petroleum and petroleum-based products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported. In the 1970s and 1980s, the USSR heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency. At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second-largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military. Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was upon its founding. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. In the early 1960s, the Soviets awarded 40% of chemistry PhDs to women, compared to only 5% in the United States. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World.Under the Reagan administration, Project Socrates determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different from what the US was using. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the USSR was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. This was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.Transport was a vital component of the country's economy. The economic centralization of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise. The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air. However, due to inadequate maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward compared to the First World.Soviet rail transport was the largest and most intensively used in the world; it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burdens from the railways and to improve the Soviet government budget. The street network and automotive industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common outside major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early-to-mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones. Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.The Soviet merchant navy was one of the largest in the world.Excess deaths throughout World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."The birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mainly due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The mortality rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanistion and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as mostly real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed, and researchers could delve into the real causes.Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in the 1930s), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms. However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a pronatalist era that lasted for decades.By 1917, Russia became the first great power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World War I and II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a 4:3 ratio. This contributed to the larger role women played in Russian society compared to other great powers at the time.Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar for Education of Soviet Russia. In the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. All left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand in the Soviet school system. Literate people were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. Throughout the 1930s, social mobility rose sharply, which has been attributed to reforms in education. In the aftermath of World War II, the country's educational system expanded dramatically, which had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in giving rise to the New Man. Citizens directly entering the workforce had the constitutional right to a job and to free vocational training.The education system was highly centralized and universally accessible to all citizens, with affirmative action for applicants from nations associated with cultural backwardness. However, as part of the general antisemitic policy, an unofficial Jewish quota was applied in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary. According to statistics from 1986, the number of higher education students per the population of 10,000 was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.The Soviet Union was an ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population of the country was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority of the population were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%).All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the father. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of Georgia, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who were all East Slavic and Orthodox, shared close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.Members of various ethnicities participated in legislative bodies. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality, ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the Soviet leadership, such as Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Podgorny or Andrei Gromyko. During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian "diaspora" in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million.In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet principle of health care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge, a revolutionary concept at the time. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. Before Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary, the Soviet healthcare system was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed, however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, during which the health care system was heavily criticized for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision. Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such successes as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the system's areas for improvement and felt that billions of Soviet rubles were squandered. After the revolution, life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic in itself was seen by some that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s when statistics indicated that the life expectancy briefly surpassed that of the United States. Life expectancy started to decline in the 1970s, possibly because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the matter. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was the highest while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.Soviet dental technology and dental health were considered notoriously bad. In 1991, the average 35-year-old had 12 to 14 cavities, fillings or missing teeth. Toothpaste was often not available, and toothbrushes did not conform to standards of modern dentistry.Under Lenin, the government gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was highly successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, it would attain "official language" status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore, their speakers were forced to have a second language. There are examples where the government retreated from this policy, most notably under Stalin where education was discontinued in languages that were not widespread. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During World War II, some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian "de facto" functioned as an official language, as the "language of interethnic communication" (), but only assumed the "de jure" status as the official national language in 1990.Christianity and Islam had the highest number of adherents among the religious citizens. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the largest Christian denomination. About 90% of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shias being concentrated in the Azerbaijan SSR. Smaller groups included Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant denominations (especially Baptists and Lutherans).Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the church of the monarchy and took part in carrying out official state functions. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a narrow interpretation of this right, and in fact utilized a range of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.The 1918 Council of People's Commissars decree establishing the Russian SFSR as a secular state also decreed that "the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general instruction are taught, is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may be taught religion privately." Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929 included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study. Both Christian and non-Christian establishments were shut down by the thousands in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, as many as 90% of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed.Under the doctrine of state atheism, a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism" was conducted. The government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organized religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the propaganda campaign. Accordingly, although personal expressions of religious faith were not explicitly banned, a strong sense of social stigma was imposed on them by the formal structures and mass media, and it was generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. While persecution accelerated following Stalin's rise to power, a revival of Orthodoxy was fostered by the government during World War II and the Soviet authorities sought to control the Russian Orthodox Church rather than liquidate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence before World War I.Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, and with the looming threat of war, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during World War II. Amid other accommodations to religious faith after the German invasion, churches were reopened. Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius of Moscow was held in 1943. Stalin had the support of the majority of the religious people in the USSR even through the late 1980s. The general tendency of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all faiths.Under Nikita Khrushchev, the state leadership clashed with the churches in 1958–1964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. During this period, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1959 to 1965, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade.Religious institutions remained monitored by the Soviet government, but churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were all given more leeway in the Brezhnev era. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexy I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as "active religious believers."The legacy of the USSR remains a controversial topic. The socio-economic nature of communist states such as the USSR, especially under Stalin, has also been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.The USSR implemented a broad range of policies over a long period of time, with a large amount of conflicting policies being implemented by different leaders. Some have a positive view of it whilst others are critical towards the country, calling it a repressive oligarchy. The opinions on the USSR are complex and have changed over time, with different generations having different views on the matter as well as on Soviet policies corresponding to separate time periods during its history. Leftists have largely varying views on the USSR. Whilst some leftists such as anarchists and other libertarian socialists, agree it did not give the workers control over the means of production and was a centralized oligarchy, others have more positive opinions as to the Bolshevik policies and Vladimir Lenin. Many anti-Stalinist leftists such as anarchists are extremely critical of Soviet authoritarianism and repression. Much of the criticism it receives is centered around massacres in the Soviet Union, the centralized hierarchy present in the USSR and mass political repression as well as violence towards government critics and political dissidents such as other leftists. Critics also point towards its failure to implement any substantial worker cooperatives or implementing worker liberation as well as corruption and the Soviet authoritarian nature.Many Russians and other former Soviet citizens have nostalgia for the USSR, pointing towards most infrastructure being built during Soviet times, increased job security, increased literacy rate, increased caloric intake and supposed ethnic pluralism enacted in the Soviet Union as well as political stability. The Russian Revolution is also seen in a positive light as well as the leadership of Lenin, Nikita Khrushchev and the later USSR, although many view Joseph Stalin's rule as positive for the country. In Armenia, 12% of respondents said the USSR collapse did good, while 66% said it did harm. In Kyrgyzstan, 16% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did good, while 61% said it did harm. In a 2018 Rating Sociological Group poll, 47% of Ukrainian respondents had a positive opinion of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982. Much of the admiration of the USSR comes from the failings of the modern post-Soviet governments such as the control by oligarchs, corruption and outdated Soviet-era infrastructure as well as the rise and dominance of organised crime after the collapse of the USSR all directly leading into nostalgia for it.The 1941–45 period of World War II is still known in Russia as the "Great Patriotic War". The war became a topic of great importance in cinema, literature, history lessons at school, the mass media, and the arts. As a result of the massive losses suffered by the military and civilians during the conflict, Victory Day celebrated on 9 May is still one of the most important and emotional dates in Russia.In some post Soviet republics, there is a more negative view of the USSR, although there is no unanimity on the matter. In large part due to the Holodomor, ethnic Ukrainians have a negative view of it. Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Ukraine's southern and eastern regions have a more positive view of the USSR. In some countries with internal conflict, there is also nostalgia for the USSR, especially for refugees of the post-Soviet conflicts who have been forced to flee their homes and have been displaced. This nostalgia is less an admiration for the country or its policies than it is a longing to return to their homes and not to live in poverty. The many Russian enclaves in the former USSR republics such as Transnistria have in a general a positive remembrance of it.The left's view of the USSR is complex. While some leftists regard the USSR as an example of state capitalism or that it was an oligarchical state, other leftists admire Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution.Council communists generally view the USSR as failing to create class consciousness, turning into a corrupt state in which the elite controlled society. Anarchists are critical of the country, labeling the Soviet system as "red fascism". Soviets actively destroyed anarchist organizations and anarchist communities, labeling anarchists as "enemies of the people". Factors contributing to the animosity towards the USSR included: the Soviet invasion of the anarchist Free Territory, the suppression of the anarchist Kronstadt rebellion and the response to the Norilsk uprising, in which prisoners created a radical system of government based on cooperatives and direct democracy in the Gulag. Anarchist organizations and unions were also banned during the Spanish Civil War under the Republican government by orders from the Soviet government. Due to this, anarchists generally hold a large animosity towards the USSR.The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's existence. During the first decade following the revolution, there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, such as Nikolay Gumilyov who was shot for alleged conspiring against the Bolshevik regime, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. As a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, films received encouragement from the state, and much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.During Stalin's rule, the Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.Following the Khrushchev Thaw, censorship was diminished. During this time, a distinctive period of Soviet culture developed, characterized by conformist public life and an intense focus on personal life. Greater experimentation in art forms was again permissible, resulting in the production of more sophisticated and subtly critical work. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. Underground dissident literature, known as "samizdat", developed during this late period. In architecture, the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch. In music, in response to the increasing popularity of forms of popular music like jazz in the West, many jazz orchestras were permitted throughout the USSR, notably the Melodiya Ensemble, named after the principle record label in the USSR.In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of "perestroika" and "glasnost" significantly expanded freedom of expression throughout the country in the media and the press.Founded on 20 July 1924 in Moscow, "Sovetsky Sport" was the first sports newspaper of the Soviet Union.The Soviet Olympic Committee formed on 21 April 1951, and the IOC recognized the new body in its 45th session. In the same year, when the Soviet representative Konstantin Andrianov became an IOC member, the USSR officially joined the Olympic Movement. The 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki thus became first Olympic Games for Soviet athletes. The Soviet Union was the biggest rival to the United States at the Summer Olympics, winning six of its nine appearances at the games and also topping the medal tally at the Winter Olympics six times. The Soviet Union's Olympics success has been attributed to its large investment in sports to demonstrate its superpower image and political influence on a global stage.The Soviet Union national ice hockey team won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament between 1954 and 1991 and never failed to medal in any International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) tournament in which they competed.The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession – in reality, the state paid many of these competitors to train on a full-time basis. Nevertheless, the IOC held to the traditional rules regarding amateurism.A 1989 report by a committee of the Australian Senate claimed that "there is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner...who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might well have been called the Chemists' Games".A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those from sixteen gold medalists, would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings had the tests been official. The results of Donike's unofficial tests later convinced the IOC to add his new technique to their testing protocols. The first documented case of "blood doping" occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics when a runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5000 m and 10,000 m.Documentation obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dated before the decision to boycott the 1984 Games, the document detailed the existing steroids operations of the program, along with suggestions for further enhancements. Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture prepared the communication, directed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field. Portugalov later became one of the leading figures involved in the implementation of Russian doping before the 2016 Summer Olympics.Official Soviet environmental policy has always attached great importance to actions in which human beings actively improve nature. Lenin's quote "Communism is Soviet power and electrification of the country!" in many respects summarizes the focus on modernization and industrial development. During the first five-year plan in 1928, Stalin proceeded to industrialize the country at all costs. Values such as environmental and nature protection have been completely ignored in the struggle to create a modern industrial society. After Stalin's death, they focused more on environmental issues, but the basic perception of the value of environmental protection remained the same.The Soviet media has always focused on the vast expanse of land and the virtually indestructible natural resources. This made it feel that contamination and uncontrolled exploitation of nature were not a problem. The Soviet state also firmly believed that scientific and technological progress would solve all the problems. Official ideology said that under socialism environmental problems could easily be overcome, unlike capitalist countries, where they seemingly could not be solved. The Soviet authorities had an almost unwavering belief that man could transcend nature. However, when the authorities had to admit that there were environmental problems in the USSR in the 1980s, they explained the problems in such a way that socialism had not yet been fully developed; pollution in a socialist society was only a temporary anomaly that would have been resolved if socialism had developed.The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. Unparalleled in the world, it resulted in a large number of radioactive isotopes being released into the atmosphere. Radioactive doses have scattered relatively far. 4,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were reported after the incident, but this led to a relatively low number of deaths (WHO data, 2005). However, the long-term effects of the accident are unknown. Another major accident is the Kyshtym disaster.After the fall of the USSR, it was discovered that the environmental problems were greater than what the Soviet authorities admitted. The Kola Peninsula was one of the places with clear problems. Around the industrial cities of Monchegorsk and Norilsk, where nickel, for example, is mined, all forests have been destroyed by contamination, while the northern and other parts of Russia have been affected by emissions. During the 1990s, people in the West were also interested in the radioactive hazards of nuclear facilities, decommissioned nuclear submarines, and the processing of nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. It was also known in the early 1990s that the USSR had transported radioactive material to the Barents Sea and Kara Sea, which was later confirmed by the Russian parliament. The crash of the K-141 Kursk submarine in 2000 in the west further raised concerns. In the past, there were accidents involving submarines K-19, K-8, and K-129. | [
"Georgy Malenkov",
"Alexei Kosygin",
"Nikolai Ryzhkov",
"Nikita Khrushchev",
"Alexei Rykov",
"Ivan Silayev",
"Vladimir Lenin",
"Nikolai Bulganin",
"Nikolai Tikhonov",
"Vyacheslav Molotov",
"Valentin Pavlov"
] |
|
Who was the head of Soviet Union in Mar 13, 1947? | March 13, 1947 | {
"text": [
"Joseph Stalin"
]
} | L2_Q15180_P6_3 | Vladimir Lenin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jul, 1923 to Jan, 1924.
Vyacheslav Molotov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Dec, 1930 to May, 1941.
Nikita Khrushchev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1958 to Oct, 1964.
Nikolai Tikhonov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1980 to Sep, 1985.
Valentin Pavlov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jan, 1991 to Aug, 1991.
Alexei Rykov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1924 to Dec, 1930.
Nikolai Bulganin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1955 to Mar, 1958.
Nikolai Ryzhkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1985 to Jan, 1991.
Joseph Stalin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from May, 1941 to Mar, 1953.
Alexei Kosygin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1964 to Oct, 1980.
Georgy Malenkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1953 to Feb, 1955.
Ivan Silayev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1991 to Dec, 1991. | Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state that spanned most of Europe and Asia during its existence from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a federal union of multiple national republics; in practice its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years. The country was a one-party state prior to 1990 governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with Moscow as its capital within its largest and most populous republic, the Russian SFSR. Other major urban centers were Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk (Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR) and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over , and spanning eleven time zones. The Soviet Union's five biomes were tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, and mountains. Its diverse population was officially known as the Soviet people.The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the monarchy of the Russian Empire. They established the Russian Soviet Republic, beginning a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and many anti-Bolshevik forces across the former Empire, among whom the largest faction was the White Guard, which engaged in violent anti-communist repression against the Bolsheviks and their worker and peasant supporters known as the White Terror. The Red Army expanded and helped local Bolsheviks take power, establishing soviets, repressing their political opponents and rebellious peasants through Red Terror. By 1922, the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. The New Economic Policy (NEP), which was introduced by Lenin, led to a partial return of a free market and private property; this resulted in a period of economic recovery.Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin suppressed all political opposition to his rule inside the Communist Party and inaugurated a command economy. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, which led to significant economic growth, but also led to a man-made famine in 1932–1933 and expanded the Gulag labour camp system originally established in 1918. Stalin also fomented political paranoia and conducted the Great Purge to remove his actual and perceived opponents from the Party through mass arrests of military leaders, Communist Party members, and ordinary citizens alike, who were then sent to correctional labor camps or sentenced to death.On 23 August 1939, after unsuccessful efforts to form an anti-fascist alliance with Western powers, the Soviets signed the non-aggression agreement with Nazi Germany. After the start of World War II, the formally neutral Soviets invaded and annexed territories of several Eastern European states, including eastern Poland and the Baltic states. In June 1941 the Germans invaded, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the cost of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin and won World War II in Europe on 9 May 1945. The territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged in 1947 as a result of a post-war Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, where the Eastern Bloc confronted the Western Bloc that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period known as de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw occurred under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took an early lead in the Space Race with the first ever satellite and the first human spaceflight and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus. In the 1970s, there was a brief "détente" of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed when the Soviet Union deployed troops in Afghanistan in 1979. The war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters.In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to further reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of "glasnost" and "perestroika". The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing economic stagnation. The Cold War ended during his tenure and in 1989, Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective Marxist-Leninist regimes. Strong nationalist and separatist movements broke out across the USSR. Gorbachev initiated a referendum—boycotted by the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova—which resulted in the majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the Union as a renewed federation. In August 1991, a coup d'état was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a high-profile role in facing down the coup. The main result was the banning of the Communist Party. The republics led by Russia and Ukraine declared independence. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned. All the republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation (formerly the Russian SFSR) assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and is recognized as its continued legal personality in world affairs.The USSR produced many significant social and technological achievements and innovations regarding military power. It boasted the world's second-largest economy and the largest standing military in the world. The USSR was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states. It was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the OSCE, the WFTU and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.Before its dissolution, the USSR had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II. Sometimes also called "Soviet Empire", it exercised its hegemony in Eastern Europe and worldwide with military and economic strength, proxy conflicts and influence in developing countries and funding of scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The word "soviet" is derived from the Russian word "sovet" (), meaning "council", "assembly", "advice", ultimately deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of "vět-iti" ("to inform"), related to Slavic "věst" ("news"), English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or" (which came to English through French), or the Dutch "weten" ("to know"; cf. "wetenschap" meaning "science"). The word "sovietnik" means "councillor".Some organizations in Russian history were called "council" (). In the Russian Empire, the State Council which functioned from 1810 to 1917 was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905.During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union which he initially named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia (). Stalin initially resisted the proposal but ultimately accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), albeit all the republics began as "socialist soviet" and did not change to the other order until 1936. In addition, in the national languages of several republics, the word "council" or "conciliar" in the respective language was only quite late changed to an adaptation of the Russian "soviet" and never in others, e.g. Ukraine."СССР" (in Latin alphabet: "SSSR") is the abbreviation of USSR in Russian. It is written in Cyrillic letters. The Soviets used the Cyrillic abbreviation so frequently that audiences worldwide became familiar with its meaning. Notably, both Cyrillic letters used have homoglyphic (but transliterally distinct) letters in Latin alphabets. Because of widespread familiarity with the Cyrillic abbreviation, Latin alphabet users in particular almost always use the Latin homoglyphs "C" and "P" (as opposed to the transliteral Latin letters "S" and "R") when rendering the USSR's native abbreviation.After "СССР", the most common short form names for the Soviet state in Russian were "Советский Союз" (transliteration: "Sovetskiy Soyuz") which literally means "Soviet Union", and also "Союз ССР" (transliteration: "Soyuz SSR") which, after compensating for grammatical differences, essentially translates to "Union of SSR's" in English.In the English language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. In other European languages, the locally translated short forms and abbreviations are usually used such as "Union soviétique" and "URSS" in French, or "Sowjetunion" and "UdSSR" in German. In the English-speaking world, the Soviet Union was also informally called Russia and its citizens Russians, although that was technically incorrect since Russia was only one of the republics. Such misapplications of the linguistic equivalents to the term "Russia" and its derivatives were frequent in other languages as well.The Soviet Union covered an area of over , and was the world's largest country, a status that is retained by its successor state, Russia. It covered a sixth of Earth's land surface, and its size was comparable to the continent of North America. Its western part in Europe accounted for a quarter of the country's area and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and, except some areas in Central Asia, was much less populous. It spanned over east to west across eleven time zones, and over north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.The Soviet Union, similarly to Russia, had the world's longest border, measuring over , or circumferences of Earth. Two-thirds of it was a coastline. The country bordered Afghanistan, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Turkey from 1945 to 1991. The Bering Strait separated the country from the United States, while the La Pérouse Strait separated it from Japan.The Soviet Union's highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismoil Somoni Peak) in Tajik SSR, at . It also included most of the world's largest lakes; the Caspian Sea (shared with Iran), and Lake Baikal in Russia, the world's largest and deepest freshwater lake.Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament—the State Duma—was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but Tsar Nicholas II resisted attempts to move from absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities.A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to the wartime decay of Russia's economy and morale, culminated in the February Revolution and the toppling of Nicholas II and the imperial government in March 1917. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I.At the same time, workers' councils, known in Russian as "Soviets", sprang up across the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. On 7 November 1917, the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, ending the rule of the Provisional Government and leaving all political power to the Soviets. This event would later be officially known in Soviet bibliographies as the Great October Socialist Revolution. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets ended involvement in the war and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention, the execution of the former tsar and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million people. In March 1921, during a related conflict with Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly established republics of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania.On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the first Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky, and Alexander Chervyakov, on 30 December 1922. The formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of the country. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931. After the economic policy of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War, as a prelude to fully developing socialism in the country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s, and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax.From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The stated purpose was to prevent the return of capitalist exploitation, and that the principles of democratic centralism would be the most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. The debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a "troika" consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of the Ukrainian SSR, Lev Kamenev of the Russian SFSR, and Joseph Stalin of the Transcaucasian SFSR.On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the United Kingdom. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union. According to Archie Brown the constitution was never an accurate guide to political reality in the USSR. For example the fact that the Party played the leading role in making and enforcing policy was not mentioned in it until 1977. The USSR was a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities. However, the term "Soviet Russia"strictly applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republicwas often applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers.On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmanoeuvring his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the country and, by the end of the 1920s, established a totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin, forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country.Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor. Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the country developed a robust industrial economy in the years preceding World War II.Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two countries. In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new constitution that was praised by supporters around the world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many "Old Bolsheviks" who had participated in the October Revolution with Lenin. According to declassified Soviet archives, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot. Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a day.In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. The two countries concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement in August 1939. The former made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland, while the Soviets remained formally neutral. In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 starting what was known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Harry Hopkins, a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the USSR's decisive role in the war.In the same year, the USSR, in fulfilment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people. Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. During the war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four Allied powers, and later became the Four Policemen that formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council. It emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official relations with practically every country by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions.During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It took effective control over most of the countries of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania), turning them into satellite states. The USSR bound its satellite states in a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, and an economic organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon, a counterpart to the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991. The USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favor the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Communist Party of China, and its influence grew elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly in proxy wars.Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials initially opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy Malenkov. This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as the German invasion of 1941. For this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956.In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with the West, and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism, led to the Sino–Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist–Leninist movement, with the governments in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China.During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and technological exploits in the Space Race, rivaling the United States: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966; and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.Khrushchev initiated "The Thaw", a complex shift in political, cultural and economic life in the country. This included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing a dramatic rise in living standards while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. An agreement was made with the United States to remove nuclear missiles from both Cuba and Turkey, concluding the crisis. This event caused Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige, resulting in his removal from power in 1964.Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.In 1968, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt the Prague Spring reforms. In the aftermath, Brezhnev justified the invasion and previous military interventions as well as any potential military interventions in the future by introducing the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in a Warsaw Pact state as a threat to all Warsaw Pact states, therefore justifying military intervention.Brezhnev presided throughout "détente" with the West that resulted in treaties on armament control (SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of "standstill", with an ageing and ossified top political leadership. This period is also known as the Era of Stagnation, a period of adverse economic, political, and social effects in the country, which began during the rule of Brezhnev and continued under his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.In late 1979, the Soviet Union's military intervened in the ongoing civil war in neighboring Afghanistan, effectively ending a détente with the West.Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in "Beyond Oil" that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called "perestroika". His policy of "glasnost" freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-controlled regions came down.At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the "War of Laws". In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990.A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991.The remaining 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union. However, by December all except Russia and Kazakhstan had formally declared independence. During this time, Yeltsin took over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Moscow Kremlin. The final blow was struck on 1 December when Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine's secession ended any realistic chance of the country staying together even on a limited scale.On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place.The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body, voted both itself and the country out of existence. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state, and the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Army initially remained under overall CIS command but was soon absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states. The few remaining Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function by the end of 1991.Following the dissolution, Russia was internationally recognized as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed Soviet overseas properties as its own. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, Russia also agreed to receive all nuclear weapons remaining in the territory of other former Soviet republics. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations. Ukraine has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the USSR and claimed such status for Ukraine as well, which was codified in Articles 7 and 8 of its 1991 law On Legal Succession of Ukraine. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has continued to pursue claims against Russia in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property that was owned by the USSR.The dissolution was followed by a severe drop in economic and social conditions in post-Soviet states, including a rapid increase in poverty, crime, corruption, unemployment, homelessness, rates of disease, infant mortality and domestic violence, as well as demographic losses and income inequality and the rise of an oligarchical class, along with decreases in calorie intake, life expectancy, adult literacy, and income. Between 1988–1989 and 1993–1995, the Gini ratio increased by an average of 9 points for all former socialist countries. The economic shocks that accompanied wholesale privatization were associated with sharp increases in mortality. Data shows Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia saw a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between 1991 and 1994. In the following decades, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc.In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: "The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance." Before the dissolution, the country had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The analysis of the succession of states for the 15 post-Soviet states is complex. The Russian Federation is seen as the legal "continuator" state and is for most purposes the heir to the Soviet Union. It retained ownership of all former Soviet embassy properties, as well as the old Soviet UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council.Of the two other co-founding states of the USSR at the time of the dissolution, Ukraine was the only one that had passed laws, similar to Russia, that it is a state-successor of both the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR. Soviet treaties laid groundwork for Ukraine's future foreign agreements as well as they led to Ukraine agreeing to undertake 16.37% of debts of the Soviet Union for which it was going to receive its share of USSR's foreign property. Although it had a tough position at the time, due to Russia's position as a "single continuation of the USSR" that became widely accepted in the West as well as a constant pressure from the Western countries, allowed Russia to dispose state property of USSR abroad and conceal information about it. Due to that Ukraine never ratified "zero option" agreement that Russian Federation had signed with other former Soviet republics, as it denied disclosing of information about Soviet Gold Reserves and its Diamond Fund. The dispute over former Soviet property and assets between the two former republics is still ongoing:Similar situation occurred with restitution of cultural property. Although on 14 February 1992 Russia and other former Soviet republics signed agreement "On the return of cultural and historic property to the origin states" in Minsk, it was halted by Russian State Duma that had eventually passed "Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation" which made restitution currently impossible.There are additionally four states that claim independence from the other internationally recognised post-Soviet states but possess limited international recognition: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria. The Chechen separatist movement of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria lacks any international recognition.During his rule, Stalin always made the final policy decisions. Otherwise, Soviet foreign policy was set by the commission on the Foreign Policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or by the party's highest body the Politburo. Operations were handled by the separate Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was known as the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (or Narkomindel), until 1946. The most influential spokesmen were Georgy Chicherin (1872–1936), Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), Andrey Vyshinsky (1883–1954) and Andrei Gromyko (1909–1989). Intellectuals were based in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.The Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Soviet Union intensely debated foreign policy issues and change directions several times. Even after Stalin assumed dictatorial control in the late 1920s, there were debates, and he frequently changed positions.During the country's early period, it was assumed that Communist revolutions would break out soon in every major industrial country, and it was the Soviet responsibility to assist them. The Comintern was the weapon of choice. A few revolutions did break out, but they were quickly suppressed (the longest lasting one was in Hungary)—the Hungarian Soviet Republic—lasted only from 21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919. The Russian Bolsheviks were in no position to give any help.By 1921, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin realized that capitalism had stabilized itself in Europe and there would not be any widespread revolutions anytime soon. It became the duty of the Russian Bolsheviks to protect what they had in Russia, and avoid military confrontations that might destroy their bridgehead. Russia was now a pariah state, along with Germany. The two came to terms in 1922 with the Treaty of Rapallo that settled long-standing grievances. At the same time, the two countries secretly set up training programs for the illegal German army and air force operations at hidden camps in the USSR.Moscow eventually stopped threatening other states, and instead worked to open peaceful relationships in terms of trade, and diplomatic recognition. The United Kingdom dismissed the warnings of Winston Churchill and a few others about a continuing Marxist-Leninist threat, and opened trade relations and "de facto" diplomatic recognition in 1922. There was hope for a settlement of the pre-war Tsarist debts, but it was repeatedly postponed. Formal recognition came when the new Labour Party came to power in 1924. All the other countries followed suit in opening trade relations. Henry Ford opened large-scale business relations with the Soviets in the late 1920s, hoping that it would lead to long-term peace. Finally, in 1933, the United States officially recognized the USSR, a decision backed by the public opinion and especially by US business interests that expected an opening of a new profitable market.In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin ordered Marxist-Leninist parties across the world to strongly oppose non-Marxist political parties, labor unions or other organizations on the left. Stalin reversed himself in 1934 with the Popular Front program that called on all Marxist parties to join together with all anti-Fascist political, labor, and organizational forces that were opposed to fascism, especially of the Nazi variety.In 1939, half a year after the Munich Agreement, the USSR attempted to form an anti-Nazi alliance with France and Britain. Adolf Hitler proposed a better deal, which would give the USSR control over much of Eastern Europe through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In September, Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR also invaded later that month, resulting in the partition of Poland. In response, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II.There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislature represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the final policymaker in the country.At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. In turn, the Central Committee voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966), Secretariat and the General Secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the "de facto" highest office in the Soviet Union. Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941). They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state mainly through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin (1941–1953) and Khrushchev (1958–1964) were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership, but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.However, in practice the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party. Nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history, at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, its powers and functions were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers relating to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the government budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium (successor of the Central Executive Committee) to wield its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the Procurator General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.The state security police (the KGB and ) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Great Purge, but was brought under strict party control after Stalin's death. Under Yuri Andropov, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.The constitution, which was promulgated in 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers that represented executive and legislative branches of the government. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal, itself due to a decision by both the Politburo and the Central Committee. All leaders of the Communist Party before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party.Between 1988 and 1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, and much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government, now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.Tensions grew between the Union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and communist hardliners. On 19–21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt. The coup failed, and the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power "in the period of transition". Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Court) and applied the law as established by the constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defence attorney collaborate to establish the truth.Constitutionally, the USSR was a federation of constituent Union Republics, which were either unitary states, such as Ukraine or Byelorussia (SSRs), or federations, such as Russia or Transcaucasia (SFSRs), all four being the founding republics who signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR in December 1922. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were formed from parts of Russia's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan SSRs. In 1929, Tajikistan was split off from the Uzbekistan SSR. With the constitution of 1936, the Transcaucasian SFSR was dissolved, resulting in its constituent republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan being elevated to Union Republics, while Kazakhstan and Kirghizia were split off from Russian SFSR, resulting in the same status. In August 1940, Moldavia was formed from parts of Ukraine and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (SSRs) were also admitted into the union which was not recognized by most of the international community and was considered an illegal occupation. Karelia was split off from Russia as a Union Republic in March 1940 and was reabsorbed in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).While nominally a union of equals, in practice the Soviet Union was dominated by Russians. The domination was so absolute that for most of its existence, the country was commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as "Russia". While the RSFSR was technically only one republic within the larger union, it was by far the largest (both in terms of population and area), most powerful, most developed, and the industrial center of the Soviet Union. Historian Matthew White wrote that it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were usually called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show".Under the Military Law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Land Forces, the Air Force, the Navy, Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the Internal Troops. The OGPU later became independent and in 1934 joined the NKVD, and so its internal troops were under the joint leadership of the defense and internal commissariats. After World War II, Strategic Missile Forces (1959), Air Defense Forces (1948) and National Civil Defense Forces (1970) were formed, which ranked first, third, and sixth in the official Soviet system of importance (ground forces were second, Air Force Fourth, and Navy Fifth).The army had the greatest political influence. In 1989, there served two million soldiers divided between 150 motorized and 52 armored divisions. Until the early 1960s, the Soviet navy was a rather small military branch, but after the Caribbean crisis, under the leadership of Sergei Gorshkov, it expanded significantly. It became known for battlecruisers and submarines. In 1989 there served 500 000 men. The Soviet Air Force focused on a fleet of strategic bombers and during war situation was to eradicate enemy infrastructure and nuclear capacity. The air force also had a number of fighters and tactical bombers to support the army in the war. Strategic missile forces had more than 1,400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed between 28 bases and 300 command centers.In the post-war period, the Soviet Army was directly involved in several military operations abroad. These included the suppression of the uprising in East Germany (1953), Hungarian revolution (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). The Soviet Union also participated in the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied.At the end of the 1950s, with the help of engineers and technologies captured and imported from defeated Nazi Germany, the Soviets constructed the first satellite – Sputnik 1 and thus overtook the United States in terms of utilizing space. This was followed by other successful satellites, where test dogs flight was sent. On April 12, 1961, the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was sent to the space. He once flew around the Earth and successfully landed in the Kazakh steppe. At that time, the first plans for space shuttles and orbital stations were drawn up in Soviet design offices, but in the end personal disputes between designers and management prevented this.As for Lunar space program; USSR only had a program on automated spacecraft launches; with no manned spacecraft used; passing on the "Moon Race" part of Space Race.In the 1970s, specific proposals for the design of the space shuttle began to emerge, but shortcomings, especially in the electronics industry (rapid overheating of electronics), postponed the program until the end of the 1980s. The first shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988, but without a human crew. Another shuttle, "Ptichka", eventually ended up under construction, as the shuttle project was canceled in 1991. For their launch into space, there is today an unused superpower rocket, Energia, which is the most powerful in the world.In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union managed to build the "Mir" orbital station. It was built on the construction of "Salyut" stations and its only role was civilian-grade research tasks. The Soviet Union adopted a command economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of War communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate money circulation, private enterprises and free trade. After the severe economic collapse, Lenin replaced war communism by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, legalizing free trade and private ownership of small businesses. The economy quickly recovered as a result.After a long debate among the members of the Politburo about the course of economic development, by 1928–1929, upon gaining control of the country, Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which significantly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. The primary motivation for industrialization was preparation for war, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalist world. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. The war caused extensive devastation of the Soviet economy and infrastructure, which required massive reconstruction.By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of Comecon, only a tiny share of domestic products was traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. However, the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied for by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the USSR became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.From the 1930s until its dissolution in late 1991, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. However, in practice, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to "ad hoc" intervention by superiors. All critical economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were usually denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but widespread. The final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice they were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links (e.g. between producer factories) were widespread.A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and health care. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defence were prioritized over consumer goods. Consumer goods, particularly outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and limited variety. Under the command economy, consumers had almost no influence on production, and the changing demands of a population with growing incomes could not be satisfied by supplies at rigidly fixed prices. A massive unplanned second economy grew up at low levels alongside the planned one, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. The legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth difficult to estimate precisely, by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid-1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, it had comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West. However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock (the rate of capital increase was only surpassed by Japan).Overall, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1989 was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries). According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, growth could have been faster. By their calculation, per capita income in 1989 should have been twice higher than it was, considering the amount of investment, education and population. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital. Steven Rosenfielde states that the standard of living declined due to Stalin's despotism. While there was a brief improvement after his death, it lapsed into stagnation.In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of "perestroika". His policies relaxed state control over enterprises but did not replace it by market incentives, resulting in a sharp decline in output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and the property was still largely state-owned until after the country's dissolution. For most of the period after World War II until its collapse, Soviet GDP (PPP) was the second-largest in the world, and third during the second half of the 1980s, although on a per-capita basis, it was behind that of First World countries. Compared to countries with similar per-capita GDP in 1928, the Soviet Union experienced significant growth.In 1990, the country had a Human Development Index of 0.920, placing it in the "high" category of human development. It was the third-highest in the Eastern Bloc, behind Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the 25th in the world of 130 countries.The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s, both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6%. David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40% of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse. The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2–2.5% during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World.In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of for crude oil and another for natural gas. Petroleum and petroleum-based products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported. In the 1970s and 1980s, the USSR heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency. At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second-largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military. Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was upon its founding. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. In the early 1960s, the Soviets awarded 40% of chemistry PhDs to women, compared to only 5% in the United States. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World.Under the Reagan administration, Project Socrates determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different from what the US was using. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the USSR was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. This was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.Transport was a vital component of the country's economy. The economic centralization of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise. The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air. However, due to inadequate maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward compared to the First World.Soviet rail transport was the largest and most intensively used in the world; it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burdens from the railways and to improve the Soviet government budget. The street network and automotive industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common outside major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early-to-mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones. Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.The Soviet merchant navy was one of the largest in the world.Excess deaths throughout World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."The birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mainly due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The mortality rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanistion and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as mostly real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed, and researchers could delve into the real causes.Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in the 1930s), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms. However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a pronatalist era that lasted for decades.By 1917, Russia became the first great power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World War I and II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a 4:3 ratio. This contributed to the larger role women played in Russian society compared to other great powers at the time.Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar for Education of Soviet Russia. In the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. All left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand in the Soviet school system. Literate people were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. Throughout the 1930s, social mobility rose sharply, which has been attributed to reforms in education. In the aftermath of World War II, the country's educational system expanded dramatically, which had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in giving rise to the New Man. Citizens directly entering the workforce had the constitutional right to a job and to free vocational training.The education system was highly centralized and universally accessible to all citizens, with affirmative action for applicants from nations associated with cultural backwardness. However, as part of the general antisemitic policy, an unofficial Jewish quota was applied in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary. According to statistics from 1986, the number of higher education students per the population of 10,000 was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.The Soviet Union was an ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population of the country was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority of the population were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%).All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the father. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of Georgia, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who were all East Slavic and Orthodox, shared close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.Members of various ethnicities participated in legislative bodies. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality, ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the Soviet leadership, such as Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Podgorny or Andrei Gromyko. During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian "diaspora" in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million.In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet principle of health care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge, a revolutionary concept at the time. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. Before Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary, the Soviet healthcare system was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed, however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, during which the health care system was heavily criticized for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision. Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such successes as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the system's areas for improvement and felt that billions of Soviet rubles were squandered. After the revolution, life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic in itself was seen by some that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s when statistics indicated that the life expectancy briefly surpassed that of the United States. Life expectancy started to decline in the 1970s, possibly because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the matter. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was the highest while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.Soviet dental technology and dental health were considered notoriously bad. In 1991, the average 35-year-old had 12 to 14 cavities, fillings or missing teeth. Toothpaste was often not available, and toothbrushes did not conform to standards of modern dentistry.Under Lenin, the government gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was highly successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, it would attain "official language" status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore, their speakers were forced to have a second language. There are examples where the government retreated from this policy, most notably under Stalin where education was discontinued in languages that were not widespread. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During World War II, some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian "de facto" functioned as an official language, as the "language of interethnic communication" (), but only assumed the "de jure" status as the official national language in 1990.Christianity and Islam had the highest number of adherents among the religious citizens. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the largest Christian denomination. About 90% of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shias being concentrated in the Azerbaijan SSR. Smaller groups included Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant denominations (especially Baptists and Lutherans).Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the church of the monarchy and took part in carrying out official state functions. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a narrow interpretation of this right, and in fact utilized a range of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.The 1918 Council of People's Commissars decree establishing the Russian SFSR as a secular state also decreed that "the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general instruction are taught, is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may be taught religion privately." Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929 included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study. Both Christian and non-Christian establishments were shut down by the thousands in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, as many as 90% of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed.Under the doctrine of state atheism, a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism" was conducted. The government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organized religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the propaganda campaign. Accordingly, although personal expressions of religious faith were not explicitly banned, a strong sense of social stigma was imposed on them by the formal structures and mass media, and it was generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. While persecution accelerated following Stalin's rise to power, a revival of Orthodoxy was fostered by the government during World War II and the Soviet authorities sought to control the Russian Orthodox Church rather than liquidate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence before World War I.Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, and with the looming threat of war, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during World War II. Amid other accommodations to religious faith after the German invasion, churches were reopened. Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius of Moscow was held in 1943. Stalin had the support of the majority of the religious people in the USSR even through the late 1980s. The general tendency of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all faiths.Under Nikita Khrushchev, the state leadership clashed with the churches in 1958–1964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. During this period, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1959 to 1965, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade.Religious institutions remained monitored by the Soviet government, but churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were all given more leeway in the Brezhnev era. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexy I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as "active religious believers."The legacy of the USSR remains a controversial topic. The socio-economic nature of communist states such as the USSR, especially under Stalin, has also been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.The USSR implemented a broad range of policies over a long period of time, with a large amount of conflicting policies being implemented by different leaders. Some have a positive view of it whilst others are critical towards the country, calling it a repressive oligarchy. The opinions on the USSR are complex and have changed over time, with different generations having different views on the matter as well as on Soviet policies corresponding to separate time periods during its history. Leftists have largely varying views on the USSR. Whilst some leftists such as anarchists and other libertarian socialists, agree it did not give the workers control over the means of production and was a centralized oligarchy, others have more positive opinions as to the Bolshevik policies and Vladimir Lenin. Many anti-Stalinist leftists such as anarchists are extremely critical of Soviet authoritarianism and repression. Much of the criticism it receives is centered around massacres in the Soviet Union, the centralized hierarchy present in the USSR and mass political repression as well as violence towards government critics and political dissidents such as other leftists. Critics also point towards its failure to implement any substantial worker cooperatives or implementing worker liberation as well as corruption and the Soviet authoritarian nature.Many Russians and other former Soviet citizens have nostalgia for the USSR, pointing towards most infrastructure being built during Soviet times, increased job security, increased literacy rate, increased caloric intake and supposed ethnic pluralism enacted in the Soviet Union as well as political stability. The Russian Revolution is also seen in a positive light as well as the leadership of Lenin, Nikita Khrushchev and the later USSR, although many view Joseph Stalin's rule as positive for the country. In Armenia, 12% of respondents said the USSR collapse did good, while 66% said it did harm. In Kyrgyzstan, 16% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did good, while 61% said it did harm. In a 2018 Rating Sociological Group poll, 47% of Ukrainian respondents had a positive opinion of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982. Much of the admiration of the USSR comes from the failings of the modern post-Soviet governments such as the control by oligarchs, corruption and outdated Soviet-era infrastructure as well as the rise and dominance of organised crime after the collapse of the USSR all directly leading into nostalgia for it.The 1941–45 period of World War II is still known in Russia as the "Great Patriotic War". The war became a topic of great importance in cinema, literature, history lessons at school, the mass media, and the arts. As a result of the massive losses suffered by the military and civilians during the conflict, Victory Day celebrated on 9 May is still one of the most important and emotional dates in Russia.In some post Soviet republics, there is a more negative view of the USSR, although there is no unanimity on the matter. In large part due to the Holodomor, ethnic Ukrainians have a negative view of it. Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Ukraine's southern and eastern regions have a more positive view of the USSR. In some countries with internal conflict, there is also nostalgia for the USSR, especially for refugees of the post-Soviet conflicts who have been forced to flee their homes and have been displaced. This nostalgia is less an admiration for the country or its policies than it is a longing to return to their homes and not to live in poverty. The many Russian enclaves in the former USSR republics such as Transnistria have in a general a positive remembrance of it.The left's view of the USSR is complex. While some leftists regard the USSR as an example of state capitalism or that it was an oligarchical state, other leftists admire Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution.Council communists generally view the USSR as failing to create class consciousness, turning into a corrupt state in which the elite controlled society. Anarchists are critical of the country, labeling the Soviet system as "red fascism". Soviets actively destroyed anarchist organizations and anarchist communities, labeling anarchists as "enemies of the people". Factors contributing to the animosity towards the USSR included: the Soviet invasion of the anarchist Free Territory, the suppression of the anarchist Kronstadt rebellion and the response to the Norilsk uprising, in which prisoners created a radical system of government based on cooperatives and direct democracy in the Gulag. Anarchist organizations and unions were also banned during the Spanish Civil War under the Republican government by orders from the Soviet government. Due to this, anarchists generally hold a large animosity towards the USSR.The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's existence. During the first decade following the revolution, there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, such as Nikolay Gumilyov who was shot for alleged conspiring against the Bolshevik regime, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. As a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, films received encouragement from the state, and much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.During Stalin's rule, the Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.Following the Khrushchev Thaw, censorship was diminished. During this time, a distinctive period of Soviet culture developed, characterized by conformist public life and an intense focus on personal life. Greater experimentation in art forms was again permissible, resulting in the production of more sophisticated and subtly critical work. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. Underground dissident literature, known as "samizdat", developed during this late period. In architecture, the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch. In music, in response to the increasing popularity of forms of popular music like jazz in the West, many jazz orchestras were permitted throughout the USSR, notably the Melodiya Ensemble, named after the principle record label in the USSR.In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of "perestroika" and "glasnost" significantly expanded freedom of expression throughout the country in the media and the press.Founded on 20 July 1924 in Moscow, "Sovetsky Sport" was the first sports newspaper of the Soviet Union.The Soviet Olympic Committee formed on 21 April 1951, and the IOC recognized the new body in its 45th session. In the same year, when the Soviet representative Konstantin Andrianov became an IOC member, the USSR officially joined the Olympic Movement. The 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki thus became first Olympic Games for Soviet athletes. The Soviet Union was the biggest rival to the United States at the Summer Olympics, winning six of its nine appearances at the games and also topping the medal tally at the Winter Olympics six times. The Soviet Union's Olympics success has been attributed to its large investment in sports to demonstrate its superpower image and political influence on a global stage.The Soviet Union national ice hockey team won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament between 1954 and 1991 and never failed to medal in any International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) tournament in which they competed.The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession – in reality, the state paid many of these competitors to train on a full-time basis. Nevertheless, the IOC held to the traditional rules regarding amateurism.A 1989 report by a committee of the Australian Senate claimed that "there is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner...who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might well have been called the Chemists' Games".A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those from sixteen gold medalists, would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings had the tests been official. The results of Donike's unofficial tests later convinced the IOC to add his new technique to their testing protocols. The first documented case of "blood doping" occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics when a runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5000 m and 10,000 m.Documentation obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dated before the decision to boycott the 1984 Games, the document detailed the existing steroids operations of the program, along with suggestions for further enhancements. Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture prepared the communication, directed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field. Portugalov later became one of the leading figures involved in the implementation of Russian doping before the 2016 Summer Olympics.Official Soviet environmental policy has always attached great importance to actions in which human beings actively improve nature. Lenin's quote "Communism is Soviet power and electrification of the country!" in many respects summarizes the focus on modernization and industrial development. During the first five-year plan in 1928, Stalin proceeded to industrialize the country at all costs. Values such as environmental and nature protection have been completely ignored in the struggle to create a modern industrial society. After Stalin's death, they focused more on environmental issues, but the basic perception of the value of environmental protection remained the same.The Soviet media has always focused on the vast expanse of land and the virtually indestructible natural resources. This made it feel that contamination and uncontrolled exploitation of nature were not a problem. The Soviet state also firmly believed that scientific and technological progress would solve all the problems. Official ideology said that under socialism environmental problems could easily be overcome, unlike capitalist countries, where they seemingly could not be solved. The Soviet authorities had an almost unwavering belief that man could transcend nature. However, when the authorities had to admit that there were environmental problems in the USSR in the 1980s, they explained the problems in such a way that socialism had not yet been fully developed; pollution in a socialist society was only a temporary anomaly that would have been resolved if socialism had developed.The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. Unparalleled in the world, it resulted in a large number of radioactive isotopes being released into the atmosphere. Radioactive doses have scattered relatively far. 4,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were reported after the incident, but this led to a relatively low number of deaths (WHO data, 2005). However, the long-term effects of the accident are unknown. Another major accident is the Kyshtym disaster.After the fall of the USSR, it was discovered that the environmental problems were greater than what the Soviet authorities admitted. The Kola Peninsula was one of the places with clear problems. Around the industrial cities of Monchegorsk and Norilsk, where nickel, for example, is mined, all forests have been destroyed by contamination, while the northern and other parts of Russia have been affected by emissions. During the 1990s, people in the West were also interested in the radioactive hazards of nuclear facilities, decommissioned nuclear submarines, and the processing of nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. It was also known in the early 1990s that the USSR had transported radioactive material to the Barents Sea and Kara Sea, which was later confirmed by the Russian parliament. The crash of the K-141 Kursk submarine in 2000 in the west further raised concerns. In the past, there were accidents involving submarines K-19, K-8, and K-129. | [
"Georgy Malenkov",
"Alexei Kosygin",
"Nikolai Ryzhkov",
"Nikita Khrushchev",
"Alexei Rykov",
"Ivan Silayev",
"Vladimir Lenin",
"Nikolai Bulganin",
"Nikolai Tikhonov",
"Vyacheslav Molotov",
"Valentin Pavlov"
] |
|
Who was the head of Soviet Union in 03/13/1947? | March 13, 1947 | {
"text": [
"Joseph Stalin"
]
} | L2_Q15180_P6_3 | Vladimir Lenin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jul, 1923 to Jan, 1924.
Vyacheslav Molotov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Dec, 1930 to May, 1941.
Nikita Khrushchev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1958 to Oct, 1964.
Nikolai Tikhonov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1980 to Sep, 1985.
Valentin Pavlov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jan, 1991 to Aug, 1991.
Alexei Rykov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1924 to Dec, 1930.
Nikolai Bulganin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1955 to Mar, 1958.
Nikolai Ryzhkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1985 to Jan, 1991.
Joseph Stalin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from May, 1941 to Mar, 1953.
Alexei Kosygin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1964 to Oct, 1980.
Georgy Malenkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1953 to Feb, 1955.
Ivan Silayev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1991 to Dec, 1991. | Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state that spanned most of Europe and Asia during its existence from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a federal union of multiple national republics; in practice its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years. The country was a one-party state prior to 1990 governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with Moscow as its capital within its largest and most populous republic, the Russian SFSR. Other major urban centers were Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk (Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR) and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over , and spanning eleven time zones. The Soviet Union's five biomes were tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, and mountains. Its diverse population was officially known as the Soviet people.The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the monarchy of the Russian Empire. They established the Russian Soviet Republic, beginning a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and many anti-Bolshevik forces across the former Empire, among whom the largest faction was the White Guard, which engaged in violent anti-communist repression against the Bolsheviks and their worker and peasant supporters known as the White Terror. The Red Army expanded and helped local Bolsheviks take power, establishing soviets, repressing their political opponents and rebellious peasants through Red Terror. By 1922, the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. The New Economic Policy (NEP), which was introduced by Lenin, led to a partial return of a free market and private property; this resulted in a period of economic recovery.Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin suppressed all political opposition to his rule inside the Communist Party and inaugurated a command economy. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, which led to significant economic growth, but also led to a man-made famine in 1932–1933 and expanded the Gulag labour camp system originally established in 1918. Stalin also fomented political paranoia and conducted the Great Purge to remove his actual and perceived opponents from the Party through mass arrests of military leaders, Communist Party members, and ordinary citizens alike, who were then sent to correctional labor camps or sentenced to death.On 23 August 1939, after unsuccessful efforts to form an anti-fascist alliance with Western powers, the Soviets signed the non-aggression agreement with Nazi Germany. After the start of World War II, the formally neutral Soviets invaded and annexed territories of several Eastern European states, including eastern Poland and the Baltic states. In June 1941 the Germans invaded, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the cost of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin and won World War II in Europe on 9 May 1945. The territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged in 1947 as a result of a post-war Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, where the Eastern Bloc confronted the Western Bloc that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period known as de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw occurred under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took an early lead in the Space Race with the first ever satellite and the first human spaceflight and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus. In the 1970s, there was a brief "détente" of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed when the Soviet Union deployed troops in Afghanistan in 1979. The war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters.In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to further reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of "glasnost" and "perestroika". The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing economic stagnation. The Cold War ended during his tenure and in 1989, Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective Marxist-Leninist regimes. Strong nationalist and separatist movements broke out across the USSR. Gorbachev initiated a referendum—boycotted by the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova—which resulted in the majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the Union as a renewed federation. In August 1991, a coup d'état was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a high-profile role in facing down the coup. The main result was the banning of the Communist Party. The republics led by Russia and Ukraine declared independence. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned. All the republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation (formerly the Russian SFSR) assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and is recognized as its continued legal personality in world affairs.The USSR produced many significant social and technological achievements and innovations regarding military power. It boasted the world's second-largest economy and the largest standing military in the world. The USSR was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states. It was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the OSCE, the WFTU and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.Before its dissolution, the USSR had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II. Sometimes also called "Soviet Empire", it exercised its hegemony in Eastern Europe and worldwide with military and economic strength, proxy conflicts and influence in developing countries and funding of scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The word "soviet" is derived from the Russian word "sovet" (), meaning "council", "assembly", "advice", ultimately deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of "vět-iti" ("to inform"), related to Slavic "věst" ("news"), English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or" (which came to English through French), or the Dutch "weten" ("to know"; cf. "wetenschap" meaning "science"). The word "sovietnik" means "councillor".Some organizations in Russian history were called "council" (). In the Russian Empire, the State Council which functioned from 1810 to 1917 was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905.During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union which he initially named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia (). Stalin initially resisted the proposal but ultimately accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), albeit all the republics began as "socialist soviet" and did not change to the other order until 1936. In addition, in the national languages of several republics, the word "council" or "conciliar" in the respective language was only quite late changed to an adaptation of the Russian "soviet" and never in others, e.g. Ukraine."СССР" (in Latin alphabet: "SSSR") is the abbreviation of USSR in Russian. It is written in Cyrillic letters. The Soviets used the Cyrillic abbreviation so frequently that audiences worldwide became familiar with its meaning. Notably, both Cyrillic letters used have homoglyphic (but transliterally distinct) letters in Latin alphabets. Because of widespread familiarity with the Cyrillic abbreviation, Latin alphabet users in particular almost always use the Latin homoglyphs "C" and "P" (as opposed to the transliteral Latin letters "S" and "R") when rendering the USSR's native abbreviation.After "СССР", the most common short form names for the Soviet state in Russian were "Советский Союз" (transliteration: "Sovetskiy Soyuz") which literally means "Soviet Union", and also "Союз ССР" (transliteration: "Soyuz SSR") which, after compensating for grammatical differences, essentially translates to "Union of SSR's" in English.In the English language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. In other European languages, the locally translated short forms and abbreviations are usually used such as "Union soviétique" and "URSS" in French, or "Sowjetunion" and "UdSSR" in German. In the English-speaking world, the Soviet Union was also informally called Russia and its citizens Russians, although that was technically incorrect since Russia was only one of the republics. Such misapplications of the linguistic equivalents to the term "Russia" and its derivatives were frequent in other languages as well.The Soviet Union covered an area of over , and was the world's largest country, a status that is retained by its successor state, Russia. It covered a sixth of Earth's land surface, and its size was comparable to the continent of North America. Its western part in Europe accounted for a quarter of the country's area and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and, except some areas in Central Asia, was much less populous. It spanned over east to west across eleven time zones, and over north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.The Soviet Union, similarly to Russia, had the world's longest border, measuring over , or circumferences of Earth. Two-thirds of it was a coastline. The country bordered Afghanistan, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Turkey from 1945 to 1991. The Bering Strait separated the country from the United States, while the La Pérouse Strait separated it from Japan.The Soviet Union's highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismoil Somoni Peak) in Tajik SSR, at . It also included most of the world's largest lakes; the Caspian Sea (shared with Iran), and Lake Baikal in Russia, the world's largest and deepest freshwater lake.Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament—the State Duma—was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but Tsar Nicholas II resisted attempts to move from absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities.A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to the wartime decay of Russia's economy and morale, culminated in the February Revolution and the toppling of Nicholas II and the imperial government in March 1917. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I.At the same time, workers' councils, known in Russian as "Soviets", sprang up across the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. On 7 November 1917, the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, ending the rule of the Provisional Government and leaving all political power to the Soviets. This event would later be officially known in Soviet bibliographies as the Great October Socialist Revolution. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets ended involvement in the war and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention, the execution of the former tsar and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million people. In March 1921, during a related conflict with Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly established republics of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania.On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the first Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky, and Alexander Chervyakov, on 30 December 1922. The formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of the country. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931. After the economic policy of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War, as a prelude to fully developing socialism in the country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s, and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax.From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The stated purpose was to prevent the return of capitalist exploitation, and that the principles of democratic centralism would be the most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. The debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a "troika" consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of the Ukrainian SSR, Lev Kamenev of the Russian SFSR, and Joseph Stalin of the Transcaucasian SFSR.On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the United Kingdom. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union. According to Archie Brown the constitution was never an accurate guide to political reality in the USSR. For example the fact that the Party played the leading role in making and enforcing policy was not mentioned in it until 1977. The USSR was a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities. However, the term "Soviet Russia"strictly applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republicwas often applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers.On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmanoeuvring his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the country and, by the end of the 1920s, established a totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin, forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country.Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor. Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the country developed a robust industrial economy in the years preceding World War II.Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two countries. In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new constitution that was praised by supporters around the world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many "Old Bolsheviks" who had participated in the October Revolution with Lenin. According to declassified Soviet archives, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot. Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a day.In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. The two countries concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement in August 1939. The former made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland, while the Soviets remained formally neutral. In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 starting what was known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Harry Hopkins, a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the USSR's decisive role in the war.In the same year, the USSR, in fulfilment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people. Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. During the war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four Allied powers, and later became the Four Policemen that formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council. It emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official relations with practically every country by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions.During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It took effective control over most of the countries of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania), turning them into satellite states. The USSR bound its satellite states in a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, and an economic organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon, a counterpart to the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991. The USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favor the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Communist Party of China, and its influence grew elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly in proxy wars.Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials initially opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy Malenkov. This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as the German invasion of 1941. For this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956.In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with the West, and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism, led to the Sino–Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist–Leninist movement, with the governments in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China.During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and technological exploits in the Space Race, rivaling the United States: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966; and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.Khrushchev initiated "The Thaw", a complex shift in political, cultural and economic life in the country. This included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing a dramatic rise in living standards while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. An agreement was made with the United States to remove nuclear missiles from both Cuba and Turkey, concluding the crisis. This event caused Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige, resulting in his removal from power in 1964.Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.In 1968, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt the Prague Spring reforms. In the aftermath, Brezhnev justified the invasion and previous military interventions as well as any potential military interventions in the future by introducing the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in a Warsaw Pact state as a threat to all Warsaw Pact states, therefore justifying military intervention.Brezhnev presided throughout "détente" with the West that resulted in treaties on armament control (SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of "standstill", with an ageing and ossified top political leadership. This period is also known as the Era of Stagnation, a period of adverse economic, political, and social effects in the country, which began during the rule of Brezhnev and continued under his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.In late 1979, the Soviet Union's military intervened in the ongoing civil war in neighboring Afghanistan, effectively ending a détente with the West.Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in "Beyond Oil" that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called "perestroika". His policy of "glasnost" freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-controlled regions came down.At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the "War of Laws". In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990.A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991.The remaining 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union. However, by December all except Russia and Kazakhstan had formally declared independence. During this time, Yeltsin took over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Moscow Kremlin. The final blow was struck on 1 December when Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine's secession ended any realistic chance of the country staying together even on a limited scale.On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place.The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body, voted both itself and the country out of existence. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state, and the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Army initially remained under overall CIS command but was soon absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states. The few remaining Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function by the end of 1991.Following the dissolution, Russia was internationally recognized as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed Soviet overseas properties as its own. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, Russia also agreed to receive all nuclear weapons remaining in the territory of other former Soviet republics. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations. Ukraine has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the USSR and claimed such status for Ukraine as well, which was codified in Articles 7 and 8 of its 1991 law On Legal Succession of Ukraine. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has continued to pursue claims against Russia in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property that was owned by the USSR.The dissolution was followed by a severe drop in economic and social conditions in post-Soviet states, including a rapid increase in poverty, crime, corruption, unemployment, homelessness, rates of disease, infant mortality and domestic violence, as well as demographic losses and income inequality and the rise of an oligarchical class, along with decreases in calorie intake, life expectancy, adult literacy, and income. Between 1988–1989 and 1993–1995, the Gini ratio increased by an average of 9 points for all former socialist countries. The economic shocks that accompanied wholesale privatization were associated with sharp increases in mortality. Data shows Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia saw a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between 1991 and 1994. In the following decades, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc.In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: "The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance." Before the dissolution, the country had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The analysis of the succession of states for the 15 post-Soviet states is complex. The Russian Federation is seen as the legal "continuator" state and is for most purposes the heir to the Soviet Union. It retained ownership of all former Soviet embassy properties, as well as the old Soviet UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council.Of the two other co-founding states of the USSR at the time of the dissolution, Ukraine was the only one that had passed laws, similar to Russia, that it is a state-successor of both the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR. Soviet treaties laid groundwork for Ukraine's future foreign agreements as well as they led to Ukraine agreeing to undertake 16.37% of debts of the Soviet Union for which it was going to receive its share of USSR's foreign property. Although it had a tough position at the time, due to Russia's position as a "single continuation of the USSR" that became widely accepted in the West as well as a constant pressure from the Western countries, allowed Russia to dispose state property of USSR abroad and conceal information about it. Due to that Ukraine never ratified "zero option" agreement that Russian Federation had signed with other former Soviet republics, as it denied disclosing of information about Soviet Gold Reserves and its Diamond Fund. The dispute over former Soviet property and assets between the two former republics is still ongoing:Similar situation occurred with restitution of cultural property. Although on 14 February 1992 Russia and other former Soviet republics signed agreement "On the return of cultural and historic property to the origin states" in Minsk, it was halted by Russian State Duma that had eventually passed "Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation" which made restitution currently impossible.There are additionally four states that claim independence from the other internationally recognised post-Soviet states but possess limited international recognition: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria. The Chechen separatist movement of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria lacks any international recognition.During his rule, Stalin always made the final policy decisions. Otherwise, Soviet foreign policy was set by the commission on the Foreign Policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or by the party's highest body the Politburo. Operations were handled by the separate Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was known as the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (or Narkomindel), until 1946. The most influential spokesmen were Georgy Chicherin (1872–1936), Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), Andrey Vyshinsky (1883–1954) and Andrei Gromyko (1909–1989). Intellectuals were based in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.The Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Soviet Union intensely debated foreign policy issues and change directions several times. Even after Stalin assumed dictatorial control in the late 1920s, there were debates, and he frequently changed positions.During the country's early period, it was assumed that Communist revolutions would break out soon in every major industrial country, and it was the Soviet responsibility to assist them. The Comintern was the weapon of choice. A few revolutions did break out, but they were quickly suppressed (the longest lasting one was in Hungary)—the Hungarian Soviet Republic—lasted only from 21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919. The Russian Bolsheviks were in no position to give any help.By 1921, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin realized that capitalism had stabilized itself in Europe and there would not be any widespread revolutions anytime soon. It became the duty of the Russian Bolsheviks to protect what they had in Russia, and avoid military confrontations that might destroy their bridgehead. Russia was now a pariah state, along with Germany. The two came to terms in 1922 with the Treaty of Rapallo that settled long-standing grievances. At the same time, the two countries secretly set up training programs for the illegal German army and air force operations at hidden camps in the USSR.Moscow eventually stopped threatening other states, and instead worked to open peaceful relationships in terms of trade, and diplomatic recognition. The United Kingdom dismissed the warnings of Winston Churchill and a few others about a continuing Marxist-Leninist threat, and opened trade relations and "de facto" diplomatic recognition in 1922. There was hope for a settlement of the pre-war Tsarist debts, but it was repeatedly postponed. Formal recognition came when the new Labour Party came to power in 1924. All the other countries followed suit in opening trade relations. Henry Ford opened large-scale business relations with the Soviets in the late 1920s, hoping that it would lead to long-term peace. Finally, in 1933, the United States officially recognized the USSR, a decision backed by the public opinion and especially by US business interests that expected an opening of a new profitable market.In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin ordered Marxist-Leninist parties across the world to strongly oppose non-Marxist political parties, labor unions or other organizations on the left. Stalin reversed himself in 1934 with the Popular Front program that called on all Marxist parties to join together with all anti-Fascist political, labor, and organizational forces that were opposed to fascism, especially of the Nazi variety.In 1939, half a year after the Munich Agreement, the USSR attempted to form an anti-Nazi alliance with France and Britain. Adolf Hitler proposed a better deal, which would give the USSR control over much of Eastern Europe through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In September, Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR also invaded later that month, resulting in the partition of Poland. In response, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II.There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislature represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the final policymaker in the country.At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. In turn, the Central Committee voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966), Secretariat and the General Secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the "de facto" highest office in the Soviet Union. Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941). They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state mainly through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin (1941–1953) and Khrushchev (1958–1964) were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership, but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.However, in practice the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party. Nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history, at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, its powers and functions were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers relating to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the government budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium (successor of the Central Executive Committee) to wield its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the Procurator General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.The state security police (the KGB and ) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Great Purge, but was brought under strict party control after Stalin's death. Under Yuri Andropov, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.The constitution, which was promulgated in 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers that represented executive and legislative branches of the government. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal, itself due to a decision by both the Politburo and the Central Committee. All leaders of the Communist Party before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party.Between 1988 and 1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, and much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government, now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.Tensions grew between the Union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and communist hardliners. On 19–21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt. The coup failed, and the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power "in the period of transition". Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Court) and applied the law as established by the constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defence attorney collaborate to establish the truth.Constitutionally, the USSR was a federation of constituent Union Republics, which were either unitary states, such as Ukraine or Byelorussia (SSRs), or federations, such as Russia or Transcaucasia (SFSRs), all four being the founding republics who signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR in December 1922. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were formed from parts of Russia's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan SSRs. In 1929, Tajikistan was split off from the Uzbekistan SSR. With the constitution of 1936, the Transcaucasian SFSR was dissolved, resulting in its constituent republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan being elevated to Union Republics, while Kazakhstan and Kirghizia were split off from Russian SFSR, resulting in the same status. In August 1940, Moldavia was formed from parts of Ukraine and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (SSRs) were also admitted into the union which was not recognized by most of the international community and was considered an illegal occupation. Karelia was split off from Russia as a Union Republic in March 1940 and was reabsorbed in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).While nominally a union of equals, in practice the Soviet Union was dominated by Russians. The domination was so absolute that for most of its existence, the country was commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as "Russia". While the RSFSR was technically only one republic within the larger union, it was by far the largest (both in terms of population and area), most powerful, most developed, and the industrial center of the Soviet Union. Historian Matthew White wrote that it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were usually called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show".Under the Military Law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Land Forces, the Air Force, the Navy, Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the Internal Troops. The OGPU later became independent and in 1934 joined the NKVD, and so its internal troops were under the joint leadership of the defense and internal commissariats. After World War II, Strategic Missile Forces (1959), Air Defense Forces (1948) and National Civil Defense Forces (1970) were formed, which ranked first, third, and sixth in the official Soviet system of importance (ground forces were second, Air Force Fourth, and Navy Fifth).The army had the greatest political influence. In 1989, there served two million soldiers divided between 150 motorized and 52 armored divisions. Until the early 1960s, the Soviet navy was a rather small military branch, but after the Caribbean crisis, under the leadership of Sergei Gorshkov, it expanded significantly. It became known for battlecruisers and submarines. In 1989 there served 500 000 men. The Soviet Air Force focused on a fleet of strategic bombers and during war situation was to eradicate enemy infrastructure and nuclear capacity. The air force also had a number of fighters and tactical bombers to support the army in the war. Strategic missile forces had more than 1,400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed between 28 bases and 300 command centers.In the post-war period, the Soviet Army was directly involved in several military operations abroad. These included the suppression of the uprising in East Germany (1953), Hungarian revolution (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). The Soviet Union also participated in the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied.At the end of the 1950s, with the help of engineers and technologies captured and imported from defeated Nazi Germany, the Soviets constructed the first satellite – Sputnik 1 and thus overtook the United States in terms of utilizing space. This was followed by other successful satellites, where test dogs flight was sent. On April 12, 1961, the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was sent to the space. He once flew around the Earth and successfully landed in the Kazakh steppe. At that time, the first plans for space shuttles and orbital stations were drawn up in Soviet design offices, but in the end personal disputes between designers and management prevented this.As for Lunar space program; USSR only had a program on automated spacecraft launches; with no manned spacecraft used; passing on the "Moon Race" part of Space Race.In the 1970s, specific proposals for the design of the space shuttle began to emerge, but shortcomings, especially in the electronics industry (rapid overheating of electronics), postponed the program until the end of the 1980s. The first shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988, but without a human crew. Another shuttle, "Ptichka", eventually ended up under construction, as the shuttle project was canceled in 1991. For their launch into space, there is today an unused superpower rocket, Energia, which is the most powerful in the world.In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union managed to build the "Mir" orbital station. It was built on the construction of "Salyut" stations and its only role was civilian-grade research tasks. The Soviet Union adopted a command economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of War communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate money circulation, private enterprises and free trade. After the severe economic collapse, Lenin replaced war communism by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, legalizing free trade and private ownership of small businesses. The economy quickly recovered as a result.After a long debate among the members of the Politburo about the course of economic development, by 1928–1929, upon gaining control of the country, Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which significantly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. The primary motivation for industrialization was preparation for war, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalist world. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. The war caused extensive devastation of the Soviet economy and infrastructure, which required massive reconstruction.By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of Comecon, only a tiny share of domestic products was traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. However, the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied for by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the USSR became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.From the 1930s until its dissolution in late 1991, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. However, in practice, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to "ad hoc" intervention by superiors. All critical economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were usually denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but widespread. The final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice they were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links (e.g. between producer factories) were widespread.A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and health care. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defence were prioritized over consumer goods. Consumer goods, particularly outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and limited variety. Under the command economy, consumers had almost no influence on production, and the changing demands of a population with growing incomes could not be satisfied by supplies at rigidly fixed prices. A massive unplanned second economy grew up at low levels alongside the planned one, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. The legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth difficult to estimate precisely, by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid-1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, it had comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West. However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock (the rate of capital increase was only surpassed by Japan).Overall, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1989 was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries). According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, growth could have been faster. By their calculation, per capita income in 1989 should have been twice higher than it was, considering the amount of investment, education and population. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital. Steven Rosenfielde states that the standard of living declined due to Stalin's despotism. While there was a brief improvement after his death, it lapsed into stagnation.In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of "perestroika". His policies relaxed state control over enterprises but did not replace it by market incentives, resulting in a sharp decline in output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and the property was still largely state-owned until after the country's dissolution. For most of the period after World War II until its collapse, Soviet GDP (PPP) was the second-largest in the world, and third during the second half of the 1980s, although on a per-capita basis, it was behind that of First World countries. Compared to countries with similar per-capita GDP in 1928, the Soviet Union experienced significant growth.In 1990, the country had a Human Development Index of 0.920, placing it in the "high" category of human development. It was the third-highest in the Eastern Bloc, behind Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the 25th in the world of 130 countries.The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s, both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6%. David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40% of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse. The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2–2.5% during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World.In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of for crude oil and another for natural gas. Petroleum and petroleum-based products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported. In the 1970s and 1980s, the USSR heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency. At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second-largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military. Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was upon its founding. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. In the early 1960s, the Soviets awarded 40% of chemistry PhDs to women, compared to only 5% in the United States. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World.Under the Reagan administration, Project Socrates determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different from what the US was using. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the USSR was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. This was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.Transport was a vital component of the country's economy. The economic centralization of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise. The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air. However, due to inadequate maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward compared to the First World.Soviet rail transport was the largest and most intensively used in the world; it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burdens from the railways and to improve the Soviet government budget. The street network and automotive industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common outside major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early-to-mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones. Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.The Soviet merchant navy was one of the largest in the world.Excess deaths throughout World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."The birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mainly due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The mortality rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanistion and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as mostly real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed, and researchers could delve into the real causes.Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in the 1930s), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms. However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a pronatalist era that lasted for decades.By 1917, Russia became the first great power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World War I and II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a 4:3 ratio. This contributed to the larger role women played in Russian society compared to other great powers at the time.Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar for Education of Soviet Russia. In the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. All left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand in the Soviet school system. Literate people were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. Throughout the 1930s, social mobility rose sharply, which has been attributed to reforms in education. In the aftermath of World War II, the country's educational system expanded dramatically, which had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in giving rise to the New Man. Citizens directly entering the workforce had the constitutional right to a job and to free vocational training.The education system was highly centralized and universally accessible to all citizens, with affirmative action for applicants from nations associated with cultural backwardness. However, as part of the general antisemitic policy, an unofficial Jewish quota was applied in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary. According to statistics from 1986, the number of higher education students per the population of 10,000 was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.The Soviet Union was an ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population of the country was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority of the population were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%).All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the father. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of Georgia, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who were all East Slavic and Orthodox, shared close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.Members of various ethnicities participated in legislative bodies. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality, ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the Soviet leadership, such as Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Podgorny or Andrei Gromyko. During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian "diaspora" in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million.In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet principle of health care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge, a revolutionary concept at the time. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. Before Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary, the Soviet healthcare system was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed, however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, during which the health care system was heavily criticized for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision. Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such successes as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the system's areas for improvement and felt that billions of Soviet rubles were squandered. After the revolution, life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic in itself was seen by some that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s when statistics indicated that the life expectancy briefly surpassed that of the United States. Life expectancy started to decline in the 1970s, possibly because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the matter. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was the highest while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.Soviet dental technology and dental health were considered notoriously bad. In 1991, the average 35-year-old had 12 to 14 cavities, fillings or missing teeth. Toothpaste was often not available, and toothbrushes did not conform to standards of modern dentistry.Under Lenin, the government gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was highly successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, it would attain "official language" status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore, their speakers were forced to have a second language. There are examples where the government retreated from this policy, most notably under Stalin where education was discontinued in languages that were not widespread. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During World War II, some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian "de facto" functioned as an official language, as the "language of interethnic communication" (), but only assumed the "de jure" status as the official national language in 1990.Christianity and Islam had the highest number of adherents among the religious citizens. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the largest Christian denomination. About 90% of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shias being concentrated in the Azerbaijan SSR. Smaller groups included Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant denominations (especially Baptists and Lutherans).Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the church of the monarchy and took part in carrying out official state functions. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a narrow interpretation of this right, and in fact utilized a range of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.The 1918 Council of People's Commissars decree establishing the Russian SFSR as a secular state also decreed that "the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general instruction are taught, is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may be taught religion privately." Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929 included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study. Both Christian and non-Christian establishments were shut down by the thousands in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, as many as 90% of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed.Under the doctrine of state atheism, a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism" was conducted. The government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organized religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the propaganda campaign. Accordingly, although personal expressions of religious faith were not explicitly banned, a strong sense of social stigma was imposed on them by the formal structures and mass media, and it was generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. While persecution accelerated following Stalin's rise to power, a revival of Orthodoxy was fostered by the government during World War II and the Soviet authorities sought to control the Russian Orthodox Church rather than liquidate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence before World War I.Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, and with the looming threat of war, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during World War II. Amid other accommodations to religious faith after the German invasion, churches were reopened. Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius of Moscow was held in 1943. Stalin had the support of the majority of the religious people in the USSR even through the late 1980s. The general tendency of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all faiths.Under Nikita Khrushchev, the state leadership clashed with the churches in 1958–1964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. During this period, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1959 to 1965, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade.Religious institutions remained monitored by the Soviet government, but churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were all given more leeway in the Brezhnev era. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexy I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as "active religious believers."The legacy of the USSR remains a controversial topic. The socio-economic nature of communist states such as the USSR, especially under Stalin, has also been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.The USSR implemented a broad range of policies over a long period of time, with a large amount of conflicting policies being implemented by different leaders. Some have a positive view of it whilst others are critical towards the country, calling it a repressive oligarchy. The opinions on the USSR are complex and have changed over time, with different generations having different views on the matter as well as on Soviet policies corresponding to separate time periods during its history. Leftists have largely varying views on the USSR. Whilst some leftists such as anarchists and other libertarian socialists, agree it did not give the workers control over the means of production and was a centralized oligarchy, others have more positive opinions as to the Bolshevik policies and Vladimir Lenin. Many anti-Stalinist leftists such as anarchists are extremely critical of Soviet authoritarianism and repression. Much of the criticism it receives is centered around massacres in the Soviet Union, the centralized hierarchy present in the USSR and mass political repression as well as violence towards government critics and political dissidents such as other leftists. Critics also point towards its failure to implement any substantial worker cooperatives or implementing worker liberation as well as corruption and the Soviet authoritarian nature.Many Russians and other former Soviet citizens have nostalgia for the USSR, pointing towards most infrastructure being built during Soviet times, increased job security, increased literacy rate, increased caloric intake and supposed ethnic pluralism enacted in the Soviet Union as well as political stability. The Russian Revolution is also seen in a positive light as well as the leadership of Lenin, Nikita Khrushchev and the later USSR, although many view Joseph Stalin's rule as positive for the country. In Armenia, 12% of respondents said the USSR collapse did good, while 66% said it did harm. In Kyrgyzstan, 16% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did good, while 61% said it did harm. In a 2018 Rating Sociological Group poll, 47% of Ukrainian respondents had a positive opinion of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982. Much of the admiration of the USSR comes from the failings of the modern post-Soviet governments such as the control by oligarchs, corruption and outdated Soviet-era infrastructure as well as the rise and dominance of organised crime after the collapse of the USSR all directly leading into nostalgia for it.The 1941–45 period of World War II is still known in Russia as the "Great Patriotic War". The war became a topic of great importance in cinema, literature, history lessons at school, the mass media, and the arts. As a result of the massive losses suffered by the military and civilians during the conflict, Victory Day celebrated on 9 May is still one of the most important and emotional dates in Russia.In some post Soviet republics, there is a more negative view of the USSR, although there is no unanimity on the matter. In large part due to the Holodomor, ethnic Ukrainians have a negative view of it. Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Ukraine's southern and eastern regions have a more positive view of the USSR. In some countries with internal conflict, there is also nostalgia for the USSR, especially for refugees of the post-Soviet conflicts who have been forced to flee their homes and have been displaced. This nostalgia is less an admiration for the country or its policies than it is a longing to return to their homes and not to live in poverty. The many Russian enclaves in the former USSR republics such as Transnistria have in a general a positive remembrance of it.The left's view of the USSR is complex. While some leftists regard the USSR as an example of state capitalism or that it was an oligarchical state, other leftists admire Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution.Council communists generally view the USSR as failing to create class consciousness, turning into a corrupt state in which the elite controlled society. Anarchists are critical of the country, labeling the Soviet system as "red fascism". Soviets actively destroyed anarchist organizations and anarchist communities, labeling anarchists as "enemies of the people". Factors contributing to the animosity towards the USSR included: the Soviet invasion of the anarchist Free Territory, the suppression of the anarchist Kronstadt rebellion and the response to the Norilsk uprising, in which prisoners created a radical system of government based on cooperatives and direct democracy in the Gulag. Anarchist organizations and unions were also banned during the Spanish Civil War under the Republican government by orders from the Soviet government. Due to this, anarchists generally hold a large animosity towards the USSR.The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's existence. During the first decade following the revolution, there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, such as Nikolay Gumilyov who was shot for alleged conspiring against the Bolshevik regime, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. As a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, films received encouragement from the state, and much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.During Stalin's rule, the Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.Following the Khrushchev Thaw, censorship was diminished. During this time, a distinctive period of Soviet culture developed, characterized by conformist public life and an intense focus on personal life. Greater experimentation in art forms was again permissible, resulting in the production of more sophisticated and subtly critical work. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. Underground dissident literature, known as "samizdat", developed during this late period. In architecture, the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch. In music, in response to the increasing popularity of forms of popular music like jazz in the West, many jazz orchestras were permitted throughout the USSR, notably the Melodiya Ensemble, named after the principle record label in the USSR.In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of "perestroika" and "glasnost" significantly expanded freedom of expression throughout the country in the media and the press.Founded on 20 July 1924 in Moscow, "Sovetsky Sport" was the first sports newspaper of the Soviet Union.The Soviet Olympic Committee formed on 21 April 1951, and the IOC recognized the new body in its 45th session. In the same year, when the Soviet representative Konstantin Andrianov became an IOC member, the USSR officially joined the Olympic Movement. The 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki thus became first Olympic Games for Soviet athletes. The Soviet Union was the biggest rival to the United States at the Summer Olympics, winning six of its nine appearances at the games and also topping the medal tally at the Winter Olympics six times. The Soviet Union's Olympics success has been attributed to its large investment in sports to demonstrate its superpower image and political influence on a global stage.The Soviet Union national ice hockey team won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament between 1954 and 1991 and never failed to medal in any International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) tournament in which they competed.The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession – in reality, the state paid many of these competitors to train on a full-time basis. Nevertheless, the IOC held to the traditional rules regarding amateurism.A 1989 report by a committee of the Australian Senate claimed that "there is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner...who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might well have been called the Chemists' Games".A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those from sixteen gold medalists, would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings had the tests been official. The results of Donike's unofficial tests later convinced the IOC to add his new technique to their testing protocols. The first documented case of "blood doping" occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics when a runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5000 m and 10,000 m.Documentation obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dated before the decision to boycott the 1984 Games, the document detailed the existing steroids operations of the program, along with suggestions for further enhancements. Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture prepared the communication, directed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field. Portugalov later became one of the leading figures involved in the implementation of Russian doping before the 2016 Summer Olympics.Official Soviet environmental policy has always attached great importance to actions in which human beings actively improve nature. Lenin's quote "Communism is Soviet power and electrification of the country!" in many respects summarizes the focus on modernization and industrial development. During the first five-year plan in 1928, Stalin proceeded to industrialize the country at all costs. Values such as environmental and nature protection have been completely ignored in the struggle to create a modern industrial society. After Stalin's death, they focused more on environmental issues, but the basic perception of the value of environmental protection remained the same.The Soviet media has always focused on the vast expanse of land and the virtually indestructible natural resources. This made it feel that contamination and uncontrolled exploitation of nature were not a problem. The Soviet state also firmly believed that scientific and technological progress would solve all the problems. Official ideology said that under socialism environmental problems could easily be overcome, unlike capitalist countries, where they seemingly could not be solved. The Soviet authorities had an almost unwavering belief that man could transcend nature. However, when the authorities had to admit that there were environmental problems in the USSR in the 1980s, they explained the problems in such a way that socialism had not yet been fully developed; pollution in a socialist society was only a temporary anomaly that would have been resolved if socialism had developed.The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. Unparalleled in the world, it resulted in a large number of radioactive isotopes being released into the atmosphere. Radioactive doses have scattered relatively far. 4,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were reported after the incident, but this led to a relatively low number of deaths (WHO data, 2005). However, the long-term effects of the accident are unknown. Another major accident is the Kyshtym disaster.After the fall of the USSR, it was discovered that the environmental problems were greater than what the Soviet authorities admitted. The Kola Peninsula was one of the places with clear problems. Around the industrial cities of Monchegorsk and Norilsk, where nickel, for example, is mined, all forests have been destroyed by contamination, while the northern and other parts of Russia have been affected by emissions. During the 1990s, people in the West were also interested in the radioactive hazards of nuclear facilities, decommissioned nuclear submarines, and the processing of nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. It was also known in the early 1990s that the USSR had transported radioactive material to the Barents Sea and Kara Sea, which was later confirmed by the Russian parliament. The crash of the K-141 Kursk submarine in 2000 in the west further raised concerns. In the past, there were accidents involving submarines K-19, K-8, and K-129. | [
"Georgy Malenkov",
"Alexei Kosygin",
"Nikolai Ryzhkov",
"Nikita Khrushchev",
"Alexei Rykov",
"Ivan Silayev",
"Vladimir Lenin",
"Nikolai Bulganin",
"Nikolai Tikhonov",
"Vyacheslav Molotov",
"Valentin Pavlov"
] |
|
Who was the head of Soviet Union in 13-Mar-194713-March-1947? | March 13, 1947 | {
"text": [
"Joseph Stalin"
]
} | L2_Q15180_P6_3 | Vladimir Lenin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jul, 1923 to Jan, 1924.
Vyacheslav Molotov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Dec, 1930 to May, 1941.
Nikita Khrushchev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1958 to Oct, 1964.
Nikolai Tikhonov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1980 to Sep, 1985.
Valentin Pavlov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Jan, 1991 to Aug, 1991.
Alexei Rykov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1924 to Dec, 1930.
Nikolai Bulganin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Feb, 1955 to Mar, 1958.
Nikolai Ryzhkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1985 to Jan, 1991.
Joseph Stalin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from May, 1941 to Mar, 1953.
Alexei Kosygin is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Oct, 1964 to Oct, 1980.
Georgy Malenkov is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Mar, 1953 to Feb, 1955.
Ivan Silayev is the head of the government of Soviet Union from Sep, 1991 to Dec, 1991. | Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was a socialist state that spanned most of Europe and Asia during its existence from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a federal union of multiple national republics; in practice its government and economy were highly centralized until its final years. The country was a one-party state prior to 1990 governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with Moscow as its capital within its largest and most populous republic, the Russian SFSR. Other major urban centers were Leningrad (Russian SFSR), Kiev (Ukrainian SSR), Minsk (Byelorussian SSR), Tashkent (Uzbek SSR), Alma-Ata (Kazakh SSR) and Novosibirsk (Russian SFSR). It was the largest country in the world, covering over , and spanning eleven time zones. The Soviet Union's five biomes were tundra, taiga, steppes, desert, and mountains. Its diverse population was officially known as the Soviet people.The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 when the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Provisional Government that had earlier replaced the monarchy of the Russian Empire. They established the Russian Soviet Republic, beginning a civil war between the Bolshevik Red Army and many anti-Bolshevik forces across the former Empire, among whom the largest faction was the White Guard, which engaged in violent anti-communist repression against the Bolsheviks and their worker and peasant supporters known as the White Terror. The Red Army expanded and helped local Bolsheviks take power, establishing soviets, repressing their political opponents and rebellious peasants through Red Terror. By 1922, the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. The New Economic Policy (NEP), which was introduced by Lenin, led to a partial return of a free market and private property; this resulted in a period of economic recovery.Following Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin came to power. Stalin suppressed all political opposition to his rule inside the Communist Party and inaugurated a command economy. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, which led to significant economic growth, but also led to a man-made famine in 1932–1933 and expanded the Gulag labour camp system originally established in 1918. Stalin also fomented political paranoia and conducted the Great Purge to remove his actual and perceived opponents from the Party through mass arrests of military leaders, Communist Party members, and ordinary citizens alike, who were then sent to correctional labor camps or sentenced to death.On 23 August 1939, after unsuccessful efforts to form an anti-fascist alliance with Western powers, the Soviets signed the non-aggression agreement with Nazi Germany. After the start of World War II, the formally neutral Soviets invaded and annexed territories of several Eastern European states, including eastern Poland and the Baltic states. In June 1941 the Germans invaded, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the cost of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin and won World War II in Europe on 9 May 1945. The territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged in 1947 as a result of a post-war Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, where the Eastern Bloc confronted the Western Bloc that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949.Following Stalin's death in 1953, a period known as de-Stalinization and the Khrushchev Thaw occurred under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took an early lead in the Space Race with the first ever satellite and the first human spaceflight and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus. In the 1970s, there was a brief "détente" of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed when the Soviet Union deployed troops in Afghanistan in 1979. The war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters.In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to further reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of "glasnost" and "perestroika". The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing economic stagnation. The Cold War ended during his tenure and in 1989, Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective Marxist-Leninist regimes. Strong nationalist and separatist movements broke out across the USSR. Gorbachev initiated a referendum—boycotted by the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova—which resulted in the majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the Union as a renewed federation. In August 1991, a coup d'état was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a high-profile role in facing down the coup. The main result was the banning of the Communist Party. The republics led by Russia and Ukraine declared independence. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned. All the republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states. The Russian Federation (formerly the Russian SFSR) assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and is recognized as its continued legal personality in world affairs.The USSR produced many significant social and technological achievements and innovations regarding military power. It boasted the world's second-largest economy and the largest standing military in the world. The USSR was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states. It was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the OSCE, the WFTU and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.Before its dissolution, the USSR had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II. Sometimes also called "Soviet Empire", it exercised its hegemony in Eastern Europe and worldwide with military and economic strength, proxy conflicts and influence in developing countries and funding of scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The word "soviet" is derived from the Russian word "sovet" (), meaning "council", "assembly", "advice", ultimately deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of "vět-iti" ("to inform"), related to Slavic "věst" ("news"), English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or" (which came to English through French), or the Dutch "weten" ("to know"; cf. "wetenschap" meaning "science"). The word "sovietnik" means "councillor".Some organizations in Russian history were called "council" (). In the Russian Empire, the State Council which functioned from 1810 to 1917 was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905.During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union which he initially named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia (). Stalin initially resisted the proposal but ultimately accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), albeit all the republics began as "socialist soviet" and did not change to the other order until 1936. In addition, in the national languages of several republics, the word "council" or "conciliar" in the respective language was only quite late changed to an adaptation of the Russian "soviet" and never in others, e.g. Ukraine."СССР" (in Latin alphabet: "SSSR") is the abbreviation of USSR in Russian. It is written in Cyrillic letters. The Soviets used the Cyrillic abbreviation so frequently that audiences worldwide became familiar with its meaning. Notably, both Cyrillic letters used have homoglyphic (but transliterally distinct) letters in Latin alphabets. Because of widespread familiarity with the Cyrillic abbreviation, Latin alphabet users in particular almost always use the Latin homoglyphs "C" and "P" (as opposed to the transliteral Latin letters "S" and "R") when rendering the USSR's native abbreviation.After "СССР", the most common short form names for the Soviet state in Russian were "Советский Союз" (transliteration: "Sovetskiy Soyuz") which literally means "Soviet Union", and also "Союз ССР" (transliteration: "Soyuz SSR") which, after compensating for grammatical differences, essentially translates to "Union of SSR's" in English.In the English language media, the state was referred to as the Soviet Union or the USSR. In other European languages, the locally translated short forms and abbreviations are usually used such as "Union soviétique" and "URSS" in French, or "Sowjetunion" and "UdSSR" in German. In the English-speaking world, the Soviet Union was also informally called Russia and its citizens Russians, although that was technically incorrect since Russia was only one of the republics. Such misapplications of the linguistic equivalents to the term "Russia" and its derivatives were frequent in other languages as well.The Soviet Union covered an area of over , and was the world's largest country, a status that is retained by its successor state, Russia. It covered a sixth of Earth's land surface, and its size was comparable to the continent of North America. Its western part in Europe accounted for a quarter of the country's area and was the cultural and economic center. The eastern part in Asia extended to the Pacific Ocean to the east and Afghanistan to the south, and, except some areas in Central Asia, was much less populous. It spanned over east to west across eleven time zones, and over north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, taiga, steppes, desert and mountains.The Soviet Union, similarly to Russia, had the world's longest border, measuring over , or circumferences of Earth. Two-thirds of it was a coastline. The country bordered Afghanistan, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Mongolia, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, and Turkey from 1945 to 1991. The Bering Strait separated the country from the United States, while the La Pérouse Strait separated it from Japan.The Soviet Union's highest mountain was Communism Peak (now Ismoil Somoni Peak) in Tajik SSR, at . It also included most of the world's largest lakes; the Caspian Sea (shared with Iran), and Lake Baikal in Russia, the world's largest and deepest freshwater lake.Modern revolutionary activity in the Russian Empire began with the 1825 Decembrist revolt. Although serfdom was abolished in 1861, it was done on terms unfavorable to the peasants and served to encourage revolutionaries. A parliament—the State Duma—was established in 1906 after the Russian Revolution of 1905, but Tsar Nicholas II resisted attempts to move from absolute to a constitutional monarchy. Social unrest continued and was aggravated during World War I by military defeat and food shortages in major cities.A spontaneous popular uprising in Petrograd, in response to the wartime decay of Russia's economy and morale, culminated in the February Revolution and the toppling of Nicholas II and the imperial government in March 1917. The tsarist autocracy was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government, which intended to conduct elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly and to continue fighting on the side of the Entente in World War I.At the same time, workers' councils, known in Russian as "Soviets", sprang up across the country. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution in the Soviets and on the streets. On 7 November 1917, the Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd, ending the rule of the Provisional Government and leaving all political power to the Soviets. This event would later be officially known in Soviet bibliographies as the Great October Socialist Revolution. In December, the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Central Powers, though by February 1918, fighting had resumed. In March, the Soviets ended involvement in the war and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.A long and bloody Civil War ensued between the Reds and the Whites, starting in 1917 and ending in 1923 with the Reds' victory. It included foreign intervention, the execution of the former tsar and his family, and the famine of 1921, which killed about five million people. In March 1921, during a related conflict with Poland, the Peace of Riga was signed, splitting disputed territories in Belarus and Ukraine between the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia had to resolve similar conflicts with the newly established republics of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania.On 28 December 1922, a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These two documents were confirmed by the first Congress of Soviets of the USSR and signed by the heads of the delegations, Mikhail Kalinin, Mikhail Tskhakaya, Mikhail Frunze, Grigory Petrovsky, and Alexander Chervyakov, on 30 December 1922. The formal proclamation was made from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre.An intensive restructuring of the economy, industry and politics of the country began in the early days of Soviet power in 1917. A large part of this was done according to the Bolshevik Initial Decrees, government documents signed by Vladimir Lenin. One of the most prominent breakthroughs was the GOELRO plan, which envisioned a major restructuring of the Soviet economy based on total electrification of the country. The plan became the prototype for subsequent Five-Year Plans and was fulfilled by 1931. After the economic policy of "War communism" during the Russian Civil War, as a prelude to fully developing socialism in the country, the Soviet government permitted some private enterprise to coexist alongside nationalized industry in the 1920s, and total food requisition in the countryside was replaced by a food tax.From its creation, the government in the Soviet Union was based on the one-party rule of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The stated purpose was to prevent the return of capitalist exploitation, and that the principles of democratic centralism would be the most effective in representing the people's will in a practical manner. The debate over the future of the economy provided the background for a power struggle in the years after Lenin's death in 1924. Initially, Lenin was to be replaced by a "troika" consisting of Grigory Zinoviev of the Ukrainian SSR, Lev Kamenev of the Russian SFSR, and Joseph Stalin of the Transcaucasian SFSR.On 1 February 1924, the USSR was recognized by the United Kingdom. The same year, a Soviet Constitution was approved, legitimizing the December 1922 union. According to Archie Brown the constitution was never an accurate guide to political reality in the USSR. For example the fact that the Party played the leading role in making and enforcing policy was not mentioned in it until 1977. The USSR was a federative entity of many constituent republics, each with its own political and administrative entities. However, the term "Soviet Russia"strictly applicable only to the Russian Federative Socialist Republicwas often applied to the entire country by non-Soviet writers.On 3 April 1922, Stalin was named the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Lenin had appointed Stalin the head of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which gave Stalin considerable power. By gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmanoeuvring his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the country and, by the end of the 1920s, established a totalitarian rule. In October 1927, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky were expelled from the Central Committee and forced into exile.In 1928, Stalin introduced the first five-year plan for building a socialist economy. In place of the internationalism expressed by Lenin throughout the Revolution, it aimed to build Socialism in One Country. In industry, the state assumed control over all existing enterprises and undertook an intensive program of industrialization. In agriculture, rather than adhering to the "lead by example" policy advocated by Lenin, forced collectivization of farms was implemented all over the country.Famines ensued as a result, causing deaths estimated at three to seven million; surviving kulaks were persecuted, and many were sent to Gulags to do forced labor. Social upheaval continued in the mid-1930s. Despite the turmoil of the mid-to-late 1930s, the country developed a robust industrial economy in the years preceding World War II.Closer cooperation between the USSR and the West developed in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, the country participated in the World Disarmament Conference. In 1933, diplomatic relations between the United States and the USSR were established when in November, the newly elected President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to recognize Stalin's Communist government formally and negotiated a new trade agreement between the two countries. In September 1934, the country joined the League of Nations. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the USSR actively supported the Republican forces against the Nationalists, who were supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.In December 1936, Stalin unveiled a new constitution that was praised by supporters around the world as the most democratic constitution imaginable, though there was some skepticism. Stalin's Great Purge resulted in the detainment or execution of many "Old Bolsheviks" who had participated in the October Revolution with Lenin. According to declassified Soviet archives, the NKVD arrested more than one and a half million people in 1937 and 1938, of whom 681,692 were shot. Over those two years, there were an average of over one thousand executions a day.In 1939, after attempts to form a military alliance with Britain and France against Germany failed, the Soviet Union made a dramatic shift towards Nazi Germany. Almost a year after Britain and France had concluded the Munich Agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union made agreements with Germany as well, both militarily and economically during extensive talks. The two countries concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement in August 1939. The former made possible the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland, while the Soviets remained formally neutral. In late November, unable to coerce the Republic of Finland by diplomatic means into moving its border back from Leningrad, Stalin ordered the invasion of Finland. In the east, the Soviet military won several decisive victories during border clashes with the Empire of Japan in 1938 and 1939. However, in April 1941, the USSR signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact with Japan, recognizing the territorial integrity of Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state.Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 starting what was known in the USSR as the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army stopped the seemingly invincible German Army at the Battle of Moscow. The Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from late 1942 to early 1943, dealt a severe blow to Germany from which they never fully recovered and became a turning point in the war. After Stalingrad, Soviet forces drove through Eastern Europe to Berlin before Germany surrendered in 1945. The German Army suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. Harry Hopkins, a close foreign policy advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke on 10 August 1943 of the USSR's decisive role in the war.In the same year, the USSR, in fulfilment of its agreement with the Allies at the Yalta Conference, denounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1945 and invaded Manchukuo and other Japan-controlled territories on 9 August 1945. This conflict ended with a decisive Soviet victory, contributing to the unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World War II.The USSR suffered greatly in the war, losing around 27 million people. Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions in just eight months of 1941–42. During the war, the country together with the United States, the United Kingdom and China were considered the Big Four Allied powers, and later became the Four Policemen that formed the basis of the United Nations Security Council. It emerged as a superpower in the post-war period. Once denied diplomatic recognition by the Western world, the USSR had official relations with practically every country by the late 1940s. A member of the United Nations at its foundation in 1945, the country became one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, which gave it the right to veto any of its resolutions.During the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union rebuilt and expanded its economy, while maintaining its strictly centralized control. It took effective control over most of the countries of Eastern Europe (except Yugoslavia and later Albania), turning them into satellite states. The USSR bound its satellite states in a military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955, and an economic organization, Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or Comecon, a counterpart to the European Economic Community (EEC), from 1949 to 1991. The USSR concentrated on its own recovery, seizing and transferring most of Germany's industrial plants, and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It also instituted trading arrangements deliberately designed to favor the country. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Later, the Comecon supplied aid to the eventually victorious Communist Party of China, and its influence grew elsewhere in the world. Fearing its ambitions, the Soviet Union's wartime allies, the United Kingdom and the United States, became its enemies. In the ensuing Cold War, the two sides clashed indirectly in proxy wars.Stalin died on 5 March 1953. Without a mutually agreeable successor, the highest Communist Party officials initially opted to rule the Soviet Union jointly through a troika headed by Georgy Malenkov. This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a critically vital buffer zone for the forward defence of its western borders, in case of another major invasion such as the German invasion of 1941. For this reason, the USSR sought to cement its control of the region by transforming the Eastern European countries into satellite states, dependent upon and subservient to its leadership. As a result, Soviet military forces were used to suppress an anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956.In the late 1950s, a confrontation with China regarding the Soviet rapprochement with the West, and what Mao Zedong perceived as Khrushchev's revisionism, led to the Sino–Soviet split. This resulted in a break throughout the global Marxist–Leninist movement, with the governments in Albania, Cambodia and Somalia choosing to ally with China.During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR continued to realize scientific and technological exploits in the Space Race, rivaling the United States: launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957; a living dog named Laika in 1957; the first human being, Yuri Gagarin in 1961; the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963; Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space in 1965; the first soft landing on the Moon by spacecraft Luna 9 in 1966; and the first Moon rovers, Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2.Khrushchev initiated "The Thaw", a complex shift in political, cultural and economic life in the country. This included some openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing a dramatic rise in living standards while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Khrushchev's reforms in agriculture and administration, however, were generally unproductive. In 1962, he precipitated a crisis with the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. An agreement was made with the United States to remove nuclear missiles from both Cuba and Turkey, concluding the crisis. This event caused Khrushchev much embarrassment and loss of prestige, resulting in his removal from power in 1964.Following the ousting of Khrushchev, another period of collective leadership ensued, consisting of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary, Alexei Kosygin as Premier and Nikolai Podgorny as Chairman of the Presidium, lasting until Brezhnev established himself in the early 1970s as the preeminent Soviet leader.In 1968, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt the Prague Spring reforms. In the aftermath, Brezhnev justified the invasion and previous military interventions as well as any potential military interventions in the future by introducing the Brezhnev Doctrine, which proclaimed any threat to socialist rule in a Warsaw Pact state as a threat to all Warsaw Pact states, therefore justifying military intervention.Brezhnev presided throughout "détente" with the West that resulted in treaties on armament control (SALT I, SALT II, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) while at the same time building up Soviet military might.In October 1977, the third Soviet Constitution was unanimously adopted. The prevailing mood of the Soviet leadership at the time of Brezhnev's death in 1982 was one of aversion to change. The long period of Brezhnev's rule had come to be dubbed one of "standstill", with an ageing and ossified top political leadership. This period is also known as the Era of Stagnation, a period of adverse economic, political, and social effects in the country, which began during the rule of Brezhnev and continued under his successors Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.In late 1979, the Soviet Union's military intervened in the ongoing civil war in neighboring Afghanistan, effectively ending a détente with the West.Two developments dominated the decade that followed: the increasingly apparent crumbling of the Soviet Union's economic and political structures, and the patchwork attempts at reforms to reverse that process. Kenneth S. Deffeyes argued in "Beyond Oil" that the Reagan administration encouraged Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil to the point where the Soviets could not make a profit selling their oil, and resulted in the depletion of the country's hard currency reserves.Brezhnev's next two successors, transitional figures with deep roots in his tradition, did not last long. Yuri Andropov was 68 years old and Konstantin Chernenko 72 when they assumed power; both died in less than two years. In an attempt to avoid a third short-lived leader, in 1985, the Soviets turned to the next generation and selected Mikhail Gorbachev. He made significant changes in the economy and party leadership, called "perestroika". His policy of "glasnost" freed public access to information after decades of heavy government censorship. Gorbachev also moved to end the Cold War. In 1988, the USSR abandoned its war in Afghanistan and began to withdraw its forces. In the following year, Gorbachev refused to interfere in the internal affairs of the Soviet satellite states, which paved the way for the Revolutions of 1989. In particular, the standstill of the Soviet Union at the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 then set a peaceful chain reaction in motion at the end of which the Eastern Bloc collapsed. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and with East and West Germany pursuing unification, the Iron Curtain between the West and Soviet-controlled regions came down.At the same time, the Soviet republics started legal moves towards potentially declaring sovereignty over their territories, citing the freedom to secede in Article 72 of the USSR constitution. On 7 April 1990, a law was passed allowing a republic to secede if more than two-thirds of its residents voted for it in a referendum. Many held their first free elections in the Soviet era for their own national legislatures in 1990. Many of these legislatures proceeded to produce legislation contradicting the Union laws in what was known as the "War of Laws". In 1989, the Russian SFSR convened a newly elected Congress of People's Deputies. Boris Yeltsin was elected its chairman. On 12 June 1990, the Congress declared Russia's sovereignty over its territory and proceeded to pass laws that attempted to supersede some of the Soviet laws. After a landslide victory of Sąjūdis in Lithuania, that country declared its independence restored on 11 March 1990.A referendum for the preservation of the USSR was held on 17 March 1991 in nine republics (the remainder having boycotted the vote), with the majority of the population in those republics voting for preservation of the Union. The referendum gave Gorbachev a minor boost. In the summer of 1991, the New Union Treaty, which would have turned the country into a much looser Union, was agreed upon by eight republics. The signing of the treaty, however, was interrupted by the August Coup—an attempted coup d'état by hardline members of the government and the KGB who sought to reverse Gorbachev's reforms and reassert the central government's control over the republics. After the coup collapsed, Yeltsin was seen as a hero for his decisive actions, while Gorbachev's power was effectively ended. The balance of power tipped significantly towards the republics. In August 1991, Latvia and Estonia immediately declared the restoration of their full independence (following Lithuania's 1990 example). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in late August, and soon afterwards, the party's activities were indefinitely suspended—effectively ending its rule. By the fall, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow, and he was being challenged even there by Yeltsin, who had been elected President of Russia in July 1991.The remaining 12 republics continued discussing new, increasingly looser, models of the Union. However, by December all except Russia and Kazakhstan had formally declared independence. During this time, Yeltsin took over what remained of the Soviet government, including the Moscow Kremlin. The final blow was struck on 1 December when Ukraine, the second-most powerful republic, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Ukraine's secession ended any realistic chance of the country staying together even on a limited scale.On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union dissolved and established the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. While doubts remained over the authority of the accords to do this, on 21 December 1991, the representatives of all Soviet republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, which confirmed the accords. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the President of the USSR, declaring the office extinct. He turned the powers that had been vested in the presidency over to Yeltsin. That night, the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time, and the Russian tricolor was raised in its place.The following day, the Supreme Soviet, the highest governmental body, voted both itself and the country out of existence. This is generally recognized as marking the official, final dissolution of the Soviet Union as a functioning state, and the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Army initially remained under overall CIS command but was soon absorbed into the different military forces of the newly independent states. The few remaining Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function by the end of 1991.Following the dissolution, Russia was internationally recognized as its legal successor on the international stage. To that end, Russia voluntarily accepted all Soviet foreign debt and claimed Soviet overseas properties as its own. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol, Russia also agreed to receive all nuclear weapons remaining in the territory of other former Soviet republics. Since then, the Russian Federation has assumed the Soviet Union's rights and obligations. Ukraine has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the USSR and claimed such status for Ukraine as well, which was codified in Articles 7 and 8 of its 1991 law On Legal Succession of Ukraine. Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine has continued to pursue claims against Russia in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property that was owned by the USSR.The dissolution was followed by a severe drop in economic and social conditions in post-Soviet states, including a rapid increase in poverty, crime, corruption, unemployment, homelessness, rates of disease, infant mortality and domestic violence, as well as demographic losses and income inequality and the rise of an oligarchical class, along with decreases in calorie intake, life expectancy, adult literacy, and income. Between 1988–1989 and 1993–1995, the Gini ratio increased by an average of 9 points for all former socialist countries. The economic shocks that accompanied wholesale privatization were associated with sharp increases in mortality. Data shows Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia saw a tripling of unemployment and a 42% increase in male death rates between 1991 and 1994. In the following decades, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take over fifty years to catch up to where they were before the fall of the Soviet Bloc.In summing up the international ramifications of these events, Vladislav Zubok stated: "The collapse of the Soviet empire was an event of epochal geopolitical, military, ideological, and economic significance." Before the dissolution, the country had maintained its status as one of the world's two superpowers for four decades after World War II through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, economic strength, aid to developing countries, and scientific research, especially in space technology and weaponry.The analysis of the succession of states for the 15 post-Soviet states is complex. The Russian Federation is seen as the legal "continuator" state and is for most purposes the heir to the Soviet Union. It retained ownership of all former Soviet embassy properties, as well as the old Soviet UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council.Of the two other co-founding states of the USSR at the time of the dissolution, Ukraine was the only one that had passed laws, similar to Russia, that it is a state-successor of both the Ukrainian SSR and the USSR. Soviet treaties laid groundwork for Ukraine's future foreign agreements as well as they led to Ukraine agreeing to undertake 16.37% of debts of the Soviet Union for which it was going to receive its share of USSR's foreign property. Although it had a tough position at the time, due to Russia's position as a "single continuation of the USSR" that became widely accepted in the West as well as a constant pressure from the Western countries, allowed Russia to dispose state property of USSR abroad and conceal information about it. Due to that Ukraine never ratified "zero option" agreement that Russian Federation had signed with other former Soviet republics, as it denied disclosing of information about Soviet Gold Reserves and its Diamond Fund. The dispute over former Soviet property and assets between the two former republics is still ongoing:Similar situation occurred with restitution of cultural property. Although on 14 February 1992 Russia and other former Soviet republics signed agreement "On the return of cultural and historic property to the origin states" in Minsk, it was halted by Russian State Duma that had eventually passed "Federal Law on Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR as a Result of the Second World War and Located on the Territory of the Russian Federation" which made restitution currently impossible.There are additionally four states that claim independence from the other internationally recognised post-Soviet states but possess limited international recognition: Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transnistria. The Chechen separatist movement of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria lacks any international recognition.During his rule, Stalin always made the final policy decisions. Otherwise, Soviet foreign policy was set by the commission on the Foreign Policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or by the party's highest body the Politburo. Operations were handled by the separate Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was known as the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (or Narkomindel), until 1946. The most influential spokesmen were Georgy Chicherin (1872–1936), Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), Andrey Vyshinsky (1883–1954) and Andrei Gromyko (1909–1989). Intellectuals were based in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.The Marxist-Leninist leadership of the Soviet Union intensely debated foreign policy issues and change directions several times. Even after Stalin assumed dictatorial control in the late 1920s, there were debates, and he frequently changed positions.During the country's early period, it was assumed that Communist revolutions would break out soon in every major industrial country, and it was the Soviet responsibility to assist them. The Comintern was the weapon of choice. A few revolutions did break out, but they were quickly suppressed (the longest lasting one was in Hungary)—the Hungarian Soviet Republic—lasted only from 21 March 1919 to 1 August 1919. The Russian Bolsheviks were in no position to give any help.By 1921, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin realized that capitalism had stabilized itself in Europe and there would not be any widespread revolutions anytime soon. It became the duty of the Russian Bolsheviks to protect what they had in Russia, and avoid military confrontations that might destroy their bridgehead. Russia was now a pariah state, along with Germany. The two came to terms in 1922 with the Treaty of Rapallo that settled long-standing grievances. At the same time, the two countries secretly set up training programs for the illegal German army and air force operations at hidden camps in the USSR.Moscow eventually stopped threatening other states, and instead worked to open peaceful relationships in terms of trade, and diplomatic recognition. The United Kingdom dismissed the warnings of Winston Churchill and a few others about a continuing Marxist-Leninist threat, and opened trade relations and "de facto" diplomatic recognition in 1922. There was hope for a settlement of the pre-war Tsarist debts, but it was repeatedly postponed. Formal recognition came when the new Labour Party came to power in 1924. All the other countries followed suit in opening trade relations. Henry Ford opened large-scale business relations with the Soviets in the late 1920s, hoping that it would lead to long-term peace. Finally, in 1933, the United States officially recognized the USSR, a decision backed by the public opinion and especially by US business interests that expected an opening of a new profitable market.In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stalin ordered Marxist-Leninist parties across the world to strongly oppose non-Marxist political parties, labor unions or other organizations on the left. Stalin reversed himself in 1934 with the Popular Front program that called on all Marxist parties to join together with all anti-Fascist political, labor, and organizational forces that were opposed to fascism, especially of the Nazi variety.In 1939, half a year after the Munich Agreement, the USSR attempted to form an anti-Nazi alliance with France and Britain. Adolf Hitler proposed a better deal, which would give the USSR control over much of Eastern Europe through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In September, Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR also invaded later that month, resulting in the partition of Poland. In response, Britain and France declared war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II.There were three power hierarchies in the Soviet Union: the legislature represented by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the government represented by the Council of Ministers, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the only legal party and the final policymaker in the country.At the top of the Communist Party was the Central Committee, elected at Party Congresses and Conferences. In turn, the Central Committee voted for a Politburo (called the Presidium between 1952 and 1966), Secretariat and the General Secretary (First Secretary from 1953 to 1966), the "de facto" highest office in the Soviet Union. Depending on the degree of power consolidation, it was either the Politburo as a collective body or the General Secretary, who always was one of the Politburo members, that effectively led the party and the country (except for the period of the highly personalized authority of Stalin, exercised directly through his position in the Council of Ministers rather than the Politburo after 1941). They were not controlled by the general party membership, as the key principle of the party organization was democratic centralism, demanding strict subordination to higher bodies, and elections went uncontested, endorsing the candidates proposed from above.The Communist Party maintained its dominance over the state mainly through its control over the system of appointments. All senior government officials and most deputies of the Supreme Soviet were members of the CPSU. Of the party heads themselves, Stalin (1941–1953) and Khrushchev (1958–1964) were Premiers. Upon the forced retirement of Khrushchev, the party leader was prohibited from this kind of double membership, but the later General Secretaries for at least some part of their tenure occupied the mostly ceremonial position of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal head of state. The institutions at lower levels were overseen and at times supplanted by primary party organizations.However, in practice the degree of control the party was able to exercise over the state bureaucracy, particularly after the death of Stalin, was far from total, with the bureaucracy pursuing different interests that were at times in conflict with the party. Nor was the party itself monolithic from top to bottom, although factions were officially banned.The Supreme Soviet (successor of the Congress of Soviets) was nominally the highest state body for most of the Soviet history, at first acting as a rubber stamp institution, approving and implementing all decisions made by the party. However, its powers and functions were extended in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the creation of new state commissions and committees. It gained additional powers relating to the approval of the Five-Year Plans and the government budget. The Supreme Soviet elected a Presidium (successor of the Central Executive Committee) to wield its power between plenary sessions, ordinarily held twice a year, and appointed the Supreme Court, the Procurator General and the Council of Ministers (known before 1946 as the Council of People's Commissars), headed by the Chairman (Premier) and managing an enormous bureaucracy responsible for the administration of the economy and society. State and party structures of the constituent republics largely emulated the structure of the central institutions, although the Russian SFSR, unlike the other constituent republics, for most of its history had no republican branch of the CPSU, being ruled directly by the union-wide party until 1990. Local authorities were organized likewise into party committees, local Soviets and executive committees. While the state system was nominally federal, the party was unitary.The state security police (the KGB and ) played an important role in Soviet politics. It was instrumental in the Great Purge, but was brought under strict party control after Stalin's death. Under Yuri Andropov, the KGB engaged in the suppression of political dissent and maintained an extensive network of informers, reasserting itself as a political actor to some extent independent of the party-state structure, culminating in the anti-corruption campaign targeting high-ranking party officials in the late 1970s and early 1980s.The constitution, which was promulgated in 1924, 1936 and 1977, did not limit state power. No formal separation of powers existed between the Party, Supreme Soviet and Council of Ministers that represented executive and legislative branches of the government. The system was governed less by statute than by informal conventions, and no settled mechanism of leadership succession existed. Bitter and at times deadly power struggles took place in the Politburo after the deaths of Lenin and Stalin, as well as after Khrushchev's dismissal, itself due to a decision by both the Politburo and the Central Committee. All leaders of the Communist Party before Gorbachev died in office, except Georgy Malenkov and Khrushchev, both dismissed from the party leadership amid internal struggle within the party.Between 1988 and 1990, facing considerable opposition, Mikhail Gorbachev enacted reforms shifting power away from the highest bodies of the party and making the Supreme Soviet less dependent on them. The Congress of People's Deputies was established, the majority of whose members were directly elected in competitive elections held in March 1989. The Congress now elected the Supreme Soviet, which became a full-time parliament, and much stronger than before. For the first time since the 1920s, it refused to rubber stamp proposals from the party and Council of Ministers. In 1990, Gorbachev introduced and assumed the position of the President of the Soviet Union, concentrated power in his executive office, independent of the party, and subordinated the government, now renamed the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, to himself.Tensions grew between the Union-wide authorities under Gorbachev, reformists led in Russia by Boris Yeltsin and controlling the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, and communist hardliners. On 19–21 August 1991, a group of hardliners staged a coup attempt. The coup failed, and the State Council of the Soviet Union became the highest organ of state power "in the period of transition". Gorbachev resigned as General Secretary, only remaining President for the final months of the existence of the USSR.The judiciary was not independent of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court supervised the lower courts (People's Court) and applied the law as established by the constitution or as interpreted by the Supreme Soviet. The Constitutional Oversight Committee reviewed the constitutionality of laws and acts. The Soviet Union used the inquisitorial system of Roman law, where the judge, procurator, and defence attorney collaborate to establish the truth.Constitutionally, the USSR was a federation of constituent Union Republics, which were either unitary states, such as Ukraine or Byelorussia (SSRs), or federations, such as Russia or Transcaucasia (SFSRs), all four being the founding republics who signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR in December 1922. In 1924, during the national delimitation in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan were formed from parts of Russia's Turkestan ASSR and two Soviet dependencies, the Khorezm and Bukharan SSRs. In 1929, Tajikistan was split off from the Uzbekistan SSR. With the constitution of 1936, the Transcaucasian SFSR was dissolved, resulting in its constituent republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan being elevated to Union Republics, while Kazakhstan and Kirghizia were split off from Russian SFSR, resulting in the same status. In August 1940, Moldavia was formed from parts of Ukraine and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (SSRs) were also admitted into the union which was not recognized by most of the international community and was considered an illegal occupation. Karelia was split off from Russia as a Union Republic in March 1940 and was reabsorbed in 1956. Between July 1956 and September 1991, there were 15 union republics (see map below).While nominally a union of equals, in practice the Soviet Union was dominated by Russians. The domination was so absolute that for most of its existence, the country was commonly (but incorrectly) referred to as "Russia". While the RSFSR was technically only one republic within the larger union, it was by far the largest (both in terms of population and area), most powerful, most developed, and the industrial center of the Soviet Union. Historian Matthew White wrote that it was an open secret that the country's federal structure was "window dressing" for Russian dominance. For that reason, the people of the USSR were usually called "Russians", not "Soviets", since "everyone knew who really ran the show".Under the Military Law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Land Forces, the Air Force, the Navy, Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the Internal Troops. The OGPU later became independent and in 1934 joined the NKVD, and so its internal troops were under the joint leadership of the defense and internal commissariats. After World War II, Strategic Missile Forces (1959), Air Defense Forces (1948) and National Civil Defense Forces (1970) were formed, which ranked first, third, and sixth in the official Soviet system of importance (ground forces were second, Air Force Fourth, and Navy Fifth).The army had the greatest political influence. In 1989, there served two million soldiers divided between 150 motorized and 52 armored divisions. Until the early 1960s, the Soviet navy was a rather small military branch, but after the Caribbean crisis, under the leadership of Sergei Gorshkov, it expanded significantly. It became known for battlecruisers and submarines. In 1989 there served 500 000 men. The Soviet Air Force focused on a fleet of strategic bombers and during war situation was to eradicate enemy infrastructure and nuclear capacity. The air force also had a number of fighters and tactical bombers to support the army in the war. Strategic missile forces had more than 1,400 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed between 28 bases and 300 command centers.In the post-war period, the Soviet Army was directly involved in several military operations abroad. These included the suppression of the uprising in East Germany (1953), Hungarian revolution (1956) and the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968). The Soviet Union also participated in the war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied.At the end of the 1950s, with the help of engineers and technologies captured and imported from defeated Nazi Germany, the Soviets constructed the first satellite – Sputnik 1 and thus overtook the United States in terms of utilizing space. This was followed by other successful satellites, where test dogs flight was sent. On April 12, 1961, the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, was sent to the space. He once flew around the Earth and successfully landed in the Kazakh steppe. At that time, the first plans for space shuttles and orbital stations were drawn up in Soviet design offices, but in the end personal disputes between designers and management prevented this.As for Lunar space program; USSR only had a program on automated spacecraft launches; with no manned spacecraft used; passing on the "Moon Race" part of Space Race.In the 1970s, specific proposals for the design of the space shuttle began to emerge, but shortcomings, especially in the electronics industry (rapid overheating of electronics), postponed the program until the end of the 1980s. The first shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988, but without a human crew. Another shuttle, "Ptichka", eventually ended up under construction, as the shuttle project was canceled in 1991. For their launch into space, there is today an unused superpower rocket, Energia, which is the most powerful in the world.In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union managed to build the "Mir" orbital station. It was built on the construction of "Salyut" stations and its only role was civilian-grade research tasks. The Soviet Union adopted a command economy, whereby production and distribution of goods were centralized and directed by the government. The first Bolshevik experience with a command economy was the policy of War communism, which involved the nationalization of industry, centralized distribution of output, coercive requisition of agricultural production, and attempts to eliminate money circulation, private enterprises and free trade. After the severe economic collapse, Lenin replaced war communism by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, legalizing free trade and private ownership of small businesses. The economy quickly recovered as a result.After a long debate among the members of the Politburo about the course of economic development, by 1928–1929, upon gaining control of the country, Stalin abandoned the NEP and pushed for full central planning, starting forced collectivization of agriculture and enacting draconian labor legislation. Resources were mobilized for rapid industrialization, which significantly expanded Soviet capacity in heavy industry and capital goods during the 1930s. The primary motivation for industrialization was preparation for war, mostly due to distrust of the outside capitalist world. As a result, the USSR was transformed from a largely agrarian economy into a great industrial power, leading the way for its emergence as a superpower after World War II. The war caused extensive devastation of the Soviet economy and infrastructure, which required massive reconstruction.By the early 1940s, the Soviet economy had become relatively self-sufficient; for most of the period until the creation of Comecon, only a tiny share of domestic products was traded internationally. After the creation of the Eastern Bloc, external trade rose rapidly. However, the influence of the world economy on the USSR was limited by fixed domestic prices and a state monopoly on foreign trade. Grain and sophisticated consumer manufactures became major import articles from around the 1960s. During the arms race of the Cold War, the Soviet economy was burdened by military expenditures, heavily lobbied for by a powerful bureaucracy dependent on the arms industry. At the same time, the USSR became the largest arms exporter to the Third World. Significant amounts of Soviet resources during the Cold War were allocated in aid to the other socialist states.From the 1930s until its dissolution in late 1991, the way the Soviet economy operated remained essentially unchanged. The economy was formally directed by central planning, carried out by Gosplan and organized in five-year plans. However, in practice, the plans were highly aggregated and provisional, subject to "ad hoc" intervention by superiors. All critical economic decisions were taken by the political leadership. Allocated resources and plan targets were usually denominated in rubles rather than in physical goods. Credit was discouraged, but widespread. The final allocation of output was achieved through relatively decentralized, unplanned contracting. Although in theory prices were legally set from above, in practice they were often negotiated, and informal horizontal links (e.g. between producer factories) were widespread.A number of basic services were state-funded, such as education and health care. In the manufacturing sector, heavy industry and defence were prioritized over consumer goods. Consumer goods, particularly outside large cities, were often scarce, of poor quality and limited variety. Under the command economy, consumers had almost no influence on production, and the changing demands of a population with growing incomes could not be satisfied by supplies at rigidly fixed prices. A massive unplanned second economy grew up at low levels alongside the planned one, providing some of the goods and services that the planners could not. The legalization of some elements of the decentralized economy was attempted with the reform of 1965.Although statistics of the Soviet economy are notoriously unreliable and its economic growth difficult to estimate precisely, by most accounts, the economy continued to expand until the mid-1980s. During the 1950s and 1960s, it had comparatively high growth and was catching up to the West. However, after 1970, the growth, while still positive, steadily declined much more quickly and consistently than in other countries, despite a rapid increase in the capital stock (the rate of capital increase was only surpassed by Japan).Overall, the growth rate of per capita income in the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1989 was slightly above the world average (based on 102 countries). According to Stanley Fischer and William Easterly, growth could have been faster. By their calculation, per capita income in 1989 should have been twice higher than it was, considering the amount of investment, education and population. The authors attribute this poor performance to the low productivity of capital. Steven Rosenfielde states that the standard of living declined due to Stalin's despotism. While there was a brief improvement after his death, it lapsed into stagnation.In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform and revitalize the economy with his program of "perestroika". His policies relaxed state control over enterprises but did not replace it by market incentives, resulting in a sharp decline in output. The economy, already suffering from reduced petroleum export revenues, started to collapse. Prices were still fixed, and the property was still largely state-owned until after the country's dissolution. For most of the period after World War II until its collapse, Soviet GDP (PPP) was the second-largest in the world, and third during the second half of the 1980s, although on a per-capita basis, it was behind that of First World countries. Compared to countries with similar per-capita GDP in 1928, the Soviet Union experienced significant growth.In 1990, the country had a Human Development Index of 0.920, placing it in the "high" category of human development. It was the third-highest in the Eastern Bloc, behind Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and the 25th in the world of 130 countries.The need for fuel declined in the Soviet Union from the 1970s to the 1980s, both per ruble of gross social product and per ruble of industrial product. At the start, this decline grew very rapidly but gradually slowed down between 1970 and 1975. From 1975 and 1980, it grew even slower, only 2.6%. David Wilson, a historian, believed that the gas industry would account for 40% of Soviet fuel production by the end of the century. His theory did not come to fruition because of the USSR's collapse. The USSR, in theory, would have continued to have an economic growth rate of 2–2.5% during the 1990s because of Soviet energy fields. However, the energy sector faced many difficulties, among them the country's high military expenditure and hostile relations with the First World.In 1991, the Soviet Union had a pipeline network of for crude oil and another for natural gas. Petroleum and petroleum-based products, natural gas, metals, wood, agricultural products, and a variety of manufactured goods, primarily machinery, arms and military equipment, were exported. In the 1970s and 1980s, the USSR heavily relied on fossil fuel exports to earn hard currency. At its peak in 1988, it was the largest producer and second-largest exporter of crude oil, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia.The Soviet Union placed great emphasis on science and technology within its economy, however, the most remarkable Soviet successes in technology, such as producing the world's first space satellite, typically were the responsibility of the military. Lenin believed that the USSR would never overtake the developed world if it remained as technologically backward as it was upon its founding. Soviet authorities proved their commitment to Lenin's belief by developing massive networks, research and development organizations. In the early 1960s, the Soviets awarded 40% of chemistry PhDs to women, compared to only 5% in the United States. By 1989, Soviet scientists were among the world's best-trained specialists in several areas, such as energy physics, selected areas of medicine, mathematics, welding and military technologies. Due to rigid state planning and bureaucracy, the Soviets remained far behind technologically in chemistry, biology, and computers when compared to the First World.Under the Reagan administration, Project Socrates determined that the Soviet Union addressed the acquisition of science and technology in a manner that was radically different from what the US was using. In the case of the US, economic prioritization was being used for indigenous research and development as the means to acquire science and technology in both the private and public sectors. In contrast, the USSR was offensively and defensively maneuvering in the acquisition and utilization of the worldwide technology, to increase the competitive advantage that they acquired from the technology while preventing the US from acquiring a competitive advantage. However, technology-based planning was executed in a centralized, government-centric manner that greatly hindered its flexibility. This was exploited by the US to undermine the strength of the Soviet Union and thus foster its reform.Transport was a vital component of the country's economy. The economic centralization of the late 1920s and 1930s led to the development of infrastructure on a massive scale, most notably the establishment of Aeroflot, an aviation enterprise. The country had a wide variety of modes of transport by land, water and air. However, due to inadequate maintenance, much of the road, water and Soviet civil aviation transport were outdated and technologically backward compared to the First World.Soviet rail transport was the largest and most intensively used in the world; it was also better developed than most of its Western counterparts. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet economists were calling for the construction of more roads to alleviate some of the burdens from the railways and to improve the Soviet government budget. The street network and automotive industry remained underdeveloped, and dirt roads were common outside major cities. Soviet maintenance projects proved unable to take care of even the few roads the country had. By the early-to-mid-1980s, the Soviet authorities tried to solve the road problem by ordering the construction of new ones. Meanwhile, the automobile industry was growing at a faster rate than road construction. The underdeveloped road network led to a growing demand for public transport.Despite improvements, several aspects of the transport sector were still riddled with problems due to outdated infrastructure, lack of investment, corruption and bad decision-making. Soviet authorities were unable to meet the growing demand for transport infrastructure and services.The Soviet merchant navy was one of the largest in the world.Excess deaths throughout World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million, some 10 million in the 1930s, and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."The birth rate of the USSR decreased from 44.0 per thousand in 1926 to 18.0 in 1974, mainly due to increasing urbanization and the rising average age of marriages. The mortality rate demonstrated a gradual decrease as well – from 23.7 per thousand in 1926 to 8.7 in 1974. In general, the birth rates of the southern republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia were considerably higher than those in the northern parts of the Soviet Union, and in some cases even increased in the post–World War II period, a phenomenon partly attributed to slower rates of urbanistion and traditionally earlier marriages in the southern republics. Soviet Europe moved towards sub-replacement fertility, while Soviet Central Asia continued to exhibit population growth well above replacement-level fertility.The late 1960s and the 1970s witnessed a reversal of the declining trajectory of the rate of mortality in the USSR, and was especially notable among men of working age, but was also prevalent in Russia and other predominantly Slavic areas of the country. An analysis of the official data from the late 1980s showed that after worsening in the late-1970s and the early 1980s, adult mortality began to improve again. The infant mortality rate increased from 24.7 in 1970 to 27.9 in 1974. Some researchers regarded the rise as mostly real, a consequence of worsening health conditions and services. The rises in both adult and infant mortality were not explained or defended by Soviet officials, and the Soviet government stopped publishing all mortality statistics for ten years. Soviet demographers and health specialists remained silent about the mortality increases until the late-1980s, when the publication of mortality data resumed, and researchers could delve into the real causes.Under Lenin, the state made explicit commitments to promote the equality of men and women. Many early Russian feminists and ordinary Russian working women actively participated in the Revolution, and many more were affected by the events of that period and the new policies. Beginning in October 1918, Lenin's government liberalized divorce and abortion laws, decriminalized homosexuality (re-criminalized in the 1930s), permitted cohabitation, and ushered in a host of reforms. However, without birth control, the new system produced many broken marriages, as well as countless out-of-wedlock children. The epidemic of divorces and extramarital affairs created social hardships when Soviet leaders wanted people to concentrate their efforts on growing the economy. Giving women control over their fertility also led to a precipitous decline in the birth rate, perceived as a threat to their country's military power. By 1936, Stalin reversed most of the liberal laws, ushering in a pronatalist era that lasted for decades.By 1917, Russia became the first great power to grant women the right to vote. After heavy casualties in World War I and II, women outnumbered men in Russia by a 4:3 ratio. This contributed to the larger role women played in Russian society compared to other great powers at the time.Anatoly Lunacharsky became the first People's Commissar for Education of Soviet Russia. In the beginning, the Soviet authorities placed great emphasis on the elimination of illiteracy. All left-handed children were forced to write with their right hand in the Soviet school system. Literate people were automatically hired as teachers. For a short period, quality was sacrificed for quantity. By 1940, Stalin could announce that illiteracy had been eliminated. Throughout the 1930s, social mobility rose sharply, which has been attributed to reforms in education. In the aftermath of World War II, the country's educational system expanded dramatically, which had a tremendous effect. In the 1960s, nearly all children had access to education, the only exception being those living in remote areas. Nikita Khrushchev tried to make education more accessible, making it clear to children that education was closely linked to the needs of society. Education also became important in giving rise to the New Man. Citizens directly entering the workforce had the constitutional right to a job and to free vocational training.The education system was highly centralized and universally accessible to all citizens, with affirmative action for applicants from nations associated with cultural backwardness. However, as part of the general antisemitic policy, an unofficial Jewish quota was applied in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations. The Brezhnev era also introduced a rule that required all university applicants to present a reference from the local Komsomol party secretary. According to statistics from 1986, the number of higher education students per the population of 10,000 was 181 for the USSR, compared to 517 for the US.The Soviet Union was an ethnically diverse country, with more than 100 distinct ethnic groups. The total population of the country was estimated at 293 million in 1991. According to a 1990 estimate, the majority of the population were Russians (50.78%), followed by Ukrainians (15.45%) and Uzbeks (5.84%).All citizens of the USSR had their own ethnic affiliation. The ethnicity of a person was chosen at the age of sixteen by the child's parents. If the parents did not agree, the child was automatically assigned the ethnicity of the father. Partly due to Soviet policies, some of the smaller minority ethnic groups were considered part of larger ones, such as the Mingrelians of Georgia, who were classified with the linguistically related Georgians. Some ethnic groups voluntarily assimilated, while others were brought in by force. Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, who were all East Slavic and Orthodox, shared close cultural, ethnic, and religious ties, while other groups did not. With multiple nationalities living in the same territory, ethnic antagonisms developed over the years.Members of various ethnicities participated in legislative bodies. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality, ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the Soviet leadership, such as Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Podgorny or Andrei Gromyko. During the Soviet era, a significant number of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians migrated to other Soviet republics, and many of them settled there. According to the last census in 1989, the Russian "diaspora" in the Soviet republics had reached 25 million.In 1917, before the revolution, health conditions were significantly behind those of developed countries. As Lenin later noted, "Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice". The Soviet principle of health care was conceived by the People's Commissariat for Health in 1918. Health care was to be controlled by the state and would be provided to its citizens free of charge, a revolutionary concept at the time. Article 42 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution gave all citizens the right to health protection and free access to any health institutions in the USSR. Before Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary, the Soviet healthcare system was held in high esteem by many foreign specialists. This changed, however, from Brezhnev's accession and Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as leader, during which the health care system was heavily criticized for many basic faults, such as the quality of service and the unevenness in its provision. Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov, during the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, while highlighting such successes as having the most doctors and hospitals in the world, recognized the system's areas for improvement and felt that billions of Soviet rubles were squandered. After the revolution, life expectancy for all age groups went up. This statistic in itself was seen by some that the socialist system was superior to the capitalist system. These improvements continued into the 1960s when statistics indicated that the life expectancy briefly surpassed that of the United States. Life expectancy started to decline in the 1970s, possibly because of alcohol abuse. At the same time, infant mortality began to rise. After 1974, the government stopped publishing statistics on the matter. This trend can be partly explained by the number of pregnancies rising drastically in the Asian part of the country where infant mortality was the highest while declining markedly in the more developed European part of the Soviet Union.Soviet dental technology and dental health were considered notoriously bad. In 1991, the average 35-year-old had 12 to 14 cavities, fillings or missing teeth. Toothpaste was often not available, and toothbrushes did not conform to standards of modern dentistry.Under Lenin, the government gave small language groups their own writing systems. The development of these writing systems was highly successful, even though some flaws were detected. During the later days of the USSR, countries with the same multilingual situation implemented similar policies. A serious problem when creating these writing systems was that the languages differed dialectally greatly from each other. When a language had been given a writing system and appeared in a notable publication, it would attain "official language" status. There were many minority languages which never received their own writing system; therefore, their speakers were forced to have a second language. There are examples where the government retreated from this policy, most notably under Stalin where education was discontinued in languages that were not widespread. These languages were then assimilated into another language, mostly Russian. During World War II, some minority languages were banned, and their speakers accused of collaborating with the enemy.As the most widely spoken of the Soviet Union's many languages, Russian "de facto" functioned as an official language, as the "language of interethnic communication" (), but only assumed the "de jure" status as the official national language in 1990.Christianity and Islam had the highest number of adherents among the religious citizens. Eastern Christianity predominated among Christians, with Russia's traditional Russian Orthodox Church being the largest Christian denomination. About 90% of the Soviet Union's Muslims were Sunnis, with Shias being concentrated in the Azerbaijan SSR. Smaller groups included Roman Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and a variety of Protestant denominations (especially Baptists and Lutherans).Religious influence had been strong in the Russian Empire. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed a privileged status as the church of the monarchy and took part in carrying out official state functions. The immediate period following the establishment of the Soviet state included a struggle against the Orthodox Church, which the revolutionaries considered an ally of the former ruling classes.In Soviet law, the "freedom to hold religious services" was constitutionally guaranteed, although the ruling Communist Party regarded religion as incompatible with the Marxist spirit of scientific materialism. In practice, the Soviet system subscribed to a narrow interpretation of this right, and in fact utilized a range of official measures to discourage religion and curb the activities of religious groups.The 1918 Council of People's Commissars decree establishing the Russian SFSR as a secular state also decreed that "the teaching of religion in all [places] where subjects of general instruction are taught, is forbidden. Citizens may teach and may be taught religion privately." Among further restrictions, those adopted in 1929 included express prohibitions on a range of church activities, including meetings for organized Bible study. Both Christian and non-Christian establishments were shut down by the thousands in the 1920s and 1930s. By 1940, as many as 90% of the churches, synagogues, and mosques that had been operating in 1917 were closed.Under the doctrine of state atheism, a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism" was conducted. The government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organized religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the propaganda campaign. Accordingly, although personal expressions of religious faith were not explicitly banned, a strong sense of social stigma was imposed on them by the formal structures and mass media, and it was generally considered unacceptable for members of certain professions (teachers, state bureaucrats, soldiers) to be openly religious. While persecution accelerated following Stalin's rise to power, a revival of Orthodoxy was fostered by the government during World War II and the Soviet authorities sought to control the Russian Orthodox Church rather than liquidate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941, only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence before World War I.Convinced that religious anti-Sovietism had become a thing of the past, and with the looming threat of war, the Stalin regime began shifting to a more moderate religion policy in the late 1930s. Soviet religious establishments overwhelmingly rallied to support the war effort during World War II. Amid other accommodations to religious faith after the German invasion, churches were reopened. Radio Moscow began broadcasting a religious hour, and a historic meeting between Stalin and Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Sergius of Moscow was held in 1943. Stalin had the support of the majority of the religious people in the USSR even through the late 1980s. The general tendency of this period was an increase in religious activity among believers of all faiths.Under Nikita Khrushchev, the state leadership clashed with the churches in 1958–1964, a period when atheism was emphasized in the educational curriculum, and numerous state publications promoted atheistic views. During this period, the number of churches fell from 20,000 to 10,000 from 1959 to 1965, and the number of synagogues dropped from 500 to 97. The number of working mosques also declined, falling from 1,500 to 500 within a decade.Religious institutions remained monitored by the Soviet government, but churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques were all given more leeway in the Brezhnev era. Official relations between the Orthodox Church and the government again warmed to the point that the Brezhnev government twice honored Orthodox Patriarch Alexy I with the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. A poll conducted by Soviet authorities in 1982 recorded 20% of the Soviet population as "active religious believers."The legacy of the USSR remains a controversial topic. The socio-economic nature of communist states such as the USSR, especially under Stalin, has also been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism, or a totally unique mode of production.The USSR implemented a broad range of policies over a long period of time, with a large amount of conflicting policies being implemented by different leaders. Some have a positive view of it whilst others are critical towards the country, calling it a repressive oligarchy. The opinions on the USSR are complex and have changed over time, with different generations having different views on the matter as well as on Soviet policies corresponding to separate time periods during its history. Leftists have largely varying views on the USSR. Whilst some leftists such as anarchists and other libertarian socialists, agree it did not give the workers control over the means of production and was a centralized oligarchy, others have more positive opinions as to the Bolshevik policies and Vladimir Lenin. Many anti-Stalinist leftists such as anarchists are extremely critical of Soviet authoritarianism and repression. Much of the criticism it receives is centered around massacres in the Soviet Union, the centralized hierarchy present in the USSR and mass political repression as well as violence towards government critics and political dissidents such as other leftists. Critics also point towards its failure to implement any substantial worker cooperatives or implementing worker liberation as well as corruption and the Soviet authoritarian nature.Many Russians and other former Soviet citizens have nostalgia for the USSR, pointing towards most infrastructure being built during Soviet times, increased job security, increased literacy rate, increased caloric intake and supposed ethnic pluralism enacted in the Soviet Union as well as political stability. The Russian Revolution is also seen in a positive light as well as the leadership of Lenin, Nikita Khrushchev and the later USSR, although many view Joseph Stalin's rule as positive for the country. In Armenia, 12% of respondents said the USSR collapse did good, while 66% said it did harm. In Kyrgyzstan, 16% of respondents said the collapse of the USSR did good, while 61% said it did harm. In a 2018 Rating Sociological Group poll, 47% of Ukrainian respondents had a positive opinion of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982. Much of the admiration of the USSR comes from the failings of the modern post-Soviet governments such as the control by oligarchs, corruption and outdated Soviet-era infrastructure as well as the rise and dominance of organised crime after the collapse of the USSR all directly leading into nostalgia for it.The 1941–45 period of World War II is still known in Russia as the "Great Patriotic War". The war became a topic of great importance in cinema, literature, history lessons at school, the mass media, and the arts. As a result of the massive losses suffered by the military and civilians during the conflict, Victory Day celebrated on 9 May is still one of the most important and emotional dates in Russia.In some post Soviet republics, there is a more negative view of the USSR, although there is no unanimity on the matter. In large part due to the Holodomor, ethnic Ukrainians have a negative view of it. Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Ukraine's southern and eastern regions have a more positive view of the USSR. In some countries with internal conflict, there is also nostalgia for the USSR, especially for refugees of the post-Soviet conflicts who have been forced to flee their homes and have been displaced. This nostalgia is less an admiration for the country or its policies than it is a longing to return to their homes and not to live in poverty. The many Russian enclaves in the former USSR republics such as Transnistria have in a general a positive remembrance of it.The left's view of the USSR is complex. While some leftists regard the USSR as an example of state capitalism or that it was an oligarchical state, other leftists admire Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution.Council communists generally view the USSR as failing to create class consciousness, turning into a corrupt state in which the elite controlled society. Anarchists are critical of the country, labeling the Soviet system as "red fascism". Soviets actively destroyed anarchist organizations and anarchist communities, labeling anarchists as "enemies of the people". Factors contributing to the animosity towards the USSR included: the Soviet invasion of the anarchist Free Territory, the suppression of the anarchist Kronstadt rebellion and the response to the Norilsk uprising, in which prisoners created a radical system of government based on cooperatives and direct democracy in the Gulag. Anarchist organizations and unions were also banned during the Spanish Civil War under the Republican government by orders from the Soviet government. Due to this, anarchists generally hold a large animosity towards the USSR.The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's existence. During the first decade following the revolution, there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, such as Nikolay Gumilyov who was shot for alleged conspiring against the Bolshevik regime, and Yevgeny Zamyatin.The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. As a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, films received encouragement from the state, and much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.During Stalin's rule, the Soviet culture was characterized by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's works. Many writers were imprisoned and killed.Following the Khrushchev Thaw, censorship was diminished. During this time, a distinctive period of Soviet culture developed, characterized by conformist public life and an intense focus on personal life. Greater experimentation in art forms was again permissible, resulting in the production of more sophisticated and subtly critical work. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Yury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. Underground dissident literature, known as "samizdat", developed during this late period. In architecture, the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch. In music, in response to the increasing popularity of forms of popular music like jazz in the West, many jazz orchestras were permitted throughout the USSR, notably the Melodiya Ensemble, named after the principle record label in the USSR.In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of "perestroika" and "glasnost" significantly expanded freedom of expression throughout the country in the media and the press.Founded on 20 July 1924 in Moscow, "Sovetsky Sport" was the first sports newspaper of the Soviet Union.The Soviet Olympic Committee formed on 21 April 1951, and the IOC recognized the new body in its 45th session. In the same year, when the Soviet representative Konstantin Andrianov became an IOC member, the USSR officially joined the Olympic Movement. The 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki thus became first Olympic Games for Soviet athletes. The Soviet Union was the biggest rival to the United States at the Summer Olympics, winning six of its nine appearances at the games and also topping the medal tally at the Winter Olympics six times. The Soviet Union's Olympics success has been attributed to its large investment in sports to demonstrate its superpower image and political influence on a global stage.The Soviet Union national ice hockey team won nearly every world championship and Olympic tournament between 1954 and 1991 and never failed to medal in any International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) tournament in which they competed.The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession – in reality, the state paid many of these competitors to train on a full-time basis. Nevertheless, the IOC held to the traditional rules regarding amateurism.A 1989 report by a committee of the Australian Senate claimed that "there is hardly a medal winner at the Moscow Games, certainly not a gold medal winner...who is not on one sort of drug or another: usually several kinds. The Moscow Games might well have been called the Chemists' Games".A member of the IOC Medical Commission, Manfred Donike, privately ran additional tests with a new technique for identifying abnormal levels of testosterone by measuring its ratio to epitestosterone in urine. Twenty percent of the specimens he tested, including those from sixteen gold medalists, would have resulted in disciplinary proceedings had the tests been official. The results of Donike's unofficial tests later convinced the IOC to add his new technique to their testing protocols. The first documented case of "blood doping" occurred at the 1980 Summer Olympics when a runner was transfused with two pints of blood before winning medals in the 5000 m and 10,000 m.Documentation obtained in 2016 revealed the Soviet Union's plans for a statewide doping system in track and field in preparation for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Dated before the decision to boycott the 1984 Games, the document detailed the existing steroids operations of the program, along with suggestions for further enhancements. Dr. Sergei Portugalov of the Institute for Physical Culture prepared the communication, directed to the Soviet Union's head of track and field. Portugalov later became one of the leading figures involved in the implementation of Russian doping before the 2016 Summer Olympics.Official Soviet environmental policy has always attached great importance to actions in which human beings actively improve nature. Lenin's quote "Communism is Soviet power and electrification of the country!" in many respects summarizes the focus on modernization and industrial development. During the first five-year plan in 1928, Stalin proceeded to industrialize the country at all costs. Values such as environmental and nature protection have been completely ignored in the struggle to create a modern industrial society. After Stalin's death, they focused more on environmental issues, but the basic perception of the value of environmental protection remained the same.The Soviet media has always focused on the vast expanse of land and the virtually indestructible natural resources. This made it feel that contamination and uncontrolled exploitation of nature were not a problem. The Soviet state also firmly believed that scientific and technological progress would solve all the problems. Official ideology said that under socialism environmental problems could easily be overcome, unlike capitalist countries, where they seemingly could not be solved. The Soviet authorities had an almost unwavering belief that man could transcend nature. However, when the authorities had to admit that there were environmental problems in the USSR in the 1980s, they explained the problems in such a way that socialism had not yet been fully developed; pollution in a socialist society was only a temporary anomaly that would have been resolved if socialism had developed.The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was the first major accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. Unparalleled in the world, it resulted in a large number of radioactive isotopes being released into the atmosphere. Radioactive doses have scattered relatively far. 4,000 new cases of thyroid cancer were reported after the incident, but this led to a relatively low number of deaths (WHO data, 2005). However, the long-term effects of the accident are unknown. Another major accident is the Kyshtym disaster.After the fall of the USSR, it was discovered that the environmental problems were greater than what the Soviet authorities admitted. The Kola Peninsula was one of the places with clear problems. Around the industrial cities of Monchegorsk and Norilsk, where nickel, for example, is mined, all forests have been destroyed by contamination, while the northern and other parts of Russia have been affected by emissions. During the 1990s, people in the West were also interested in the radioactive hazards of nuclear facilities, decommissioned nuclear submarines, and the processing of nuclear waste or spent nuclear fuel. It was also known in the early 1990s that the USSR had transported radioactive material to the Barents Sea and Kara Sea, which was later confirmed by the Russian parliament. The crash of the K-141 Kursk submarine in 2000 in the west further raised concerns. In the past, there were accidents involving submarines K-19, K-8, and K-129. | [
"Georgy Malenkov",
"Alexei Kosygin",
"Nikolai Ryzhkov",
"Nikita Khrushchev",
"Alexei Rykov",
"Ivan Silayev",
"Vladimir Lenin",
"Nikolai Bulganin",
"Nikolai Tikhonov",
"Vyacheslav Molotov",
"Valentin Pavlov"
] |
|
Which employer did Thomas George Cowling work for in Feb, 1946? | February 08, 1946 | {
"text": [
"Bangor University"
]
} | L2_Q1388645_P108_4 | Thomas George Cowling works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1937 to Jan, 1938.
Thomas George Cowling works for Swansea University from Jan, 1933 to Jan, 1937.
Thomas George Cowling works for University of Leeds from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1970.
Thomas George Cowling works for Bangor University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1948.
Thomas George Cowling works for Victoria University of Manchester from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945.
Thomas George Cowling works for Imperial College London from Jan, 1930 to Jan, 1933. | Thomas CowlingThomas George Cowling FRS (17 June 1906 – 16 June 1990) was an English astronomer.Cowling was born in Hackney, London and studied mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results. After Cowling's doctorate, Chapman proposed that they work together.In 1933 Cowling wrote an article, "The magnetic field of sunspots". Joseph Larmor had worked in this area, arguing that sunspots regenerate themselves through a dynamo effect. Cowling showed that Larmor's proposed explanation was incorrect. His article assured him of a good reputation in the field of astrophysics.During the 1930s, Cowling also worked on stellar structure involving radiation and convection, at the same time as Ludwig Biermann but independently of him. He constructed a model of star with a convective core and radiative envelope, named the Cowling model by Chandrasekhar. He also studied magnetic fields within stars and classified the modes of non-radial oscillation of the body of a star, the basis of the field of helioseismology.Cowling became an Assistant Lecturer at Swansea in 1933. He was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Dundee (1937–38) and the University of Manchester (1938–45) before being appointed Professor at the University of Wales, Bangor (now Bangor University). In 1948 Cowling was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds in succession to Professor Selig Brodetsky. Cowling retired from his chair at Leeds in 1970 with the title Emeritus Professor.Cowling was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar, 1947. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1956 and the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1985. He was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1965 to 1967. He was also awarded the Hughes Medal two days before his death. | [
"Swansea University",
"University of Leeds",
"Victoria University of Manchester",
"University of Dundee",
"Imperial College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Thomas George Cowling work for in 1946-02-08? | February 08, 1946 | {
"text": [
"Bangor University"
]
} | L2_Q1388645_P108_4 | Thomas George Cowling works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1937 to Jan, 1938.
Thomas George Cowling works for Swansea University from Jan, 1933 to Jan, 1937.
Thomas George Cowling works for University of Leeds from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1970.
Thomas George Cowling works for Bangor University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1948.
Thomas George Cowling works for Victoria University of Manchester from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945.
Thomas George Cowling works for Imperial College London from Jan, 1930 to Jan, 1933. | Thomas CowlingThomas George Cowling FRS (17 June 1906 – 16 June 1990) was an English astronomer.Cowling was born in Hackney, London and studied mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results. After Cowling's doctorate, Chapman proposed that they work together.In 1933 Cowling wrote an article, "The magnetic field of sunspots". Joseph Larmor had worked in this area, arguing that sunspots regenerate themselves through a dynamo effect. Cowling showed that Larmor's proposed explanation was incorrect. His article assured him of a good reputation in the field of astrophysics.During the 1930s, Cowling also worked on stellar structure involving radiation and convection, at the same time as Ludwig Biermann but independently of him. He constructed a model of star with a convective core and radiative envelope, named the Cowling model by Chandrasekhar. He also studied magnetic fields within stars and classified the modes of non-radial oscillation of the body of a star, the basis of the field of helioseismology.Cowling became an Assistant Lecturer at Swansea in 1933. He was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Dundee (1937–38) and the University of Manchester (1938–45) before being appointed Professor at the University of Wales, Bangor (now Bangor University). In 1948 Cowling was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds in succession to Professor Selig Brodetsky. Cowling retired from his chair at Leeds in 1970 with the title Emeritus Professor.Cowling was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar, 1947. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1956 and the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1985. He was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1965 to 1967. He was also awarded the Hughes Medal two days before his death. | [
"Swansea University",
"University of Leeds",
"Victoria University of Manchester",
"University of Dundee",
"Imperial College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Thomas George Cowling work for in 08/02/1946? | February 08, 1946 | {
"text": [
"Bangor University"
]
} | L2_Q1388645_P108_4 | Thomas George Cowling works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1937 to Jan, 1938.
Thomas George Cowling works for Swansea University from Jan, 1933 to Jan, 1937.
Thomas George Cowling works for University of Leeds from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1970.
Thomas George Cowling works for Bangor University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1948.
Thomas George Cowling works for Victoria University of Manchester from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945.
Thomas George Cowling works for Imperial College London from Jan, 1930 to Jan, 1933. | Thomas CowlingThomas George Cowling FRS (17 June 1906 – 16 June 1990) was an English astronomer.Cowling was born in Hackney, London and studied mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results. After Cowling's doctorate, Chapman proposed that they work together.In 1933 Cowling wrote an article, "The magnetic field of sunspots". Joseph Larmor had worked in this area, arguing that sunspots regenerate themselves through a dynamo effect. Cowling showed that Larmor's proposed explanation was incorrect. His article assured him of a good reputation in the field of astrophysics.During the 1930s, Cowling also worked on stellar structure involving radiation and convection, at the same time as Ludwig Biermann but independently of him. He constructed a model of star with a convective core and radiative envelope, named the Cowling model by Chandrasekhar. He also studied magnetic fields within stars and classified the modes of non-radial oscillation of the body of a star, the basis of the field of helioseismology.Cowling became an Assistant Lecturer at Swansea in 1933. He was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Dundee (1937–38) and the University of Manchester (1938–45) before being appointed Professor at the University of Wales, Bangor (now Bangor University). In 1948 Cowling was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds in succession to Professor Selig Brodetsky. Cowling retired from his chair at Leeds in 1970 with the title Emeritus Professor.Cowling was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar, 1947. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1956 and the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1985. He was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1965 to 1967. He was also awarded the Hughes Medal two days before his death. | [
"Swansea University",
"University of Leeds",
"Victoria University of Manchester",
"University of Dundee",
"Imperial College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Thomas George Cowling work for in Feb 08, 1946? | February 08, 1946 | {
"text": [
"Bangor University"
]
} | L2_Q1388645_P108_4 | Thomas George Cowling works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1937 to Jan, 1938.
Thomas George Cowling works for Swansea University from Jan, 1933 to Jan, 1937.
Thomas George Cowling works for University of Leeds from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1970.
Thomas George Cowling works for Bangor University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1948.
Thomas George Cowling works for Victoria University of Manchester from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945.
Thomas George Cowling works for Imperial College London from Jan, 1930 to Jan, 1933. | Thomas CowlingThomas George Cowling FRS (17 June 1906 – 16 June 1990) was an English astronomer.Cowling was born in Hackney, London and studied mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results. After Cowling's doctorate, Chapman proposed that they work together.In 1933 Cowling wrote an article, "The magnetic field of sunspots". Joseph Larmor had worked in this area, arguing that sunspots regenerate themselves through a dynamo effect. Cowling showed that Larmor's proposed explanation was incorrect. His article assured him of a good reputation in the field of astrophysics.During the 1930s, Cowling also worked on stellar structure involving radiation and convection, at the same time as Ludwig Biermann but independently of him. He constructed a model of star with a convective core and radiative envelope, named the Cowling model by Chandrasekhar. He also studied magnetic fields within stars and classified the modes of non-radial oscillation of the body of a star, the basis of the field of helioseismology.Cowling became an Assistant Lecturer at Swansea in 1933. He was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Dundee (1937–38) and the University of Manchester (1938–45) before being appointed Professor at the University of Wales, Bangor (now Bangor University). In 1948 Cowling was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds in succession to Professor Selig Brodetsky. Cowling retired from his chair at Leeds in 1970 with the title Emeritus Professor.Cowling was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar, 1947. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1956 and the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1985. He was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1965 to 1967. He was also awarded the Hughes Medal two days before his death. | [
"Swansea University",
"University of Leeds",
"Victoria University of Manchester",
"University of Dundee",
"Imperial College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Thomas George Cowling work for in 02/08/1946? | February 08, 1946 | {
"text": [
"Bangor University"
]
} | L2_Q1388645_P108_4 | Thomas George Cowling works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1937 to Jan, 1938.
Thomas George Cowling works for Swansea University from Jan, 1933 to Jan, 1937.
Thomas George Cowling works for University of Leeds from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1970.
Thomas George Cowling works for Bangor University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1948.
Thomas George Cowling works for Victoria University of Manchester from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945.
Thomas George Cowling works for Imperial College London from Jan, 1930 to Jan, 1933. | Thomas CowlingThomas George Cowling FRS (17 June 1906 – 16 June 1990) was an English astronomer.Cowling was born in Hackney, London and studied mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results. After Cowling's doctorate, Chapman proposed that they work together.In 1933 Cowling wrote an article, "The magnetic field of sunspots". Joseph Larmor had worked in this area, arguing that sunspots regenerate themselves through a dynamo effect. Cowling showed that Larmor's proposed explanation was incorrect. His article assured him of a good reputation in the field of astrophysics.During the 1930s, Cowling also worked on stellar structure involving radiation and convection, at the same time as Ludwig Biermann but independently of him. He constructed a model of star with a convective core and radiative envelope, named the Cowling model by Chandrasekhar. He also studied magnetic fields within stars and classified the modes of non-radial oscillation of the body of a star, the basis of the field of helioseismology.Cowling became an Assistant Lecturer at Swansea in 1933. He was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Dundee (1937–38) and the University of Manchester (1938–45) before being appointed Professor at the University of Wales, Bangor (now Bangor University). In 1948 Cowling was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds in succession to Professor Selig Brodetsky. Cowling retired from his chair at Leeds in 1970 with the title Emeritus Professor.Cowling was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar, 1947. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1956 and the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1985. He was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1965 to 1967. He was also awarded the Hughes Medal two days before his death. | [
"Swansea University",
"University of Leeds",
"Victoria University of Manchester",
"University of Dundee",
"Imperial College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Thomas George Cowling work for in 08-Feb-194608-February-1946? | February 08, 1946 | {
"text": [
"Bangor University"
]
} | L2_Q1388645_P108_4 | Thomas George Cowling works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1937 to Jan, 1938.
Thomas George Cowling works for Swansea University from Jan, 1933 to Jan, 1937.
Thomas George Cowling works for University of Leeds from Jan, 1948 to Jan, 1970.
Thomas George Cowling works for Bangor University from Jan, 1945 to Jan, 1948.
Thomas George Cowling works for Victoria University of Manchester from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945.
Thomas George Cowling works for Imperial College London from Jan, 1930 to Jan, 1933. | Thomas CowlingThomas George Cowling FRS (17 June 1906 – 16 June 1990) was an English astronomer.Cowling was born in Hackney, London and studied mathematics at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1924 to 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he worked under Edward Arthur Milne. In 1929, Milne had no problems left to ask his student to work on and appealed to Sydney Chapman, who proposed that they work on an article on which he was working that dealt with the Sun's magnetic field. Cowling found an error in the paper that invalidated Chapman's results. After Cowling's doctorate, Chapman proposed that they work together.In 1933 Cowling wrote an article, "The magnetic field of sunspots". Joseph Larmor had worked in this area, arguing that sunspots regenerate themselves through a dynamo effect. Cowling showed that Larmor's proposed explanation was incorrect. His article assured him of a good reputation in the field of astrophysics.During the 1930s, Cowling also worked on stellar structure involving radiation and convection, at the same time as Ludwig Biermann but independently of him. He constructed a model of star with a convective core and radiative envelope, named the Cowling model by Chandrasekhar. He also studied magnetic fields within stars and classified the modes of non-radial oscillation of the body of a star, the basis of the field of helioseismology.Cowling became an Assistant Lecturer at Swansea in 1933. He was subsequently a lecturer at the University of Dundee (1937–38) and the University of Manchester (1938–45) before being appointed Professor at the University of Wales, Bangor (now Bangor University). In 1948 Cowling was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds in succession to Professor Selig Brodetsky. Cowling retired from his chair at Leeds in 1970 with the title Emeritus Professor.Cowling was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar, 1947. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1956 and the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1985. He was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1965 to 1967. He was also awarded the Hughes Medal two days before his death. | [
"Swansea University",
"University of Leeds",
"Victoria University of Manchester",
"University of Dundee",
"Imperial College London"
] |
|
Which position did John Round hold in Feb, 1840? | February 03, 1840 | {
"text": [
"Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom"
]
} | L2_Q6255760_P39_1 | John Round holds the position of Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jul, 1837 to Jun, 1841.
John Round holds the position of Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jun, 1841 to Jul, 1847.
John Round holds the position of High Sheriff of Essex from Jan, 1834 to Jan, 1835. | John Round (MP)John Round (8 March 1783 – 28 April 1860) was an English banker and Conservative Party politician.He was the eldest surviving son of barrister John Round, of Colchester and educated at Gray's Inn (1800) and Balliol College, Oxford (1801-5).He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Ipswich from 1812 to 1818, and for Maldon from 1837 to 1847. he was High Steward of Colchester from 1818 to his death and appointed High Sheriff of Essex for 1834–5.He married Susan Constantia, the daughter of George Caswall of Sacombe Park, Hertfordshire, with whom he had 3 sons and 2 daughters. His grandson John Horace Round was a historian and genealogist of medieval England. | [
"Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"High Sheriff of Essex"
] |
|
Which position did John Round hold in 1840-02-03? | February 03, 1840 | {
"text": [
"Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom"
]
} | L2_Q6255760_P39_1 | John Round holds the position of Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jul, 1837 to Jun, 1841.
John Round holds the position of Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jun, 1841 to Jul, 1847.
John Round holds the position of High Sheriff of Essex from Jan, 1834 to Jan, 1835. | John Round (MP)John Round (8 March 1783 – 28 April 1860) was an English banker and Conservative Party politician.He was the eldest surviving son of barrister John Round, of Colchester and educated at Gray's Inn (1800) and Balliol College, Oxford (1801-5).He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Ipswich from 1812 to 1818, and for Maldon from 1837 to 1847. he was High Steward of Colchester from 1818 to his death and appointed High Sheriff of Essex for 1834–5.He married Susan Constantia, the daughter of George Caswall of Sacombe Park, Hertfordshire, with whom he had 3 sons and 2 daughters. His grandson John Horace Round was a historian and genealogist of medieval England. | [
"Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"High Sheriff of Essex"
] |
|
Which position did John Round hold in 03/02/1840? | February 03, 1840 | {
"text": [
"Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom"
]
} | L2_Q6255760_P39_1 | John Round holds the position of Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jul, 1837 to Jun, 1841.
John Round holds the position of Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jun, 1841 to Jul, 1847.
John Round holds the position of High Sheriff of Essex from Jan, 1834 to Jan, 1835. | John Round (MP)John Round (8 March 1783 – 28 April 1860) was an English banker and Conservative Party politician.He was the eldest surviving son of barrister John Round, of Colchester and educated at Gray's Inn (1800) and Balliol College, Oxford (1801-5).He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Ipswich from 1812 to 1818, and for Maldon from 1837 to 1847. he was High Steward of Colchester from 1818 to his death and appointed High Sheriff of Essex for 1834–5.He married Susan Constantia, the daughter of George Caswall of Sacombe Park, Hertfordshire, with whom he had 3 sons and 2 daughters. His grandson John Horace Round was a historian and genealogist of medieval England. | [
"Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"High Sheriff of Essex"
] |
|
Which position did John Round hold in Feb 03, 1840? | February 03, 1840 | {
"text": [
"Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom"
]
} | L2_Q6255760_P39_1 | John Round holds the position of Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jul, 1837 to Jun, 1841.
John Round holds the position of Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jun, 1841 to Jul, 1847.
John Round holds the position of High Sheriff of Essex from Jan, 1834 to Jan, 1835. | John Round (MP)John Round (8 March 1783 – 28 April 1860) was an English banker and Conservative Party politician.He was the eldest surviving son of barrister John Round, of Colchester and educated at Gray's Inn (1800) and Balliol College, Oxford (1801-5).He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Ipswich from 1812 to 1818, and for Maldon from 1837 to 1847. he was High Steward of Colchester from 1818 to his death and appointed High Sheriff of Essex for 1834–5.He married Susan Constantia, the daughter of George Caswall of Sacombe Park, Hertfordshire, with whom he had 3 sons and 2 daughters. His grandson John Horace Round was a historian and genealogist of medieval England. | [
"Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"High Sheriff of Essex"
] |
|
Which position did John Round hold in 02/03/1840? | February 03, 1840 | {
"text": [
"Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom"
]
} | L2_Q6255760_P39_1 | John Round holds the position of Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jul, 1837 to Jun, 1841.
John Round holds the position of Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jun, 1841 to Jul, 1847.
John Round holds the position of High Sheriff of Essex from Jan, 1834 to Jan, 1835. | John Round (MP)John Round (8 March 1783 – 28 April 1860) was an English banker and Conservative Party politician.He was the eldest surviving son of barrister John Round, of Colchester and educated at Gray's Inn (1800) and Balliol College, Oxford (1801-5).He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Ipswich from 1812 to 1818, and for Maldon from 1837 to 1847. he was High Steward of Colchester from 1818 to his death and appointed High Sheriff of Essex for 1834–5.He married Susan Constantia, the daughter of George Caswall of Sacombe Park, Hertfordshire, with whom he had 3 sons and 2 daughters. His grandson John Horace Round was a historian and genealogist of medieval England. | [
"Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"High Sheriff of Essex"
] |
|
Which position did John Round hold in 03-Feb-184003-February-1840? | February 03, 1840 | {
"text": [
"Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom"
]
} | L2_Q6255760_P39_1 | John Round holds the position of Member of the 13th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jul, 1837 to Jun, 1841.
John Round holds the position of Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jun, 1841 to Jul, 1847.
John Round holds the position of High Sheriff of Essex from Jan, 1834 to Jan, 1835. | John Round (MP)John Round (8 March 1783 – 28 April 1860) was an English banker and Conservative Party politician.He was the eldest surviving son of barrister John Round, of Colchester and educated at Gray's Inn (1800) and Balliol College, Oxford (1801-5).He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Ipswich from 1812 to 1818, and for Maldon from 1837 to 1847. he was High Steward of Colchester from 1818 to his death and appointed High Sheriff of Essex for 1834–5.He married Susan Constantia, the daughter of George Caswall of Sacombe Park, Hertfordshire, with whom he had 3 sons and 2 daughters. His grandson John Horace Round was a historian and genealogist of medieval England. | [
"Member of the 14th Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"High Sheriff of Essex"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Liberal Party of Canada in Nov, 2010? | November 23, 2010 | {
"text": [
"Michael Ignatieff"
]
} | L2_Q138345_P488_13 | Louis St. Laurent is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1948 to Jan, 1958.
Edward Blake is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 1880 to Jun, 1887.
Jean Chrétien is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1990 to Nov, 2003.
Stéphane Dion is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2006 to Dec, 2008.
Paul Martin is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Nov, 2003 to Mar, 2006.
Pierre Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 1968 to Jun, 1984.
Alexander Mackenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 1873 to Apr, 1880.
Daniel Duncan McKenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Feb, 1919 to Aug, 1919.
William Lyon Mackenzie King is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1919 to Aug, 1948.
Wilfrid Laurier is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1887 to Feb, 1919.
Lester B. Pearson is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jan, 1958 to Apr, 1968.
John Turner is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1984 to Jun, 1990.
Justin Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Bob Rae is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 2011 to Apr, 2013.
Michael Ignatieff is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2008 to May, 2011.
Bill Graham is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 2006 to Dec, 2006. | Liberal Party of CanadaThe Liberal Party of Canada (LPC; ) is the longest-serving and oldest active federal political party in Canada. The party has dominated federal politics for much of Canada's history, holding power for almost 70 years of the 20th century. As a result, it has sometimes been referred to as Canada's "natural governing party".The party espouses the principles of liberalism, and generally sits at the centre to centre-left of the Canadian political spectrum, with their rival the Conservative Party positioned to the right and the New Democratic Party (who at times aligned itself with the Liberals during minority governments), positioned to their left. The party is described as "big tent", practicing "brokerage politics", attracting support from a broad spectrum of voters. In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau claimed that his Liberal Party adhered to the "radical centre".The Liberals' signature policies and legislative decisions include universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, peacekeeping, multilateralism, official bilingualism, official multiculturalism, gun control, patriating the Canadian constitution and the entrenchment of Canada's "Charter of Rights and Freedoms", the "Clarity Act", legalizing same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and cannabis, national carbon pricing, and expanded access to abortion.In the 2015 federal election, the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau had its best result since the 2000 election, winning 39.5 percent of the popular vote and 184 seats, gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In the 2019 federal election, they were reduced to a minority government, winning 157 seats to remain the largest party in the House of Commons while narrowly losing the popular vote.The Liberals are descended from the mid-19th century Reformers who advocated for responsible government throughout British North America. These included George Brown, Alexander Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and the Clear Grits in Upper Canada, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, and the Patriotes and Rouges in Lower Canada led by figures such as Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Clear Grits and "Parti rouge" sometimes functioned as a united bloc in the legislature of the Province of Canada beginning in 1854, and a united Liberal Party combining both English and French Canadian members was formed in 1861.At the time of confederation of the former British colonies of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the radical Liberals were marginalized by the more pragmatic Conservative coalition assembled under Sir John A. Macdonald. In the 29 years after Canadian confederation, the Liberals were consigned to opposition, with the exception of one stint in government. Alexander Mackenzie was the de facto leader of the Official Opposition after Confederation and finally agreed to become the first official leader of the Liberal Party in 1873. He was able to lead the party to power for the first time in 1873, after the MacDonald government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons due to the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie subsequently won the 1874 election, and served as Prime Minister for an additional four years. During the five years the Liberal government brought in many reforms, which include the replacement of open voting by secret ballot, confining elections to one day and the creation of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the Office of the Auditor General. However the party was only able to build a solid support base in Ontario, and in 1878 lost the government to MacDonald. The Liberals would spend the next 18 years in opposition.In their early history, the Liberals were the party of continentalism and opposition to imperialism. The Liberals also became identified with the aspirations of Quebecers as a result of the growing hostility of French Canadians to the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost the support of French Canadians because of the role of Conservative governments in the execution of Louis Riel and their role in the Conscription Crisis of 1917, and especially their opposition to French schools in provinces besides Quebec.It was not until Wilfrid Laurier became leader that the Liberal Party emerged as a modern party. Laurier was able to capitalize on the Tories' alienation of French Canada by offering the Liberals as a credible alternative. Laurier was able to overcome the party's reputation for anti-clericalism that offended the still-powerful Quebec Roman Catholic Church. In English-speaking Canada, the Liberal Party's support for reciprocity made it popular among farmers, and helped cement the party's hold in the growing prairie provinces.Laurier led the Liberals to power in the 1896 election (in which he became the first Francophone Prime Minister), and oversaw a government that increased immigration in order to settle Western Canada. Laurier's government created the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta out of the North-West Territories, and promoted the development of Canadian industry.Until the early part of the century, the Liberal Party was a loose, informal coalition of local, provincial and regional bodies with a strong national party leader and caucus (and when in power, the national cabinet) but with an informal and regionalized extra-parliamentary organizational structure. There was no national membership of the party, an individual became a member by joining a provincial Liberal party. Laurier called the party's first national convention in 1893 in order to unite Liberal supporters behind a programme and build the campaign that successfully brought the party to power in 1896; however, once in power, no efforts were made to create a formal national organization outside of parliament.As a result of the party's defeats in the 1911 and 1917 federal elections, Laurier attempted to organize the party on a national level by creating three bodies: the Central Liberal Information Office, the National Liberal Advisory Committee, and the National Liberal Organization Committee. However, the advisory committee became dominated by members of parliament and all three bodies were underfunded and competed with both local and provincial Liberal associations and the national caucus for authority. The party did organize the national party's second convention in 1919 to elect William Lyon Mackenzie King as Laurier's successor (Canada's first ever leadership convention), yet following the party's return to power in the 1921 federal election the nascent national party organizations were eclipsed by powerful ministers and local party organizations largely driven by patronage.As a result of both the party's defeat in the 1930 federal election, and the Beauharnois bribery scandal which highlighted the need for distance between the Liberal Party's political wing and campaign fundraising, a central coordinating organization, the National Liberal Federation, was created in 1932 with Vincent Massey as its first president. The new organization allowed individuals to directly join the national Liberal Party for the first time. With the Liberals return to power the national organization languished except for occasional national committee meetings, such as in 1943 when Mackenzie King called a meeting of the federation (consisting of the national caucus and up to seven voting delegates per province) to approve a new platform for the party in anticipation of the end of World War II and prepare for a post-war election. No national convention was held, however, until 1948; the Liberal Party held only three national conventions prior to the 1950s – in 1893, 1919 and 1948. The National Liberal Federation remained largely dependent on provincial Liberal parties and was often ignored and bypassed the parliamentary party in the organization of election campaigns and the development of policy. With the defeat of the Liberals in the 1957 federal election and in particular 1958, reformers argued for the strengthening of the national party organization so it would not be dependent on provincial Liberal parties and patronage. A national executive and Council of presidents, consisting of the presidents of each Liberal riding association, were developed to give the party more co-ordination and national party conventions were regularly held in biennially where previously they had been held infrequently. Over time, provincial Liberal parties in most provinces were separated from provincial wings of the federal party and in a number of cases disaffiliated. By the 1980s, the National Liberal Federation was officially known as the Liberal Party of Canada.Under Laurier, and his successor William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberals promoted Canadian sovereignty and greater independence within the British Commonwealth. In Imperial Conferences held throughout the 1920s, Canadian Liberal governments often took the lead in arguing that the United Kingdom and the dominions should have equal status, and against proposals for an 'imperial parliament' that would have subsumed Canadian independence. After the King–Byng Affair of 1926, the Liberals argued that the Governor General of Canada should no longer be appointed on the recommendation of the British government. The decisions of the Imperial Conferences were formalized in the Statute of Westminster, which was actually passed in 1931, the year after the Liberals lost power.The Liberals also promoted the idea of Canada being responsible for its own foreign and defence policy. Initially, it was Britain which determined external affairs for the dominion. In 1905, Laurier created the Department of External Affairs, and in 1909 he advised Governor General Earl Grey to appoint the first Secretary of State for External Affairs to Cabinet. It was also Laurier who first proposed the creation of a Canadian Navy in 1910. Mackenzie King recommended the appointment by Governor General Lord Byng of Vincent Massey as the first Canadian ambassador to Washington in 1926, marking the Liberal government's insistence on having direct relations with the United States, rather than having Britain act on Canada's behalf.In the period just before and after the Second World War, the party became a champion of 'progressive social policy'. As Prime Minister for most of the time between 1921 and 1948, King introduced several measures that led to the creation of Canada's social safety net. Bowing to popular pressure, he introduced the mother's allowance, a monthly payment to all mothers with young children. He also reluctantly introduced old age pensions when J. S. Woodsworth required it in exchange for his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party's support of King's minority government.Louis St. Laurent succeeded King as Liberal leader and Prime Minister on November 15, 1948. In the 1949 and 1953 federal elections, St. Laurent led the Liberal Party to two large majority governments. As Prime Minister he oversaw the joining of Newfoundland in Confederation as Canada's tenth province, he established equalization payments to the provinces, and continued with social reform with improvements in pensions and health insurance. In 1956, Canada played an important role in resolving the Suez Crisis, and contributed to the United Nations force in the Korean War. Canada enjoyed economic prosperity during St. Laurent's premiership and wartime debts were paid off. The Pipeline Debate proved the Liberal Party's undoing. Their attempt to pass legislation to build a natural gas pipeline from Alberta to central Canada was met with fierce disagreement in the House of Commons. In 1957, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives won a minority government and St. Laurent resigned as Prime Minister and Liberal leader.Lester B. Pearson was easily elected Liberal leader at the party's 1958 leadership convention. However, only months after becoming Liberal leader, Pearson led the party into the 1958 federal election that saw Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives win the largest majority government, by percentage of seats, in Canadian history. The Progressive Conservatives won 206 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons, while the Liberals were reduced to just 48 seats. Pearson remained Liberal leader during this time and in the 1962 election managed to reduce Diefenbaker to a minority government. In the 1963 election Pearson led the Liberal Party back to victory, forming a minority government. Pearson served as Prime Minister for five years, winning a second election in 1965. While Pearson's leadership was considered poor and the Liberal Party never held a majority of the seats in parliament during his premiership, he left office in 1968 with an impressive legacy. Pearson's government introduced Medicare, a new immigration act, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, the Canada Assistance Plan, and adopted the Maple Leaf as Canada's national flag.Under Pierre Trudeau, the mission of a progressive social policy evolved into the goal of creating a "just society".The Liberal Party under Trudeau promoted official bilingualism and passed the "Official Languages Act", which gave French and English languages equal status in Canada. Trudeau hoped that the promotion of bilingualism would cement Quebec's place in Confederation, and counter growing calls for an independent Quebec. The party hoped the policy would transform Canada into a country where English and French Canadians could live together, and allow Canadians to move to any part of the country without having to lose their language. Although this vision has yet to fully materialize, official bilingualism has helped to halt the decline of the French language outside of Quebec, and to ensure that all federal government services (including radio and television services provided by the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada) are available in both languages throughout the country.The Trudeau Liberals are also credited with support for state multiculturalism as a means of integrating immigrants into Canadian society without forcing them to shed their culture, leading the party to build a base of support among recent immigrants and their children. This marked the culmination of a decades-long shift in Liberal immigration policy, a reversal of pre-war racial attitudes that spurred discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 and the MS St. Louis incident.The most lasting effect of the Trudeau years has been the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau's Liberals supported the concept of a strong, central government, and fought Quebec separatism, other forms of Quebec nationalism, and the granting of "distinct society" status to Quebec. Such actions, however, served as rallying cries for sovereigntists and alienated many Francophone Quebeckers.The other primary legacy of the Trudeau years has been financial. Net federal debt in fiscal 1968, just before Trudeau became Prime Minister, was about $18 billion CAD, or 26 percent of gross domestic product; by his final year in office, it had ballooned to over 200 billion—at 46 percent of GDP, nearly twice as large relative to the economy.After Trudeau's retirement in 1984, many Liberals, such as Jean Chrétien and Clyde Wells, continued to adhere to Trudeau's concept of federalism. Others, such as John Turner, supported the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" and would have increased the powers of the provinces to the detriment of the federal government.Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister and party leader in 1984, as the Liberals were slipping in polls. At that year's leadership convention, Turner defeated Chrétien on the second ballot to become Prime Minister. Immediately, upon taking office, Turner called a snap election, citing favourable internal polls. However, the party was hurt by numerous patronage appointments, many of which Turner had made supposedly in return for Trudeau retiring early. Also, they were unpopular in their traditional stronghold of Quebec because of the constitution repatriation which excluded that province. The Liberals lost power in the 1984 election, and were reduced to only 40 seats in the House of Commons. The Progressive Conservatives won a majority of the seats in every province, including Quebec. The 95-seat loss was the worst defeat in the party's history, and the worst defeat at the time for a governing party at the federal level. What was more, the New Democratic Party, successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, won only ten fewer seats than the Liberals, and some thought that the NDP under Ed Broadbent would push the Liberals to third-party status.The party began a long process of reconstruction. A small group of young Liberal MPs, known as the Rat Pack, gained fame by criticizing the Tory government of Brian Mulroney at every turn. Also, despite public and backroom attempts to remove Turner as leader, he managed to consolidate his leadership at the 1986 review.The 1988 election was notable for Turner's strong opposition to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although most Canadians voted for parties opposed to free trade, the Tories were returned with a majority government, and implemented the deal. The Liberals recovered from their near-meltdown of 1984, however, winning 83 seats and ending much of the talk of being eclipsed by the NDP, who won 43 seats.Turner announced that he would resign as leader of the Liberal Party on May 3, 1989. The Liberal Party set a leadership convention for June 23, 1990, in Calgary. Five candidates contested the leadership of the party and former Deputy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who had served in every Liberal cabinet since 1965, won on the first ballot. Chrétien's Liberals campaigned in the 1993 election on the promise of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and eliminating the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Just after the writ was dropped for the election, they issued the Red Book, an integrated and coherent approach to economic, social, environmental and foreign policy. This was unprecedented for a Canadian party. Taking full advantage of the inability of Mulroney's successor, Kim Campbell, to overcome a large amount of antipathy toward Mulroney, they won a strong majority government with 177 seats—the third-best performance in party history, and their best since 1949. The Progressive Conservatives were cut down to only two seats, suffering a defeat even more severe than the one they had handed the Liberals nine years earlier. The Liberals were re-elected with a considerably reduced majority in 1997, but nearly tied their 1993 total in 2000.For the next decade, the Liberals dominated Canadian politics in a fashion not seen since the early years of Confederation. This was because of the destruction of the "grand coalition" of Western socially conservative populists, Quebec nationalists, and fiscal conservatives from Ontario that had supported the Progressive Conservatives in 1984 and 1988. The Progressive Conservatives Western support, for all practical purposes, transferred en masse to the Western-based Reform Party, which replaced the PCs as the major right-wing party in Canada. However, the new party's agenda was seen as too conservative for most Canadians. It only won one seat east of Manitoba in an election (but gained another in a floor-crossing). Even when Reform restructured into the Canadian Alliance, the party was virtually non-existent east of Manitoba, winning only 66 seats in 2000. Reform/Alliance was the official opposition from 1997 to 2003, but was never able to overcome wide perceptions that it was merely a Western protest party. The Quebec nationalists who had once supported the Tories largely switched their support to the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois, while the Tories' Ontario support largely moved to the Liberals. The PCs would never be a major force in Canadian politics again; while they rebounded to 20 seats in the next election, they won only two seats west of Quebec in the next decade.Ontario and Quebec combine for a majority of seats in the House of Commons by virtue of Ontario's current population and Quebec's historic population (59 percent of the seats ). As a result, it is very difficult to form even a minority government without substantial support in Ontario and/or Quebec. No party has ever formed a majority government without winning the most seats in either Ontario or Quebec. It is mathematically possible to form a minority government without a strong base in either province, but such an undertaking is politically difficult. The Liberals were the only party with a strong base in both provinces, thus making them the only party capable of forming a government.There was some disappointment as Liberals were not able to recover their traditional dominant position in Quebec, despite being led by a Quebecer from a strongly nationalist region of Quebec. The Bloc capitalized on discontent with the failure of the 1990 Meech Lake Accord and Chrétien's uncompromising stance on federalism (see below) to win the most seats in Quebec in every election from 1993, onward, even serving as the official opposition from 1993 to 1997. Chrétien's reputation in his home province never recovered after the 1990 leadership convention when rival Paul Martin forced him to declare his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord. However, the Liberals did increase their support in the next two elections because of infighting within the Bloc. In the 1997 election, although the Liberals finished with a thin majority, it was their gains in Quebec which were credited with offsetting their losses in the Maritime provinces. In particular, the 2000 election was a breakthrough for the Liberals after the PQ government's unpopular initiatives regarding consolidation of several Quebec urban areas into "megacities". Many federal Liberals also took credit for Charest's provincial election victory over the PQ in spring 2003. A series of by-elections allowed the Liberals to gain a majority of Quebec ridings for the first time since 1984.The Chrétien Liberals more than made up for their shortfall in Quebec by building a strong base in Ontario. They reaped a substantial windfall from the votes of fiscally conservative and socially liberal voters who had previously voted Tory, as well as rapid growth in the Greater Toronto Area. They were also able to take advantage of massive vote splitting between the Tories and Reform/Alliance in rural areas of the province that had traditionally formed the backbone of provincial Tory governments. Combined with their historic dominance of Metro Toronto and northern Ontario, the Liberals dominated the province's federal politics even as the Tories won landslide majorities at the provincial level. In 1993, for example, the Liberals won all but one seat in Ontario, and came within 123 votes in Simcoe Centre of pulling off the first clean sweep of Canada's most populated province. They were able to retain their position as the largest party in the House by winning all but two seats in Ontario in the 1997 election. The Liberals were assured of at least a minority government once the Ontario results came in, but it was not clear until later in the night that they would retain their majority. In 2000, the Liberals won all but three seats in Ontario.While the Chrétien Liberals campaigned from the left, their time in power is most marked by the cuts made to many social programs, including health transfers, in order to balance the federal budget. Chrétien had supported the Charlottetown Accord while in opposition, but in power opposed major concessions to Quebec and other provincialist factions. In contrast to their promises during the 1993 campaign, they implemented only minor changes to NAFTA, embraced the free trade concept and—with the exception of the replacement of the GST with the Harmonized Sales Tax in some Atlantic provinces—broke their promise to replace the GST.After a proposal for Quebec independence was narrowly defeated in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Liberals passed the "Clarity Act", which outlines the federal government's preconditions for negotiating provincial independence. In Chrétien's final days, he supported same-sex marriage and decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana. Chrétien displeased the United States government when he pledged on March 17, 2003, that Canada would not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A poll released shortly after showed widespread approval of Chrétien's decision by the Canadian public. The poll, which was conducted by EKOS for the "Toronto Star" and "La Presse", found 71 percent of those questioned approved of the government's decision to not enter the United States-led invasion, with 27 percent expressing disapproval.Several trends started in 2003 which suggested the end of the Liberal Party's political dominance. Notably, there would be a high turnover of permanent party leaders, in contrast to their predecessors who usually served over two or more elections, particularly Trudeau and Chrétien who each led for over a decade. The Liberals were also hampered by their inability to raise campaign money competitively after Chrétien passed a bill in 2003 which banned corporate donations, even though the Liberals had enjoyed by far the lion's share of this funding because of the then-divided opposition parties. It has been suggested that Chrétien, who had done nothing about election financing for his 10 years in office, could be seen as the idealist as he retired, while his rival and successor Paul Martin would have the burden of having to fight an election under the strict new rules. Simon Fraser University professor Doug McArthur has noted that Martin's leadership campaign used aggressive tactics for the 2003 leadership convention, in attempting to end the contest before it could start by giving the impression that his bid was too strong for any other candidate to beat. McArthur blamed Martin's tactics for the ongoing sag in Liberal fortunes, as it discouraged activists who were not on side.Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien as party leader and prime minister in 2003. Despite the personal rivalry between the two, Martin was the architect of the Liberals' economic policies as Minister of Finance during the 1990s. Chrétien left office with a high approval rating and Martin was expected to make inroads into Quebec and Western Canada, two regions of Canada where the Liberals had not attracted much support since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. While his cabinet choices provoked some controversy over excluding many Chrétien supporters, it at first did little to hurt his popularity.However, the political situation changed with the revelation of the sponsorship scandal, in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services. Having faced a divided conservative opposition for the past three elections, Liberals were seriously challenged by competition from the newly united Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper. The infighting between Martin and Chrétien's supporters also dogged the party. Nonetheless, by criticizing the Conservatives' social policies, the Liberals were able to draw progressive votes from the NDP which made the difference in several close races. On June 28, 2004 federal election, the Martin Liberals retained enough support to continue as the government, though they were reduced to a minority.In the ensuing months, testimony from the Gomery Commission caused public opinion to turn sharply against the Liberals for the first time in over a decade. Despite the devastating revelations, only two Liberal MPs—David Kilgour (who had crossed the floor from the PC Party in 1990) and Pat O'Brien—left the party for reasons other than the scandal. Belinda Stronach, who crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, gave Martin the number of votes needed, although barely, to hold onto power when an NDP-sponsored amendment to his budget was passed only by the Speaker's tiebreaking vote on May 19, 2005.In November, the Liberals dropped in polls following the release of the first Gomery Report. Nonetheless, Martin turned down the NDP's conditions for continued support, as well as rejected an opposition proposal which would schedule a February 2006 election in return for passing several pieces of legislation. The Liberals thus lost the no-confidence vote on November 28; Martin thus became only the fifth prime minister to lose the confidence of the House, but the first to lose on a straight no-confidence motion. Because of the Christmas holiday, Martin advised Governor General Michaëlle Jean to dissolve Parliament and call an election for January 2006.The Liberal campaign was dogged from start to finish by the sponsorship scandal, which was brought up by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) criminal investigation into the leak of the income trust announcement. Numerous gaffes, contrasting with a smoothly run Conservative campaign, put Liberals as many as ten points behind the Conservatives in opinion polling. They managed to recover some of their momentum by election night, but not enough to retain power. They won 103 seats, a net loss of 30 from when the writs were dropped, losing a similar number of seats in Ontario and Quebec to the Tories. However, the Liberals managed to capture the most seats in Ontario for the fifth straight election (54 to the Tories' 40), holding the Conservatives to a minority government. While the Conservatives captured many of Ontario's rural ridings, the Liberals retained most of the population-rich Greater Toronto Area. Many of these ridings, particularly the 905 region, had historically been bellwethers (the Liberals were nearly shut out of this region in 1979 and 1984), but demographic changes have resulted in high Liberal returns in recent years.Martin resigned as parliamentary leader after the election and stepped down as Liberal leader on March 18, having previously promised to step down if he did not win a plurality.On May 11, 2006, "La Presse" reported that the Government of Canada would file a lawsuit against the Liberal Party to recover all the money missing in the sponsorship program. Scott Brison told reporters that same day that the Liberals has already paid back the $1.14 million into the public purse; however, the Conservatives believed that there was as much as $40 million unaccounted for in the sponsorship program.After their election defeat Martin chose not to take on the office of Leader of the Opposition. He stepped down as parliamentary leader of his party on February 1, and the Liberal caucus appointed Bill Graham, MP for Toronto Centre and outgoing Defence Minister, as his interim successor. Martin officially resigned as leader in March, with Graham taking over on an interim basis.The leadership election was set for December 2, 2006, in Montreal; however, a number of prominent members such as John Manley, Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin, and Allan Rock had already announced they would not enter the race to succeed Martin. Throughout the campaign 12 candidates came forward to lead the party, but by the time of the leadership convention only eight people remained in the race; Martha Hall Findlay, Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, Joe Volpe.Throughout the campaign Ignatieff, Rae, Dion and Kennedy were considered to be the only candidates with enough support to be able to win the leadership, with Ignatieff and Rae being considered the two front-runners. However polling showed Ignatieff had little room to grow his support, while Dion was the second and third choice among a plurality of delegates. At the leadership convention Ignatieff came out on top on the first ballot with 29.3 percent, With Kennedy's support Dion was able to leapfrog both Rae and Ignatieff on the third ballot, eliminating Rae. On the fourth and final ballot Dion defeated Ignatieff to become leader of the Liberal Party.Following the leadership race the Liberal Party saw a bounce in support and surpassed the Conservative Party as the most popular party in Canada. However, in the months and years to come the party's support gradually fell. Dion's own popularity lagged considerably behind that of Prime Minister Harper's, and he often trailed NDP leader Jack Layton in opinion polls when Canadians were asked who would make the best Prime Minister.Dion campaigned on environmental sustainability during the leadership race, and created the "Green Shift" plan following his election as leader. The Green Shift proposed creating a carbon tax that would be coupled with reductions to income tax rates. The proposal was to tax greenhouse gas emissions, starting at $10 per tonne of CO2 and reaching $40 per tonne within four years. The plan was a key policy for the party in the 2008 federal election, but it was not well received and was continuously attacked by both the Conservatives and NDP. On election night the Liberal Party won 26.26 percent of the popular vote and 77 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. At that time their popular support was the lowest in the party's history, and weeks later Dion announced he would step down as Liberal leader once his successor was chosen.New Brunswick Member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc was the first candidate to announce he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party on October 27, 2008. Days later Bob Rae, who had finished third in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate for the leadership. The party executive met in early November and chose May 2, 2009, as the date to elect the next leader. On November 13 Michael Ignatieff, who finished second in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate.On November 27, 2008, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty provided the House of Commons with a fiscal update, within which were plans to cut government spending, suspend the ability of civil servants to strike until 2011, sell off some Crown assets to raise capital, and eliminate the existing $1.95 per vote subsidy parties garner in an election. The opposition parties criticized the fiscal update, and announced they would not support it because it contained no stimulus money to spur Canada's economy and protect workers during the economic crisis. With the Conservative Party only holding a minority of the seats in the House of Commons the government would be defeated if the opposition parties voted against the fiscal update. With the Conservatives unwilling to budge on the proposals outlined in the fiscal update the Liberals and NDP signed an agreement to form a coalition government, with a written pledge of support from the Bloc Québécois. Under the terms of the agreement Dion would be sworn in as Prime Minister, however he would only serve in the position until the next Liberal leader was chosen. Dion contacted Governor General Michaëlle Jean and advised her that he had the confidence of the House of Commons if Prime Minister Harper's government was to fall. However, before the fiscal update could be voted on in the House of Commons Prime Minister Harper requested the Governor General to prorogue parliament till January 26, 2009, which she accepted.While polls showed Canadians were split on the idea of having either a coalition government or having the Conservatives continue to govern, it was clear that because of Dion's personal popularity they were not comfortable with him becoming Prime Minister. Members of the Liberal Party therefore called on Dion to resign as leader immediately and for an interim leader to be chosen, this person would become the Prime Minister in the event that the Conservatives were defeated when parliament resumed in January. With an estimated 70 percent of the Liberal caucus wanting Ignatieff to be named interim leader, Dion resigned the post on December 8, 2008 (effective December 10, upon Ignatieff's becoming interim leader). LeBlanc announced on the same day that he was abandoning the Liberal leadership race and endorsing Ignatieff as the next leader. The following day Rae announced he was also dropping out of the race and was placing his "full and unqualified" support to Ignatieff.With Ignatieff named interim leader of the party (on December 10), the Liberal's poll numbers saw significant gains, after they plummeted with the signing of the coalition agreement. When parliament resumed on January 28, 2009, the Ignatieff Liberals agreed to support the budget as long as it included regular accountability reports, which the Conservatives accepted. This ended the possibility of the coalition government with the New Democrats.Throughout the Winter of 2008–09, opinion polls showed that while the Ignatieff led Liberals still trailed the Conservatives their support had stabilized in the low 30 percent range. However, by the time Ignatieff was confirmed as party leader on May 2, 2009, the Liberal Party had a comfortable lead over the governing Conservatives. After a summer where he was accused of being missing in action, Ignatieff announced on August 31, 2009, that the Liberals would not support the minority Conservative government. After this announcement the Liberal Party's poll numbers, which had already declined over the summer, started to fall further behind the Conservatives. On October 1, 2009, the Liberals put forth a non-confidence motion with the hope of defeating the government. However, the NDP abstained from voting and the Conservatives survived the confidence motion.The Liberal Party's attempt to force an election, just a year after the previous one, was reported as a miscalculation, as polls showed that most Canadians did not want another election. Even after the government survived the confidence motion popularity for Ignatieff and his party continued to fall. Over the next year and a half, with the exception of a brief period in early 2010, support for the Liberals remained below 30 percent, and behind the Conservatives. While his predecessor Dion was criticized by the Conservatives as a "weak leader", Ignatieff was attacked as a "political opportunist".On March 25, 2011, Ignatieff introduced a motion of non-confidence against the Harper government to attempt to force a May 2011, federal election after the government was found to be in Contempt of Parliament, the first such occurrence in Commonwealth history. The House of Commons passed the motion by 156–145.The Liberals had considerable momentum when the writ was dropped, and Ignatieff successfully squeezed NDP leader Jack Layton out of media attention, by issuing challenges to Harper for one-on-one debates. In the first couple weeks of the campaign, Ignatieff kept his party in second place in the polls, and his personal ratings exceeded that of Layton for the first time. However, opponents frequently criticized Ignatieff's perceived political opportunism, particularly during the leaders debates when Layton criticized Ignatieff for having a poor attendance record for Commons votes saying "You know, most Canadians, if they don't show up for work, they don't get a promotion". Ignatieff failed to defend himself against these charges, and the debates were said to be a turning point for his party's campaign. Near the end of the campaign, a late surge in support for Layton and the NDP relegated Ignatieff and the Liberals to third in opinion polls.The Liberals suffered their worst defeat in history in the May 2, 2011, federal election. The result was a third-place finish, with only 19 percent of the vote and returning 34 seats in the House of Commons. Notably, their support in Toronto and Montreal, their power bases for the last two decades, all but vanished. All told, the Liberals won only 11 seats in Ontario (seven of which were in Toronto) and seven in Quebec (all in Montreal)—their fewest totals in either province. Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province with majority Liberal seats at 4 out of 7. They also won only four seats west of Ontario. The Conservatives won 40 percent of the vote and formed a majority government, while the NDP formed the Official Opposition winning 31 percent of the vote.This election marked the first time the Liberals were unable to form either government or the official opposition. Ignatieff was defeated in his own riding, and announced his resignation as Liberal leader shortly after. Bob Rae was chosen as the interim leader on May 25, 2011.On April 14, 2013 Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was elected leader of the Liberal Party on the first ballot, winning 80% of the vote. Following his win, support for the Liberal Party increased considerably, and the party moved into first place in public opinion polls.An initial surge in support in the polls following Trudeau's election wore off in the following year, in the face of Conservative ad campaign after Trudeau's win attempting to "[paint] him as a silly dilettante unfit for public office."In 2014, Trudeau removed all Liberal senators from the Liberal Party caucus. In announcing this, Trudeau said the purpose of the unelected upper chamber is to act as a check on the power of the prime minister, but the party structure interferes with that purpose. Following this move, Liberal senators chose to keep the designation "Liberal" and sit together as a caucus, albeit not one supported by the Liberal Party of Canada. This independent group continued to refer to itself in publications as the Senate Liberal Caucus until 2019.By the time the 2015 federal election was called, the Liberals had been knocked back into third place. Trudeau and his advisors planned to mount a campaign based on economic stimulus in the hopes of regaining the mantle of being the party that best represented change from the New Democrats.Justin Trudeau's Liberals would win the 2015 election in dramatic fashion: becoming the first party to win a parliamentary majority after being reduced to third party status in a previous general election, besting Brian Mulroney's record for the largest seat increase by a party in a single election (111 in 1984), and winning the most seats in Quebec for the first time since 1980. Chantal Hébert deemed the result "a Liberal comeback that is headed straight for the history books", while Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove and Theophilos Argitis similarly described it as "capping the biggest political comeback in the country’s history."Scholars and political experts have recently used a political realignment model to explain what was considered a collapse of a dominant party, and put its condition in long-term perspective. According to recent scholarship, there have been four party systems in Canada at the federal level since Confederation, each with its own distinctive pattern of social support, patronage relationships, leadership styles, and electoral strategies. Steve Patten identifies four party systems in Canada's political history:Stephen Clarkson (2005) shows how the Liberal Party has dominated all the party systems, using different approaches. It began with a "clientelistic approach" under Laurier, which evolved into a "brokerage" system of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s under Mackenzie King. The 1950s saw the emergence of a "pan-Canadian system", which lasted until the 1990s. The 1993 election – categorized by Clarkson as an electoral "earthquake" which "fragmented" the party system, saw the emergence of regional politics within a four party-system, whereby various groups championed regional issues and concerns. Clarkson concludes that the inherent bias built into the first-past-the-post system, has chiefly benefited the Liberals.Pundits in the wake of the 2011 election widely believed in a theme of major realignment. Lawrence Martin, commentator for "The Globe and Mail", claimed that "Harper has completed a remarkable reconstruction of a Canadian political landscape that endured for more than a century. The realignment sees both old parties of the moderate middle, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals, either eliminated or marginalized." "Maclean's" said that the election marked "an unprecedented realignment of Canadian politics" as "the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada"; Andrew Coyne proclaimed "The West is in and Ontario has joined it," noting that the Conservatives accomplished the rare feat of putting together a majority by winning in both Ontario and the western provinces (difficult because of traditionally conflicting interests), while having little representation in Quebec. Books such as "The Big Shift" by John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, and Peter C. Newman's "When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada", provocatively asserted that the Liberals had become an "endangered species" and that an NDP-led opposition would mean that "fortune favours the Harper government" in subsequent campaigns.The Liberal victory in 2015, leaving Alberta and Saskatchewan as the only provinces represented by a majority of Conservative MPs, has now challenged that narrative.The principles of the party are based on liberalism as defined by various liberal theorists and include individual freedom for present and future generations, responsibility, human dignity, a just society, political freedom, religious freedom, national unity, equality of opportunity, cultural diversity, bilingualism, and multilateralism. In the present times, the Liberal party has favoured a variety of "big tent" policies from both right and left of the political spectrum. When it formed the government from 1993 to 2006, it championed balanced budgets, and eliminated the budget deficit completely from the federal budget in 1995 by reducing spending on social programs or delegating them to the provinces, and promised to replace the Goods and Services Tax in the party's famous Red Book. It also legalized same-sex marriage.During the 2015 election, the Liberal party's proposed policies included:Each province and one territory in Canada has its own Liberal Party. However, only those in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are politically and organizationally affiliated with the federal Liberal Party. While other provincial Liberal parties may align ideologically with the federal party, they operate as completely separate entities. Those provincial parties have separate policies, finances, memberships, constituency associations, executives, conventions and offices.To date, only seven Liberal leaders never served as Prime Minister, three of whom were interim leaders. | [
"Wilfrid Laurier",
"Stéphane Dion",
"Bob Rae",
"Paul Martin",
"William Lyon Mackenzie King",
"Daniel Duncan McKenzie",
"Jean Chrétien",
"Louis St. Laurent",
"Pierre Trudeau",
"John Turner",
"Lester B. Pearson",
"Alexander Mackenzie",
"Edward Blake",
"Justin Trudeau",
"Bill Graham"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Liberal Party of Canada in 2010-11-23? | November 23, 2010 | {
"text": [
"Michael Ignatieff"
]
} | L2_Q138345_P488_13 | Louis St. Laurent is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1948 to Jan, 1958.
Edward Blake is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 1880 to Jun, 1887.
Jean Chrétien is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1990 to Nov, 2003.
Stéphane Dion is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2006 to Dec, 2008.
Paul Martin is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Nov, 2003 to Mar, 2006.
Pierre Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 1968 to Jun, 1984.
Alexander Mackenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 1873 to Apr, 1880.
Daniel Duncan McKenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Feb, 1919 to Aug, 1919.
William Lyon Mackenzie King is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1919 to Aug, 1948.
Wilfrid Laurier is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1887 to Feb, 1919.
Lester B. Pearson is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jan, 1958 to Apr, 1968.
John Turner is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1984 to Jun, 1990.
Justin Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Bob Rae is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 2011 to Apr, 2013.
Michael Ignatieff is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2008 to May, 2011.
Bill Graham is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 2006 to Dec, 2006. | Liberal Party of CanadaThe Liberal Party of Canada (LPC; ) is the longest-serving and oldest active federal political party in Canada. The party has dominated federal politics for much of Canada's history, holding power for almost 70 years of the 20th century. As a result, it has sometimes been referred to as Canada's "natural governing party".The party espouses the principles of liberalism, and generally sits at the centre to centre-left of the Canadian political spectrum, with their rival the Conservative Party positioned to the right and the New Democratic Party (who at times aligned itself with the Liberals during minority governments), positioned to their left. The party is described as "big tent", practicing "brokerage politics", attracting support from a broad spectrum of voters. In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau claimed that his Liberal Party adhered to the "radical centre".The Liberals' signature policies and legislative decisions include universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, peacekeeping, multilateralism, official bilingualism, official multiculturalism, gun control, patriating the Canadian constitution and the entrenchment of Canada's "Charter of Rights and Freedoms", the "Clarity Act", legalizing same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and cannabis, national carbon pricing, and expanded access to abortion.In the 2015 federal election, the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau had its best result since the 2000 election, winning 39.5 percent of the popular vote and 184 seats, gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In the 2019 federal election, they were reduced to a minority government, winning 157 seats to remain the largest party in the House of Commons while narrowly losing the popular vote.The Liberals are descended from the mid-19th century Reformers who advocated for responsible government throughout British North America. These included George Brown, Alexander Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and the Clear Grits in Upper Canada, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, and the Patriotes and Rouges in Lower Canada led by figures such as Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Clear Grits and "Parti rouge" sometimes functioned as a united bloc in the legislature of the Province of Canada beginning in 1854, and a united Liberal Party combining both English and French Canadian members was formed in 1861.At the time of confederation of the former British colonies of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the radical Liberals were marginalized by the more pragmatic Conservative coalition assembled under Sir John A. Macdonald. In the 29 years after Canadian confederation, the Liberals were consigned to opposition, with the exception of one stint in government. Alexander Mackenzie was the de facto leader of the Official Opposition after Confederation and finally agreed to become the first official leader of the Liberal Party in 1873. He was able to lead the party to power for the first time in 1873, after the MacDonald government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons due to the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie subsequently won the 1874 election, and served as Prime Minister for an additional four years. During the five years the Liberal government brought in many reforms, which include the replacement of open voting by secret ballot, confining elections to one day and the creation of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the Office of the Auditor General. However the party was only able to build a solid support base in Ontario, and in 1878 lost the government to MacDonald. The Liberals would spend the next 18 years in opposition.In their early history, the Liberals were the party of continentalism and opposition to imperialism. The Liberals also became identified with the aspirations of Quebecers as a result of the growing hostility of French Canadians to the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost the support of French Canadians because of the role of Conservative governments in the execution of Louis Riel and their role in the Conscription Crisis of 1917, and especially their opposition to French schools in provinces besides Quebec.It was not until Wilfrid Laurier became leader that the Liberal Party emerged as a modern party. Laurier was able to capitalize on the Tories' alienation of French Canada by offering the Liberals as a credible alternative. Laurier was able to overcome the party's reputation for anti-clericalism that offended the still-powerful Quebec Roman Catholic Church. In English-speaking Canada, the Liberal Party's support for reciprocity made it popular among farmers, and helped cement the party's hold in the growing prairie provinces.Laurier led the Liberals to power in the 1896 election (in which he became the first Francophone Prime Minister), and oversaw a government that increased immigration in order to settle Western Canada. Laurier's government created the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta out of the North-West Territories, and promoted the development of Canadian industry.Until the early part of the century, the Liberal Party was a loose, informal coalition of local, provincial and regional bodies with a strong national party leader and caucus (and when in power, the national cabinet) but with an informal and regionalized extra-parliamentary organizational structure. There was no national membership of the party, an individual became a member by joining a provincial Liberal party. Laurier called the party's first national convention in 1893 in order to unite Liberal supporters behind a programme and build the campaign that successfully brought the party to power in 1896; however, once in power, no efforts were made to create a formal national organization outside of parliament.As a result of the party's defeats in the 1911 and 1917 federal elections, Laurier attempted to organize the party on a national level by creating three bodies: the Central Liberal Information Office, the National Liberal Advisory Committee, and the National Liberal Organization Committee. However, the advisory committee became dominated by members of parliament and all three bodies were underfunded and competed with both local and provincial Liberal associations and the national caucus for authority. The party did organize the national party's second convention in 1919 to elect William Lyon Mackenzie King as Laurier's successor (Canada's first ever leadership convention), yet following the party's return to power in the 1921 federal election the nascent national party organizations were eclipsed by powerful ministers and local party organizations largely driven by patronage.As a result of both the party's defeat in the 1930 federal election, and the Beauharnois bribery scandal which highlighted the need for distance between the Liberal Party's political wing and campaign fundraising, a central coordinating organization, the National Liberal Federation, was created in 1932 with Vincent Massey as its first president. The new organization allowed individuals to directly join the national Liberal Party for the first time. With the Liberals return to power the national organization languished except for occasional national committee meetings, such as in 1943 when Mackenzie King called a meeting of the federation (consisting of the national caucus and up to seven voting delegates per province) to approve a new platform for the party in anticipation of the end of World War II and prepare for a post-war election. No national convention was held, however, until 1948; the Liberal Party held only three national conventions prior to the 1950s – in 1893, 1919 and 1948. The National Liberal Federation remained largely dependent on provincial Liberal parties and was often ignored and bypassed the parliamentary party in the organization of election campaigns and the development of policy. With the defeat of the Liberals in the 1957 federal election and in particular 1958, reformers argued for the strengthening of the national party organization so it would not be dependent on provincial Liberal parties and patronage. A national executive and Council of presidents, consisting of the presidents of each Liberal riding association, were developed to give the party more co-ordination and national party conventions were regularly held in biennially where previously they had been held infrequently. Over time, provincial Liberal parties in most provinces were separated from provincial wings of the federal party and in a number of cases disaffiliated. By the 1980s, the National Liberal Federation was officially known as the Liberal Party of Canada.Under Laurier, and his successor William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberals promoted Canadian sovereignty and greater independence within the British Commonwealth. In Imperial Conferences held throughout the 1920s, Canadian Liberal governments often took the lead in arguing that the United Kingdom and the dominions should have equal status, and against proposals for an 'imperial parliament' that would have subsumed Canadian independence. After the King–Byng Affair of 1926, the Liberals argued that the Governor General of Canada should no longer be appointed on the recommendation of the British government. The decisions of the Imperial Conferences were formalized in the Statute of Westminster, which was actually passed in 1931, the year after the Liberals lost power.The Liberals also promoted the idea of Canada being responsible for its own foreign and defence policy. Initially, it was Britain which determined external affairs for the dominion. In 1905, Laurier created the Department of External Affairs, and in 1909 he advised Governor General Earl Grey to appoint the first Secretary of State for External Affairs to Cabinet. It was also Laurier who first proposed the creation of a Canadian Navy in 1910. Mackenzie King recommended the appointment by Governor General Lord Byng of Vincent Massey as the first Canadian ambassador to Washington in 1926, marking the Liberal government's insistence on having direct relations with the United States, rather than having Britain act on Canada's behalf.In the period just before and after the Second World War, the party became a champion of 'progressive social policy'. As Prime Minister for most of the time between 1921 and 1948, King introduced several measures that led to the creation of Canada's social safety net. Bowing to popular pressure, he introduced the mother's allowance, a monthly payment to all mothers with young children. He also reluctantly introduced old age pensions when J. S. Woodsworth required it in exchange for his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party's support of King's minority government.Louis St. Laurent succeeded King as Liberal leader and Prime Minister on November 15, 1948. In the 1949 and 1953 federal elections, St. Laurent led the Liberal Party to two large majority governments. As Prime Minister he oversaw the joining of Newfoundland in Confederation as Canada's tenth province, he established equalization payments to the provinces, and continued with social reform with improvements in pensions and health insurance. In 1956, Canada played an important role in resolving the Suez Crisis, and contributed to the United Nations force in the Korean War. Canada enjoyed economic prosperity during St. Laurent's premiership and wartime debts were paid off. The Pipeline Debate proved the Liberal Party's undoing. Their attempt to pass legislation to build a natural gas pipeline from Alberta to central Canada was met with fierce disagreement in the House of Commons. In 1957, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives won a minority government and St. Laurent resigned as Prime Minister and Liberal leader.Lester B. Pearson was easily elected Liberal leader at the party's 1958 leadership convention. However, only months after becoming Liberal leader, Pearson led the party into the 1958 federal election that saw Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives win the largest majority government, by percentage of seats, in Canadian history. The Progressive Conservatives won 206 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons, while the Liberals were reduced to just 48 seats. Pearson remained Liberal leader during this time and in the 1962 election managed to reduce Diefenbaker to a minority government. In the 1963 election Pearson led the Liberal Party back to victory, forming a minority government. Pearson served as Prime Minister for five years, winning a second election in 1965. While Pearson's leadership was considered poor and the Liberal Party never held a majority of the seats in parliament during his premiership, he left office in 1968 with an impressive legacy. Pearson's government introduced Medicare, a new immigration act, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, the Canada Assistance Plan, and adopted the Maple Leaf as Canada's national flag.Under Pierre Trudeau, the mission of a progressive social policy evolved into the goal of creating a "just society".The Liberal Party under Trudeau promoted official bilingualism and passed the "Official Languages Act", which gave French and English languages equal status in Canada. Trudeau hoped that the promotion of bilingualism would cement Quebec's place in Confederation, and counter growing calls for an independent Quebec. The party hoped the policy would transform Canada into a country where English and French Canadians could live together, and allow Canadians to move to any part of the country without having to lose their language. Although this vision has yet to fully materialize, official bilingualism has helped to halt the decline of the French language outside of Quebec, and to ensure that all federal government services (including radio and television services provided by the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada) are available in both languages throughout the country.The Trudeau Liberals are also credited with support for state multiculturalism as a means of integrating immigrants into Canadian society without forcing them to shed their culture, leading the party to build a base of support among recent immigrants and their children. This marked the culmination of a decades-long shift in Liberal immigration policy, a reversal of pre-war racial attitudes that spurred discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 and the MS St. Louis incident.The most lasting effect of the Trudeau years has been the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau's Liberals supported the concept of a strong, central government, and fought Quebec separatism, other forms of Quebec nationalism, and the granting of "distinct society" status to Quebec. Such actions, however, served as rallying cries for sovereigntists and alienated many Francophone Quebeckers.The other primary legacy of the Trudeau years has been financial. Net federal debt in fiscal 1968, just before Trudeau became Prime Minister, was about $18 billion CAD, or 26 percent of gross domestic product; by his final year in office, it had ballooned to over 200 billion—at 46 percent of GDP, nearly twice as large relative to the economy.After Trudeau's retirement in 1984, many Liberals, such as Jean Chrétien and Clyde Wells, continued to adhere to Trudeau's concept of federalism. Others, such as John Turner, supported the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" and would have increased the powers of the provinces to the detriment of the federal government.Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister and party leader in 1984, as the Liberals were slipping in polls. At that year's leadership convention, Turner defeated Chrétien on the second ballot to become Prime Minister. Immediately, upon taking office, Turner called a snap election, citing favourable internal polls. However, the party was hurt by numerous patronage appointments, many of which Turner had made supposedly in return for Trudeau retiring early. Also, they were unpopular in their traditional stronghold of Quebec because of the constitution repatriation which excluded that province. The Liberals lost power in the 1984 election, and were reduced to only 40 seats in the House of Commons. The Progressive Conservatives won a majority of the seats in every province, including Quebec. The 95-seat loss was the worst defeat in the party's history, and the worst defeat at the time for a governing party at the federal level. What was more, the New Democratic Party, successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, won only ten fewer seats than the Liberals, and some thought that the NDP under Ed Broadbent would push the Liberals to third-party status.The party began a long process of reconstruction. A small group of young Liberal MPs, known as the Rat Pack, gained fame by criticizing the Tory government of Brian Mulroney at every turn. Also, despite public and backroom attempts to remove Turner as leader, he managed to consolidate his leadership at the 1986 review.The 1988 election was notable for Turner's strong opposition to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although most Canadians voted for parties opposed to free trade, the Tories were returned with a majority government, and implemented the deal. The Liberals recovered from their near-meltdown of 1984, however, winning 83 seats and ending much of the talk of being eclipsed by the NDP, who won 43 seats.Turner announced that he would resign as leader of the Liberal Party on May 3, 1989. The Liberal Party set a leadership convention for June 23, 1990, in Calgary. Five candidates contested the leadership of the party and former Deputy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who had served in every Liberal cabinet since 1965, won on the first ballot. Chrétien's Liberals campaigned in the 1993 election on the promise of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and eliminating the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Just after the writ was dropped for the election, they issued the Red Book, an integrated and coherent approach to economic, social, environmental and foreign policy. This was unprecedented for a Canadian party. Taking full advantage of the inability of Mulroney's successor, Kim Campbell, to overcome a large amount of antipathy toward Mulroney, they won a strong majority government with 177 seats—the third-best performance in party history, and their best since 1949. The Progressive Conservatives were cut down to only two seats, suffering a defeat even more severe than the one they had handed the Liberals nine years earlier. The Liberals were re-elected with a considerably reduced majority in 1997, but nearly tied their 1993 total in 2000.For the next decade, the Liberals dominated Canadian politics in a fashion not seen since the early years of Confederation. This was because of the destruction of the "grand coalition" of Western socially conservative populists, Quebec nationalists, and fiscal conservatives from Ontario that had supported the Progressive Conservatives in 1984 and 1988. The Progressive Conservatives Western support, for all practical purposes, transferred en masse to the Western-based Reform Party, which replaced the PCs as the major right-wing party in Canada. However, the new party's agenda was seen as too conservative for most Canadians. It only won one seat east of Manitoba in an election (but gained another in a floor-crossing). Even when Reform restructured into the Canadian Alliance, the party was virtually non-existent east of Manitoba, winning only 66 seats in 2000. Reform/Alliance was the official opposition from 1997 to 2003, but was never able to overcome wide perceptions that it was merely a Western protest party. The Quebec nationalists who had once supported the Tories largely switched their support to the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois, while the Tories' Ontario support largely moved to the Liberals. The PCs would never be a major force in Canadian politics again; while they rebounded to 20 seats in the next election, they won only two seats west of Quebec in the next decade.Ontario and Quebec combine for a majority of seats in the House of Commons by virtue of Ontario's current population and Quebec's historic population (59 percent of the seats ). As a result, it is very difficult to form even a minority government without substantial support in Ontario and/or Quebec. No party has ever formed a majority government without winning the most seats in either Ontario or Quebec. It is mathematically possible to form a minority government without a strong base in either province, but such an undertaking is politically difficult. The Liberals were the only party with a strong base in both provinces, thus making them the only party capable of forming a government.There was some disappointment as Liberals were not able to recover their traditional dominant position in Quebec, despite being led by a Quebecer from a strongly nationalist region of Quebec. The Bloc capitalized on discontent with the failure of the 1990 Meech Lake Accord and Chrétien's uncompromising stance on federalism (see below) to win the most seats in Quebec in every election from 1993, onward, even serving as the official opposition from 1993 to 1997. Chrétien's reputation in his home province never recovered after the 1990 leadership convention when rival Paul Martin forced him to declare his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord. However, the Liberals did increase their support in the next two elections because of infighting within the Bloc. In the 1997 election, although the Liberals finished with a thin majority, it was their gains in Quebec which were credited with offsetting their losses in the Maritime provinces. In particular, the 2000 election was a breakthrough for the Liberals after the PQ government's unpopular initiatives regarding consolidation of several Quebec urban areas into "megacities". Many federal Liberals also took credit for Charest's provincial election victory over the PQ in spring 2003. A series of by-elections allowed the Liberals to gain a majority of Quebec ridings for the first time since 1984.The Chrétien Liberals more than made up for their shortfall in Quebec by building a strong base in Ontario. They reaped a substantial windfall from the votes of fiscally conservative and socially liberal voters who had previously voted Tory, as well as rapid growth in the Greater Toronto Area. They were also able to take advantage of massive vote splitting between the Tories and Reform/Alliance in rural areas of the province that had traditionally formed the backbone of provincial Tory governments. Combined with their historic dominance of Metro Toronto and northern Ontario, the Liberals dominated the province's federal politics even as the Tories won landslide majorities at the provincial level. In 1993, for example, the Liberals won all but one seat in Ontario, and came within 123 votes in Simcoe Centre of pulling off the first clean sweep of Canada's most populated province. They were able to retain their position as the largest party in the House by winning all but two seats in Ontario in the 1997 election. The Liberals were assured of at least a minority government once the Ontario results came in, but it was not clear until later in the night that they would retain their majority. In 2000, the Liberals won all but three seats in Ontario.While the Chrétien Liberals campaigned from the left, their time in power is most marked by the cuts made to many social programs, including health transfers, in order to balance the federal budget. Chrétien had supported the Charlottetown Accord while in opposition, but in power opposed major concessions to Quebec and other provincialist factions. In contrast to their promises during the 1993 campaign, they implemented only minor changes to NAFTA, embraced the free trade concept and—with the exception of the replacement of the GST with the Harmonized Sales Tax in some Atlantic provinces—broke their promise to replace the GST.After a proposal for Quebec independence was narrowly defeated in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Liberals passed the "Clarity Act", which outlines the federal government's preconditions for negotiating provincial independence. In Chrétien's final days, he supported same-sex marriage and decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana. Chrétien displeased the United States government when he pledged on March 17, 2003, that Canada would not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A poll released shortly after showed widespread approval of Chrétien's decision by the Canadian public. The poll, which was conducted by EKOS for the "Toronto Star" and "La Presse", found 71 percent of those questioned approved of the government's decision to not enter the United States-led invasion, with 27 percent expressing disapproval.Several trends started in 2003 which suggested the end of the Liberal Party's political dominance. Notably, there would be a high turnover of permanent party leaders, in contrast to their predecessors who usually served over two or more elections, particularly Trudeau and Chrétien who each led for over a decade. The Liberals were also hampered by their inability to raise campaign money competitively after Chrétien passed a bill in 2003 which banned corporate donations, even though the Liberals had enjoyed by far the lion's share of this funding because of the then-divided opposition parties. It has been suggested that Chrétien, who had done nothing about election financing for his 10 years in office, could be seen as the idealist as he retired, while his rival and successor Paul Martin would have the burden of having to fight an election under the strict new rules. Simon Fraser University professor Doug McArthur has noted that Martin's leadership campaign used aggressive tactics for the 2003 leadership convention, in attempting to end the contest before it could start by giving the impression that his bid was too strong for any other candidate to beat. McArthur blamed Martin's tactics for the ongoing sag in Liberal fortunes, as it discouraged activists who were not on side.Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien as party leader and prime minister in 2003. Despite the personal rivalry between the two, Martin was the architect of the Liberals' economic policies as Minister of Finance during the 1990s. Chrétien left office with a high approval rating and Martin was expected to make inroads into Quebec and Western Canada, two regions of Canada where the Liberals had not attracted much support since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. While his cabinet choices provoked some controversy over excluding many Chrétien supporters, it at first did little to hurt his popularity.However, the political situation changed with the revelation of the sponsorship scandal, in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services. Having faced a divided conservative opposition for the past three elections, Liberals were seriously challenged by competition from the newly united Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper. The infighting between Martin and Chrétien's supporters also dogged the party. Nonetheless, by criticizing the Conservatives' social policies, the Liberals were able to draw progressive votes from the NDP which made the difference in several close races. On June 28, 2004 federal election, the Martin Liberals retained enough support to continue as the government, though they were reduced to a minority.In the ensuing months, testimony from the Gomery Commission caused public opinion to turn sharply against the Liberals for the first time in over a decade. Despite the devastating revelations, only two Liberal MPs—David Kilgour (who had crossed the floor from the PC Party in 1990) and Pat O'Brien—left the party for reasons other than the scandal. Belinda Stronach, who crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, gave Martin the number of votes needed, although barely, to hold onto power when an NDP-sponsored amendment to his budget was passed only by the Speaker's tiebreaking vote on May 19, 2005.In November, the Liberals dropped in polls following the release of the first Gomery Report. Nonetheless, Martin turned down the NDP's conditions for continued support, as well as rejected an opposition proposal which would schedule a February 2006 election in return for passing several pieces of legislation. The Liberals thus lost the no-confidence vote on November 28; Martin thus became only the fifth prime minister to lose the confidence of the House, but the first to lose on a straight no-confidence motion. Because of the Christmas holiday, Martin advised Governor General Michaëlle Jean to dissolve Parliament and call an election for January 2006.The Liberal campaign was dogged from start to finish by the sponsorship scandal, which was brought up by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) criminal investigation into the leak of the income trust announcement. Numerous gaffes, contrasting with a smoothly run Conservative campaign, put Liberals as many as ten points behind the Conservatives in opinion polling. They managed to recover some of their momentum by election night, but not enough to retain power. They won 103 seats, a net loss of 30 from when the writs were dropped, losing a similar number of seats in Ontario and Quebec to the Tories. However, the Liberals managed to capture the most seats in Ontario for the fifth straight election (54 to the Tories' 40), holding the Conservatives to a minority government. While the Conservatives captured many of Ontario's rural ridings, the Liberals retained most of the population-rich Greater Toronto Area. Many of these ridings, particularly the 905 region, had historically been bellwethers (the Liberals were nearly shut out of this region in 1979 and 1984), but demographic changes have resulted in high Liberal returns in recent years.Martin resigned as parliamentary leader after the election and stepped down as Liberal leader on March 18, having previously promised to step down if he did not win a plurality.On May 11, 2006, "La Presse" reported that the Government of Canada would file a lawsuit against the Liberal Party to recover all the money missing in the sponsorship program. Scott Brison told reporters that same day that the Liberals has already paid back the $1.14 million into the public purse; however, the Conservatives believed that there was as much as $40 million unaccounted for in the sponsorship program.After their election defeat Martin chose not to take on the office of Leader of the Opposition. He stepped down as parliamentary leader of his party on February 1, and the Liberal caucus appointed Bill Graham, MP for Toronto Centre and outgoing Defence Minister, as his interim successor. Martin officially resigned as leader in March, with Graham taking over on an interim basis.The leadership election was set for December 2, 2006, in Montreal; however, a number of prominent members such as John Manley, Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin, and Allan Rock had already announced they would not enter the race to succeed Martin. Throughout the campaign 12 candidates came forward to lead the party, but by the time of the leadership convention only eight people remained in the race; Martha Hall Findlay, Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, Joe Volpe.Throughout the campaign Ignatieff, Rae, Dion and Kennedy were considered to be the only candidates with enough support to be able to win the leadership, with Ignatieff and Rae being considered the two front-runners. However polling showed Ignatieff had little room to grow his support, while Dion was the second and third choice among a plurality of delegates. At the leadership convention Ignatieff came out on top on the first ballot with 29.3 percent, With Kennedy's support Dion was able to leapfrog both Rae and Ignatieff on the third ballot, eliminating Rae. On the fourth and final ballot Dion defeated Ignatieff to become leader of the Liberal Party.Following the leadership race the Liberal Party saw a bounce in support and surpassed the Conservative Party as the most popular party in Canada. However, in the months and years to come the party's support gradually fell. Dion's own popularity lagged considerably behind that of Prime Minister Harper's, and he often trailed NDP leader Jack Layton in opinion polls when Canadians were asked who would make the best Prime Minister.Dion campaigned on environmental sustainability during the leadership race, and created the "Green Shift" plan following his election as leader. The Green Shift proposed creating a carbon tax that would be coupled with reductions to income tax rates. The proposal was to tax greenhouse gas emissions, starting at $10 per tonne of CO2 and reaching $40 per tonne within four years. The plan was a key policy for the party in the 2008 federal election, but it was not well received and was continuously attacked by both the Conservatives and NDP. On election night the Liberal Party won 26.26 percent of the popular vote and 77 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. At that time their popular support was the lowest in the party's history, and weeks later Dion announced he would step down as Liberal leader once his successor was chosen.New Brunswick Member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc was the first candidate to announce he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party on October 27, 2008. Days later Bob Rae, who had finished third in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate for the leadership. The party executive met in early November and chose May 2, 2009, as the date to elect the next leader. On November 13 Michael Ignatieff, who finished second in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate.On November 27, 2008, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty provided the House of Commons with a fiscal update, within which were plans to cut government spending, suspend the ability of civil servants to strike until 2011, sell off some Crown assets to raise capital, and eliminate the existing $1.95 per vote subsidy parties garner in an election. The opposition parties criticized the fiscal update, and announced they would not support it because it contained no stimulus money to spur Canada's economy and protect workers during the economic crisis. With the Conservative Party only holding a minority of the seats in the House of Commons the government would be defeated if the opposition parties voted against the fiscal update. With the Conservatives unwilling to budge on the proposals outlined in the fiscal update the Liberals and NDP signed an agreement to form a coalition government, with a written pledge of support from the Bloc Québécois. Under the terms of the agreement Dion would be sworn in as Prime Minister, however he would only serve in the position until the next Liberal leader was chosen. Dion contacted Governor General Michaëlle Jean and advised her that he had the confidence of the House of Commons if Prime Minister Harper's government was to fall. However, before the fiscal update could be voted on in the House of Commons Prime Minister Harper requested the Governor General to prorogue parliament till January 26, 2009, which she accepted.While polls showed Canadians were split on the idea of having either a coalition government or having the Conservatives continue to govern, it was clear that because of Dion's personal popularity they were not comfortable with him becoming Prime Minister. Members of the Liberal Party therefore called on Dion to resign as leader immediately and for an interim leader to be chosen, this person would become the Prime Minister in the event that the Conservatives were defeated when parliament resumed in January. With an estimated 70 percent of the Liberal caucus wanting Ignatieff to be named interim leader, Dion resigned the post on December 8, 2008 (effective December 10, upon Ignatieff's becoming interim leader). LeBlanc announced on the same day that he was abandoning the Liberal leadership race and endorsing Ignatieff as the next leader. The following day Rae announced he was also dropping out of the race and was placing his "full and unqualified" support to Ignatieff.With Ignatieff named interim leader of the party (on December 10), the Liberal's poll numbers saw significant gains, after they plummeted with the signing of the coalition agreement. When parliament resumed on January 28, 2009, the Ignatieff Liberals agreed to support the budget as long as it included regular accountability reports, which the Conservatives accepted. This ended the possibility of the coalition government with the New Democrats.Throughout the Winter of 2008–09, opinion polls showed that while the Ignatieff led Liberals still trailed the Conservatives their support had stabilized in the low 30 percent range. However, by the time Ignatieff was confirmed as party leader on May 2, 2009, the Liberal Party had a comfortable lead over the governing Conservatives. After a summer where he was accused of being missing in action, Ignatieff announced on August 31, 2009, that the Liberals would not support the minority Conservative government. After this announcement the Liberal Party's poll numbers, which had already declined over the summer, started to fall further behind the Conservatives. On October 1, 2009, the Liberals put forth a non-confidence motion with the hope of defeating the government. However, the NDP abstained from voting and the Conservatives survived the confidence motion.The Liberal Party's attempt to force an election, just a year after the previous one, was reported as a miscalculation, as polls showed that most Canadians did not want another election. Even after the government survived the confidence motion popularity for Ignatieff and his party continued to fall. Over the next year and a half, with the exception of a brief period in early 2010, support for the Liberals remained below 30 percent, and behind the Conservatives. While his predecessor Dion was criticized by the Conservatives as a "weak leader", Ignatieff was attacked as a "political opportunist".On March 25, 2011, Ignatieff introduced a motion of non-confidence against the Harper government to attempt to force a May 2011, federal election after the government was found to be in Contempt of Parliament, the first such occurrence in Commonwealth history. The House of Commons passed the motion by 156–145.The Liberals had considerable momentum when the writ was dropped, and Ignatieff successfully squeezed NDP leader Jack Layton out of media attention, by issuing challenges to Harper for one-on-one debates. In the first couple weeks of the campaign, Ignatieff kept his party in second place in the polls, and his personal ratings exceeded that of Layton for the first time. However, opponents frequently criticized Ignatieff's perceived political opportunism, particularly during the leaders debates when Layton criticized Ignatieff for having a poor attendance record for Commons votes saying "You know, most Canadians, if they don't show up for work, they don't get a promotion". Ignatieff failed to defend himself against these charges, and the debates were said to be a turning point for his party's campaign. Near the end of the campaign, a late surge in support for Layton and the NDP relegated Ignatieff and the Liberals to third in opinion polls.The Liberals suffered their worst defeat in history in the May 2, 2011, federal election. The result was a third-place finish, with only 19 percent of the vote and returning 34 seats in the House of Commons. Notably, their support in Toronto and Montreal, their power bases for the last two decades, all but vanished. All told, the Liberals won only 11 seats in Ontario (seven of which were in Toronto) and seven in Quebec (all in Montreal)—their fewest totals in either province. Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province with majority Liberal seats at 4 out of 7. They also won only four seats west of Ontario. The Conservatives won 40 percent of the vote and formed a majority government, while the NDP formed the Official Opposition winning 31 percent of the vote.This election marked the first time the Liberals were unable to form either government or the official opposition. Ignatieff was defeated in his own riding, and announced his resignation as Liberal leader shortly after. Bob Rae was chosen as the interim leader on May 25, 2011.On April 14, 2013 Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was elected leader of the Liberal Party on the first ballot, winning 80% of the vote. Following his win, support for the Liberal Party increased considerably, and the party moved into first place in public opinion polls.An initial surge in support in the polls following Trudeau's election wore off in the following year, in the face of Conservative ad campaign after Trudeau's win attempting to "[paint] him as a silly dilettante unfit for public office."In 2014, Trudeau removed all Liberal senators from the Liberal Party caucus. In announcing this, Trudeau said the purpose of the unelected upper chamber is to act as a check on the power of the prime minister, but the party structure interferes with that purpose. Following this move, Liberal senators chose to keep the designation "Liberal" and sit together as a caucus, albeit not one supported by the Liberal Party of Canada. This independent group continued to refer to itself in publications as the Senate Liberal Caucus until 2019.By the time the 2015 federal election was called, the Liberals had been knocked back into third place. Trudeau and his advisors planned to mount a campaign based on economic stimulus in the hopes of regaining the mantle of being the party that best represented change from the New Democrats.Justin Trudeau's Liberals would win the 2015 election in dramatic fashion: becoming the first party to win a parliamentary majority after being reduced to third party status in a previous general election, besting Brian Mulroney's record for the largest seat increase by a party in a single election (111 in 1984), and winning the most seats in Quebec for the first time since 1980. Chantal Hébert deemed the result "a Liberal comeback that is headed straight for the history books", while Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove and Theophilos Argitis similarly described it as "capping the biggest political comeback in the country’s history."Scholars and political experts have recently used a political realignment model to explain what was considered a collapse of a dominant party, and put its condition in long-term perspective. According to recent scholarship, there have been four party systems in Canada at the federal level since Confederation, each with its own distinctive pattern of social support, patronage relationships, leadership styles, and electoral strategies. Steve Patten identifies four party systems in Canada's political history:Stephen Clarkson (2005) shows how the Liberal Party has dominated all the party systems, using different approaches. It began with a "clientelistic approach" under Laurier, which evolved into a "brokerage" system of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s under Mackenzie King. The 1950s saw the emergence of a "pan-Canadian system", which lasted until the 1990s. The 1993 election – categorized by Clarkson as an electoral "earthquake" which "fragmented" the party system, saw the emergence of regional politics within a four party-system, whereby various groups championed regional issues and concerns. Clarkson concludes that the inherent bias built into the first-past-the-post system, has chiefly benefited the Liberals.Pundits in the wake of the 2011 election widely believed in a theme of major realignment. Lawrence Martin, commentator for "The Globe and Mail", claimed that "Harper has completed a remarkable reconstruction of a Canadian political landscape that endured for more than a century. The realignment sees both old parties of the moderate middle, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals, either eliminated or marginalized." "Maclean's" said that the election marked "an unprecedented realignment of Canadian politics" as "the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada"; Andrew Coyne proclaimed "The West is in and Ontario has joined it," noting that the Conservatives accomplished the rare feat of putting together a majority by winning in both Ontario and the western provinces (difficult because of traditionally conflicting interests), while having little representation in Quebec. Books such as "The Big Shift" by John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, and Peter C. Newman's "When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada", provocatively asserted that the Liberals had become an "endangered species" and that an NDP-led opposition would mean that "fortune favours the Harper government" in subsequent campaigns.The Liberal victory in 2015, leaving Alberta and Saskatchewan as the only provinces represented by a majority of Conservative MPs, has now challenged that narrative.The principles of the party are based on liberalism as defined by various liberal theorists and include individual freedom for present and future generations, responsibility, human dignity, a just society, political freedom, religious freedom, national unity, equality of opportunity, cultural diversity, bilingualism, and multilateralism. In the present times, the Liberal party has favoured a variety of "big tent" policies from both right and left of the political spectrum. When it formed the government from 1993 to 2006, it championed balanced budgets, and eliminated the budget deficit completely from the federal budget in 1995 by reducing spending on social programs or delegating them to the provinces, and promised to replace the Goods and Services Tax in the party's famous Red Book. It also legalized same-sex marriage.During the 2015 election, the Liberal party's proposed policies included:Each province and one territory in Canada has its own Liberal Party. However, only those in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are politically and organizationally affiliated with the federal Liberal Party. While other provincial Liberal parties may align ideologically with the federal party, they operate as completely separate entities. Those provincial parties have separate policies, finances, memberships, constituency associations, executives, conventions and offices.To date, only seven Liberal leaders never served as Prime Minister, three of whom were interim leaders. | [
"Wilfrid Laurier",
"Stéphane Dion",
"Bob Rae",
"Paul Martin",
"William Lyon Mackenzie King",
"Daniel Duncan McKenzie",
"Jean Chrétien",
"Louis St. Laurent",
"Pierre Trudeau",
"John Turner",
"Lester B. Pearson",
"Alexander Mackenzie",
"Edward Blake",
"Justin Trudeau",
"Bill Graham"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Liberal Party of Canada in 23/11/2010? | November 23, 2010 | {
"text": [
"Michael Ignatieff"
]
} | L2_Q138345_P488_13 | Louis St. Laurent is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1948 to Jan, 1958.
Edward Blake is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 1880 to Jun, 1887.
Jean Chrétien is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1990 to Nov, 2003.
Stéphane Dion is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2006 to Dec, 2008.
Paul Martin is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Nov, 2003 to Mar, 2006.
Pierre Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 1968 to Jun, 1984.
Alexander Mackenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 1873 to Apr, 1880.
Daniel Duncan McKenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Feb, 1919 to Aug, 1919.
William Lyon Mackenzie King is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1919 to Aug, 1948.
Wilfrid Laurier is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1887 to Feb, 1919.
Lester B. Pearson is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jan, 1958 to Apr, 1968.
John Turner is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1984 to Jun, 1990.
Justin Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Bob Rae is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 2011 to Apr, 2013.
Michael Ignatieff is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2008 to May, 2011.
Bill Graham is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 2006 to Dec, 2006. | Liberal Party of CanadaThe Liberal Party of Canada (LPC; ) is the longest-serving and oldest active federal political party in Canada. The party has dominated federal politics for much of Canada's history, holding power for almost 70 years of the 20th century. As a result, it has sometimes been referred to as Canada's "natural governing party".The party espouses the principles of liberalism, and generally sits at the centre to centre-left of the Canadian political spectrum, with their rival the Conservative Party positioned to the right and the New Democratic Party (who at times aligned itself with the Liberals during minority governments), positioned to their left. The party is described as "big tent", practicing "brokerage politics", attracting support from a broad spectrum of voters. In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau claimed that his Liberal Party adhered to the "radical centre".The Liberals' signature policies and legislative decisions include universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, peacekeeping, multilateralism, official bilingualism, official multiculturalism, gun control, patriating the Canadian constitution and the entrenchment of Canada's "Charter of Rights and Freedoms", the "Clarity Act", legalizing same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and cannabis, national carbon pricing, and expanded access to abortion.In the 2015 federal election, the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau had its best result since the 2000 election, winning 39.5 percent of the popular vote and 184 seats, gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In the 2019 federal election, they were reduced to a minority government, winning 157 seats to remain the largest party in the House of Commons while narrowly losing the popular vote.The Liberals are descended from the mid-19th century Reformers who advocated for responsible government throughout British North America. These included George Brown, Alexander Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and the Clear Grits in Upper Canada, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, and the Patriotes and Rouges in Lower Canada led by figures such as Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Clear Grits and "Parti rouge" sometimes functioned as a united bloc in the legislature of the Province of Canada beginning in 1854, and a united Liberal Party combining both English and French Canadian members was formed in 1861.At the time of confederation of the former British colonies of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the radical Liberals were marginalized by the more pragmatic Conservative coalition assembled under Sir John A. Macdonald. In the 29 years after Canadian confederation, the Liberals were consigned to opposition, with the exception of one stint in government. Alexander Mackenzie was the de facto leader of the Official Opposition after Confederation and finally agreed to become the first official leader of the Liberal Party in 1873. He was able to lead the party to power for the first time in 1873, after the MacDonald government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons due to the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie subsequently won the 1874 election, and served as Prime Minister for an additional four years. During the five years the Liberal government brought in many reforms, which include the replacement of open voting by secret ballot, confining elections to one day and the creation of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the Office of the Auditor General. However the party was only able to build a solid support base in Ontario, and in 1878 lost the government to MacDonald. The Liberals would spend the next 18 years in opposition.In their early history, the Liberals were the party of continentalism and opposition to imperialism. The Liberals also became identified with the aspirations of Quebecers as a result of the growing hostility of French Canadians to the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost the support of French Canadians because of the role of Conservative governments in the execution of Louis Riel and their role in the Conscription Crisis of 1917, and especially their opposition to French schools in provinces besides Quebec.It was not until Wilfrid Laurier became leader that the Liberal Party emerged as a modern party. Laurier was able to capitalize on the Tories' alienation of French Canada by offering the Liberals as a credible alternative. Laurier was able to overcome the party's reputation for anti-clericalism that offended the still-powerful Quebec Roman Catholic Church. In English-speaking Canada, the Liberal Party's support for reciprocity made it popular among farmers, and helped cement the party's hold in the growing prairie provinces.Laurier led the Liberals to power in the 1896 election (in which he became the first Francophone Prime Minister), and oversaw a government that increased immigration in order to settle Western Canada. Laurier's government created the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta out of the North-West Territories, and promoted the development of Canadian industry.Until the early part of the century, the Liberal Party was a loose, informal coalition of local, provincial and regional bodies with a strong national party leader and caucus (and when in power, the national cabinet) but with an informal and regionalized extra-parliamentary organizational structure. There was no national membership of the party, an individual became a member by joining a provincial Liberal party. Laurier called the party's first national convention in 1893 in order to unite Liberal supporters behind a programme and build the campaign that successfully brought the party to power in 1896; however, once in power, no efforts were made to create a formal national organization outside of parliament.As a result of the party's defeats in the 1911 and 1917 federal elections, Laurier attempted to organize the party on a national level by creating three bodies: the Central Liberal Information Office, the National Liberal Advisory Committee, and the National Liberal Organization Committee. However, the advisory committee became dominated by members of parliament and all three bodies were underfunded and competed with both local and provincial Liberal associations and the national caucus for authority. The party did organize the national party's second convention in 1919 to elect William Lyon Mackenzie King as Laurier's successor (Canada's first ever leadership convention), yet following the party's return to power in the 1921 federal election the nascent national party organizations were eclipsed by powerful ministers and local party organizations largely driven by patronage.As a result of both the party's defeat in the 1930 federal election, and the Beauharnois bribery scandal which highlighted the need for distance between the Liberal Party's political wing and campaign fundraising, a central coordinating organization, the National Liberal Federation, was created in 1932 with Vincent Massey as its first president. The new organization allowed individuals to directly join the national Liberal Party for the first time. With the Liberals return to power the national organization languished except for occasional national committee meetings, such as in 1943 when Mackenzie King called a meeting of the federation (consisting of the national caucus and up to seven voting delegates per province) to approve a new platform for the party in anticipation of the end of World War II and prepare for a post-war election. No national convention was held, however, until 1948; the Liberal Party held only three national conventions prior to the 1950s – in 1893, 1919 and 1948. The National Liberal Federation remained largely dependent on provincial Liberal parties and was often ignored and bypassed the parliamentary party in the organization of election campaigns and the development of policy. With the defeat of the Liberals in the 1957 federal election and in particular 1958, reformers argued for the strengthening of the national party organization so it would not be dependent on provincial Liberal parties and patronage. A national executive and Council of presidents, consisting of the presidents of each Liberal riding association, were developed to give the party more co-ordination and national party conventions were regularly held in biennially where previously they had been held infrequently. Over time, provincial Liberal parties in most provinces were separated from provincial wings of the federal party and in a number of cases disaffiliated. By the 1980s, the National Liberal Federation was officially known as the Liberal Party of Canada.Under Laurier, and his successor William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberals promoted Canadian sovereignty and greater independence within the British Commonwealth. In Imperial Conferences held throughout the 1920s, Canadian Liberal governments often took the lead in arguing that the United Kingdom and the dominions should have equal status, and against proposals for an 'imperial parliament' that would have subsumed Canadian independence. After the King–Byng Affair of 1926, the Liberals argued that the Governor General of Canada should no longer be appointed on the recommendation of the British government. The decisions of the Imperial Conferences were formalized in the Statute of Westminster, which was actually passed in 1931, the year after the Liberals lost power.The Liberals also promoted the idea of Canada being responsible for its own foreign and defence policy. Initially, it was Britain which determined external affairs for the dominion. In 1905, Laurier created the Department of External Affairs, and in 1909 he advised Governor General Earl Grey to appoint the first Secretary of State for External Affairs to Cabinet. It was also Laurier who first proposed the creation of a Canadian Navy in 1910. Mackenzie King recommended the appointment by Governor General Lord Byng of Vincent Massey as the first Canadian ambassador to Washington in 1926, marking the Liberal government's insistence on having direct relations with the United States, rather than having Britain act on Canada's behalf.In the period just before and after the Second World War, the party became a champion of 'progressive social policy'. As Prime Minister for most of the time between 1921 and 1948, King introduced several measures that led to the creation of Canada's social safety net. Bowing to popular pressure, he introduced the mother's allowance, a monthly payment to all mothers with young children. He also reluctantly introduced old age pensions when J. S. Woodsworth required it in exchange for his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party's support of King's minority government.Louis St. Laurent succeeded King as Liberal leader and Prime Minister on November 15, 1948. In the 1949 and 1953 federal elections, St. Laurent led the Liberal Party to two large majority governments. As Prime Minister he oversaw the joining of Newfoundland in Confederation as Canada's tenth province, he established equalization payments to the provinces, and continued with social reform with improvements in pensions and health insurance. In 1956, Canada played an important role in resolving the Suez Crisis, and contributed to the United Nations force in the Korean War. Canada enjoyed economic prosperity during St. Laurent's premiership and wartime debts were paid off. The Pipeline Debate proved the Liberal Party's undoing. Their attempt to pass legislation to build a natural gas pipeline from Alberta to central Canada was met with fierce disagreement in the House of Commons. In 1957, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives won a minority government and St. Laurent resigned as Prime Minister and Liberal leader.Lester B. Pearson was easily elected Liberal leader at the party's 1958 leadership convention. However, only months after becoming Liberal leader, Pearson led the party into the 1958 federal election that saw Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives win the largest majority government, by percentage of seats, in Canadian history. The Progressive Conservatives won 206 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons, while the Liberals were reduced to just 48 seats. Pearson remained Liberal leader during this time and in the 1962 election managed to reduce Diefenbaker to a minority government. In the 1963 election Pearson led the Liberal Party back to victory, forming a minority government. Pearson served as Prime Minister for five years, winning a second election in 1965. While Pearson's leadership was considered poor and the Liberal Party never held a majority of the seats in parliament during his premiership, he left office in 1968 with an impressive legacy. Pearson's government introduced Medicare, a new immigration act, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, the Canada Assistance Plan, and adopted the Maple Leaf as Canada's national flag.Under Pierre Trudeau, the mission of a progressive social policy evolved into the goal of creating a "just society".The Liberal Party under Trudeau promoted official bilingualism and passed the "Official Languages Act", which gave French and English languages equal status in Canada. Trudeau hoped that the promotion of bilingualism would cement Quebec's place in Confederation, and counter growing calls for an independent Quebec. The party hoped the policy would transform Canada into a country where English and French Canadians could live together, and allow Canadians to move to any part of the country without having to lose their language. Although this vision has yet to fully materialize, official bilingualism has helped to halt the decline of the French language outside of Quebec, and to ensure that all federal government services (including radio and television services provided by the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada) are available in both languages throughout the country.The Trudeau Liberals are also credited with support for state multiculturalism as a means of integrating immigrants into Canadian society without forcing them to shed their culture, leading the party to build a base of support among recent immigrants and their children. This marked the culmination of a decades-long shift in Liberal immigration policy, a reversal of pre-war racial attitudes that spurred discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 and the MS St. Louis incident.The most lasting effect of the Trudeau years has been the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau's Liberals supported the concept of a strong, central government, and fought Quebec separatism, other forms of Quebec nationalism, and the granting of "distinct society" status to Quebec. Such actions, however, served as rallying cries for sovereigntists and alienated many Francophone Quebeckers.The other primary legacy of the Trudeau years has been financial. Net federal debt in fiscal 1968, just before Trudeau became Prime Minister, was about $18 billion CAD, or 26 percent of gross domestic product; by his final year in office, it had ballooned to over 200 billion—at 46 percent of GDP, nearly twice as large relative to the economy.After Trudeau's retirement in 1984, many Liberals, such as Jean Chrétien and Clyde Wells, continued to adhere to Trudeau's concept of federalism. Others, such as John Turner, supported the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" and would have increased the powers of the provinces to the detriment of the federal government.Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister and party leader in 1984, as the Liberals were slipping in polls. At that year's leadership convention, Turner defeated Chrétien on the second ballot to become Prime Minister. Immediately, upon taking office, Turner called a snap election, citing favourable internal polls. However, the party was hurt by numerous patronage appointments, many of which Turner had made supposedly in return for Trudeau retiring early. Also, they were unpopular in their traditional stronghold of Quebec because of the constitution repatriation which excluded that province. The Liberals lost power in the 1984 election, and were reduced to only 40 seats in the House of Commons. The Progressive Conservatives won a majority of the seats in every province, including Quebec. The 95-seat loss was the worst defeat in the party's history, and the worst defeat at the time for a governing party at the federal level. What was more, the New Democratic Party, successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, won only ten fewer seats than the Liberals, and some thought that the NDP under Ed Broadbent would push the Liberals to third-party status.The party began a long process of reconstruction. A small group of young Liberal MPs, known as the Rat Pack, gained fame by criticizing the Tory government of Brian Mulroney at every turn. Also, despite public and backroom attempts to remove Turner as leader, he managed to consolidate his leadership at the 1986 review.The 1988 election was notable for Turner's strong opposition to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although most Canadians voted for parties opposed to free trade, the Tories were returned with a majority government, and implemented the deal. The Liberals recovered from their near-meltdown of 1984, however, winning 83 seats and ending much of the talk of being eclipsed by the NDP, who won 43 seats.Turner announced that he would resign as leader of the Liberal Party on May 3, 1989. The Liberal Party set a leadership convention for June 23, 1990, in Calgary. Five candidates contested the leadership of the party and former Deputy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who had served in every Liberal cabinet since 1965, won on the first ballot. Chrétien's Liberals campaigned in the 1993 election on the promise of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and eliminating the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Just after the writ was dropped for the election, they issued the Red Book, an integrated and coherent approach to economic, social, environmental and foreign policy. This was unprecedented for a Canadian party. Taking full advantage of the inability of Mulroney's successor, Kim Campbell, to overcome a large amount of antipathy toward Mulroney, they won a strong majority government with 177 seats—the third-best performance in party history, and their best since 1949. The Progressive Conservatives were cut down to only two seats, suffering a defeat even more severe than the one they had handed the Liberals nine years earlier. The Liberals were re-elected with a considerably reduced majority in 1997, but nearly tied their 1993 total in 2000.For the next decade, the Liberals dominated Canadian politics in a fashion not seen since the early years of Confederation. This was because of the destruction of the "grand coalition" of Western socially conservative populists, Quebec nationalists, and fiscal conservatives from Ontario that had supported the Progressive Conservatives in 1984 and 1988. The Progressive Conservatives Western support, for all practical purposes, transferred en masse to the Western-based Reform Party, which replaced the PCs as the major right-wing party in Canada. However, the new party's agenda was seen as too conservative for most Canadians. It only won one seat east of Manitoba in an election (but gained another in a floor-crossing). Even when Reform restructured into the Canadian Alliance, the party was virtually non-existent east of Manitoba, winning only 66 seats in 2000. Reform/Alliance was the official opposition from 1997 to 2003, but was never able to overcome wide perceptions that it was merely a Western protest party. The Quebec nationalists who had once supported the Tories largely switched their support to the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois, while the Tories' Ontario support largely moved to the Liberals. The PCs would never be a major force in Canadian politics again; while they rebounded to 20 seats in the next election, they won only two seats west of Quebec in the next decade.Ontario and Quebec combine for a majority of seats in the House of Commons by virtue of Ontario's current population and Quebec's historic population (59 percent of the seats ). As a result, it is very difficult to form even a minority government without substantial support in Ontario and/or Quebec. No party has ever formed a majority government without winning the most seats in either Ontario or Quebec. It is mathematically possible to form a minority government without a strong base in either province, but such an undertaking is politically difficult. The Liberals were the only party with a strong base in both provinces, thus making them the only party capable of forming a government.There was some disappointment as Liberals were not able to recover their traditional dominant position in Quebec, despite being led by a Quebecer from a strongly nationalist region of Quebec. The Bloc capitalized on discontent with the failure of the 1990 Meech Lake Accord and Chrétien's uncompromising stance on federalism (see below) to win the most seats in Quebec in every election from 1993, onward, even serving as the official opposition from 1993 to 1997. Chrétien's reputation in his home province never recovered after the 1990 leadership convention when rival Paul Martin forced him to declare his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord. However, the Liberals did increase their support in the next two elections because of infighting within the Bloc. In the 1997 election, although the Liberals finished with a thin majority, it was their gains in Quebec which were credited with offsetting their losses in the Maritime provinces. In particular, the 2000 election was a breakthrough for the Liberals after the PQ government's unpopular initiatives regarding consolidation of several Quebec urban areas into "megacities". Many federal Liberals also took credit for Charest's provincial election victory over the PQ in spring 2003. A series of by-elections allowed the Liberals to gain a majority of Quebec ridings for the first time since 1984.The Chrétien Liberals more than made up for their shortfall in Quebec by building a strong base in Ontario. They reaped a substantial windfall from the votes of fiscally conservative and socially liberal voters who had previously voted Tory, as well as rapid growth in the Greater Toronto Area. They were also able to take advantage of massive vote splitting between the Tories and Reform/Alliance in rural areas of the province that had traditionally formed the backbone of provincial Tory governments. Combined with their historic dominance of Metro Toronto and northern Ontario, the Liberals dominated the province's federal politics even as the Tories won landslide majorities at the provincial level. In 1993, for example, the Liberals won all but one seat in Ontario, and came within 123 votes in Simcoe Centre of pulling off the first clean sweep of Canada's most populated province. They were able to retain their position as the largest party in the House by winning all but two seats in Ontario in the 1997 election. The Liberals were assured of at least a minority government once the Ontario results came in, but it was not clear until later in the night that they would retain their majority. In 2000, the Liberals won all but three seats in Ontario.While the Chrétien Liberals campaigned from the left, their time in power is most marked by the cuts made to many social programs, including health transfers, in order to balance the federal budget. Chrétien had supported the Charlottetown Accord while in opposition, but in power opposed major concessions to Quebec and other provincialist factions. In contrast to their promises during the 1993 campaign, they implemented only minor changes to NAFTA, embraced the free trade concept and—with the exception of the replacement of the GST with the Harmonized Sales Tax in some Atlantic provinces—broke their promise to replace the GST.After a proposal for Quebec independence was narrowly defeated in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Liberals passed the "Clarity Act", which outlines the federal government's preconditions for negotiating provincial independence. In Chrétien's final days, he supported same-sex marriage and decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana. Chrétien displeased the United States government when he pledged on March 17, 2003, that Canada would not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A poll released shortly after showed widespread approval of Chrétien's decision by the Canadian public. The poll, which was conducted by EKOS for the "Toronto Star" and "La Presse", found 71 percent of those questioned approved of the government's decision to not enter the United States-led invasion, with 27 percent expressing disapproval.Several trends started in 2003 which suggested the end of the Liberal Party's political dominance. Notably, there would be a high turnover of permanent party leaders, in contrast to their predecessors who usually served over two or more elections, particularly Trudeau and Chrétien who each led for over a decade. The Liberals were also hampered by their inability to raise campaign money competitively after Chrétien passed a bill in 2003 which banned corporate donations, even though the Liberals had enjoyed by far the lion's share of this funding because of the then-divided opposition parties. It has been suggested that Chrétien, who had done nothing about election financing for his 10 years in office, could be seen as the idealist as he retired, while his rival and successor Paul Martin would have the burden of having to fight an election under the strict new rules. Simon Fraser University professor Doug McArthur has noted that Martin's leadership campaign used aggressive tactics for the 2003 leadership convention, in attempting to end the contest before it could start by giving the impression that his bid was too strong for any other candidate to beat. McArthur blamed Martin's tactics for the ongoing sag in Liberal fortunes, as it discouraged activists who were not on side.Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien as party leader and prime minister in 2003. Despite the personal rivalry between the two, Martin was the architect of the Liberals' economic policies as Minister of Finance during the 1990s. Chrétien left office with a high approval rating and Martin was expected to make inroads into Quebec and Western Canada, two regions of Canada where the Liberals had not attracted much support since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. While his cabinet choices provoked some controversy over excluding many Chrétien supporters, it at first did little to hurt his popularity.However, the political situation changed with the revelation of the sponsorship scandal, in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services. Having faced a divided conservative opposition for the past three elections, Liberals were seriously challenged by competition from the newly united Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper. The infighting between Martin and Chrétien's supporters also dogged the party. Nonetheless, by criticizing the Conservatives' social policies, the Liberals were able to draw progressive votes from the NDP which made the difference in several close races. On June 28, 2004 federal election, the Martin Liberals retained enough support to continue as the government, though they were reduced to a minority.In the ensuing months, testimony from the Gomery Commission caused public opinion to turn sharply against the Liberals for the first time in over a decade. Despite the devastating revelations, only two Liberal MPs—David Kilgour (who had crossed the floor from the PC Party in 1990) and Pat O'Brien—left the party for reasons other than the scandal. Belinda Stronach, who crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, gave Martin the number of votes needed, although barely, to hold onto power when an NDP-sponsored amendment to his budget was passed only by the Speaker's tiebreaking vote on May 19, 2005.In November, the Liberals dropped in polls following the release of the first Gomery Report. Nonetheless, Martin turned down the NDP's conditions for continued support, as well as rejected an opposition proposal which would schedule a February 2006 election in return for passing several pieces of legislation. The Liberals thus lost the no-confidence vote on November 28; Martin thus became only the fifth prime minister to lose the confidence of the House, but the first to lose on a straight no-confidence motion. Because of the Christmas holiday, Martin advised Governor General Michaëlle Jean to dissolve Parliament and call an election for January 2006.The Liberal campaign was dogged from start to finish by the sponsorship scandal, which was brought up by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) criminal investigation into the leak of the income trust announcement. Numerous gaffes, contrasting with a smoothly run Conservative campaign, put Liberals as many as ten points behind the Conservatives in opinion polling. They managed to recover some of their momentum by election night, but not enough to retain power. They won 103 seats, a net loss of 30 from when the writs were dropped, losing a similar number of seats in Ontario and Quebec to the Tories. However, the Liberals managed to capture the most seats in Ontario for the fifth straight election (54 to the Tories' 40), holding the Conservatives to a minority government. While the Conservatives captured many of Ontario's rural ridings, the Liberals retained most of the population-rich Greater Toronto Area. Many of these ridings, particularly the 905 region, had historically been bellwethers (the Liberals were nearly shut out of this region in 1979 and 1984), but demographic changes have resulted in high Liberal returns in recent years.Martin resigned as parliamentary leader after the election and stepped down as Liberal leader on March 18, having previously promised to step down if he did not win a plurality.On May 11, 2006, "La Presse" reported that the Government of Canada would file a lawsuit against the Liberal Party to recover all the money missing in the sponsorship program. Scott Brison told reporters that same day that the Liberals has already paid back the $1.14 million into the public purse; however, the Conservatives believed that there was as much as $40 million unaccounted for in the sponsorship program.After their election defeat Martin chose not to take on the office of Leader of the Opposition. He stepped down as parliamentary leader of his party on February 1, and the Liberal caucus appointed Bill Graham, MP for Toronto Centre and outgoing Defence Minister, as his interim successor. Martin officially resigned as leader in March, with Graham taking over on an interim basis.The leadership election was set for December 2, 2006, in Montreal; however, a number of prominent members such as John Manley, Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin, and Allan Rock had already announced they would not enter the race to succeed Martin. Throughout the campaign 12 candidates came forward to lead the party, but by the time of the leadership convention only eight people remained in the race; Martha Hall Findlay, Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, Joe Volpe.Throughout the campaign Ignatieff, Rae, Dion and Kennedy were considered to be the only candidates with enough support to be able to win the leadership, with Ignatieff and Rae being considered the two front-runners. However polling showed Ignatieff had little room to grow his support, while Dion was the second and third choice among a plurality of delegates. At the leadership convention Ignatieff came out on top on the first ballot with 29.3 percent, With Kennedy's support Dion was able to leapfrog both Rae and Ignatieff on the third ballot, eliminating Rae. On the fourth and final ballot Dion defeated Ignatieff to become leader of the Liberal Party.Following the leadership race the Liberal Party saw a bounce in support and surpassed the Conservative Party as the most popular party in Canada. However, in the months and years to come the party's support gradually fell. Dion's own popularity lagged considerably behind that of Prime Minister Harper's, and he often trailed NDP leader Jack Layton in opinion polls when Canadians were asked who would make the best Prime Minister.Dion campaigned on environmental sustainability during the leadership race, and created the "Green Shift" plan following his election as leader. The Green Shift proposed creating a carbon tax that would be coupled with reductions to income tax rates. The proposal was to tax greenhouse gas emissions, starting at $10 per tonne of CO2 and reaching $40 per tonne within four years. The plan was a key policy for the party in the 2008 federal election, but it was not well received and was continuously attacked by both the Conservatives and NDP. On election night the Liberal Party won 26.26 percent of the popular vote and 77 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. At that time their popular support was the lowest in the party's history, and weeks later Dion announced he would step down as Liberal leader once his successor was chosen.New Brunswick Member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc was the first candidate to announce he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party on October 27, 2008. Days later Bob Rae, who had finished third in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate for the leadership. The party executive met in early November and chose May 2, 2009, as the date to elect the next leader. On November 13 Michael Ignatieff, who finished second in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate.On November 27, 2008, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty provided the House of Commons with a fiscal update, within which were plans to cut government spending, suspend the ability of civil servants to strike until 2011, sell off some Crown assets to raise capital, and eliminate the existing $1.95 per vote subsidy parties garner in an election. The opposition parties criticized the fiscal update, and announced they would not support it because it contained no stimulus money to spur Canada's economy and protect workers during the economic crisis. With the Conservative Party only holding a minority of the seats in the House of Commons the government would be defeated if the opposition parties voted against the fiscal update. With the Conservatives unwilling to budge on the proposals outlined in the fiscal update the Liberals and NDP signed an agreement to form a coalition government, with a written pledge of support from the Bloc Québécois. Under the terms of the agreement Dion would be sworn in as Prime Minister, however he would only serve in the position until the next Liberal leader was chosen. Dion contacted Governor General Michaëlle Jean and advised her that he had the confidence of the House of Commons if Prime Minister Harper's government was to fall. However, before the fiscal update could be voted on in the House of Commons Prime Minister Harper requested the Governor General to prorogue parliament till January 26, 2009, which she accepted.While polls showed Canadians were split on the idea of having either a coalition government or having the Conservatives continue to govern, it was clear that because of Dion's personal popularity they were not comfortable with him becoming Prime Minister. Members of the Liberal Party therefore called on Dion to resign as leader immediately and for an interim leader to be chosen, this person would become the Prime Minister in the event that the Conservatives were defeated when parliament resumed in January. With an estimated 70 percent of the Liberal caucus wanting Ignatieff to be named interim leader, Dion resigned the post on December 8, 2008 (effective December 10, upon Ignatieff's becoming interim leader). LeBlanc announced on the same day that he was abandoning the Liberal leadership race and endorsing Ignatieff as the next leader. The following day Rae announced he was also dropping out of the race and was placing his "full and unqualified" support to Ignatieff.With Ignatieff named interim leader of the party (on December 10), the Liberal's poll numbers saw significant gains, after they plummeted with the signing of the coalition agreement. When parliament resumed on January 28, 2009, the Ignatieff Liberals agreed to support the budget as long as it included regular accountability reports, which the Conservatives accepted. This ended the possibility of the coalition government with the New Democrats.Throughout the Winter of 2008–09, opinion polls showed that while the Ignatieff led Liberals still trailed the Conservatives their support had stabilized in the low 30 percent range. However, by the time Ignatieff was confirmed as party leader on May 2, 2009, the Liberal Party had a comfortable lead over the governing Conservatives. After a summer where he was accused of being missing in action, Ignatieff announced on August 31, 2009, that the Liberals would not support the minority Conservative government. After this announcement the Liberal Party's poll numbers, which had already declined over the summer, started to fall further behind the Conservatives. On October 1, 2009, the Liberals put forth a non-confidence motion with the hope of defeating the government. However, the NDP abstained from voting and the Conservatives survived the confidence motion.The Liberal Party's attempt to force an election, just a year after the previous one, was reported as a miscalculation, as polls showed that most Canadians did not want another election. Even after the government survived the confidence motion popularity for Ignatieff and his party continued to fall. Over the next year and a half, with the exception of a brief period in early 2010, support for the Liberals remained below 30 percent, and behind the Conservatives. While his predecessor Dion was criticized by the Conservatives as a "weak leader", Ignatieff was attacked as a "political opportunist".On March 25, 2011, Ignatieff introduced a motion of non-confidence against the Harper government to attempt to force a May 2011, federal election after the government was found to be in Contempt of Parliament, the first such occurrence in Commonwealth history. The House of Commons passed the motion by 156–145.The Liberals had considerable momentum when the writ was dropped, and Ignatieff successfully squeezed NDP leader Jack Layton out of media attention, by issuing challenges to Harper for one-on-one debates. In the first couple weeks of the campaign, Ignatieff kept his party in second place in the polls, and his personal ratings exceeded that of Layton for the first time. However, opponents frequently criticized Ignatieff's perceived political opportunism, particularly during the leaders debates when Layton criticized Ignatieff for having a poor attendance record for Commons votes saying "You know, most Canadians, if they don't show up for work, they don't get a promotion". Ignatieff failed to defend himself against these charges, and the debates were said to be a turning point for his party's campaign. Near the end of the campaign, a late surge in support for Layton and the NDP relegated Ignatieff and the Liberals to third in opinion polls.The Liberals suffered their worst defeat in history in the May 2, 2011, federal election. The result was a third-place finish, with only 19 percent of the vote and returning 34 seats in the House of Commons. Notably, their support in Toronto and Montreal, their power bases for the last two decades, all but vanished. All told, the Liberals won only 11 seats in Ontario (seven of which were in Toronto) and seven in Quebec (all in Montreal)—their fewest totals in either province. Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province with majority Liberal seats at 4 out of 7. They also won only four seats west of Ontario. The Conservatives won 40 percent of the vote and formed a majority government, while the NDP formed the Official Opposition winning 31 percent of the vote.This election marked the first time the Liberals were unable to form either government or the official opposition. Ignatieff was defeated in his own riding, and announced his resignation as Liberal leader shortly after. Bob Rae was chosen as the interim leader on May 25, 2011.On April 14, 2013 Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was elected leader of the Liberal Party on the first ballot, winning 80% of the vote. Following his win, support for the Liberal Party increased considerably, and the party moved into first place in public opinion polls.An initial surge in support in the polls following Trudeau's election wore off in the following year, in the face of Conservative ad campaign after Trudeau's win attempting to "[paint] him as a silly dilettante unfit for public office."In 2014, Trudeau removed all Liberal senators from the Liberal Party caucus. In announcing this, Trudeau said the purpose of the unelected upper chamber is to act as a check on the power of the prime minister, but the party structure interferes with that purpose. Following this move, Liberal senators chose to keep the designation "Liberal" and sit together as a caucus, albeit not one supported by the Liberal Party of Canada. This independent group continued to refer to itself in publications as the Senate Liberal Caucus until 2019.By the time the 2015 federal election was called, the Liberals had been knocked back into third place. Trudeau and his advisors planned to mount a campaign based on economic stimulus in the hopes of regaining the mantle of being the party that best represented change from the New Democrats.Justin Trudeau's Liberals would win the 2015 election in dramatic fashion: becoming the first party to win a parliamentary majority after being reduced to third party status in a previous general election, besting Brian Mulroney's record for the largest seat increase by a party in a single election (111 in 1984), and winning the most seats in Quebec for the first time since 1980. Chantal Hébert deemed the result "a Liberal comeback that is headed straight for the history books", while Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove and Theophilos Argitis similarly described it as "capping the biggest political comeback in the country’s history."Scholars and political experts have recently used a political realignment model to explain what was considered a collapse of a dominant party, and put its condition in long-term perspective. According to recent scholarship, there have been four party systems in Canada at the federal level since Confederation, each with its own distinctive pattern of social support, patronage relationships, leadership styles, and electoral strategies. Steve Patten identifies four party systems in Canada's political history:Stephen Clarkson (2005) shows how the Liberal Party has dominated all the party systems, using different approaches. It began with a "clientelistic approach" under Laurier, which evolved into a "brokerage" system of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s under Mackenzie King. The 1950s saw the emergence of a "pan-Canadian system", which lasted until the 1990s. The 1993 election – categorized by Clarkson as an electoral "earthquake" which "fragmented" the party system, saw the emergence of regional politics within a four party-system, whereby various groups championed regional issues and concerns. Clarkson concludes that the inherent bias built into the first-past-the-post system, has chiefly benefited the Liberals.Pundits in the wake of the 2011 election widely believed in a theme of major realignment. Lawrence Martin, commentator for "The Globe and Mail", claimed that "Harper has completed a remarkable reconstruction of a Canadian political landscape that endured for more than a century. The realignment sees both old parties of the moderate middle, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals, either eliminated or marginalized." "Maclean's" said that the election marked "an unprecedented realignment of Canadian politics" as "the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada"; Andrew Coyne proclaimed "The West is in and Ontario has joined it," noting that the Conservatives accomplished the rare feat of putting together a majority by winning in both Ontario and the western provinces (difficult because of traditionally conflicting interests), while having little representation in Quebec. Books such as "The Big Shift" by John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, and Peter C. Newman's "When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada", provocatively asserted that the Liberals had become an "endangered species" and that an NDP-led opposition would mean that "fortune favours the Harper government" in subsequent campaigns.The Liberal victory in 2015, leaving Alberta and Saskatchewan as the only provinces represented by a majority of Conservative MPs, has now challenged that narrative.The principles of the party are based on liberalism as defined by various liberal theorists and include individual freedom for present and future generations, responsibility, human dignity, a just society, political freedom, religious freedom, national unity, equality of opportunity, cultural diversity, bilingualism, and multilateralism. In the present times, the Liberal party has favoured a variety of "big tent" policies from both right and left of the political spectrum. When it formed the government from 1993 to 2006, it championed balanced budgets, and eliminated the budget deficit completely from the federal budget in 1995 by reducing spending on social programs or delegating them to the provinces, and promised to replace the Goods and Services Tax in the party's famous Red Book. It also legalized same-sex marriage.During the 2015 election, the Liberal party's proposed policies included:Each province and one territory in Canada has its own Liberal Party. However, only those in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are politically and organizationally affiliated with the federal Liberal Party. While other provincial Liberal parties may align ideologically with the federal party, they operate as completely separate entities. Those provincial parties have separate policies, finances, memberships, constituency associations, executives, conventions and offices.To date, only seven Liberal leaders never served as Prime Minister, three of whom were interim leaders. | [
"Wilfrid Laurier",
"Stéphane Dion",
"Bob Rae",
"Paul Martin",
"William Lyon Mackenzie King",
"Daniel Duncan McKenzie",
"Jean Chrétien",
"Louis St. Laurent",
"Pierre Trudeau",
"John Turner",
"Lester B. Pearson",
"Alexander Mackenzie",
"Edward Blake",
"Justin Trudeau",
"Bill Graham"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Liberal Party of Canada in Nov 23, 2010? | November 23, 2010 | {
"text": [
"Michael Ignatieff"
]
} | L2_Q138345_P488_13 | Louis St. Laurent is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1948 to Jan, 1958.
Edward Blake is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 1880 to Jun, 1887.
Jean Chrétien is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1990 to Nov, 2003.
Stéphane Dion is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2006 to Dec, 2008.
Paul Martin is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Nov, 2003 to Mar, 2006.
Pierre Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 1968 to Jun, 1984.
Alexander Mackenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 1873 to Apr, 1880.
Daniel Duncan McKenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Feb, 1919 to Aug, 1919.
William Lyon Mackenzie King is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1919 to Aug, 1948.
Wilfrid Laurier is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1887 to Feb, 1919.
Lester B. Pearson is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jan, 1958 to Apr, 1968.
John Turner is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1984 to Jun, 1990.
Justin Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Bob Rae is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 2011 to Apr, 2013.
Michael Ignatieff is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2008 to May, 2011.
Bill Graham is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 2006 to Dec, 2006. | Liberal Party of CanadaThe Liberal Party of Canada (LPC; ) is the longest-serving and oldest active federal political party in Canada. The party has dominated federal politics for much of Canada's history, holding power for almost 70 years of the 20th century. As a result, it has sometimes been referred to as Canada's "natural governing party".The party espouses the principles of liberalism, and generally sits at the centre to centre-left of the Canadian political spectrum, with their rival the Conservative Party positioned to the right and the New Democratic Party (who at times aligned itself with the Liberals during minority governments), positioned to their left. The party is described as "big tent", practicing "brokerage politics", attracting support from a broad spectrum of voters. In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau claimed that his Liberal Party adhered to the "radical centre".The Liberals' signature policies and legislative decisions include universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, peacekeeping, multilateralism, official bilingualism, official multiculturalism, gun control, patriating the Canadian constitution and the entrenchment of Canada's "Charter of Rights and Freedoms", the "Clarity Act", legalizing same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and cannabis, national carbon pricing, and expanded access to abortion.In the 2015 federal election, the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau had its best result since the 2000 election, winning 39.5 percent of the popular vote and 184 seats, gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In the 2019 federal election, they were reduced to a minority government, winning 157 seats to remain the largest party in the House of Commons while narrowly losing the popular vote.The Liberals are descended from the mid-19th century Reformers who advocated for responsible government throughout British North America. These included George Brown, Alexander Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and the Clear Grits in Upper Canada, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, and the Patriotes and Rouges in Lower Canada led by figures such as Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Clear Grits and "Parti rouge" sometimes functioned as a united bloc in the legislature of the Province of Canada beginning in 1854, and a united Liberal Party combining both English and French Canadian members was formed in 1861.At the time of confederation of the former British colonies of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the radical Liberals were marginalized by the more pragmatic Conservative coalition assembled under Sir John A. Macdonald. In the 29 years after Canadian confederation, the Liberals were consigned to opposition, with the exception of one stint in government. Alexander Mackenzie was the de facto leader of the Official Opposition after Confederation and finally agreed to become the first official leader of the Liberal Party in 1873. He was able to lead the party to power for the first time in 1873, after the MacDonald government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons due to the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie subsequently won the 1874 election, and served as Prime Minister for an additional four years. During the five years the Liberal government brought in many reforms, which include the replacement of open voting by secret ballot, confining elections to one day and the creation of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the Office of the Auditor General. However the party was only able to build a solid support base in Ontario, and in 1878 lost the government to MacDonald. The Liberals would spend the next 18 years in opposition.In their early history, the Liberals were the party of continentalism and opposition to imperialism. The Liberals also became identified with the aspirations of Quebecers as a result of the growing hostility of French Canadians to the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost the support of French Canadians because of the role of Conservative governments in the execution of Louis Riel and their role in the Conscription Crisis of 1917, and especially their opposition to French schools in provinces besides Quebec.It was not until Wilfrid Laurier became leader that the Liberal Party emerged as a modern party. Laurier was able to capitalize on the Tories' alienation of French Canada by offering the Liberals as a credible alternative. Laurier was able to overcome the party's reputation for anti-clericalism that offended the still-powerful Quebec Roman Catholic Church. In English-speaking Canada, the Liberal Party's support for reciprocity made it popular among farmers, and helped cement the party's hold in the growing prairie provinces.Laurier led the Liberals to power in the 1896 election (in which he became the first Francophone Prime Minister), and oversaw a government that increased immigration in order to settle Western Canada. Laurier's government created the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta out of the North-West Territories, and promoted the development of Canadian industry.Until the early part of the century, the Liberal Party was a loose, informal coalition of local, provincial and regional bodies with a strong national party leader and caucus (and when in power, the national cabinet) but with an informal and regionalized extra-parliamentary organizational structure. There was no national membership of the party, an individual became a member by joining a provincial Liberal party. Laurier called the party's first national convention in 1893 in order to unite Liberal supporters behind a programme and build the campaign that successfully brought the party to power in 1896; however, once in power, no efforts were made to create a formal national organization outside of parliament.As a result of the party's defeats in the 1911 and 1917 federal elections, Laurier attempted to organize the party on a national level by creating three bodies: the Central Liberal Information Office, the National Liberal Advisory Committee, and the National Liberal Organization Committee. However, the advisory committee became dominated by members of parliament and all three bodies were underfunded and competed with both local and provincial Liberal associations and the national caucus for authority. The party did organize the national party's second convention in 1919 to elect William Lyon Mackenzie King as Laurier's successor (Canada's first ever leadership convention), yet following the party's return to power in the 1921 federal election the nascent national party organizations were eclipsed by powerful ministers and local party organizations largely driven by patronage.As a result of both the party's defeat in the 1930 federal election, and the Beauharnois bribery scandal which highlighted the need for distance between the Liberal Party's political wing and campaign fundraising, a central coordinating organization, the National Liberal Federation, was created in 1932 with Vincent Massey as its first president. The new organization allowed individuals to directly join the national Liberal Party for the first time. With the Liberals return to power the national organization languished except for occasional national committee meetings, such as in 1943 when Mackenzie King called a meeting of the federation (consisting of the national caucus and up to seven voting delegates per province) to approve a new platform for the party in anticipation of the end of World War II and prepare for a post-war election. No national convention was held, however, until 1948; the Liberal Party held only three national conventions prior to the 1950s – in 1893, 1919 and 1948. The National Liberal Federation remained largely dependent on provincial Liberal parties and was often ignored and bypassed the parliamentary party in the organization of election campaigns and the development of policy. With the defeat of the Liberals in the 1957 federal election and in particular 1958, reformers argued for the strengthening of the national party organization so it would not be dependent on provincial Liberal parties and patronage. A national executive and Council of presidents, consisting of the presidents of each Liberal riding association, were developed to give the party more co-ordination and national party conventions were regularly held in biennially where previously they had been held infrequently. Over time, provincial Liberal parties in most provinces were separated from provincial wings of the federal party and in a number of cases disaffiliated. By the 1980s, the National Liberal Federation was officially known as the Liberal Party of Canada.Under Laurier, and his successor William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberals promoted Canadian sovereignty and greater independence within the British Commonwealth. In Imperial Conferences held throughout the 1920s, Canadian Liberal governments often took the lead in arguing that the United Kingdom and the dominions should have equal status, and against proposals for an 'imperial parliament' that would have subsumed Canadian independence. After the King–Byng Affair of 1926, the Liberals argued that the Governor General of Canada should no longer be appointed on the recommendation of the British government. The decisions of the Imperial Conferences were formalized in the Statute of Westminster, which was actually passed in 1931, the year after the Liberals lost power.The Liberals also promoted the idea of Canada being responsible for its own foreign and defence policy. Initially, it was Britain which determined external affairs for the dominion. In 1905, Laurier created the Department of External Affairs, and in 1909 he advised Governor General Earl Grey to appoint the first Secretary of State for External Affairs to Cabinet. It was also Laurier who first proposed the creation of a Canadian Navy in 1910. Mackenzie King recommended the appointment by Governor General Lord Byng of Vincent Massey as the first Canadian ambassador to Washington in 1926, marking the Liberal government's insistence on having direct relations with the United States, rather than having Britain act on Canada's behalf.In the period just before and after the Second World War, the party became a champion of 'progressive social policy'. As Prime Minister for most of the time between 1921 and 1948, King introduced several measures that led to the creation of Canada's social safety net. Bowing to popular pressure, he introduced the mother's allowance, a monthly payment to all mothers with young children. He also reluctantly introduced old age pensions when J. S. Woodsworth required it in exchange for his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party's support of King's minority government.Louis St. Laurent succeeded King as Liberal leader and Prime Minister on November 15, 1948. In the 1949 and 1953 federal elections, St. Laurent led the Liberal Party to two large majority governments. As Prime Minister he oversaw the joining of Newfoundland in Confederation as Canada's tenth province, he established equalization payments to the provinces, and continued with social reform with improvements in pensions and health insurance. In 1956, Canada played an important role in resolving the Suez Crisis, and contributed to the United Nations force in the Korean War. Canada enjoyed economic prosperity during St. Laurent's premiership and wartime debts were paid off. The Pipeline Debate proved the Liberal Party's undoing. Their attempt to pass legislation to build a natural gas pipeline from Alberta to central Canada was met with fierce disagreement in the House of Commons. In 1957, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives won a minority government and St. Laurent resigned as Prime Minister and Liberal leader.Lester B. Pearson was easily elected Liberal leader at the party's 1958 leadership convention. However, only months after becoming Liberal leader, Pearson led the party into the 1958 federal election that saw Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives win the largest majority government, by percentage of seats, in Canadian history. The Progressive Conservatives won 206 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons, while the Liberals were reduced to just 48 seats. Pearson remained Liberal leader during this time and in the 1962 election managed to reduce Diefenbaker to a minority government. In the 1963 election Pearson led the Liberal Party back to victory, forming a minority government. Pearson served as Prime Minister for five years, winning a second election in 1965. While Pearson's leadership was considered poor and the Liberal Party never held a majority of the seats in parliament during his premiership, he left office in 1968 with an impressive legacy. Pearson's government introduced Medicare, a new immigration act, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, the Canada Assistance Plan, and adopted the Maple Leaf as Canada's national flag.Under Pierre Trudeau, the mission of a progressive social policy evolved into the goal of creating a "just society".The Liberal Party under Trudeau promoted official bilingualism and passed the "Official Languages Act", which gave French and English languages equal status in Canada. Trudeau hoped that the promotion of bilingualism would cement Quebec's place in Confederation, and counter growing calls for an independent Quebec. The party hoped the policy would transform Canada into a country where English and French Canadians could live together, and allow Canadians to move to any part of the country without having to lose their language. Although this vision has yet to fully materialize, official bilingualism has helped to halt the decline of the French language outside of Quebec, and to ensure that all federal government services (including radio and television services provided by the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada) are available in both languages throughout the country.The Trudeau Liberals are also credited with support for state multiculturalism as a means of integrating immigrants into Canadian society without forcing them to shed their culture, leading the party to build a base of support among recent immigrants and their children. This marked the culmination of a decades-long shift in Liberal immigration policy, a reversal of pre-war racial attitudes that spurred discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 and the MS St. Louis incident.The most lasting effect of the Trudeau years has been the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau's Liberals supported the concept of a strong, central government, and fought Quebec separatism, other forms of Quebec nationalism, and the granting of "distinct society" status to Quebec. Such actions, however, served as rallying cries for sovereigntists and alienated many Francophone Quebeckers.The other primary legacy of the Trudeau years has been financial. Net federal debt in fiscal 1968, just before Trudeau became Prime Minister, was about $18 billion CAD, or 26 percent of gross domestic product; by his final year in office, it had ballooned to over 200 billion—at 46 percent of GDP, nearly twice as large relative to the economy.After Trudeau's retirement in 1984, many Liberals, such as Jean Chrétien and Clyde Wells, continued to adhere to Trudeau's concept of federalism. Others, such as John Turner, supported the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" and would have increased the powers of the provinces to the detriment of the federal government.Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister and party leader in 1984, as the Liberals were slipping in polls. At that year's leadership convention, Turner defeated Chrétien on the second ballot to become Prime Minister. Immediately, upon taking office, Turner called a snap election, citing favourable internal polls. However, the party was hurt by numerous patronage appointments, many of which Turner had made supposedly in return for Trudeau retiring early. Also, they were unpopular in their traditional stronghold of Quebec because of the constitution repatriation which excluded that province. The Liberals lost power in the 1984 election, and were reduced to only 40 seats in the House of Commons. The Progressive Conservatives won a majority of the seats in every province, including Quebec. The 95-seat loss was the worst defeat in the party's history, and the worst defeat at the time for a governing party at the federal level. What was more, the New Democratic Party, successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, won only ten fewer seats than the Liberals, and some thought that the NDP under Ed Broadbent would push the Liberals to third-party status.The party began a long process of reconstruction. A small group of young Liberal MPs, known as the Rat Pack, gained fame by criticizing the Tory government of Brian Mulroney at every turn. Also, despite public and backroom attempts to remove Turner as leader, he managed to consolidate his leadership at the 1986 review.The 1988 election was notable for Turner's strong opposition to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although most Canadians voted for parties opposed to free trade, the Tories were returned with a majority government, and implemented the deal. The Liberals recovered from their near-meltdown of 1984, however, winning 83 seats and ending much of the talk of being eclipsed by the NDP, who won 43 seats.Turner announced that he would resign as leader of the Liberal Party on May 3, 1989. The Liberal Party set a leadership convention for June 23, 1990, in Calgary. Five candidates contested the leadership of the party and former Deputy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who had served in every Liberal cabinet since 1965, won on the first ballot. Chrétien's Liberals campaigned in the 1993 election on the promise of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and eliminating the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Just after the writ was dropped for the election, they issued the Red Book, an integrated and coherent approach to economic, social, environmental and foreign policy. This was unprecedented for a Canadian party. Taking full advantage of the inability of Mulroney's successor, Kim Campbell, to overcome a large amount of antipathy toward Mulroney, they won a strong majority government with 177 seats—the third-best performance in party history, and their best since 1949. The Progressive Conservatives were cut down to only two seats, suffering a defeat even more severe than the one they had handed the Liberals nine years earlier. The Liberals were re-elected with a considerably reduced majority in 1997, but nearly tied their 1993 total in 2000.For the next decade, the Liberals dominated Canadian politics in a fashion not seen since the early years of Confederation. This was because of the destruction of the "grand coalition" of Western socially conservative populists, Quebec nationalists, and fiscal conservatives from Ontario that had supported the Progressive Conservatives in 1984 and 1988. The Progressive Conservatives Western support, for all practical purposes, transferred en masse to the Western-based Reform Party, which replaced the PCs as the major right-wing party in Canada. However, the new party's agenda was seen as too conservative for most Canadians. It only won one seat east of Manitoba in an election (but gained another in a floor-crossing). Even when Reform restructured into the Canadian Alliance, the party was virtually non-existent east of Manitoba, winning only 66 seats in 2000. Reform/Alliance was the official opposition from 1997 to 2003, but was never able to overcome wide perceptions that it was merely a Western protest party. The Quebec nationalists who had once supported the Tories largely switched their support to the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois, while the Tories' Ontario support largely moved to the Liberals. The PCs would never be a major force in Canadian politics again; while they rebounded to 20 seats in the next election, they won only two seats west of Quebec in the next decade.Ontario and Quebec combine for a majority of seats in the House of Commons by virtue of Ontario's current population and Quebec's historic population (59 percent of the seats ). As a result, it is very difficult to form even a minority government without substantial support in Ontario and/or Quebec. No party has ever formed a majority government without winning the most seats in either Ontario or Quebec. It is mathematically possible to form a minority government without a strong base in either province, but such an undertaking is politically difficult. The Liberals were the only party with a strong base in both provinces, thus making them the only party capable of forming a government.There was some disappointment as Liberals were not able to recover their traditional dominant position in Quebec, despite being led by a Quebecer from a strongly nationalist region of Quebec. The Bloc capitalized on discontent with the failure of the 1990 Meech Lake Accord and Chrétien's uncompromising stance on federalism (see below) to win the most seats in Quebec in every election from 1993, onward, even serving as the official opposition from 1993 to 1997. Chrétien's reputation in his home province never recovered after the 1990 leadership convention when rival Paul Martin forced him to declare his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord. However, the Liberals did increase their support in the next two elections because of infighting within the Bloc. In the 1997 election, although the Liberals finished with a thin majority, it was their gains in Quebec which were credited with offsetting their losses in the Maritime provinces. In particular, the 2000 election was a breakthrough for the Liberals after the PQ government's unpopular initiatives regarding consolidation of several Quebec urban areas into "megacities". Many federal Liberals also took credit for Charest's provincial election victory over the PQ in spring 2003. A series of by-elections allowed the Liberals to gain a majority of Quebec ridings for the first time since 1984.The Chrétien Liberals more than made up for their shortfall in Quebec by building a strong base in Ontario. They reaped a substantial windfall from the votes of fiscally conservative and socially liberal voters who had previously voted Tory, as well as rapid growth in the Greater Toronto Area. They were also able to take advantage of massive vote splitting between the Tories and Reform/Alliance in rural areas of the province that had traditionally formed the backbone of provincial Tory governments. Combined with their historic dominance of Metro Toronto and northern Ontario, the Liberals dominated the province's federal politics even as the Tories won landslide majorities at the provincial level. In 1993, for example, the Liberals won all but one seat in Ontario, and came within 123 votes in Simcoe Centre of pulling off the first clean sweep of Canada's most populated province. They were able to retain their position as the largest party in the House by winning all but two seats in Ontario in the 1997 election. The Liberals were assured of at least a minority government once the Ontario results came in, but it was not clear until later in the night that they would retain their majority. In 2000, the Liberals won all but three seats in Ontario.While the Chrétien Liberals campaigned from the left, their time in power is most marked by the cuts made to many social programs, including health transfers, in order to balance the federal budget. Chrétien had supported the Charlottetown Accord while in opposition, but in power opposed major concessions to Quebec and other provincialist factions. In contrast to their promises during the 1993 campaign, they implemented only minor changes to NAFTA, embraced the free trade concept and—with the exception of the replacement of the GST with the Harmonized Sales Tax in some Atlantic provinces—broke their promise to replace the GST.After a proposal for Quebec independence was narrowly defeated in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Liberals passed the "Clarity Act", which outlines the federal government's preconditions for negotiating provincial independence. In Chrétien's final days, he supported same-sex marriage and decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana. Chrétien displeased the United States government when he pledged on March 17, 2003, that Canada would not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A poll released shortly after showed widespread approval of Chrétien's decision by the Canadian public. The poll, which was conducted by EKOS for the "Toronto Star" and "La Presse", found 71 percent of those questioned approved of the government's decision to not enter the United States-led invasion, with 27 percent expressing disapproval.Several trends started in 2003 which suggested the end of the Liberal Party's political dominance. Notably, there would be a high turnover of permanent party leaders, in contrast to their predecessors who usually served over two or more elections, particularly Trudeau and Chrétien who each led for over a decade. The Liberals were also hampered by their inability to raise campaign money competitively after Chrétien passed a bill in 2003 which banned corporate donations, even though the Liberals had enjoyed by far the lion's share of this funding because of the then-divided opposition parties. It has been suggested that Chrétien, who had done nothing about election financing for his 10 years in office, could be seen as the idealist as he retired, while his rival and successor Paul Martin would have the burden of having to fight an election under the strict new rules. Simon Fraser University professor Doug McArthur has noted that Martin's leadership campaign used aggressive tactics for the 2003 leadership convention, in attempting to end the contest before it could start by giving the impression that his bid was too strong for any other candidate to beat. McArthur blamed Martin's tactics for the ongoing sag in Liberal fortunes, as it discouraged activists who were not on side.Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien as party leader and prime minister in 2003. Despite the personal rivalry between the two, Martin was the architect of the Liberals' economic policies as Minister of Finance during the 1990s. Chrétien left office with a high approval rating and Martin was expected to make inroads into Quebec and Western Canada, two regions of Canada where the Liberals had not attracted much support since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. While his cabinet choices provoked some controversy over excluding many Chrétien supporters, it at first did little to hurt his popularity.However, the political situation changed with the revelation of the sponsorship scandal, in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services. Having faced a divided conservative opposition for the past three elections, Liberals were seriously challenged by competition from the newly united Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper. The infighting between Martin and Chrétien's supporters also dogged the party. Nonetheless, by criticizing the Conservatives' social policies, the Liberals were able to draw progressive votes from the NDP which made the difference in several close races. On June 28, 2004 federal election, the Martin Liberals retained enough support to continue as the government, though they were reduced to a minority.In the ensuing months, testimony from the Gomery Commission caused public opinion to turn sharply against the Liberals for the first time in over a decade. Despite the devastating revelations, only two Liberal MPs—David Kilgour (who had crossed the floor from the PC Party in 1990) and Pat O'Brien—left the party for reasons other than the scandal. Belinda Stronach, who crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, gave Martin the number of votes needed, although barely, to hold onto power when an NDP-sponsored amendment to his budget was passed only by the Speaker's tiebreaking vote on May 19, 2005.In November, the Liberals dropped in polls following the release of the first Gomery Report. Nonetheless, Martin turned down the NDP's conditions for continued support, as well as rejected an opposition proposal which would schedule a February 2006 election in return for passing several pieces of legislation. The Liberals thus lost the no-confidence vote on November 28; Martin thus became only the fifth prime minister to lose the confidence of the House, but the first to lose on a straight no-confidence motion. Because of the Christmas holiday, Martin advised Governor General Michaëlle Jean to dissolve Parliament and call an election for January 2006.The Liberal campaign was dogged from start to finish by the sponsorship scandal, which was brought up by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) criminal investigation into the leak of the income trust announcement. Numerous gaffes, contrasting with a smoothly run Conservative campaign, put Liberals as many as ten points behind the Conservatives in opinion polling. They managed to recover some of their momentum by election night, but not enough to retain power. They won 103 seats, a net loss of 30 from when the writs were dropped, losing a similar number of seats in Ontario and Quebec to the Tories. However, the Liberals managed to capture the most seats in Ontario for the fifth straight election (54 to the Tories' 40), holding the Conservatives to a minority government. While the Conservatives captured many of Ontario's rural ridings, the Liberals retained most of the population-rich Greater Toronto Area. Many of these ridings, particularly the 905 region, had historically been bellwethers (the Liberals were nearly shut out of this region in 1979 and 1984), but demographic changes have resulted in high Liberal returns in recent years.Martin resigned as parliamentary leader after the election and stepped down as Liberal leader on March 18, having previously promised to step down if he did not win a plurality.On May 11, 2006, "La Presse" reported that the Government of Canada would file a lawsuit against the Liberal Party to recover all the money missing in the sponsorship program. Scott Brison told reporters that same day that the Liberals has already paid back the $1.14 million into the public purse; however, the Conservatives believed that there was as much as $40 million unaccounted for in the sponsorship program.After their election defeat Martin chose not to take on the office of Leader of the Opposition. He stepped down as parliamentary leader of his party on February 1, and the Liberal caucus appointed Bill Graham, MP for Toronto Centre and outgoing Defence Minister, as his interim successor. Martin officially resigned as leader in March, with Graham taking over on an interim basis.The leadership election was set for December 2, 2006, in Montreal; however, a number of prominent members such as John Manley, Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin, and Allan Rock had already announced they would not enter the race to succeed Martin. Throughout the campaign 12 candidates came forward to lead the party, but by the time of the leadership convention only eight people remained in the race; Martha Hall Findlay, Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, Joe Volpe.Throughout the campaign Ignatieff, Rae, Dion and Kennedy were considered to be the only candidates with enough support to be able to win the leadership, with Ignatieff and Rae being considered the two front-runners. However polling showed Ignatieff had little room to grow his support, while Dion was the second and third choice among a plurality of delegates. At the leadership convention Ignatieff came out on top on the first ballot with 29.3 percent, With Kennedy's support Dion was able to leapfrog both Rae and Ignatieff on the third ballot, eliminating Rae. On the fourth and final ballot Dion defeated Ignatieff to become leader of the Liberal Party.Following the leadership race the Liberal Party saw a bounce in support and surpassed the Conservative Party as the most popular party in Canada. However, in the months and years to come the party's support gradually fell. Dion's own popularity lagged considerably behind that of Prime Minister Harper's, and he often trailed NDP leader Jack Layton in opinion polls when Canadians were asked who would make the best Prime Minister.Dion campaigned on environmental sustainability during the leadership race, and created the "Green Shift" plan following his election as leader. The Green Shift proposed creating a carbon tax that would be coupled with reductions to income tax rates. The proposal was to tax greenhouse gas emissions, starting at $10 per tonne of CO2 and reaching $40 per tonne within four years. The plan was a key policy for the party in the 2008 federal election, but it was not well received and was continuously attacked by both the Conservatives and NDP. On election night the Liberal Party won 26.26 percent of the popular vote and 77 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. At that time their popular support was the lowest in the party's history, and weeks later Dion announced he would step down as Liberal leader once his successor was chosen.New Brunswick Member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc was the first candidate to announce he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party on October 27, 2008. Days later Bob Rae, who had finished third in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate for the leadership. The party executive met in early November and chose May 2, 2009, as the date to elect the next leader. On November 13 Michael Ignatieff, who finished second in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate.On November 27, 2008, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty provided the House of Commons with a fiscal update, within which were plans to cut government spending, suspend the ability of civil servants to strike until 2011, sell off some Crown assets to raise capital, and eliminate the existing $1.95 per vote subsidy parties garner in an election. The opposition parties criticized the fiscal update, and announced they would not support it because it contained no stimulus money to spur Canada's economy and protect workers during the economic crisis. With the Conservative Party only holding a minority of the seats in the House of Commons the government would be defeated if the opposition parties voted against the fiscal update. With the Conservatives unwilling to budge on the proposals outlined in the fiscal update the Liberals and NDP signed an agreement to form a coalition government, with a written pledge of support from the Bloc Québécois. Under the terms of the agreement Dion would be sworn in as Prime Minister, however he would only serve in the position until the next Liberal leader was chosen. Dion contacted Governor General Michaëlle Jean and advised her that he had the confidence of the House of Commons if Prime Minister Harper's government was to fall. However, before the fiscal update could be voted on in the House of Commons Prime Minister Harper requested the Governor General to prorogue parliament till January 26, 2009, which she accepted.While polls showed Canadians were split on the idea of having either a coalition government or having the Conservatives continue to govern, it was clear that because of Dion's personal popularity they were not comfortable with him becoming Prime Minister. Members of the Liberal Party therefore called on Dion to resign as leader immediately and for an interim leader to be chosen, this person would become the Prime Minister in the event that the Conservatives were defeated when parliament resumed in January. With an estimated 70 percent of the Liberal caucus wanting Ignatieff to be named interim leader, Dion resigned the post on December 8, 2008 (effective December 10, upon Ignatieff's becoming interim leader). LeBlanc announced on the same day that he was abandoning the Liberal leadership race and endorsing Ignatieff as the next leader. The following day Rae announced he was also dropping out of the race and was placing his "full and unqualified" support to Ignatieff.With Ignatieff named interim leader of the party (on December 10), the Liberal's poll numbers saw significant gains, after they plummeted with the signing of the coalition agreement. When parliament resumed on January 28, 2009, the Ignatieff Liberals agreed to support the budget as long as it included regular accountability reports, which the Conservatives accepted. This ended the possibility of the coalition government with the New Democrats.Throughout the Winter of 2008–09, opinion polls showed that while the Ignatieff led Liberals still trailed the Conservatives their support had stabilized in the low 30 percent range. However, by the time Ignatieff was confirmed as party leader on May 2, 2009, the Liberal Party had a comfortable lead over the governing Conservatives. After a summer where he was accused of being missing in action, Ignatieff announced on August 31, 2009, that the Liberals would not support the minority Conservative government. After this announcement the Liberal Party's poll numbers, which had already declined over the summer, started to fall further behind the Conservatives. On October 1, 2009, the Liberals put forth a non-confidence motion with the hope of defeating the government. However, the NDP abstained from voting and the Conservatives survived the confidence motion.The Liberal Party's attempt to force an election, just a year after the previous one, was reported as a miscalculation, as polls showed that most Canadians did not want another election. Even after the government survived the confidence motion popularity for Ignatieff and his party continued to fall. Over the next year and a half, with the exception of a brief period in early 2010, support for the Liberals remained below 30 percent, and behind the Conservatives. While his predecessor Dion was criticized by the Conservatives as a "weak leader", Ignatieff was attacked as a "political opportunist".On March 25, 2011, Ignatieff introduced a motion of non-confidence against the Harper government to attempt to force a May 2011, federal election after the government was found to be in Contempt of Parliament, the first such occurrence in Commonwealth history. The House of Commons passed the motion by 156–145.The Liberals had considerable momentum when the writ was dropped, and Ignatieff successfully squeezed NDP leader Jack Layton out of media attention, by issuing challenges to Harper for one-on-one debates. In the first couple weeks of the campaign, Ignatieff kept his party in second place in the polls, and his personal ratings exceeded that of Layton for the first time. However, opponents frequently criticized Ignatieff's perceived political opportunism, particularly during the leaders debates when Layton criticized Ignatieff for having a poor attendance record for Commons votes saying "You know, most Canadians, if they don't show up for work, they don't get a promotion". Ignatieff failed to defend himself against these charges, and the debates were said to be a turning point for his party's campaign. Near the end of the campaign, a late surge in support for Layton and the NDP relegated Ignatieff and the Liberals to third in opinion polls.The Liberals suffered their worst defeat in history in the May 2, 2011, federal election. The result was a third-place finish, with only 19 percent of the vote and returning 34 seats in the House of Commons. Notably, their support in Toronto and Montreal, their power bases for the last two decades, all but vanished. All told, the Liberals won only 11 seats in Ontario (seven of which were in Toronto) and seven in Quebec (all in Montreal)—their fewest totals in either province. Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province with majority Liberal seats at 4 out of 7. They also won only four seats west of Ontario. The Conservatives won 40 percent of the vote and formed a majority government, while the NDP formed the Official Opposition winning 31 percent of the vote.This election marked the first time the Liberals were unable to form either government or the official opposition. Ignatieff was defeated in his own riding, and announced his resignation as Liberal leader shortly after. Bob Rae was chosen as the interim leader on May 25, 2011.On April 14, 2013 Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was elected leader of the Liberal Party on the first ballot, winning 80% of the vote. Following his win, support for the Liberal Party increased considerably, and the party moved into first place in public opinion polls.An initial surge in support in the polls following Trudeau's election wore off in the following year, in the face of Conservative ad campaign after Trudeau's win attempting to "[paint] him as a silly dilettante unfit for public office."In 2014, Trudeau removed all Liberal senators from the Liberal Party caucus. In announcing this, Trudeau said the purpose of the unelected upper chamber is to act as a check on the power of the prime minister, but the party structure interferes with that purpose. Following this move, Liberal senators chose to keep the designation "Liberal" and sit together as a caucus, albeit not one supported by the Liberal Party of Canada. This independent group continued to refer to itself in publications as the Senate Liberal Caucus until 2019.By the time the 2015 federal election was called, the Liberals had been knocked back into third place. Trudeau and his advisors planned to mount a campaign based on economic stimulus in the hopes of regaining the mantle of being the party that best represented change from the New Democrats.Justin Trudeau's Liberals would win the 2015 election in dramatic fashion: becoming the first party to win a parliamentary majority after being reduced to third party status in a previous general election, besting Brian Mulroney's record for the largest seat increase by a party in a single election (111 in 1984), and winning the most seats in Quebec for the first time since 1980. Chantal Hébert deemed the result "a Liberal comeback that is headed straight for the history books", while Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove and Theophilos Argitis similarly described it as "capping the biggest political comeback in the country’s history."Scholars and political experts have recently used a political realignment model to explain what was considered a collapse of a dominant party, and put its condition in long-term perspective. According to recent scholarship, there have been four party systems in Canada at the federal level since Confederation, each with its own distinctive pattern of social support, patronage relationships, leadership styles, and electoral strategies. Steve Patten identifies four party systems in Canada's political history:Stephen Clarkson (2005) shows how the Liberal Party has dominated all the party systems, using different approaches. It began with a "clientelistic approach" under Laurier, which evolved into a "brokerage" system of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s under Mackenzie King. The 1950s saw the emergence of a "pan-Canadian system", which lasted until the 1990s. The 1993 election – categorized by Clarkson as an electoral "earthquake" which "fragmented" the party system, saw the emergence of regional politics within a four party-system, whereby various groups championed regional issues and concerns. Clarkson concludes that the inherent bias built into the first-past-the-post system, has chiefly benefited the Liberals.Pundits in the wake of the 2011 election widely believed in a theme of major realignment. Lawrence Martin, commentator for "The Globe and Mail", claimed that "Harper has completed a remarkable reconstruction of a Canadian political landscape that endured for more than a century. The realignment sees both old parties of the moderate middle, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals, either eliminated or marginalized." "Maclean's" said that the election marked "an unprecedented realignment of Canadian politics" as "the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada"; Andrew Coyne proclaimed "The West is in and Ontario has joined it," noting that the Conservatives accomplished the rare feat of putting together a majority by winning in both Ontario and the western provinces (difficult because of traditionally conflicting interests), while having little representation in Quebec. Books such as "The Big Shift" by John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, and Peter C. Newman's "When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada", provocatively asserted that the Liberals had become an "endangered species" and that an NDP-led opposition would mean that "fortune favours the Harper government" in subsequent campaigns.The Liberal victory in 2015, leaving Alberta and Saskatchewan as the only provinces represented by a majority of Conservative MPs, has now challenged that narrative.The principles of the party are based on liberalism as defined by various liberal theorists and include individual freedom for present and future generations, responsibility, human dignity, a just society, political freedom, religious freedom, national unity, equality of opportunity, cultural diversity, bilingualism, and multilateralism. In the present times, the Liberal party has favoured a variety of "big tent" policies from both right and left of the political spectrum. When it formed the government from 1993 to 2006, it championed balanced budgets, and eliminated the budget deficit completely from the federal budget in 1995 by reducing spending on social programs or delegating them to the provinces, and promised to replace the Goods and Services Tax in the party's famous Red Book. It also legalized same-sex marriage.During the 2015 election, the Liberal party's proposed policies included:Each province and one territory in Canada has its own Liberal Party. However, only those in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are politically and organizationally affiliated with the federal Liberal Party. While other provincial Liberal parties may align ideologically with the federal party, they operate as completely separate entities. Those provincial parties have separate policies, finances, memberships, constituency associations, executives, conventions and offices.To date, only seven Liberal leaders never served as Prime Minister, three of whom were interim leaders. | [
"Wilfrid Laurier",
"Stéphane Dion",
"Bob Rae",
"Paul Martin",
"William Lyon Mackenzie King",
"Daniel Duncan McKenzie",
"Jean Chrétien",
"Louis St. Laurent",
"Pierre Trudeau",
"John Turner",
"Lester B. Pearson",
"Alexander Mackenzie",
"Edward Blake",
"Justin Trudeau",
"Bill Graham"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Liberal Party of Canada in 11/23/2010? | November 23, 2010 | {
"text": [
"Michael Ignatieff"
]
} | L2_Q138345_P488_13 | Louis St. Laurent is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1948 to Jan, 1958.
Edward Blake is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 1880 to Jun, 1887.
Jean Chrétien is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1990 to Nov, 2003.
Stéphane Dion is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2006 to Dec, 2008.
Paul Martin is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Nov, 2003 to Mar, 2006.
Pierre Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 1968 to Jun, 1984.
Alexander Mackenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 1873 to Apr, 1880.
Daniel Duncan McKenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Feb, 1919 to Aug, 1919.
William Lyon Mackenzie King is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1919 to Aug, 1948.
Wilfrid Laurier is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1887 to Feb, 1919.
Lester B. Pearson is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jan, 1958 to Apr, 1968.
John Turner is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1984 to Jun, 1990.
Justin Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Bob Rae is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 2011 to Apr, 2013.
Michael Ignatieff is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2008 to May, 2011.
Bill Graham is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 2006 to Dec, 2006. | Liberal Party of CanadaThe Liberal Party of Canada (LPC; ) is the longest-serving and oldest active federal political party in Canada. The party has dominated federal politics for much of Canada's history, holding power for almost 70 years of the 20th century. As a result, it has sometimes been referred to as Canada's "natural governing party".The party espouses the principles of liberalism, and generally sits at the centre to centre-left of the Canadian political spectrum, with their rival the Conservative Party positioned to the right and the New Democratic Party (who at times aligned itself with the Liberals during minority governments), positioned to their left. The party is described as "big tent", practicing "brokerage politics", attracting support from a broad spectrum of voters. In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau claimed that his Liberal Party adhered to the "radical centre".The Liberals' signature policies and legislative decisions include universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, peacekeeping, multilateralism, official bilingualism, official multiculturalism, gun control, patriating the Canadian constitution and the entrenchment of Canada's "Charter of Rights and Freedoms", the "Clarity Act", legalizing same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and cannabis, national carbon pricing, and expanded access to abortion.In the 2015 federal election, the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau had its best result since the 2000 election, winning 39.5 percent of the popular vote and 184 seats, gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In the 2019 federal election, they were reduced to a minority government, winning 157 seats to remain the largest party in the House of Commons while narrowly losing the popular vote.The Liberals are descended from the mid-19th century Reformers who advocated for responsible government throughout British North America. These included George Brown, Alexander Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and the Clear Grits in Upper Canada, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, and the Patriotes and Rouges in Lower Canada led by figures such as Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Clear Grits and "Parti rouge" sometimes functioned as a united bloc in the legislature of the Province of Canada beginning in 1854, and a united Liberal Party combining both English and French Canadian members was formed in 1861.At the time of confederation of the former British colonies of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the radical Liberals were marginalized by the more pragmatic Conservative coalition assembled under Sir John A. Macdonald. In the 29 years after Canadian confederation, the Liberals were consigned to opposition, with the exception of one stint in government. Alexander Mackenzie was the de facto leader of the Official Opposition after Confederation and finally agreed to become the first official leader of the Liberal Party in 1873. He was able to lead the party to power for the first time in 1873, after the MacDonald government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons due to the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie subsequently won the 1874 election, and served as Prime Minister for an additional four years. During the five years the Liberal government brought in many reforms, which include the replacement of open voting by secret ballot, confining elections to one day and the creation of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the Office of the Auditor General. However the party was only able to build a solid support base in Ontario, and in 1878 lost the government to MacDonald. The Liberals would spend the next 18 years in opposition.In their early history, the Liberals were the party of continentalism and opposition to imperialism. The Liberals also became identified with the aspirations of Quebecers as a result of the growing hostility of French Canadians to the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost the support of French Canadians because of the role of Conservative governments in the execution of Louis Riel and their role in the Conscription Crisis of 1917, and especially their opposition to French schools in provinces besides Quebec.It was not until Wilfrid Laurier became leader that the Liberal Party emerged as a modern party. Laurier was able to capitalize on the Tories' alienation of French Canada by offering the Liberals as a credible alternative. Laurier was able to overcome the party's reputation for anti-clericalism that offended the still-powerful Quebec Roman Catholic Church. In English-speaking Canada, the Liberal Party's support for reciprocity made it popular among farmers, and helped cement the party's hold in the growing prairie provinces.Laurier led the Liberals to power in the 1896 election (in which he became the first Francophone Prime Minister), and oversaw a government that increased immigration in order to settle Western Canada. Laurier's government created the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta out of the North-West Territories, and promoted the development of Canadian industry.Until the early part of the century, the Liberal Party was a loose, informal coalition of local, provincial and regional bodies with a strong national party leader and caucus (and when in power, the national cabinet) but with an informal and regionalized extra-parliamentary organizational structure. There was no national membership of the party, an individual became a member by joining a provincial Liberal party. Laurier called the party's first national convention in 1893 in order to unite Liberal supporters behind a programme and build the campaign that successfully brought the party to power in 1896; however, once in power, no efforts were made to create a formal national organization outside of parliament.As a result of the party's defeats in the 1911 and 1917 federal elections, Laurier attempted to organize the party on a national level by creating three bodies: the Central Liberal Information Office, the National Liberal Advisory Committee, and the National Liberal Organization Committee. However, the advisory committee became dominated by members of parliament and all three bodies were underfunded and competed with both local and provincial Liberal associations and the national caucus for authority. The party did organize the national party's second convention in 1919 to elect William Lyon Mackenzie King as Laurier's successor (Canada's first ever leadership convention), yet following the party's return to power in the 1921 federal election the nascent national party organizations were eclipsed by powerful ministers and local party organizations largely driven by patronage.As a result of both the party's defeat in the 1930 federal election, and the Beauharnois bribery scandal which highlighted the need for distance between the Liberal Party's political wing and campaign fundraising, a central coordinating organization, the National Liberal Federation, was created in 1932 with Vincent Massey as its first president. The new organization allowed individuals to directly join the national Liberal Party for the first time. With the Liberals return to power the national organization languished except for occasional national committee meetings, such as in 1943 when Mackenzie King called a meeting of the federation (consisting of the national caucus and up to seven voting delegates per province) to approve a new platform for the party in anticipation of the end of World War II and prepare for a post-war election. No national convention was held, however, until 1948; the Liberal Party held only three national conventions prior to the 1950s – in 1893, 1919 and 1948. The National Liberal Federation remained largely dependent on provincial Liberal parties and was often ignored and bypassed the parliamentary party in the organization of election campaigns and the development of policy. With the defeat of the Liberals in the 1957 federal election and in particular 1958, reformers argued for the strengthening of the national party organization so it would not be dependent on provincial Liberal parties and patronage. A national executive and Council of presidents, consisting of the presidents of each Liberal riding association, were developed to give the party more co-ordination and national party conventions were regularly held in biennially where previously they had been held infrequently. Over time, provincial Liberal parties in most provinces were separated from provincial wings of the federal party and in a number of cases disaffiliated. By the 1980s, the National Liberal Federation was officially known as the Liberal Party of Canada.Under Laurier, and his successor William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberals promoted Canadian sovereignty and greater independence within the British Commonwealth. In Imperial Conferences held throughout the 1920s, Canadian Liberal governments often took the lead in arguing that the United Kingdom and the dominions should have equal status, and against proposals for an 'imperial parliament' that would have subsumed Canadian independence. After the King–Byng Affair of 1926, the Liberals argued that the Governor General of Canada should no longer be appointed on the recommendation of the British government. The decisions of the Imperial Conferences were formalized in the Statute of Westminster, which was actually passed in 1931, the year after the Liberals lost power.The Liberals also promoted the idea of Canada being responsible for its own foreign and defence policy. Initially, it was Britain which determined external affairs for the dominion. In 1905, Laurier created the Department of External Affairs, and in 1909 he advised Governor General Earl Grey to appoint the first Secretary of State for External Affairs to Cabinet. It was also Laurier who first proposed the creation of a Canadian Navy in 1910. Mackenzie King recommended the appointment by Governor General Lord Byng of Vincent Massey as the first Canadian ambassador to Washington in 1926, marking the Liberal government's insistence on having direct relations with the United States, rather than having Britain act on Canada's behalf.In the period just before and after the Second World War, the party became a champion of 'progressive social policy'. As Prime Minister for most of the time between 1921 and 1948, King introduced several measures that led to the creation of Canada's social safety net. Bowing to popular pressure, he introduced the mother's allowance, a monthly payment to all mothers with young children. He also reluctantly introduced old age pensions when J. S. Woodsworth required it in exchange for his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party's support of King's minority government.Louis St. Laurent succeeded King as Liberal leader and Prime Minister on November 15, 1948. In the 1949 and 1953 federal elections, St. Laurent led the Liberal Party to two large majority governments. As Prime Minister he oversaw the joining of Newfoundland in Confederation as Canada's tenth province, he established equalization payments to the provinces, and continued with social reform with improvements in pensions and health insurance. In 1956, Canada played an important role in resolving the Suez Crisis, and contributed to the United Nations force in the Korean War. Canada enjoyed economic prosperity during St. Laurent's premiership and wartime debts were paid off. The Pipeline Debate proved the Liberal Party's undoing. Their attempt to pass legislation to build a natural gas pipeline from Alberta to central Canada was met with fierce disagreement in the House of Commons. In 1957, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives won a minority government and St. Laurent resigned as Prime Minister and Liberal leader.Lester B. Pearson was easily elected Liberal leader at the party's 1958 leadership convention. However, only months after becoming Liberal leader, Pearson led the party into the 1958 federal election that saw Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives win the largest majority government, by percentage of seats, in Canadian history. The Progressive Conservatives won 206 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons, while the Liberals were reduced to just 48 seats. Pearson remained Liberal leader during this time and in the 1962 election managed to reduce Diefenbaker to a minority government. In the 1963 election Pearson led the Liberal Party back to victory, forming a minority government. Pearson served as Prime Minister for five years, winning a second election in 1965. While Pearson's leadership was considered poor and the Liberal Party never held a majority of the seats in parliament during his premiership, he left office in 1968 with an impressive legacy. Pearson's government introduced Medicare, a new immigration act, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, the Canada Assistance Plan, and adopted the Maple Leaf as Canada's national flag.Under Pierre Trudeau, the mission of a progressive social policy evolved into the goal of creating a "just society".The Liberal Party under Trudeau promoted official bilingualism and passed the "Official Languages Act", which gave French and English languages equal status in Canada. Trudeau hoped that the promotion of bilingualism would cement Quebec's place in Confederation, and counter growing calls for an independent Quebec. The party hoped the policy would transform Canada into a country where English and French Canadians could live together, and allow Canadians to move to any part of the country without having to lose their language. Although this vision has yet to fully materialize, official bilingualism has helped to halt the decline of the French language outside of Quebec, and to ensure that all federal government services (including radio and television services provided by the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada) are available in both languages throughout the country.The Trudeau Liberals are also credited with support for state multiculturalism as a means of integrating immigrants into Canadian society without forcing them to shed their culture, leading the party to build a base of support among recent immigrants and their children. This marked the culmination of a decades-long shift in Liberal immigration policy, a reversal of pre-war racial attitudes that spurred discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 and the MS St. Louis incident.The most lasting effect of the Trudeau years has been the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau's Liberals supported the concept of a strong, central government, and fought Quebec separatism, other forms of Quebec nationalism, and the granting of "distinct society" status to Quebec. Such actions, however, served as rallying cries for sovereigntists and alienated many Francophone Quebeckers.The other primary legacy of the Trudeau years has been financial. Net federal debt in fiscal 1968, just before Trudeau became Prime Minister, was about $18 billion CAD, or 26 percent of gross domestic product; by his final year in office, it had ballooned to over 200 billion—at 46 percent of GDP, nearly twice as large relative to the economy.After Trudeau's retirement in 1984, many Liberals, such as Jean Chrétien and Clyde Wells, continued to adhere to Trudeau's concept of federalism. Others, such as John Turner, supported the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" and would have increased the powers of the provinces to the detriment of the federal government.Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister and party leader in 1984, as the Liberals were slipping in polls. At that year's leadership convention, Turner defeated Chrétien on the second ballot to become Prime Minister. Immediately, upon taking office, Turner called a snap election, citing favourable internal polls. However, the party was hurt by numerous patronage appointments, many of which Turner had made supposedly in return for Trudeau retiring early. Also, they were unpopular in their traditional stronghold of Quebec because of the constitution repatriation which excluded that province. The Liberals lost power in the 1984 election, and were reduced to only 40 seats in the House of Commons. The Progressive Conservatives won a majority of the seats in every province, including Quebec. The 95-seat loss was the worst defeat in the party's history, and the worst defeat at the time for a governing party at the federal level. What was more, the New Democratic Party, successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, won only ten fewer seats than the Liberals, and some thought that the NDP under Ed Broadbent would push the Liberals to third-party status.The party began a long process of reconstruction. A small group of young Liberal MPs, known as the Rat Pack, gained fame by criticizing the Tory government of Brian Mulroney at every turn. Also, despite public and backroom attempts to remove Turner as leader, he managed to consolidate his leadership at the 1986 review.The 1988 election was notable for Turner's strong opposition to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although most Canadians voted for parties opposed to free trade, the Tories were returned with a majority government, and implemented the deal. The Liberals recovered from their near-meltdown of 1984, however, winning 83 seats and ending much of the talk of being eclipsed by the NDP, who won 43 seats.Turner announced that he would resign as leader of the Liberal Party on May 3, 1989. The Liberal Party set a leadership convention for June 23, 1990, in Calgary. Five candidates contested the leadership of the party and former Deputy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who had served in every Liberal cabinet since 1965, won on the first ballot. Chrétien's Liberals campaigned in the 1993 election on the promise of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and eliminating the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Just after the writ was dropped for the election, they issued the Red Book, an integrated and coherent approach to economic, social, environmental and foreign policy. This was unprecedented for a Canadian party. Taking full advantage of the inability of Mulroney's successor, Kim Campbell, to overcome a large amount of antipathy toward Mulroney, they won a strong majority government with 177 seats—the third-best performance in party history, and their best since 1949. The Progressive Conservatives were cut down to only two seats, suffering a defeat even more severe than the one they had handed the Liberals nine years earlier. The Liberals were re-elected with a considerably reduced majority in 1997, but nearly tied their 1993 total in 2000.For the next decade, the Liberals dominated Canadian politics in a fashion not seen since the early years of Confederation. This was because of the destruction of the "grand coalition" of Western socially conservative populists, Quebec nationalists, and fiscal conservatives from Ontario that had supported the Progressive Conservatives in 1984 and 1988. The Progressive Conservatives Western support, for all practical purposes, transferred en masse to the Western-based Reform Party, which replaced the PCs as the major right-wing party in Canada. However, the new party's agenda was seen as too conservative for most Canadians. It only won one seat east of Manitoba in an election (but gained another in a floor-crossing). Even when Reform restructured into the Canadian Alliance, the party was virtually non-existent east of Manitoba, winning only 66 seats in 2000. Reform/Alliance was the official opposition from 1997 to 2003, but was never able to overcome wide perceptions that it was merely a Western protest party. The Quebec nationalists who had once supported the Tories largely switched their support to the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois, while the Tories' Ontario support largely moved to the Liberals. The PCs would never be a major force in Canadian politics again; while they rebounded to 20 seats in the next election, they won only two seats west of Quebec in the next decade.Ontario and Quebec combine for a majority of seats in the House of Commons by virtue of Ontario's current population and Quebec's historic population (59 percent of the seats ). As a result, it is very difficult to form even a minority government without substantial support in Ontario and/or Quebec. No party has ever formed a majority government without winning the most seats in either Ontario or Quebec. It is mathematically possible to form a minority government without a strong base in either province, but such an undertaking is politically difficult. The Liberals were the only party with a strong base in both provinces, thus making them the only party capable of forming a government.There was some disappointment as Liberals were not able to recover their traditional dominant position in Quebec, despite being led by a Quebecer from a strongly nationalist region of Quebec. The Bloc capitalized on discontent with the failure of the 1990 Meech Lake Accord and Chrétien's uncompromising stance on federalism (see below) to win the most seats in Quebec in every election from 1993, onward, even serving as the official opposition from 1993 to 1997. Chrétien's reputation in his home province never recovered after the 1990 leadership convention when rival Paul Martin forced him to declare his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord. However, the Liberals did increase their support in the next two elections because of infighting within the Bloc. In the 1997 election, although the Liberals finished with a thin majority, it was their gains in Quebec which were credited with offsetting their losses in the Maritime provinces. In particular, the 2000 election was a breakthrough for the Liberals after the PQ government's unpopular initiatives regarding consolidation of several Quebec urban areas into "megacities". Many federal Liberals also took credit for Charest's provincial election victory over the PQ in spring 2003. A series of by-elections allowed the Liberals to gain a majority of Quebec ridings for the first time since 1984.The Chrétien Liberals more than made up for their shortfall in Quebec by building a strong base in Ontario. They reaped a substantial windfall from the votes of fiscally conservative and socially liberal voters who had previously voted Tory, as well as rapid growth in the Greater Toronto Area. They were also able to take advantage of massive vote splitting between the Tories and Reform/Alliance in rural areas of the province that had traditionally formed the backbone of provincial Tory governments. Combined with their historic dominance of Metro Toronto and northern Ontario, the Liberals dominated the province's federal politics even as the Tories won landslide majorities at the provincial level. In 1993, for example, the Liberals won all but one seat in Ontario, and came within 123 votes in Simcoe Centre of pulling off the first clean sweep of Canada's most populated province. They were able to retain their position as the largest party in the House by winning all but two seats in Ontario in the 1997 election. The Liberals were assured of at least a minority government once the Ontario results came in, but it was not clear until later in the night that they would retain their majority. In 2000, the Liberals won all but three seats in Ontario.While the Chrétien Liberals campaigned from the left, their time in power is most marked by the cuts made to many social programs, including health transfers, in order to balance the federal budget. Chrétien had supported the Charlottetown Accord while in opposition, but in power opposed major concessions to Quebec and other provincialist factions. In contrast to their promises during the 1993 campaign, they implemented only minor changes to NAFTA, embraced the free trade concept and—with the exception of the replacement of the GST with the Harmonized Sales Tax in some Atlantic provinces—broke their promise to replace the GST.After a proposal for Quebec independence was narrowly defeated in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Liberals passed the "Clarity Act", which outlines the federal government's preconditions for negotiating provincial independence. In Chrétien's final days, he supported same-sex marriage and decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana. Chrétien displeased the United States government when he pledged on March 17, 2003, that Canada would not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A poll released shortly after showed widespread approval of Chrétien's decision by the Canadian public. The poll, which was conducted by EKOS for the "Toronto Star" and "La Presse", found 71 percent of those questioned approved of the government's decision to not enter the United States-led invasion, with 27 percent expressing disapproval.Several trends started in 2003 which suggested the end of the Liberal Party's political dominance. Notably, there would be a high turnover of permanent party leaders, in contrast to their predecessors who usually served over two or more elections, particularly Trudeau and Chrétien who each led for over a decade. The Liberals were also hampered by their inability to raise campaign money competitively after Chrétien passed a bill in 2003 which banned corporate donations, even though the Liberals had enjoyed by far the lion's share of this funding because of the then-divided opposition parties. It has been suggested that Chrétien, who had done nothing about election financing for his 10 years in office, could be seen as the idealist as he retired, while his rival and successor Paul Martin would have the burden of having to fight an election under the strict new rules. Simon Fraser University professor Doug McArthur has noted that Martin's leadership campaign used aggressive tactics for the 2003 leadership convention, in attempting to end the contest before it could start by giving the impression that his bid was too strong for any other candidate to beat. McArthur blamed Martin's tactics for the ongoing sag in Liberal fortunes, as it discouraged activists who were not on side.Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien as party leader and prime minister in 2003. Despite the personal rivalry between the two, Martin was the architect of the Liberals' economic policies as Minister of Finance during the 1990s. Chrétien left office with a high approval rating and Martin was expected to make inroads into Quebec and Western Canada, two regions of Canada where the Liberals had not attracted much support since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. While his cabinet choices provoked some controversy over excluding many Chrétien supporters, it at first did little to hurt his popularity.However, the political situation changed with the revelation of the sponsorship scandal, in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services. Having faced a divided conservative opposition for the past three elections, Liberals were seriously challenged by competition from the newly united Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper. The infighting between Martin and Chrétien's supporters also dogged the party. Nonetheless, by criticizing the Conservatives' social policies, the Liberals were able to draw progressive votes from the NDP which made the difference in several close races. On June 28, 2004 federal election, the Martin Liberals retained enough support to continue as the government, though they were reduced to a minority.In the ensuing months, testimony from the Gomery Commission caused public opinion to turn sharply against the Liberals for the first time in over a decade. Despite the devastating revelations, only two Liberal MPs—David Kilgour (who had crossed the floor from the PC Party in 1990) and Pat O'Brien—left the party for reasons other than the scandal. Belinda Stronach, who crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, gave Martin the number of votes needed, although barely, to hold onto power when an NDP-sponsored amendment to his budget was passed only by the Speaker's tiebreaking vote on May 19, 2005.In November, the Liberals dropped in polls following the release of the first Gomery Report. Nonetheless, Martin turned down the NDP's conditions for continued support, as well as rejected an opposition proposal which would schedule a February 2006 election in return for passing several pieces of legislation. The Liberals thus lost the no-confidence vote on November 28; Martin thus became only the fifth prime minister to lose the confidence of the House, but the first to lose on a straight no-confidence motion. Because of the Christmas holiday, Martin advised Governor General Michaëlle Jean to dissolve Parliament and call an election for January 2006.The Liberal campaign was dogged from start to finish by the sponsorship scandal, which was brought up by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) criminal investigation into the leak of the income trust announcement. Numerous gaffes, contrasting with a smoothly run Conservative campaign, put Liberals as many as ten points behind the Conservatives in opinion polling. They managed to recover some of their momentum by election night, but not enough to retain power. They won 103 seats, a net loss of 30 from when the writs were dropped, losing a similar number of seats in Ontario and Quebec to the Tories. However, the Liberals managed to capture the most seats in Ontario for the fifth straight election (54 to the Tories' 40), holding the Conservatives to a minority government. While the Conservatives captured many of Ontario's rural ridings, the Liberals retained most of the population-rich Greater Toronto Area. Many of these ridings, particularly the 905 region, had historically been bellwethers (the Liberals were nearly shut out of this region in 1979 and 1984), but demographic changes have resulted in high Liberal returns in recent years.Martin resigned as parliamentary leader after the election and stepped down as Liberal leader on March 18, having previously promised to step down if he did not win a plurality.On May 11, 2006, "La Presse" reported that the Government of Canada would file a lawsuit against the Liberal Party to recover all the money missing in the sponsorship program. Scott Brison told reporters that same day that the Liberals has already paid back the $1.14 million into the public purse; however, the Conservatives believed that there was as much as $40 million unaccounted for in the sponsorship program.After their election defeat Martin chose not to take on the office of Leader of the Opposition. He stepped down as parliamentary leader of his party on February 1, and the Liberal caucus appointed Bill Graham, MP for Toronto Centre and outgoing Defence Minister, as his interim successor. Martin officially resigned as leader in March, with Graham taking over on an interim basis.The leadership election was set for December 2, 2006, in Montreal; however, a number of prominent members such as John Manley, Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin, and Allan Rock had already announced they would not enter the race to succeed Martin. Throughout the campaign 12 candidates came forward to lead the party, but by the time of the leadership convention only eight people remained in the race; Martha Hall Findlay, Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, Joe Volpe.Throughout the campaign Ignatieff, Rae, Dion and Kennedy were considered to be the only candidates with enough support to be able to win the leadership, with Ignatieff and Rae being considered the two front-runners. However polling showed Ignatieff had little room to grow his support, while Dion was the second and third choice among a plurality of delegates. At the leadership convention Ignatieff came out on top on the first ballot with 29.3 percent, With Kennedy's support Dion was able to leapfrog both Rae and Ignatieff on the third ballot, eliminating Rae. On the fourth and final ballot Dion defeated Ignatieff to become leader of the Liberal Party.Following the leadership race the Liberal Party saw a bounce in support and surpassed the Conservative Party as the most popular party in Canada. However, in the months and years to come the party's support gradually fell. Dion's own popularity lagged considerably behind that of Prime Minister Harper's, and he often trailed NDP leader Jack Layton in opinion polls when Canadians were asked who would make the best Prime Minister.Dion campaigned on environmental sustainability during the leadership race, and created the "Green Shift" plan following his election as leader. The Green Shift proposed creating a carbon tax that would be coupled with reductions to income tax rates. The proposal was to tax greenhouse gas emissions, starting at $10 per tonne of CO2 and reaching $40 per tonne within four years. The plan was a key policy for the party in the 2008 federal election, but it was not well received and was continuously attacked by both the Conservatives and NDP. On election night the Liberal Party won 26.26 percent of the popular vote and 77 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. At that time their popular support was the lowest in the party's history, and weeks later Dion announced he would step down as Liberal leader once his successor was chosen.New Brunswick Member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc was the first candidate to announce he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party on October 27, 2008. Days later Bob Rae, who had finished third in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate for the leadership. The party executive met in early November and chose May 2, 2009, as the date to elect the next leader. On November 13 Michael Ignatieff, who finished second in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate.On November 27, 2008, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty provided the House of Commons with a fiscal update, within which were plans to cut government spending, suspend the ability of civil servants to strike until 2011, sell off some Crown assets to raise capital, and eliminate the existing $1.95 per vote subsidy parties garner in an election. The opposition parties criticized the fiscal update, and announced they would not support it because it contained no stimulus money to spur Canada's economy and protect workers during the economic crisis. With the Conservative Party only holding a minority of the seats in the House of Commons the government would be defeated if the opposition parties voted against the fiscal update. With the Conservatives unwilling to budge on the proposals outlined in the fiscal update the Liberals and NDP signed an agreement to form a coalition government, with a written pledge of support from the Bloc Québécois. Under the terms of the agreement Dion would be sworn in as Prime Minister, however he would only serve in the position until the next Liberal leader was chosen. Dion contacted Governor General Michaëlle Jean and advised her that he had the confidence of the House of Commons if Prime Minister Harper's government was to fall. However, before the fiscal update could be voted on in the House of Commons Prime Minister Harper requested the Governor General to prorogue parliament till January 26, 2009, which she accepted.While polls showed Canadians were split on the idea of having either a coalition government or having the Conservatives continue to govern, it was clear that because of Dion's personal popularity they were not comfortable with him becoming Prime Minister. Members of the Liberal Party therefore called on Dion to resign as leader immediately and for an interim leader to be chosen, this person would become the Prime Minister in the event that the Conservatives were defeated when parliament resumed in January. With an estimated 70 percent of the Liberal caucus wanting Ignatieff to be named interim leader, Dion resigned the post on December 8, 2008 (effective December 10, upon Ignatieff's becoming interim leader). LeBlanc announced on the same day that he was abandoning the Liberal leadership race and endorsing Ignatieff as the next leader. The following day Rae announced he was also dropping out of the race and was placing his "full and unqualified" support to Ignatieff.With Ignatieff named interim leader of the party (on December 10), the Liberal's poll numbers saw significant gains, after they plummeted with the signing of the coalition agreement. When parliament resumed on January 28, 2009, the Ignatieff Liberals agreed to support the budget as long as it included regular accountability reports, which the Conservatives accepted. This ended the possibility of the coalition government with the New Democrats.Throughout the Winter of 2008–09, opinion polls showed that while the Ignatieff led Liberals still trailed the Conservatives their support had stabilized in the low 30 percent range. However, by the time Ignatieff was confirmed as party leader on May 2, 2009, the Liberal Party had a comfortable lead over the governing Conservatives. After a summer where he was accused of being missing in action, Ignatieff announced on August 31, 2009, that the Liberals would not support the minority Conservative government. After this announcement the Liberal Party's poll numbers, which had already declined over the summer, started to fall further behind the Conservatives. On October 1, 2009, the Liberals put forth a non-confidence motion with the hope of defeating the government. However, the NDP abstained from voting and the Conservatives survived the confidence motion.The Liberal Party's attempt to force an election, just a year after the previous one, was reported as a miscalculation, as polls showed that most Canadians did not want another election. Even after the government survived the confidence motion popularity for Ignatieff and his party continued to fall. Over the next year and a half, with the exception of a brief period in early 2010, support for the Liberals remained below 30 percent, and behind the Conservatives. While his predecessor Dion was criticized by the Conservatives as a "weak leader", Ignatieff was attacked as a "political opportunist".On March 25, 2011, Ignatieff introduced a motion of non-confidence against the Harper government to attempt to force a May 2011, federal election after the government was found to be in Contempt of Parliament, the first such occurrence in Commonwealth history. The House of Commons passed the motion by 156–145.The Liberals had considerable momentum when the writ was dropped, and Ignatieff successfully squeezed NDP leader Jack Layton out of media attention, by issuing challenges to Harper for one-on-one debates. In the first couple weeks of the campaign, Ignatieff kept his party in second place in the polls, and his personal ratings exceeded that of Layton for the first time. However, opponents frequently criticized Ignatieff's perceived political opportunism, particularly during the leaders debates when Layton criticized Ignatieff for having a poor attendance record for Commons votes saying "You know, most Canadians, if they don't show up for work, they don't get a promotion". Ignatieff failed to defend himself against these charges, and the debates were said to be a turning point for his party's campaign. Near the end of the campaign, a late surge in support for Layton and the NDP relegated Ignatieff and the Liberals to third in opinion polls.The Liberals suffered their worst defeat in history in the May 2, 2011, federal election. The result was a third-place finish, with only 19 percent of the vote and returning 34 seats in the House of Commons. Notably, their support in Toronto and Montreal, their power bases for the last two decades, all but vanished. All told, the Liberals won only 11 seats in Ontario (seven of which were in Toronto) and seven in Quebec (all in Montreal)—their fewest totals in either province. Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province with majority Liberal seats at 4 out of 7. They also won only four seats west of Ontario. The Conservatives won 40 percent of the vote and formed a majority government, while the NDP formed the Official Opposition winning 31 percent of the vote.This election marked the first time the Liberals were unable to form either government or the official opposition. Ignatieff was defeated in his own riding, and announced his resignation as Liberal leader shortly after. Bob Rae was chosen as the interim leader on May 25, 2011.On April 14, 2013 Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was elected leader of the Liberal Party on the first ballot, winning 80% of the vote. Following his win, support for the Liberal Party increased considerably, and the party moved into first place in public opinion polls.An initial surge in support in the polls following Trudeau's election wore off in the following year, in the face of Conservative ad campaign after Trudeau's win attempting to "[paint] him as a silly dilettante unfit for public office."In 2014, Trudeau removed all Liberal senators from the Liberal Party caucus. In announcing this, Trudeau said the purpose of the unelected upper chamber is to act as a check on the power of the prime minister, but the party structure interferes with that purpose. Following this move, Liberal senators chose to keep the designation "Liberal" and sit together as a caucus, albeit not one supported by the Liberal Party of Canada. This independent group continued to refer to itself in publications as the Senate Liberal Caucus until 2019.By the time the 2015 federal election was called, the Liberals had been knocked back into third place. Trudeau and his advisors planned to mount a campaign based on economic stimulus in the hopes of regaining the mantle of being the party that best represented change from the New Democrats.Justin Trudeau's Liberals would win the 2015 election in dramatic fashion: becoming the first party to win a parliamentary majority after being reduced to third party status in a previous general election, besting Brian Mulroney's record for the largest seat increase by a party in a single election (111 in 1984), and winning the most seats in Quebec for the first time since 1980. Chantal Hébert deemed the result "a Liberal comeback that is headed straight for the history books", while Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove and Theophilos Argitis similarly described it as "capping the biggest political comeback in the country’s history."Scholars and political experts have recently used a political realignment model to explain what was considered a collapse of a dominant party, and put its condition in long-term perspective. According to recent scholarship, there have been four party systems in Canada at the federal level since Confederation, each with its own distinctive pattern of social support, patronage relationships, leadership styles, and electoral strategies. Steve Patten identifies four party systems in Canada's political history:Stephen Clarkson (2005) shows how the Liberal Party has dominated all the party systems, using different approaches. It began with a "clientelistic approach" under Laurier, which evolved into a "brokerage" system of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s under Mackenzie King. The 1950s saw the emergence of a "pan-Canadian system", which lasted until the 1990s. The 1993 election – categorized by Clarkson as an electoral "earthquake" which "fragmented" the party system, saw the emergence of regional politics within a four party-system, whereby various groups championed regional issues and concerns. Clarkson concludes that the inherent bias built into the first-past-the-post system, has chiefly benefited the Liberals.Pundits in the wake of the 2011 election widely believed in a theme of major realignment. Lawrence Martin, commentator for "The Globe and Mail", claimed that "Harper has completed a remarkable reconstruction of a Canadian political landscape that endured for more than a century. The realignment sees both old parties of the moderate middle, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals, either eliminated or marginalized." "Maclean's" said that the election marked "an unprecedented realignment of Canadian politics" as "the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada"; Andrew Coyne proclaimed "The West is in and Ontario has joined it," noting that the Conservatives accomplished the rare feat of putting together a majority by winning in both Ontario and the western provinces (difficult because of traditionally conflicting interests), while having little representation in Quebec. Books such as "The Big Shift" by John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, and Peter C. Newman's "When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada", provocatively asserted that the Liberals had become an "endangered species" and that an NDP-led opposition would mean that "fortune favours the Harper government" in subsequent campaigns.The Liberal victory in 2015, leaving Alberta and Saskatchewan as the only provinces represented by a majority of Conservative MPs, has now challenged that narrative.The principles of the party are based on liberalism as defined by various liberal theorists and include individual freedom for present and future generations, responsibility, human dignity, a just society, political freedom, religious freedom, national unity, equality of opportunity, cultural diversity, bilingualism, and multilateralism. In the present times, the Liberal party has favoured a variety of "big tent" policies from both right and left of the political spectrum. When it formed the government from 1993 to 2006, it championed balanced budgets, and eliminated the budget deficit completely from the federal budget in 1995 by reducing spending on social programs or delegating them to the provinces, and promised to replace the Goods and Services Tax in the party's famous Red Book. It also legalized same-sex marriage.During the 2015 election, the Liberal party's proposed policies included:Each province and one territory in Canada has its own Liberal Party. However, only those in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are politically and organizationally affiliated with the federal Liberal Party. While other provincial Liberal parties may align ideologically with the federal party, they operate as completely separate entities. Those provincial parties have separate policies, finances, memberships, constituency associations, executives, conventions and offices.To date, only seven Liberal leaders never served as Prime Minister, three of whom were interim leaders. | [
"Wilfrid Laurier",
"Stéphane Dion",
"Bob Rae",
"Paul Martin",
"William Lyon Mackenzie King",
"Daniel Duncan McKenzie",
"Jean Chrétien",
"Louis St. Laurent",
"Pierre Trudeau",
"John Turner",
"Lester B. Pearson",
"Alexander Mackenzie",
"Edward Blake",
"Justin Trudeau",
"Bill Graham"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Liberal Party of Canada in 23-Nov-201023-November-2010? | November 23, 2010 | {
"text": [
"Michael Ignatieff"
]
} | L2_Q138345_P488_13 | Louis St. Laurent is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1948 to Jan, 1958.
Edward Blake is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 1880 to Jun, 1887.
Jean Chrétien is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1990 to Nov, 2003.
Stéphane Dion is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2006 to Dec, 2008.
Paul Martin is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Nov, 2003 to Mar, 2006.
Pierre Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 1968 to Jun, 1984.
Alexander Mackenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 1873 to Apr, 1880.
Daniel Duncan McKenzie is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Feb, 1919 to Aug, 1919.
William Lyon Mackenzie King is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Aug, 1919 to Aug, 1948.
Wilfrid Laurier is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1887 to Feb, 1919.
Lester B. Pearson is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jan, 1958 to Apr, 1968.
John Turner is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Jun, 1984 to Jun, 1990.
Justin Trudeau is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Apr, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Bob Rae is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from May, 2011 to Apr, 2013.
Michael Ignatieff is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Dec, 2008 to May, 2011.
Bill Graham is the chair of Liberal Party of Canada from Mar, 2006 to Dec, 2006. | Liberal Party of CanadaThe Liberal Party of Canada (LPC; ) is the longest-serving and oldest active federal political party in Canada. The party has dominated federal politics for much of Canada's history, holding power for almost 70 years of the 20th century. As a result, it has sometimes been referred to as Canada's "natural governing party".The party espouses the principles of liberalism, and generally sits at the centre to centre-left of the Canadian political spectrum, with their rival the Conservative Party positioned to the right and the New Democratic Party (who at times aligned itself with the Liberals during minority governments), positioned to their left. The party is described as "big tent", practicing "brokerage politics", attracting support from a broad spectrum of voters. In the late 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau claimed that his Liberal Party adhered to the "radical centre".The Liberals' signature policies and legislative decisions include universal health care, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, peacekeeping, multilateralism, official bilingualism, official multiculturalism, gun control, patriating the Canadian constitution and the entrenchment of Canada's "Charter of Rights and Freedoms", the "Clarity Act", legalizing same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and cannabis, national carbon pricing, and expanded access to abortion.In the 2015 federal election, the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau had its best result since the 2000 election, winning 39.5 percent of the popular vote and 184 seats, gaining a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In the 2019 federal election, they were reduced to a minority government, winning 157 seats to remain the largest party in the House of Commons while narrowly losing the popular vote.The Liberals are descended from the mid-19th century Reformers who advocated for responsible government throughout British North America. These included George Brown, Alexander Mackenzie, Robert Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and the Clear Grits in Upper Canada, Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia, and the Patriotes and Rouges in Lower Canada led by figures such as Louis-Joseph Papineau. The Clear Grits and "Parti rouge" sometimes functioned as a united bloc in the legislature of the Province of Canada beginning in 1854, and a united Liberal Party combining both English and French Canadian members was formed in 1861.At the time of confederation of the former British colonies of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the radical Liberals were marginalized by the more pragmatic Conservative coalition assembled under Sir John A. Macdonald. In the 29 years after Canadian confederation, the Liberals were consigned to opposition, with the exception of one stint in government. Alexander Mackenzie was the de facto leader of the Official Opposition after Confederation and finally agreed to become the first official leader of the Liberal Party in 1873. He was able to lead the party to power for the first time in 1873, after the MacDonald government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons due to the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie subsequently won the 1874 election, and served as Prime Minister for an additional four years. During the five years the Liberal government brought in many reforms, which include the replacement of open voting by secret ballot, confining elections to one day and the creation of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the Office of the Auditor General. However the party was only able to build a solid support base in Ontario, and in 1878 lost the government to MacDonald. The Liberals would spend the next 18 years in opposition.In their early history, the Liberals were the party of continentalism and opposition to imperialism. The Liberals also became identified with the aspirations of Quebecers as a result of the growing hostility of French Canadians to the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost the support of French Canadians because of the role of Conservative governments in the execution of Louis Riel and their role in the Conscription Crisis of 1917, and especially their opposition to French schools in provinces besides Quebec.It was not until Wilfrid Laurier became leader that the Liberal Party emerged as a modern party. Laurier was able to capitalize on the Tories' alienation of French Canada by offering the Liberals as a credible alternative. Laurier was able to overcome the party's reputation for anti-clericalism that offended the still-powerful Quebec Roman Catholic Church. In English-speaking Canada, the Liberal Party's support for reciprocity made it popular among farmers, and helped cement the party's hold in the growing prairie provinces.Laurier led the Liberals to power in the 1896 election (in which he became the first Francophone Prime Minister), and oversaw a government that increased immigration in order to settle Western Canada. Laurier's government created the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta out of the North-West Territories, and promoted the development of Canadian industry.Until the early part of the century, the Liberal Party was a loose, informal coalition of local, provincial and regional bodies with a strong national party leader and caucus (and when in power, the national cabinet) but with an informal and regionalized extra-parliamentary organizational structure. There was no national membership of the party, an individual became a member by joining a provincial Liberal party. Laurier called the party's first national convention in 1893 in order to unite Liberal supporters behind a programme and build the campaign that successfully brought the party to power in 1896; however, once in power, no efforts were made to create a formal national organization outside of parliament.As a result of the party's defeats in the 1911 and 1917 federal elections, Laurier attempted to organize the party on a national level by creating three bodies: the Central Liberal Information Office, the National Liberal Advisory Committee, and the National Liberal Organization Committee. However, the advisory committee became dominated by members of parliament and all three bodies were underfunded and competed with both local and provincial Liberal associations and the national caucus for authority. The party did organize the national party's second convention in 1919 to elect William Lyon Mackenzie King as Laurier's successor (Canada's first ever leadership convention), yet following the party's return to power in the 1921 federal election the nascent national party organizations were eclipsed by powerful ministers and local party organizations largely driven by patronage.As a result of both the party's defeat in the 1930 federal election, and the Beauharnois bribery scandal which highlighted the need for distance between the Liberal Party's political wing and campaign fundraising, a central coordinating organization, the National Liberal Federation, was created in 1932 with Vincent Massey as its first president. The new organization allowed individuals to directly join the national Liberal Party for the first time. With the Liberals return to power the national organization languished except for occasional national committee meetings, such as in 1943 when Mackenzie King called a meeting of the federation (consisting of the national caucus and up to seven voting delegates per province) to approve a new platform for the party in anticipation of the end of World War II and prepare for a post-war election. No national convention was held, however, until 1948; the Liberal Party held only three national conventions prior to the 1950s – in 1893, 1919 and 1948. The National Liberal Federation remained largely dependent on provincial Liberal parties and was often ignored and bypassed the parliamentary party in the organization of election campaigns and the development of policy. With the defeat of the Liberals in the 1957 federal election and in particular 1958, reformers argued for the strengthening of the national party organization so it would not be dependent on provincial Liberal parties and patronage. A national executive and Council of presidents, consisting of the presidents of each Liberal riding association, were developed to give the party more co-ordination and national party conventions were regularly held in biennially where previously they had been held infrequently. Over time, provincial Liberal parties in most provinces were separated from provincial wings of the federal party and in a number of cases disaffiliated. By the 1980s, the National Liberal Federation was officially known as the Liberal Party of Canada.Under Laurier, and his successor William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberals promoted Canadian sovereignty and greater independence within the British Commonwealth. In Imperial Conferences held throughout the 1920s, Canadian Liberal governments often took the lead in arguing that the United Kingdom and the dominions should have equal status, and against proposals for an 'imperial parliament' that would have subsumed Canadian independence. After the King–Byng Affair of 1926, the Liberals argued that the Governor General of Canada should no longer be appointed on the recommendation of the British government. The decisions of the Imperial Conferences were formalized in the Statute of Westminster, which was actually passed in 1931, the year after the Liberals lost power.The Liberals also promoted the idea of Canada being responsible for its own foreign and defence policy. Initially, it was Britain which determined external affairs for the dominion. In 1905, Laurier created the Department of External Affairs, and in 1909 he advised Governor General Earl Grey to appoint the first Secretary of State for External Affairs to Cabinet. It was also Laurier who first proposed the creation of a Canadian Navy in 1910. Mackenzie King recommended the appointment by Governor General Lord Byng of Vincent Massey as the first Canadian ambassador to Washington in 1926, marking the Liberal government's insistence on having direct relations with the United States, rather than having Britain act on Canada's behalf.In the period just before and after the Second World War, the party became a champion of 'progressive social policy'. As Prime Minister for most of the time between 1921 and 1948, King introduced several measures that led to the creation of Canada's social safety net. Bowing to popular pressure, he introduced the mother's allowance, a monthly payment to all mothers with young children. He also reluctantly introduced old age pensions when J. S. Woodsworth required it in exchange for his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party's support of King's minority government.Louis St. Laurent succeeded King as Liberal leader and Prime Minister on November 15, 1948. In the 1949 and 1953 federal elections, St. Laurent led the Liberal Party to two large majority governments. As Prime Minister he oversaw the joining of Newfoundland in Confederation as Canada's tenth province, he established equalization payments to the provinces, and continued with social reform with improvements in pensions and health insurance. In 1956, Canada played an important role in resolving the Suez Crisis, and contributed to the United Nations force in the Korean War. Canada enjoyed economic prosperity during St. Laurent's premiership and wartime debts were paid off. The Pipeline Debate proved the Liberal Party's undoing. Their attempt to pass legislation to build a natural gas pipeline from Alberta to central Canada was met with fierce disagreement in the House of Commons. In 1957, John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives won a minority government and St. Laurent resigned as Prime Minister and Liberal leader.Lester B. Pearson was easily elected Liberal leader at the party's 1958 leadership convention. However, only months after becoming Liberal leader, Pearson led the party into the 1958 federal election that saw Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservatives win the largest majority government, by percentage of seats, in Canadian history. The Progressive Conservatives won 206 of the 265 seats in the House of Commons, while the Liberals were reduced to just 48 seats. Pearson remained Liberal leader during this time and in the 1962 election managed to reduce Diefenbaker to a minority government. In the 1963 election Pearson led the Liberal Party back to victory, forming a minority government. Pearson served as Prime Minister for five years, winning a second election in 1965. While Pearson's leadership was considered poor and the Liberal Party never held a majority of the seats in parliament during his premiership, he left office in 1968 with an impressive legacy. Pearson's government introduced Medicare, a new immigration act, the Canada Pension Plan, Canada Student Loans, the Canada Assistance Plan, and adopted the Maple Leaf as Canada's national flag.Under Pierre Trudeau, the mission of a progressive social policy evolved into the goal of creating a "just society".The Liberal Party under Trudeau promoted official bilingualism and passed the "Official Languages Act", which gave French and English languages equal status in Canada. Trudeau hoped that the promotion of bilingualism would cement Quebec's place in Confederation, and counter growing calls for an independent Quebec. The party hoped the policy would transform Canada into a country where English and French Canadians could live together, and allow Canadians to move to any part of the country without having to lose their language. Although this vision has yet to fully materialize, official bilingualism has helped to halt the decline of the French language outside of Quebec, and to ensure that all federal government services (including radio and television services provided by the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada) are available in both languages throughout the country.The Trudeau Liberals are also credited with support for state multiculturalism as a means of integrating immigrants into Canadian society without forcing them to shed their culture, leading the party to build a base of support among recent immigrants and their children. This marked the culmination of a decades-long shift in Liberal immigration policy, a reversal of pre-war racial attitudes that spurred discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 and the MS St. Louis incident.The most lasting effect of the Trudeau years has been the patriation of the Canadian constitution and the creation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau's Liberals supported the concept of a strong, central government, and fought Quebec separatism, other forms of Quebec nationalism, and the granting of "distinct society" status to Quebec. Such actions, however, served as rallying cries for sovereigntists and alienated many Francophone Quebeckers.The other primary legacy of the Trudeau years has been financial. Net federal debt in fiscal 1968, just before Trudeau became Prime Minister, was about $18 billion CAD, or 26 percent of gross domestic product; by his final year in office, it had ballooned to over 200 billion—at 46 percent of GDP, nearly twice as large relative to the economy.After Trudeau's retirement in 1984, many Liberals, such as Jean Chrétien and Clyde Wells, continued to adhere to Trudeau's concept of federalism. Others, such as John Turner, supported the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown Constitutional Accords, which would have recognized Quebec as a "distinct society" and would have increased the powers of the provinces to the detriment of the federal government.Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister and party leader in 1984, as the Liberals were slipping in polls. At that year's leadership convention, Turner defeated Chrétien on the second ballot to become Prime Minister. Immediately, upon taking office, Turner called a snap election, citing favourable internal polls. However, the party was hurt by numerous patronage appointments, many of which Turner had made supposedly in return for Trudeau retiring early. Also, they were unpopular in their traditional stronghold of Quebec because of the constitution repatriation which excluded that province. The Liberals lost power in the 1984 election, and were reduced to only 40 seats in the House of Commons. The Progressive Conservatives won a majority of the seats in every province, including Quebec. The 95-seat loss was the worst defeat in the party's history, and the worst defeat at the time for a governing party at the federal level. What was more, the New Democratic Party, successor to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, won only ten fewer seats than the Liberals, and some thought that the NDP under Ed Broadbent would push the Liberals to third-party status.The party began a long process of reconstruction. A small group of young Liberal MPs, known as the Rat Pack, gained fame by criticizing the Tory government of Brian Mulroney at every turn. Also, despite public and backroom attempts to remove Turner as leader, he managed to consolidate his leadership at the 1986 review.The 1988 election was notable for Turner's strong opposition to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement negotiated by Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Although most Canadians voted for parties opposed to free trade, the Tories were returned with a majority government, and implemented the deal. The Liberals recovered from their near-meltdown of 1984, however, winning 83 seats and ending much of the talk of being eclipsed by the NDP, who won 43 seats.Turner announced that he would resign as leader of the Liberal Party on May 3, 1989. The Liberal Party set a leadership convention for June 23, 1990, in Calgary. Five candidates contested the leadership of the party and former Deputy Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who had served in every Liberal cabinet since 1965, won on the first ballot. Chrétien's Liberals campaigned in the 1993 election on the promise of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and eliminating the Goods and Services Tax (GST). Just after the writ was dropped for the election, they issued the Red Book, an integrated and coherent approach to economic, social, environmental and foreign policy. This was unprecedented for a Canadian party. Taking full advantage of the inability of Mulroney's successor, Kim Campbell, to overcome a large amount of antipathy toward Mulroney, they won a strong majority government with 177 seats—the third-best performance in party history, and their best since 1949. The Progressive Conservatives were cut down to only two seats, suffering a defeat even more severe than the one they had handed the Liberals nine years earlier. The Liberals were re-elected with a considerably reduced majority in 1997, but nearly tied their 1993 total in 2000.For the next decade, the Liberals dominated Canadian politics in a fashion not seen since the early years of Confederation. This was because of the destruction of the "grand coalition" of Western socially conservative populists, Quebec nationalists, and fiscal conservatives from Ontario that had supported the Progressive Conservatives in 1984 and 1988. The Progressive Conservatives Western support, for all practical purposes, transferred en masse to the Western-based Reform Party, which replaced the PCs as the major right-wing party in Canada. However, the new party's agenda was seen as too conservative for most Canadians. It only won one seat east of Manitoba in an election (but gained another in a floor-crossing). Even when Reform restructured into the Canadian Alliance, the party was virtually non-existent east of Manitoba, winning only 66 seats in 2000. Reform/Alliance was the official opposition from 1997 to 2003, but was never able to overcome wide perceptions that it was merely a Western protest party. The Quebec nationalists who had once supported the Tories largely switched their support to the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois, while the Tories' Ontario support largely moved to the Liberals. The PCs would never be a major force in Canadian politics again; while they rebounded to 20 seats in the next election, they won only two seats west of Quebec in the next decade.Ontario and Quebec combine for a majority of seats in the House of Commons by virtue of Ontario's current population and Quebec's historic population (59 percent of the seats ). As a result, it is very difficult to form even a minority government without substantial support in Ontario and/or Quebec. No party has ever formed a majority government without winning the most seats in either Ontario or Quebec. It is mathematically possible to form a minority government without a strong base in either province, but such an undertaking is politically difficult. The Liberals were the only party with a strong base in both provinces, thus making them the only party capable of forming a government.There was some disappointment as Liberals were not able to recover their traditional dominant position in Quebec, despite being led by a Quebecer from a strongly nationalist region of Quebec. The Bloc capitalized on discontent with the failure of the 1990 Meech Lake Accord and Chrétien's uncompromising stance on federalism (see below) to win the most seats in Quebec in every election from 1993, onward, even serving as the official opposition from 1993 to 1997. Chrétien's reputation in his home province never recovered after the 1990 leadership convention when rival Paul Martin forced him to declare his opposition to the Meech Lake Accord. However, the Liberals did increase their support in the next two elections because of infighting within the Bloc. In the 1997 election, although the Liberals finished with a thin majority, it was their gains in Quebec which were credited with offsetting their losses in the Maritime provinces. In particular, the 2000 election was a breakthrough for the Liberals after the PQ government's unpopular initiatives regarding consolidation of several Quebec urban areas into "megacities". Many federal Liberals also took credit for Charest's provincial election victory over the PQ in spring 2003. A series of by-elections allowed the Liberals to gain a majority of Quebec ridings for the first time since 1984.The Chrétien Liberals more than made up for their shortfall in Quebec by building a strong base in Ontario. They reaped a substantial windfall from the votes of fiscally conservative and socially liberal voters who had previously voted Tory, as well as rapid growth in the Greater Toronto Area. They were also able to take advantage of massive vote splitting between the Tories and Reform/Alliance in rural areas of the province that had traditionally formed the backbone of provincial Tory governments. Combined with their historic dominance of Metro Toronto and northern Ontario, the Liberals dominated the province's federal politics even as the Tories won landslide majorities at the provincial level. In 1993, for example, the Liberals won all but one seat in Ontario, and came within 123 votes in Simcoe Centre of pulling off the first clean sweep of Canada's most populated province. They were able to retain their position as the largest party in the House by winning all but two seats in Ontario in the 1997 election. The Liberals were assured of at least a minority government once the Ontario results came in, but it was not clear until later in the night that they would retain their majority. In 2000, the Liberals won all but three seats in Ontario.While the Chrétien Liberals campaigned from the left, their time in power is most marked by the cuts made to many social programs, including health transfers, in order to balance the federal budget. Chrétien had supported the Charlottetown Accord while in opposition, but in power opposed major concessions to Quebec and other provincialist factions. In contrast to their promises during the 1993 campaign, they implemented only minor changes to NAFTA, embraced the free trade concept and—with the exception of the replacement of the GST with the Harmonized Sales Tax in some Atlantic provinces—broke their promise to replace the GST.After a proposal for Quebec independence was narrowly defeated in the 1995 Quebec referendum, the Liberals passed the "Clarity Act", which outlines the federal government's preconditions for negotiating provincial independence. In Chrétien's final days, he supported same-sex marriage and decriminalizing the possession of small quantities of marijuana. Chrétien displeased the United States government when he pledged on March 17, 2003, that Canada would not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. A poll released shortly after showed widespread approval of Chrétien's decision by the Canadian public. The poll, which was conducted by EKOS for the "Toronto Star" and "La Presse", found 71 percent of those questioned approved of the government's decision to not enter the United States-led invasion, with 27 percent expressing disapproval.Several trends started in 2003 which suggested the end of the Liberal Party's political dominance. Notably, there would be a high turnover of permanent party leaders, in contrast to their predecessors who usually served over two or more elections, particularly Trudeau and Chrétien who each led for over a decade. The Liberals were also hampered by their inability to raise campaign money competitively after Chrétien passed a bill in 2003 which banned corporate donations, even though the Liberals had enjoyed by far the lion's share of this funding because of the then-divided opposition parties. It has been suggested that Chrétien, who had done nothing about election financing for his 10 years in office, could be seen as the idealist as he retired, while his rival and successor Paul Martin would have the burden of having to fight an election under the strict new rules. Simon Fraser University professor Doug McArthur has noted that Martin's leadership campaign used aggressive tactics for the 2003 leadership convention, in attempting to end the contest before it could start by giving the impression that his bid was too strong for any other candidate to beat. McArthur blamed Martin's tactics for the ongoing sag in Liberal fortunes, as it discouraged activists who were not on side.Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien as party leader and prime minister in 2003. Despite the personal rivalry between the two, Martin was the architect of the Liberals' economic policies as Minister of Finance during the 1990s. Chrétien left office with a high approval rating and Martin was expected to make inroads into Quebec and Western Canada, two regions of Canada where the Liberals had not attracted much support since the 1980s and 1990s, respectively. While his cabinet choices provoked some controversy over excluding many Chrétien supporters, it at first did little to hurt his popularity.However, the political situation changed with the revelation of the sponsorship scandal, in which advertising agencies supporting the Liberal Party received grossly inflated commissions for their services. Having faced a divided conservative opposition for the past three elections, Liberals were seriously challenged by competition from the newly united Conservative Party led by Stephen Harper. The infighting between Martin and Chrétien's supporters also dogged the party. Nonetheless, by criticizing the Conservatives' social policies, the Liberals were able to draw progressive votes from the NDP which made the difference in several close races. On June 28, 2004 federal election, the Martin Liberals retained enough support to continue as the government, though they were reduced to a minority.In the ensuing months, testimony from the Gomery Commission caused public opinion to turn sharply against the Liberals for the first time in over a decade. Despite the devastating revelations, only two Liberal MPs—David Kilgour (who had crossed the floor from the PC Party in 1990) and Pat O'Brien—left the party for reasons other than the scandal. Belinda Stronach, who crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, gave Martin the number of votes needed, although barely, to hold onto power when an NDP-sponsored amendment to his budget was passed only by the Speaker's tiebreaking vote on May 19, 2005.In November, the Liberals dropped in polls following the release of the first Gomery Report. Nonetheless, Martin turned down the NDP's conditions for continued support, as well as rejected an opposition proposal which would schedule a February 2006 election in return for passing several pieces of legislation. The Liberals thus lost the no-confidence vote on November 28; Martin thus became only the fifth prime minister to lose the confidence of the House, but the first to lose on a straight no-confidence motion. Because of the Christmas holiday, Martin advised Governor General Michaëlle Jean to dissolve Parliament and call an election for January 2006.The Liberal campaign was dogged from start to finish by the sponsorship scandal, which was brought up by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) criminal investigation into the leak of the income trust announcement. Numerous gaffes, contrasting with a smoothly run Conservative campaign, put Liberals as many as ten points behind the Conservatives in opinion polling. They managed to recover some of their momentum by election night, but not enough to retain power. They won 103 seats, a net loss of 30 from when the writs were dropped, losing a similar number of seats in Ontario and Quebec to the Tories. However, the Liberals managed to capture the most seats in Ontario for the fifth straight election (54 to the Tories' 40), holding the Conservatives to a minority government. While the Conservatives captured many of Ontario's rural ridings, the Liberals retained most of the population-rich Greater Toronto Area. Many of these ridings, particularly the 905 region, had historically been bellwethers (the Liberals were nearly shut out of this region in 1979 and 1984), but demographic changes have resulted in high Liberal returns in recent years.Martin resigned as parliamentary leader after the election and stepped down as Liberal leader on March 18, having previously promised to step down if he did not win a plurality.On May 11, 2006, "La Presse" reported that the Government of Canada would file a lawsuit against the Liberal Party to recover all the money missing in the sponsorship program. Scott Brison told reporters that same day that the Liberals has already paid back the $1.14 million into the public purse; however, the Conservatives believed that there was as much as $40 million unaccounted for in the sponsorship program.After their election defeat Martin chose not to take on the office of Leader of the Opposition. He stepped down as parliamentary leader of his party on February 1, and the Liberal caucus appointed Bill Graham, MP for Toronto Centre and outgoing Defence Minister, as his interim successor. Martin officially resigned as leader in March, with Graham taking over on an interim basis.The leadership election was set for December 2, 2006, in Montreal; however, a number of prominent members such as John Manley, Frank McKenna, Brian Tobin, and Allan Rock had already announced they would not enter the race to succeed Martin. Throughout the campaign 12 candidates came forward to lead the party, but by the time of the leadership convention only eight people remained in the race; Martha Hall Findlay, Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Gerard Kennedy, Bob Rae, Scott Brison, Ken Dryden, Joe Volpe.Throughout the campaign Ignatieff, Rae, Dion and Kennedy were considered to be the only candidates with enough support to be able to win the leadership, with Ignatieff and Rae being considered the two front-runners. However polling showed Ignatieff had little room to grow his support, while Dion was the second and third choice among a plurality of delegates. At the leadership convention Ignatieff came out on top on the first ballot with 29.3 percent, With Kennedy's support Dion was able to leapfrog both Rae and Ignatieff on the third ballot, eliminating Rae. On the fourth and final ballot Dion defeated Ignatieff to become leader of the Liberal Party.Following the leadership race the Liberal Party saw a bounce in support and surpassed the Conservative Party as the most popular party in Canada. However, in the months and years to come the party's support gradually fell. Dion's own popularity lagged considerably behind that of Prime Minister Harper's, and he often trailed NDP leader Jack Layton in opinion polls when Canadians were asked who would make the best Prime Minister.Dion campaigned on environmental sustainability during the leadership race, and created the "Green Shift" plan following his election as leader. The Green Shift proposed creating a carbon tax that would be coupled with reductions to income tax rates. The proposal was to tax greenhouse gas emissions, starting at $10 per tonne of CO2 and reaching $40 per tonne within four years. The plan was a key policy for the party in the 2008 federal election, but it was not well received and was continuously attacked by both the Conservatives and NDP. On election night the Liberal Party won 26.26 percent of the popular vote and 77 of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. At that time their popular support was the lowest in the party's history, and weeks later Dion announced he would step down as Liberal leader once his successor was chosen.New Brunswick Member of Parliament Dominic LeBlanc was the first candidate to announce he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party on October 27, 2008. Days later Bob Rae, who had finished third in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate for the leadership. The party executive met in early November and chose May 2, 2009, as the date to elect the next leader. On November 13 Michael Ignatieff, who finished second in 2006, announced he would also be a candidate.On November 27, 2008, Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty provided the House of Commons with a fiscal update, within which were plans to cut government spending, suspend the ability of civil servants to strike until 2011, sell off some Crown assets to raise capital, and eliminate the existing $1.95 per vote subsidy parties garner in an election. The opposition parties criticized the fiscal update, and announced they would not support it because it contained no stimulus money to spur Canada's economy and protect workers during the economic crisis. With the Conservative Party only holding a minority of the seats in the House of Commons the government would be defeated if the opposition parties voted against the fiscal update. With the Conservatives unwilling to budge on the proposals outlined in the fiscal update the Liberals and NDP signed an agreement to form a coalition government, with a written pledge of support from the Bloc Québécois. Under the terms of the agreement Dion would be sworn in as Prime Minister, however he would only serve in the position until the next Liberal leader was chosen. Dion contacted Governor General Michaëlle Jean and advised her that he had the confidence of the House of Commons if Prime Minister Harper's government was to fall. However, before the fiscal update could be voted on in the House of Commons Prime Minister Harper requested the Governor General to prorogue parliament till January 26, 2009, which she accepted.While polls showed Canadians were split on the idea of having either a coalition government or having the Conservatives continue to govern, it was clear that because of Dion's personal popularity they were not comfortable with him becoming Prime Minister. Members of the Liberal Party therefore called on Dion to resign as leader immediately and for an interim leader to be chosen, this person would become the Prime Minister in the event that the Conservatives were defeated when parliament resumed in January. With an estimated 70 percent of the Liberal caucus wanting Ignatieff to be named interim leader, Dion resigned the post on December 8, 2008 (effective December 10, upon Ignatieff's becoming interim leader). LeBlanc announced on the same day that he was abandoning the Liberal leadership race and endorsing Ignatieff as the next leader. The following day Rae announced he was also dropping out of the race and was placing his "full and unqualified" support to Ignatieff.With Ignatieff named interim leader of the party (on December 10), the Liberal's poll numbers saw significant gains, after they plummeted with the signing of the coalition agreement. When parliament resumed on January 28, 2009, the Ignatieff Liberals agreed to support the budget as long as it included regular accountability reports, which the Conservatives accepted. This ended the possibility of the coalition government with the New Democrats.Throughout the Winter of 2008–09, opinion polls showed that while the Ignatieff led Liberals still trailed the Conservatives their support had stabilized in the low 30 percent range. However, by the time Ignatieff was confirmed as party leader on May 2, 2009, the Liberal Party had a comfortable lead over the governing Conservatives. After a summer where he was accused of being missing in action, Ignatieff announced on August 31, 2009, that the Liberals would not support the minority Conservative government. After this announcement the Liberal Party's poll numbers, which had already declined over the summer, started to fall further behind the Conservatives. On October 1, 2009, the Liberals put forth a non-confidence motion with the hope of defeating the government. However, the NDP abstained from voting and the Conservatives survived the confidence motion.The Liberal Party's attempt to force an election, just a year after the previous one, was reported as a miscalculation, as polls showed that most Canadians did not want another election. Even after the government survived the confidence motion popularity for Ignatieff and his party continued to fall. Over the next year and a half, with the exception of a brief period in early 2010, support for the Liberals remained below 30 percent, and behind the Conservatives. While his predecessor Dion was criticized by the Conservatives as a "weak leader", Ignatieff was attacked as a "political opportunist".On March 25, 2011, Ignatieff introduced a motion of non-confidence against the Harper government to attempt to force a May 2011, federal election after the government was found to be in Contempt of Parliament, the first such occurrence in Commonwealth history. The House of Commons passed the motion by 156–145.The Liberals had considerable momentum when the writ was dropped, and Ignatieff successfully squeezed NDP leader Jack Layton out of media attention, by issuing challenges to Harper for one-on-one debates. In the first couple weeks of the campaign, Ignatieff kept his party in second place in the polls, and his personal ratings exceeded that of Layton for the first time. However, opponents frequently criticized Ignatieff's perceived political opportunism, particularly during the leaders debates when Layton criticized Ignatieff for having a poor attendance record for Commons votes saying "You know, most Canadians, if they don't show up for work, they don't get a promotion". Ignatieff failed to defend himself against these charges, and the debates were said to be a turning point for his party's campaign. Near the end of the campaign, a late surge in support for Layton and the NDP relegated Ignatieff and the Liberals to third in opinion polls.The Liberals suffered their worst defeat in history in the May 2, 2011, federal election. The result was a third-place finish, with only 19 percent of the vote and returning 34 seats in the House of Commons. Notably, their support in Toronto and Montreal, their power bases for the last two decades, all but vanished. All told, the Liberals won only 11 seats in Ontario (seven of which were in Toronto) and seven in Quebec (all in Montreal)—their fewest totals in either province. Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province with majority Liberal seats at 4 out of 7. They also won only four seats west of Ontario. The Conservatives won 40 percent of the vote and formed a majority government, while the NDP formed the Official Opposition winning 31 percent of the vote.This election marked the first time the Liberals were unable to form either government or the official opposition. Ignatieff was defeated in his own riding, and announced his resignation as Liberal leader shortly after. Bob Rae was chosen as the interim leader on May 25, 2011.On April 14, 2013 Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was elected leader of the Liberal Party on the first ballot, winning 80% of the vote. Following his win, support for the Liberal Party increased considerably, and the party moved into first place in public opinion polls.An initial surge in support in the polls following Trudeau's election wore off in the following year, in the face of Conservative ad campaign after Trudeau's win attempting to "[paint] him as a silly dilettante unfit for public office."In 2014, Trudeau removed all Liberal senators from the Liberal Party caucus. In announcing this, Trudeau said the purpose of the unelected upper chamber is to act as a check on the power of the prime minister, but the party structure interferes with that purpose. Following this move, Liberal senators chose to keep the designation "Liberal" and sit together as a caucus, albeit not one supported by the Liberal Party of Canada. This independent group continued to refer to itself in publications as the Senate Liberal Caucus until 2019.By the time the 2015 federal election was called, the Liberals had been knocked back into third place. Trudeau and his advisors planned to mount a campaign based on economic stimulus in the hopes of regaining the mantle of being the party that best represented change from the New Democrats.Justin Trudeau's Liberals would win the 2015 election in dramatic fashion: becoming the first party to win a parliamentary majority after being reduced to third party status in a previous general election, besting Brian Mulroney's record for the largest seat increase by a party in a single election (111 in 1984), and winning the most seats in Quebec for the first time since 1980. Chantal Hébert deemed the result "a Liberal comeback that is headed straight for the history books", while Bloomberg's Josh Wingrove and Theophilos Argitis similarly described it as "capping the biggest political comeback in the country’s history."Scholars and political experts have recently used a political realignment model to explain what was considered a collapse of a dominant party, and put its condition in long-term perspective. According to recent scholarship, there have been four party systems in Canada at the federal level since Confederation, each with its own distinctive pattern of social support, patronage relationships, leadership styles, and electoral strategies. Steve Patten identifies four party systems in Canada's political history:Stephen Clarkson (2005) shows how the Liberal Party has dominated all the party systems, using different approaches. It began with a "clientelistic approach" under Laurier, which evolved into a "brokerage" system of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s under Mackenzie King. The 1950s saw the emergence of a "pan-Canadian system", which lasted until the 1990s. The 1993 election – categorized by Clarkson as an electoral "earthquake" which "fragmented" the party system, saw the emergence of regional politics within a four party-system, whereby various groups championed regional issues and concerns. Clarkson concludes that the inherent bias built into the first-past-the-post system, has chiefly benefited the Liberals.Pundits in the wake of the 2011 election widely believed in a theme of major realignment. Lawrence Martin, commentator for "The Globe and Mail", claimed that "Harper has completed a remarkable reconstruction of a Canadian political landscape that endured for more than a century. The realignment sees both old parties of the moderate middle, the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals, either eliminated or marginalized." "Maclean's" said that the election marked "an unprecedented realignment of Canadian politics" as "the Conservatives are now in a position to replace the Liberals as the natural governing party in Canada"; Andrew Coyne proclaimed "The West is in and Ontario has joined it," noting that the Conservatives accomplished the rare feat of putting together a majority by winning in both Ontario and the western provinces (difficult because of traditionally conflicting interests), while having little representation in Quebec. Books such as "The Big Shift" by John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, and Peter C. Newman's "When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada", provocatively asserted that the Liberals had become an "endangered species" and that an NDP-led opposition would mean that "fortune favours the Harper government" in subsequent campaigns.The Liberal victory in 2015, leaving Alberta and Saskatchewan as the only provinces represented by a majority of Conservative MPs, has now challenged that narrative.The principles of the party are based on liberalism as defined by various liberal theorists and include individual freedom for present and future generations, responsibility, human dignity, a just society, political freedom, religious freedom, national unity, equality of opportunity, cultural diversity, bilingualism, and multilateralism. In the present times, the Liberal party has favoured a variety of "big tent" policies from both right and left of the political spectrum. When it formed the government from 1993 to 2006, it championed balanced budgets, and eliminated the budget deficit completely from the federal budget in 1995 by reducing spending on social programs or delegating them to the provinces, and promised to replace the Goods and Services Tax in the party's famous Red Book. It also legalized same-sex marriage.During the 2015 election, the Liberal party's proposed policies included:Each province and one territory in Canada has its own Liberal Party. However, only those in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island are politically and organizationally affiliated with the federal Liberal Party. While other provincial Liberal parties may align ideologically with the federal party, they operate as completely separate entities. Those provincial parties have separate policies, finances, memberships, constituency associations, executives, conventions and offices.To date, only seven Liberal leaders never served as Prime Minister, three of whom were interim leaders. | [
"Wilfrid Laurier",
"Stéphane Dion",
"Bob Rae",
"Paul Martin",
"William Lyon Mackenzie King",
"Daniel Duncan McKenzie",
"Jean Chrétien",
"Louis St. Laurent",
"Pierre Trudeau",
"John Turner",
"Lester B. Pearson",
"Alexander Mackenzie",
"Edward Blake",
"Justin Trudeau",
"Bill Graham"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon in Feb, 1994? | February 23, 1994 | {
"text": [
"Hugues Taÿ"
]
} | L2_Q10140_P488_2 | Pierre Doueil is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Nov, 1980 to Nov, 1983.
Francis Jeanson is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Oct, 1984 to Oct, 1987.
Hugues Taÿ is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Jan, 1988 to May, 1994.
Michel Cusin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Sep, 1994 to Aug, 1997.
Anne Poursin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Dec, 2019 to Sep, 2021.
Carine Soulay is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Feb, 2022 to Dec, 2022.
Roland Tissot is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from May, 1998 to Nov, 2000. | Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de LyonThe Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, sometimes referred to as the Conservatoire de Lyon, is a conservatory for the study of music and dance, located in Lyon, France.It is one of the two existing "Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse" in France, the other being the "Conservatoire de Paris" in Paris.Under the Ministry of Culture and Communication, CNSMDL is administered by a board whose chairman is appointed by the minister. The current director is Géry Moutier. He directs the conservatory with a deputy director. He is also assisted with a director of musical studies, a director of choreographic studies and a board of educational guidance. The teaching staff consists of 180 teachers, assistants and attendants. The administrative and technical team comprises 65 people. Enrollments are 500 musicians and 90 dancers. Foreign students account for 15% of the workforce.The average season consists of nearly 300 public events that are part of the educational project, and help showcase the talent and the work of students, faculty and guest artists. Conservatory partnerships provide opportunities to expose students to the workplace.The CNSMD Lyon is part of a network of fifty higher education institutions through the Erasmus exchange and also increases the projects with institutions outside Europe (in: Montreal, Bogota, Beirut). It has, for its projects and those of students, patronage of the SACEM, the Adams SPEDIDAM Patronage and Musical Société Générale, and for his actions at the international support of the Convention Cultures France, Region and DRAC Rhône-Alpes.The Conservatory offers an education for future professionals, selected by competitive audition. The studies are organized in two distinct cycles approved by the Bologna scheme. The first cycle (3 years) is sanctioned by the National Diploma graduate professional musician / dancer (and DNSPM DNSMD), and the second (2 years) to a degree equal to the rank of master.The faculty are grouped into ten departments:The annual budget of the institution is €11,048,054 and a grant from the direction of music, dance, theater and amounts to €9,632,911.The current facility CNSMD Lyon is located north of the district Old Lyon, quai Chauveau, in the 9th arrondissement of Lyon. These historic buildings originally sheltered a religious community, the Convent of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth (seventeenth century), and after the Revolution, they became the speaker of the Veterinary School Lyon. The current layout of the premise is due to the architect Chabrol (mid-nineteenth century). Finally, in 1980, it was updated and expanded to accommodate the CNSMD Lyon.History of public institutions of the Ministry of Culture] (PDF) | [
"Michel Cusin",
"Francis Jeanson",
"Anne Poursin",
"Pierre Doueil",
"Carine Soulay",
"Roland Tissot"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon in 1994-02-23? | February 23, 1994 | {
"text": [
"Hugues Taÿ"
]
} | L2_Q10140_P488_2 | Pierre Doueil is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Nov, 1980 to Nov, 1983.
Francis Jeanson is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Oct, 1984 to Oct, 1987.
Hugues Taÿ is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Jan, 1988 to May, 1994.
Michel Cusin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Sep, 1994 to Aug, 1997.
Anne Poursin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Dec, 2019 to Sep, 2021.
Carine Soulay is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Feb, 2022 to Dec, 2022.
Roland Tissot is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from May, 1998 to Nov, 2000. | Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de LyonThe Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, sometimes referred to as the Conservatoire de Lyon, is a conservatory for the study of music and dance, located in Lyon, France.It is one of the two existing "Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse" in France, the other being the "Conservatoire de Paris" in Paris.Under the Ministry of Culture and Communication, CNSMDL is administered by a board whose chairman is appointed by the minister. The current director is Géry Moutier. He directs the conservatory with a deputy director. He is also assisted with a director of musical studies, a director of choreographic studies and a board of educational guidance. The teaching staff consists of 180 teachers, assistants and attendants. The administrative and technical team comprises 65 people. Enrollments are 500 musicians and 90 dancers. Foreign students account for 15% of the workforce.The average season consists of nearly 300 public events that are part of the educational project, and help showcase the talent and the work of students, faculty and guest artists. Conservatory partnerships provide opportunities to expose students to the workplace.The CNSMD Lyon is part of a network of fifty higher education institutions through the Erasmus exchange and also increases the projects with institutions outside Europe (in: Montreal, Bogota, Beirut). It has, for its projects and those of students, patronage of the SACEM, the Adams SPEDIDAM Patronage and Musical Société Générale, and for his actions at the international support of the Convention Cultures France, Region and DRAC Rhône-Alpes.The Conservatory offers an education for future professionals, selected by competitive audition. The studies are organized in two distinct cycles approved by the Bologna scheme. The first cycle (3 years) is sanctioned by the National Diploma graduate professional musician / dancer (and DNSPM DNSMD), and the second (2 years) to a degree equal to the rank of master.The faculty are grouped into ten departments:The annual budget of the institution is €11,048,054 and a grant from the direction of music, dance, theater and amounts to €9,632,911.The current facility CNSMD Lyon is located north of the district Old Lyon, quai Chauveau, in the 9th arrondissement of Lyon. These historic buildings originally sheltered a religious community, the Convent of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth (seventeenth century), and after the Revolution, they became the speaker of the Veterinary School Lyon. The current layout of the premise is due to the architect Chabrol (mid-nineteenth century). Finally, in 1980, it was updated and expanded to accommodate the CNSMD Lyon.History of public institutions of the Ministry of Culture] (PDF) | [
"Michel Cusin",
"Francis Jeanson",
"Anne Poursin",
"Pierre Doueil",
"Carine Soulay",
"Roland Tissot"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon in 23/02/1994? | February 23, 1994 | {
"text": [
"Hugues Taÿ"
]
} | L2_Q10140_P488_2 | Pierre Doueil is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Nov, 1980 to Nov, 1983.
Francis Jeanson is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Oct, 1984 to Oct, 1987.
Hugues Taÿ is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Jan, 1988 to May, 1994.
Michel Cusin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Sep, 1994 to Aug, 1997.
Anne Poursin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Dec, 2019 to Sep, 2021.
Carine Soulay is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Feb, 2022 to Dec, 2022.
Roland Tissot is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from May, 1998 to Nov, 2000. | Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de LyonThe Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, sometimes referred to as the Conservatoire de Lyon, is a conservatory for the study of music and dance, located in Lyon, France.It is one of the two existing "Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse" in France, the other being the "Conservatoire de Paris" in Paris.Under the Ministry of Culture and Communication, CNSMDL is administered by a board whose chairman is appointed by the minister. The current director is Géry Moutier. He directs the conservatory with a deputy director. He is also assisted with a director of musical studies, a director of choreographic studies and a board of educational guidance. The teaching staff consists of 180 teachers, assistants and attendants. The administrative and technical team comprises 65 people. Enrollments are 500 musicians and 90 dancers. Foreign students account for 15% of the workforce.The average season consists of nearly 300 public events that are part of the educational project, and help showcase the talent and the work of students, faculty and guest artists. Conservatory partnerships provide opportunities to expose students to the workplace.The CNSMD Lyon is part of a network of fifty higher education institutions through the Erasmus exchange and also increases the projects with institutions outside Europe (in: Montreal, Bogota, Beirut). It has, for its projects and those of students, patronage of the SACEM, the Adams SPEDIDAM Patronage and Musical Société Générale, and for his actions at the international support of the Convention Cultures France, Region and DRAC Rhône-Alpes.The Conservatory offers an education for future professionals, selected by competitive audition. The studies are organized in two distinct cycles approved by the Bologna scheme. The first cycle (3 years) is sanctioned by the National Diploma graduate professional musician / dancer (and DNSPM DNSMD), and the second (2 years) to a degree equal to the rank of master.The faculty are grouped into ten departments:The annual budget of the institution is €11,048,054 and a grant from the direction of music, dance, theater and amounts to €9,632,911.The current facility CNSMD Lyon is located north of the district Old Lyon, quai Chauveau, in the 9th arrondissement of Lyon. These historic buildings originally sheltered a religious community, the Convent of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth (seventeenth century), and after the Revolution, they became the speaker of the Veterinary School Lyon. The current layout of the premise is due to the architect Chabrol (mid-nineteenth century). Finally, in 1980, it was updated and expanded to accommodate the CNSMD Lyon.History of public institutions of the Ministry of Culture] (PDF) | [
"Michel Cusin",
"Francis Jeanson",
"Anne Poursin",
"Pierre Doueil",
"Carine Soulay",
"Roland Tissot"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon in Feb 23, 1994? | February 23, 1994 | {
"text": [
"Hugues Taÿ"
]
} | L2_Q10140_P488_2 | Pierre Doueil is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Nov, 1980 to Nov, 1983.
Francis Jeanson is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Oct, 1984 to Oct, 1987.
Hugues Taÿ is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Jan, 1988 to May, 1994.
Michel Cusin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Sep, 1994 to Aug, 1997.
Anne Poursin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Dec, 2019 to Sep, 2021.
Carine Soulay is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Feb, 2022 to Dec, 2022.
Roland Tissot is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from May, 1998 to Nov, 2000. | Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de LyonThe Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, sometimes referred to as the Conservatoire de Lyon, is a conservatory for the study of music and dance, located in Lyon, France.It is one of the two existing "Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse" in France, the other being the "Conservatoire de Paris" in Paris.Under the Ministry of Culture and Communication, CNSMDL is administered by a board whose chairman is appointed by the minister. The current director is Géry Moutier. He directs the conservatory with a deputy director. He is also assisted with a director of musical studies, a director of choreographic studies and a board of educational guidance. The teaching staff consists of 180 teachers, assistants and attendants. The administrative and technical team comprises 65 people. Enrollments are 500 musicians and 90 dancers. Foreign students account for 15% of the workforce.The average season consists of nearly 300 public events that are part of the educational project, and help showcase the talent and the work of students, faculty and guest artists. Conservatory partnerships provide opportunities to expose students to the workplace.The CNSMD Lyon is part of a network of fifty higher education institutions through the Erasmus exchange and also increases the projects with institutions outside Europe (in: Montreal, Bogota, Beirut). It has, for its projects and those of students, patronage of the SACEM, the Adams SPEDIDAM Patronage and Musical Société Générale, and for his actions at the international support of the Convention Cultures France, Region and DRAC Rhône-Alpes.The Conservatory offers an education for future professionals, selected by competitive audition. The studies are organized in two distinct cycles approved by the Bologna scheme. The first cycle (3 years) is sanctioned by the National Diploma graduate professional musician / dancer (and DNSPM DNSMD), and the second (2 years) to a degree equal to the rank of master.The faculty are grouped into ten departments:The annual budget of the institution is €11,048,054 and a grant from the direction of music, dance, theater and amounts to €9,632,911.The current facility CNSMD Lyon is located north of the district Old Lyon, quai Chauveau, in the 9th arrondissement of Lyon. These historic buildings originally sheltered a religious community, the Convent of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth (seventeenth century), and after the Revolution, they became the speaker of the Veterinary School Lyon. The current layout of the premise is due to the architect Chabrol (mid-nineteenth century). Finally, in 1980, it was updated and expanded to accommodate the CNSMD Lyon.History of public institutions of the Ministry of Culture] (PDF) | [
"Michel Cusin",
"Francis Jeanson",
"Anne Poursin",
"Pierre Doueil",
"Carine Soulay",
"Roland Tissot"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon in 02/23/1994? | February 23, 1994 | {
"text": [
"Hugues Taÿ"
]
} | L2_Q10140_P488_2 | Pierre Doueil is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Nov, 1980 to Nov, 1983.
Francis Jeanson is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Oct, 1984 to Oct, 1987.
Hugues Taÿ is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Jan, 1988 to May, 1994.
Michel Cusin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Sep, 1994 to Aug, 1997.
Anne Poursin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Dec, 2019 to Sep, 2021.
Carine Soulay is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Feb, 2022 to Dec, 2022.
Roland Tissot is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from May, 1998 to Nov, 2000. | Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de LyonThe Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, sometimes referred to as the Conservatoire de Lyon, is a conservatory for the study of music and dance, located in Lyon, France.It is one of the two existing "Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse" in France, the other being the "Conservatoire de Paris" in Paris.Under the Ministry of Culture and Communication, CNSMDL is administered by a board whose chairman is appointed by the minister. The current director is Géry Moutier. He directs the conservatory with a deputy director. He is also assisted with a director of musical studies, a director of choreographic studies and a board of educational guidance. The teaching staff consists of 180 teachers, assistants and attendants. The administrative and technical team comprises 65 people. Enrollments are 500 musicians and 90 dancers. Foreign students account for 15% of the workforce.The average season consists of nearly 300 public events that are part of the educational project, and help showcase the talent and the work of students, faculty and guest artists. Conservatory partnerships provide opportunities to expose students to the workplace.The CNSMD Lyon is part of a network of fifty higher education institutions through the Erasmus exchange and also increases the projects with institutions outside Europe (in: Montreal, Bogota, Beirut). It has, for its projects and those of students, patronage of the SACEM, the Adams SPEDIDAM Patronage and Musical Société Générale, and for his actions at the international support of the Convention Cultures France, Region and DRAC Rhône-Alpes.The Conservatory offers an education for future professionals, selected by competitive audition. The studies are organized in two distinct cycles approved by the Bologna scheme. The first cycle (3 years) is sanctioned by the National Diploma graduate professional musician / dancer (and DNSPM DNSMD), and the second (2 years) to a degree equal to the rank of master.The faculty are grouped into ten departments:The annual budget of the institution is €11,048,054 and a grant from the direction of music, dance, theater and amounts to €9,632,911.The current facility CNSMD Lyon is located north of the district Old Lyon, quai Chauveau, in the 9th arrondissement of Lyon. These historic buildings originally sheltered a religious community, the Convent of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth (seventeenth century), and after the Revolution, they became the speaker of the Veterinary School Lyon. The current layout of the premise is due to the architect Chabrol (mid-nineteenth century). Finally, in 1980, it was updated and expanded to accommodate the CNSMD Lyon.History of public institutions of the Ministry of Culture] (PDF) | [
"Michel Cusin",
"Francis Jeanson",
"Anne Poursin",
"Pierre Doueil",
"Carine Soulay",
"Roland Tissot"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon in 23-Feb-199423-February-1994? | February 23, 1994 | {
"text": [
"Hugues Taÿ"
]
} | L2_Q10140_P488_2 | Pierre Doueil is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Nov, 1980 to Nov, 1983.
Francis Jeanson is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Oct, 1984 to Oct, 1987.
Hugues Taÿ is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Jan, 1988 to May, 1994.
Michel Cusin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Sep, 1994 to Aug, 1997.
Anne Poursin is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Dec, 2019 to Sep, 2021.
Carine Soulay is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from Feb, 2022 to Dec, 2022.
Roland Tissot is the chair of Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon from May, 1998 to Nov, 2000. | Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de LyonThe Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, sometimes referred to as the Conservatoire de Lyon, is a conservatory for the study of music and dance, located in Lyon, France.It is one of the two existing "Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse" in France, the other being the "Conservatoire de Paris" in Paris.Under the Ministry of Culture and Communication, CNSMDL is administered by a board whose chairman is appointed by the minister. The current director is Géry Moutier. He directs the conservatory with a deputy director. He is also assisted with a director of musical studies, a director of choreographic studies and a board of educational guidance. The teaching staff consists of 180 teachers, assistants and attendants. The administrative and technical team comprises 65 people. Enrollments are 500 musicians and 90 dancers. Foreign students account for 15% of the workforce.The average season consists of nearly 300 public events that are part of the educational project, and help showcase the talent and the work of students, faculty and guest artists. Conservatory partnerships provide opportunities to expose students to the workplace.The CNSMD Lyon is part of a network of fifty higher education institutions through the Erasmus exchange and also increases the projects with institutions outside Europe (in: Montreal, Bogota, Beirut). It has, for its projects and those of students, patronage of the SACEM, the Adams SPEDIDAM Patronage and Musical Société Générale, and for his actions at the international support of the Convention Cultures France, Region and DRAC Rhône-Alpes.The Conservatory offers an education for future professionals, selected by competitive audition. The studies are organized in two distinct cycles approved by the Bologna scheme. The first cycle (3 years) is sanctioned by the National Diploma graduate professional musician / dancer (and DNSPM DNSMD), and the second (2 years) to a degree equal to the rank of master.The faculty are grouped into ten departments:The annual budget of the institution is €11,048,054 and a grant from the direction of music, dance, theater and amounts to €9,632,911.The current facility CNSMD Lyon is located north of the district Old Lyon, quai Chauveau, in the 9th arrondissement of Lyon. These historic buildings originally sheltered a religious community, the Convent of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth (seventeenth century), and after the Revolution, they became the speaker of the Veterinary School Lyon. The current layout of the premise is due to the architect Chabrol (mid-nineteenth century). Finally, in 1980, it was updated and expanded to accommodate the CNSMD Lyon.History of public institutions of the Ministry of Culture] (PDF) | [
"Michel Cusin",
"Francis Jeanson",
"Anne Poursin",
"Pierre Doueil",
"Carine Soulay",
"Roland Tissot"
] |
|
Which employer did Mohammad H Ansari work for in Feb, 2011? | February 18, 2011 | {
"text": [
"University of Waterloo"
]
} | L2_Q19662464_P108_2 | Mohammad H Ansari works for Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from Jan, 2004 to Sep, 2008.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Delft University of Technology from Nov, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for University of Waterloo from Sep, 2010 to Aug, 2013.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Research Centre Jülich from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for BlackBerry from Aug, 2008 to Aug, 2010. | Mohammad H. AnsariMohammad H. Ansari is a theoretical physicist expert in quantum physics. In 2006 he proposed that quantum gravitational effects can be seen on top of Hawking radiation of black hole. He is the first winner of John Brodie prize from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.In 2015 Ansari and Nazarov proposed a quantum version of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in quantum heat engines that is an exact correspondence between Rényi entropy and Full Counting Statistics (FCS) of energy transfers.Ansari has recently reported a novel symmetry in quantum computation that helps to liberate quantum bits from a fundamental parasitic interactions. In 2020 experimentalists from IBM Watson Research Center have verified the symmetry and eliminated the redundant interactions between qubits. | [
"Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics",
"Delft University of Technology",
"BlackBerry",
"Research Centre Jülich"
] |
|
Which employer did Mohammad H Ansari work for in 2011-02-18? | February 18, 2011 | {
"text": [
"University of Waterloo"
]
} | L2_Q19662464_P108_2 | Mohammad H Ansari works for Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from Jan, 2004 to Sep, 2008.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Delft University of Technology from Nov, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for University of Waterloo from Sep, 2010 to Aug, 2013.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Research Centre Jülich from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for BlackBerry from Aug, 2008 to Aug, 2010. | Mohammad H. AnsariMohammad H. Ansari is a theoretical physicist expert in quantum physics. In 2006 he proposed that quantum gravitational effects can be seen on top of Hawking radiation of black hole. He is the first winner of John Brodie prize from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.In 2015 Ansari and Nazarov proposed a quantum version of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in quantum heat engines that is an exact correspondence between Rényi entropy and Full Counting Statistics (FCS) of energy transfers.Ansari has recently reported a novel symmetry in quantum computation that helps to liberate quantum bits from a fundamental parasitic interactions. In 2020 experimentalists from IBM Watson Research Center have verified the symmetry and eliminated the redundant interactions between qubits. | [
"Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics",
"Delft University of Technology",
"BlackBerry",
"Research Centre Jülich"
] |
|
Which employer did Mohammad H Ansari work for in 18/02/2011? | February 18, 2011 | {
"text": [
"University of Waterloo"
]
} | L2_Q19662464_P108_2 | Mohammad H Ansari works for Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from Jan, 2004 to Sep, 2008.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Delft University of Technology from Nov, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for University of Waterloo from Sep, 2010 to Aug, 2013.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Research Centre Jülich from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for BlackBerry from Aug, 2008 to Aug, 2010. | Mohammad H. AnsariMohammad H. Ansari is a theoretical physicist expert in quantum physics. In 2006 he proposed that quantum gravitational effects can be seen on top of Hawking radiation of black hole. He is the first winner of John Brodie prize from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.In 2015 Ansari and Nazarov proposed a quantum version of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in quantum heat engines that is an exact correspondence between Rényi entropy and Full Counting Statistics (FCS) of energy transfers.Ansari has recently reported a novel symmetry in quantum computation that helps to liberate quantum bits from a fundamental parasitic interactions. In 2020 experimentalists from IBM Watson Research Center have verified the symmetry and eliminated the redundant interactions between qubits. | [
"Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics",
"Delft University of Technology",
"BlackBerry",
"Research Centre Jülich"
] |
|
Which employer did Mohammad H Ansari work for in Feb 18, 2011? | February 18, 2011 | {
"text": [
"University of Waterloo"
]
} | L2_Q19662464_P108_2 | Mohammad H Ansari works for Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from Jan, 2004 to Sep, 2008.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Delft University of Technology from Nov, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for University of Waterloo from Sep, 2010 to Aug, 2013.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Research Centre Jülich from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for BlackBerry from Aug, 2008 to Aug, 2010. | Mohammad H. AnsariMohammad H. Ansari is a theoretical physicist expert in quantum physics. In 2006 he proposed that quantum gravitational effects can be seen on top of Hawking radiation of black hole. He is the first winner of John Brodie prize from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.In 2015 Ansari and Nazarov proposed a quantum version of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in quantum heat engines that is an exact correspondence between Rényi entropy and Full Counting Statistics (FCS) of energy transfers.Ansari has recently reported a novel symmetry in quantum computation that helps to liberate quantum bits from a fundamental parasitic interactions. In 2020 experimentalists from IBM Watson Research Center have verified the symmetry and eliminated the redundant interactions between qubits. | [
"Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics",
"Delft University of Technology",
"BlackBerry",
"Research Centre Jülich"
] |
|
Which employer did Mohammad H Ansari work for in 02/18/2011? | February 18, 2011 | {
"text": [
"University of Waterloo"
]
} | L2_Q19662464_P108_2 | Mohammad H Ansari works for Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from Jan, 2004 to Sep, 2008.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Delft University of Technology from Nov, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for University of Waterloo from Sep, 2010 to Aug, 2013.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Research Centre Jülich from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for BlackBerry from Aug, 2008 to Aug, 2010. | Mohammad H. AnsariMohammad H. Ansari is a theoretical physicist expert in quantum physics. In 2006 he proposed that quantum gravitational effects can be seen on top of Hawking radiation of black hole. He is the first winner of John Brodie prize from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.In 2015 Ansari and Nazarov proposed a quantum version of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in quantum heat engines that is an exact correspondence between Rényi entropy and Full Counting Statistics (FCS) of energy transfers.Ansari has recently reported a novel symmetry in quantum computation that helps to liberate quantum bits from a fundamental parasitic interactions. In 2020 experimentalists from IBM Watson Research Center have verified the symmetry and eliminated the redundant interactions between qubits. | [
"Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics",
"Delft University of Technology",
"BlackBerry",
"Research Centre Jülich"
] |
|
Which employer did Mohammad H Ansari work for in 18-Feb-201118-February-2011? | February 18, 2011 | {
"text": [
"University of Waterloo"
]
} | L2_Q19662464_P108_2 | Mohammad H Ansari works for Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics from Jan, 2004 to Sep, 2008.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Delft University of Technology from Nov, 2013 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for University of Waterloo from Sep, 2010 to Aug, 2013.
Mohammad H Ansari works for Research Centre Jülich from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Mohammad H Ansari works for BlackBerry from Aug, 2008 to Aug, 2010. | Mohammad H. AnsariMohammad H. Ansari is a theoretical physicist expert in quantum physics. In 2006 he proposed that quantum gravitational effects can be seen on top of Hawking radiation of black hole. He is the first winner of John Brodie prize from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.In 2015 Ansari and Nazarov proposed a quantum version of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in quantum heat engines that is an exact correspondence between Rényi entropy and Full Counting Statistics (FCS) of energy transfers.Ansari has recently reported a novel symmetry in quantum computation that helps to liberate quantum bits from a fundamental parasitic interactions. In 2020 experimentalists from IBM Watson Research Center have verified the symmetry and eliminated the redundant interactions between qubits. | [
"Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics",
"Delft University of Technology",
"BlackBerry",
"Research Centre Jülich"
] |
|
Which team did Ivelin Yanev play for in May, 2011? | May 28, 2011 | {
"text": [
"PFC Cherno More Varna"
]
} | L2_Q6098666_P54_5 | Ivelin Yanev plays for OFC Sliven 2000 from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Cherno More Varna from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2012.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Chernomorets Balchik from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PSFC Chernomorets Burgas from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2007.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Karnobat from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Naftex Burgas from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006.
Ivelin Yanev plays for Neftochimic Burgas 1986 from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2011.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2013. | Ivelin YanevIvelin Yanev (; born 23 November 1981) is a Bulgarian footballer who plays as a defender for FC Karnobat. | [
"PFC Naftex Burgas",
"FC Karnobat",
"OFC Sliven 2000",
"FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo",
"PSFC Chernomorets Burgas",
"PFC Chernomorets Balchik",
"Neftochimic Burgas 1986",
"FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia"
] |
|
Which team did Ivelin Yanev play for in 2011-05-28? | May 28, 2011 | {
"text": [
"PFC Cherno More Varna"
]
} | L2_Q6098666_P54_5 | Ivelin Yanev plays for OFC Sliven 2000 from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Cherno More Varna from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2012.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Chernomorets Balchik from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PSFC Chernomorets Burgas from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2007.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Karnobat from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Naftex Burgas from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006.
Ivelin Yanev plays for Neftochimic Burgas 1986 from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2011.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2013. | Ivelin YanevIvelin Yanev (; born 23 November 1981) is a Bulgarian footballer who plays as a defender for FC Karnobat. | [
"PFC Naftex Burgas",
"FC Karnobat",
"OFC Sliven 2000",
"FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo",
"PSFC Chernomorets Burgas",
"PFC Chernomorets Balchik",
"Neftochimic Burgas 1986",
"FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia"
] |
|
Which team did Ivelin Yanev play for in 28/05/2011? | May 28, 2011 | {
"text": [
"PFC Cherno More Varna"
]
} | L2_Q6098666_P54_5 | Ivelin Yanev plays for OFC Sliven 2000 from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Cherno More Varna from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2012.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Chernomorets Balchik from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PSFC Chernomorets Burgas from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2007.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Karnobat from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Naftex Burgas from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006.
Ivelin Yanev plays for Neftochimic Burgas 1986 from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2011.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2013. | Ivelin YanevIvelin Yanev (; born 23 November 1981) is a Bulgarian footballer who plays as a defender for FC Karnobat. | [
"PFC Naftex Burgas",
"FC Karnobat",
"OFC Sliven 2000",
"FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo",
"PSFC Chernomorets Burgas",
"PFC Chernomorets Balchik",
"Neftochimic Burgas 1986",
"FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia"
] |
|
Which team did Ivelin Yanev play for in May 28, 2011? | May 28, 2011 | {
"text": [
"PFC Cherno More Varna"
]
} | L2_Q6098666_P54_5 | Ivelin Yanev plays for OFC Sliven 2000 from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Cherno More Varna from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2012.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Chernomorets Balchik from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PSFC Chernomorets Burgas from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2007.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Karnobat from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Naftex Burgas from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006.
Ivelin Yanev plays for Neftochimic Burgas 1986 from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2011.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2013. | Ivelin YanevIvelin Yanev (; born 23 November 1981) is a Bulgarian footballer who plays as a defender for FC Karnobat. | [
"PFC Naftex Burgas",
"FC Karnobat",
"OFC Sliven 2000",
"FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo",
"PSFC Chernomorets Burgas",
"PFC Chernomorets Balchik",
"Neftochimic Burgas 1986",
"FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia"
] |
|
Which team did Ivelin Yanev play for in 05/28/2011? | May 28, 2011 | {
"text": [
"PFC Cherno More Varna"
]
} | L2_Q6098666_P54_5 | Ivelin Yanev plays for OFC Sliven 2000 from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Cherno More Varna from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2012.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Chernomorets Balchik from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PSFC Chernomorets Burgas from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2007.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Karnobat from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Naftex Burgas from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006.
Ivelin Yanev plays for Neftochimic Burgas 1986 from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2011.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2013. | Ivelin YanevIvelin Yanev (; born 23 November 1981) is a Bulgarian footballer who plays as a defender for FC Karnobat. | [
"PFC Naftex Burgas",
"FC Karnobat",
"OFC Sliven 2000",
"FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo",
"PSFC Chernomorets Burgas",
"PFC Chernomorets Balchik",
"Neftochimic Burgas 1986",
"FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia"
] |
|
Which team did Ivelin Yanev play for in 28-May-201128-May-2011? | May 28, 2011 | {
"text": [
"PFC Cherno More Varna"
]
} | L2_Q6098666_P54_5 | Ivelin Yanev plays for OFC Sliven 2000 from Jan, 2007 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Cherno More Varna from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2012.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Chernomorets Balchik from Jan, 2010 to Jan, 2010.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PSFC Chernomorets Burgas from Jan, 2006 to Jan, 2007.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Karnobat from Jan, 2014 to Dec, 2022.
Ivelin Yanev plays for PFC Naftex Burgas from Jan, 2002 to Jan, 2006.
Ivelin Yanev plays for Neftochimic Burgas 1986 from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo from Jan, 2011 to Jan, 2011.
Ivelin Yanev plays for FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2013. | Ivelin YanevIvelin Yanev (; born 23 November 1981) is a Bulgarian footballer who plays as a defender for FC Karnobat. | [
"PFC Naftex Burgas",
"FC Karnobat",
"OFC Sliven 2000",
"FC Etar 1924 Veliko Tarnovo",
"PSFC Chernomorets Burgas",
"PFC Chernomorets Balchik",
"Neftochimic Burgas 1986",
"FC Lokomotiv 1929 Sofia"
] |
|
Who was the head coach of the team TSG 1899 Hoffenheim in Jan, 2021? | January 05, 2021 | {
"text": [
"Sebastian Hoeneß"
]
} | L2_Q22707_P286_3 | Sebastian Hoeneß is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2020 to Jun, 2022.
Alfred Schreuder is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2019 to Jun, 2020.
Matthias Kaltenbach is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jun, 2020 to Jul, 2020.
Julian Nagelsmann is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Feb, 2016 to Jun, 2019.
André Breitenreiter is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2022 to Dec, 2022. | TSG 1899 HoffenheimTurn- und Sportgemeinschaft 1899 Hoffenheim e.V., or simply TSG 1899 Hoffenheim or just Hoffenheim () is a German professional football club based in Hoffenheim, a village of Sinsheim municipality, Baden-Württemberg.Originally founded in 1899 as a gymnastics club, Hoffenheim came into being in its modern form in 1945. A fifth division side in 2000, the club rapidly advanced through the German football league system with the financial backing of alumnus and software mogul Dietmar Hopp, and in 2008 Hoffenheim was promoted to the top tier Bundesliga. In the 2017–18 season, Hoffenheim finished third in the Bundesliga (its best to date), qualifying for the UEFA Champions League group stage for the first time.Since 2009, Hoffenheim has played its home games at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena (currently known as PreZero Arena), having previously played at the Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion from 1999.The modern-day club was formed in 1945, when gymnastics club Turnverein Hoffenheim (founded 1 July 1899) and football club Fußballverein Hoffenheim (founded 1921) merged. At the beginning of the 1990s, the club was an obscure local amateur side playing in the eighth division Baden-Württemberg A-Liga. They steadily improved and by 1996 were competing in the Verbandsliga Nordbaden (V).Around 2000, alumnus Dietmar Hopp returned to the club of his youth as a financial backer. Hopp was the co-founder of software firm SAP and he put some of his money into the club. His contributions generated almost immediate results: in 2000 Hoffenheim finished first in the Verbandsliga and was promoted to the fourth-division Oberliga Baden-Württemberg. Another first-place finish moved the club up to the Regionalliga Süd (III) for the 2001–02 season. They finished 13th in their first season in the Regionalliga, but improved significantly the next year, earning a fifth-place result.Hoffenheim earned fifth and seventh-place finishes in the next two seasons, before improving to fourth in 2005–06 to earn their best result to date. The club made its first DFB-Pokal appearance in the 2003–04 competition and performed well, advancing to the quarter-finals by eliminating 2. Bundesliga sides Eintracht Trier and Karlsruher SC and Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen before being put out themselves by another 2. Bundesliga side, VfB Lübeck.Negotiations to merge TSG Hoffenheim, Astoria Walldorf, and SV Sandhausen to create "FC Heidelberg 06" in 2005 were abandoned due to the resistance of the latter two clubs, and the failure to agree on whether the new side's stadium should be located in Heidelberg or Eppelheim. Team owner Hopp clearly preferred Heidelberg, but could not overcome the resistance of local firm Wild, which had already reserved the site of the planned stadium for its new production facilities.In 2006, the club sought to improve its squad and technical staff by bringing in players with several years of Bundesliga experience, most notably Jochen Seitz and Tomislav Marić, and young talents like Sejad Salihović, while signing manager Ralf Rangnick, who managed Bundesliga teams such as SSV Ulm 1846, VfB Stuttgart, Hannover 96 and Schalke 04, to a five-year contract. The investment paid off in the 2006–07 season with the club's promotion to the 2. Bundesliga after finishing second in Regionalliga Süd.The 2007–08 season was Hoffenheim's first season in professional football. After a weak start with three losses and only one draw in the first four games, the team's performance improved remarkably and Hoffenheim climbed from 16th place on matchday four to second place on matchday 23. The team managed to defend their place until the end of the season, having scored 60 points after matchday 34. As a result of their second-place finish they received automatic promotion to the Bundesliga, the highest tier in German football, after playing in the 2. Bundesliga for just one season.Hoffenheim had a successful season in their debut in the Bundesliga, the top German division, as they went on to record a 7th place finish. The club's best players of the season were Vedad Ibišević and Demba Ba, who scored 18 and 14 respectively. In the 2009–10 Bundesliga, the club had a less successful season, recording a finish outside of the top 10, finishing 11th. The club eventually went on to finish in 11th place for the next two consecutive seasons. In the 2012–13 Bundesliga, the club came very close to suffering relegation, after they a 16th place finish, meaning they would have to play in the relegation play-offs to survive; the club went on to beat their opponents Kaiserslautern by a scoreline of 5–2 on aggregate, with Roberto Firmino scoring two goals in the first match. In the 2013–14 Bundesliga, the club had strange statistics; being the third best goalscoring team in the league, but also the worst defensive team, scoring 72 goals and conceding 70. The club's best goalscorer of the season, also their best assist provider, was Roberto Firmino, scoring 16 goals and providing 12 assists, with the player winning the Bundesliga Breakthrough Player of the Season award. In the 2014–15 Bundesliga, the club came very close to qualifying for the Europa League, with just two points separating them from Borussia Dortmund, who were in 7th place. Despite the 8th place finish, Hoffenheim still had a goal difference of −6 in the 2014–15 season. In the 2015–16 Bundesliga, the club once again came close to suffering relegation, with just one point separating them from the relegation play-offs.In the 2016–17 season, new coach Julian Nagelsmann took over, beginning to recruit several very significant players, including Andrej Kramarić, Kerem Demirbay and Sandro Wagner. Initially, the club struggled for form, with four draws in the first four games of the season, before a rise in form rose the club to third place in the league by the end of October. On 4 April 2017, the club beat Bayern Munich by a scoreline of 1–0, one of the most important wins in the club's history. On 21 April 2017, the club confirmed that they would play European football next season following a 1–1 draw with Köln. Following a 4th place finish in the 2016–17 Bundesliga, Hoffenheim confirmed Champions League football for the 2017–18 season. The club were eventually drawn to play six-time European champions Liverpool in the play-off round. The club lost the first leg tie by a scoreline of 1–2, before a 4–2 loss in the second leg confirmed Hoffenheim's elimination from the tournament, as the club lost 3–6 on aggregate. Due to their elimination from the play-off stages, the club would continue playing European football in the Europa League group stages, however, the club would suffer elimination from the tournament as they would finish bottom of their group.In the 2017–18 Bundesliga season, Hoffenheim had a successful season, finishing third, automatically qualifying for next year's UEFA Champions League.The 2018–19 season was more disappointing for Hoffenheim, as they finished bottom of their Champions League group with only 3 draws and 3 losses whilst playing against the likes of Manchester City, Lyon and Shakhtar Donetsk. This meant that they did not make it out of the group stages of a European competition again. In the Bundesliga Hoffenheim didn't fare much better, finishing a disappointing 9th place, 6 below their ranking of 3rd during the 2017–18 campaign with 51 points. This was just two places and 3 points away from the Europa League qualifying rounds. In the DFB-Pokal Hoffenheim were eliminated by RB Leipzig in a 2–0 loss with both goals from Timo Werner. The season's top scorer was Andre Kramarić, with the Croatian finding the goal 22 times in 37 appearances. The German Kerem Demirbay was the clubs top playmaker with 11 assists during the 2018–19 season. Head coach Julian Nagelsmann left the club to join RB Leipzig at the end of the season. Alfred Schreuder, former assistant coach under Huub Stevens and Julian Nagelsmann was appointed as the new head coach. Before being promoted to the 1. Bundesliga in 2008, the club played in Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion which was built in 1999 with a capacity of 5,000 (1,620 seats)."TSG 1899 Hoffenheim" made their loftier ambitions clear in 2006 when the club's management decided to build the new 30,150 seat Rhein-Neckar-Arena suitable for hosting Bundesliga matches. The stadium was originally to be built in Heidelberg before the selection of a site in Sinsheim.They opened their first season in the 1. Bundesliga at the 26,022 capacity Carl-Benz-Stadion in Mannheim and played their first match in their new stadium on 31 January 2009.Interwetten betting company has agreed to be the stadium's betting partner for TSG Hoffenheim from August 2017, to 2020.Dietmar Hopp's financial support, which transformed Hoffenheim from a local amateur club into a competitive Bundesliga club, has been strongly criticized by other clubs, fans and some in the German press. The main points of criticism are the club's lack of "tradition" and a proper fan base as the club is a historically insignificant side from a village of just 3,300 inhabitants. This situation is similar to that of now-defunct Scottish side Gretna and German clubs VfL Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen and RB Leipzig, as those teams also received large financial support by companies; Wolfsburg is wholly owned and supported by automobile manufacturer Volkswagen, Bayer Leverkusen by pharmaceutical company Bayer and RB Leipzig by Red Bull. Despite this, Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are nonetheless different from Hoffenheim because of their long history as football clubs founded by the factory workers themselves, and have been successful chiefly through their own merits rather than outside funding.On 16 August 2011, the club released a statement regarding complaints of a loudspeaker that was strategically placed under away fans during a home game against Borussia Dortmund. The loudspeaker was designed to drown out the noise of the away fans cheers and chants during the game. It was reported that the speaker was placed by the groundskeeper, although the club denied any involvement, saying he acted alone. It was also reported that the loudspeaker was used during other games, not just the home game against Dortmund.In a later statement, the club admitted that the disruptive sound assembly has been used at least five times, although club officials claim to have no knowledge of these measures.On 29 February 2020, Bayern Munich supporters unfurled an offensive banner aimed at Hoffenheim owner Dietmar Hopp, resulting the game at Hoffenheim to be suspended with less than 15 minutes remaining. After concerns that the game could be abandoned, both teams returned to finish the match, but had decided to just run down the clock to end the game in solidarity with Hopp. Rather than play on, the two sets of players began passing the ball to each other and chatting as if they were teammates.The very next day, the Bundesliga match between Vfl Wolfsburg and 1. FC Union Berlin was stopped at the 44th minute of play due to derogatory banners being unfurled, one of which showed Hopp under crosshairs. The two teams left the field to return 10 minutes later and play out the remainder of the half and subsequently the game.On 25 September 2020, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim signed a partnership agreement with MLS club FC Cincinnati.The club's honours:Recent coaches of the club:The recent season-by-season performance of the club:Hoffenheim made their debut in European competition in 2017, qualifying for the play-off round of the 2017–18 UEFA Champions League play-offs. Their first match was on 15 August 2017, losing the first leg of the play-offs 2–1 to Liverpool.The women's team started playing in 2006–07 and rushed through the lower leagues. The women's team plays at Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion and is currently coached by Jürgen Ehrmann. | [
"Julian Nagelsmann",
"Matthias Kaltenbach",
"Alfred Schreuder",
"André Breitenreiter"
] |
|
Who was the head coach of the team 2021-01-05 Hoffenheim in Jan, 2021? | January 05, 2021 | {
"text": [
"Sebastian Hoeneß"
]
} | L2_Q22707_P286_3 | Sebastian Hoeneß is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2020 to Jun, 2022.
Alfred Schreuder is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2019 to Jun, 2020.
Matthias Kaltenbach is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jun, 2020 to Jul, 2020.
Julian Nagelsmann is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Feb, 2016 to Jun, 2019.
André Breitenreiter is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2022 to Dec, 2022. | TSG 1899 HoffenheimTurn- und Sportgemeinschaft 1899 Hoffenheim e.V., or simply TSG 1899 Hoffenheim or just Hoffenheim () is a German professional football club based in Hoffenheim, a village of Sinsheim municipality, Baden-Württemberg.Originally founded in 1899 as a gymnastics club, Hoffenheim came into being in its modern form in 1945. A fifth division side in 2000, the club rapidly advanced through the German football league system with the financial backing of alumnus and software mogul Dietmar Hopp, and in 2008 Hoffenheim was promoted to the top tier Bundesliga. In the 2017–18 season, Hoffenheim finished third in the Bundesliga (its best to date), qualifying for the UEFA Champions League group stage for the first time.Since 2009, Hoffenheim has played its home games at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena (currently known as PreZero Arena), having previously played at the Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion from 1999.The modern-day club was formed in 1945, when gymnastics club Turnverein Hoffenheim (founded 1 July 1899) and football club Fußballverein Hoffenheim (founded 1921) merged. At the beginning of the 1990s, the club was an obscure local amateur side playing in the eighth division Baden-Württemberg A-Liga. They steadily improved and by 1996 were competing in the Verbandsliga Nordbaden (V).Around 2000, alumnus Dietmar Hopp returned to the club of his youth as a financial backer. Hopp was the co-founder of software firm SAP and he put some of his money into the club. His contributions generated almost immediate results: in 2000 Hoffenheim finished first in the Verbandsliga and was promoted to the fourth-division Oberliga Baden-Württemberg. Another first-place finish moved the club up to the Regionalliga Süd (III) for the 2001–02 season. They finished 13th in their first season in the Regionalliga, but improved significantly the next year, earning a fifth-place result.Hoffenheim earned fifth and seventh-place finishes in the next two seasons, before improving to fourth in 2005–06 to earn their best result to date. The club made its first DFB-Pokal appearance in the 2003–04 competition and performed well, advancing to the quarter-finals by eliminating 2. Bundesliga sides Eintracht Trier and Karlsruher SC and Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen before being put out themselves by another 2. Bundesliga side, VfB Lübeck.Negotiations to merge TSG Hoffenheim, Astoria Walldorf, and SV Sandhausen to create "FC Heidelberg 06" in 2005 were abandoned due to the resistance of the latter two clubs, and the failure to agree on whether the new side's stadium should be located in Heidelberg or Eppelheim. Team owner Hopp clearly preferred Heidelberg, but could not overcome the resistance of local firm Wild, which had already reserved the site of the planned stadium for its new production facilities.In 2006, the club sought to improve its squad and technical staff by bringing in players with several years of Bundesliga experience, most notably Jochen Seitz and Tomislav Marić, and young talents like Sejad Salihović, while signing manager Ralf Rangnick, who managed Bundesliga teams such as SSV Ulm 1846, VfB Stuttgart, Hannover 96 and Schalke 04, to a five-year contract. The investment paid off in the 2006–07 season with the club's promotion to the 2. Bundesliga after finishing second in Regionalliga Süd.The 2007–08 season was Hoffenheim's first season in professional football. After a weak start with three losses and only one draw in the first four games, the team's performance improved remarkably and Hoffenheim climbed from 16th place on matchday four to second place on matchday 23. The team managed to defend their place until the end of the season, having scored 60 points after matchday 34. As a result of their second-place finish they received automatic promotion to the Bundesliga, the highest tier in German football, after playing in the 2. Bundesliga for just one season.Hoffenheim had a successful season in their debut in the Bundesliga, the top German division, as they went on to record a 7th place finish. The club's best players of the season were Vedad Ibišević and Demba Ba, who scored 18 and 14 respectively. In the 2009–10 Bundesliga, the club had a less successful season, recording a finish outside of the top 10, finishing 11th. The club eventually went on to finish in 11th place for the next two consecutive seasons. In the 2012–13 Bundesliga, the club came very close to suffering relegation, after they a 16th place finish, meaning they would have to play in the relegation play-offs to survive; the club went on to beat their opponents Kaiserslautern by a scoreline of 5–2 on aggregate, with Roberto Firmino scoring two goals in the first match. In the 2013–14 Bundesliga, the club had strange statistics; being the third best goalscoring team in the league, but also the worst defensive team, scoring 72 goals and conceding 70. The club's best goalscorer of the season, also their best assist provider, was Roberto Firmino, scoring 16 goals and providing 12 assists, with the player winning the Bundesliga Breakthrough Player of the Season award. In the 2014–15 Bundesliga, the club came very close to qualifying for the Europa League, with just two points separating them from Borussia Dortmund, who were in 7th place. Despite the 8th place finish, Hoffenheim still had a goal difference of −6 in the 2014–15 season. In the 2015–16 Bundesliga, the club once again came close to suffering relegation, with just one point separating them from the relegation play-offs.In the 2016–17 season, new coach Julian Nagelsmann took over, beginning to recruit several very significant players, including Andrej Kramarić, Kerem Demirbay and Sandro Wagner. Initially, the club struggled for form, with four draws in the first four games of the season, before a rise in form rose the club to third place in the league by the end of October. On 4 April 2017, the club beat Bayern Munich by a scoreline of 1–0, one of the most important wins in the club's history. On 21 April 2017, the club confirmed that they would play European football next season following a 1–1 draw with Köln. Following a 4th place finish in the 2016–17 Bundesliga, Hoffenheim confirmed Champions League football for the 2017–18 season. The club were eventually drawn to play six-time European champions Liverpool in the play-off round. The club lost the first leg tie by a scoreline of 1–2, before a 4–2 loss in the second leg confirmed Hoffenheim's elimination from the tournament, as the club lost 3–6 on aggregate. Due to their elimination from the play-off stages, the club would continue playing European football in the Europa League group stages, however, the club would suffer elimination from the tournament as they would finish bottom of their group.In the 2017–18 Bundesliga season, Hoffenheim had a successful season, finishing third, automatically qualifying for next year's UEFA Champions League.The 2018–19 season was more disappointing for Hoffenheim, as they finished bottom of their Champions League group with only 3 draws and 3 losses whilst playing against the likes of Manchester City, Lyon and Shakhtar Donetsk. This meant that they did not make it out of the group stages of a European competition again. In the Bundesliga Hoffenheim didn't fare much better, finishing a disappointing 9th place, 6 below their ranking of 3rd during the 2017–18 campaign with 51 points. This was just two places and 3 points away from the Europa League qualifying rounds. In the DFB-Pokal Hoffenheim were eliminated by RB Leipzig in a 2–0 loss with both goals from Timo Werner. The season's top scorer was Andre Kramarić, with the Croatian finding the goal 22 times in 37 appearances. The German Kerem Demirbay was the clubs top playmaker with 11 assists during the 2018–19 season. Head coach Julian Nagelsmann left the club to join RB Leipzig at the end of the season. Alfred Schreuder, former assistant coach under Huub Stevens and Julian Nagelsmann was appointed as the new head coach. Before being promoted to the 1. Bundesliga in 2008, the club played in Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion which was built in 1999 with a capacity of 5,000 (1,620 seats)."TSG 1899 Hoffenheim" made their loftier ambitions clear in 2006 when the club's management decided to build the new 30,150 seat Rhein-Neckar-Arena suitable for hosting Bundesliga matches. The stadium was originally to be built in Heidelberg before the selection of a site in Sinsheim.They opened their first season in the 1. Bundesliga at the 26,022 capacity Carl-Benz-Stadion in Mannheim and played their first match in their new stadium on 31 January 2009.Interwetten betting company has agreed to be the stadium's betting partner for TSG Hoffenheim from August 2017, to 2020.Dietmar Hopp's financial support, which transformed Hoffenheim from a local amateur club into a competitive Bundesliga club, has been strongly criticized by other clubs, fans and some in the German press. The main points of criticism are the club's lack of "tradition" and a proper fan base as the club is a historically insignificant side from a village of just 3,300 inhabitants. This situation is similar to that of now-defunct Scottish side Gretna and German clubs VfL Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen and RB Leipzig, as those teams also received large financial support by companies; Wolfsburg is wholly owned and supported by automobile manufacturer Volkswagen, Bayer Leverkusen by pharmaceutical company Bayer and RB Leipzig by Red Bull. Despite this, Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are nonetheless different from Hoffenheim because of their long history as football clubs founded by the factory workers themselves, and have been successful chiefly through their own merits rather than outside funding.On 16 August 2011, the club released a statement regarding complaints of a loudspeaker that was strategically placed under away fans during a home game against Borussia Dortmund. The loudspeaker was designed to drown out the noise of the away fans cheers and chants during the game. It was reported that the speaker was placed by the groundskeeper, although the club denied any involvement, saying he acted alone. It was also reported that the loudspeaker was used during other games, not just the home game against Dortmund.In a later statement, the club admitted that the disruptive sound assembly has been used at least five times, although club officials claim to have no knowledge of these measures.On 29 February 2020, Bayern Munich supporters unfurled an offensive banner aimed at Hoffenheim owner Dietmar Hopp, resulting the game at Hoffenheim to be suspended with less than 15 minutes remaining. After concerns that the game could be abandoned, both teams returned to finish the match, but had decided to just run down the clock to end the game in solidarity with Hopp. Rather than play on, the two sets of players began passing the ball to each other and chatting as if they were teammates.The very next day, the Bundesliga match between Vfl Wolfsburg and 1. FC Union Berlin was stopped at the 44th minute of play due to derogatory banners being unfurled, one of which showed Hopp under crosshairs. The two teams left the field to return 10 minutes later and play out the remainder of the half and subsequently the game.On 25 September 2020, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim signed a partnership agreement with MLS club FC Cincinnati.The club's honours:Recent coaches of the club:The recent season-by-season performance of the club:Hoffenheim made their debut in European competition in 2017, qualifying for the play-off round of the 2017–18 UEFA Champions League play-offs. Their first match was on 15 August 2017, losing the first leg of the play-offs 2–1 to Liverpool.The women's team started playing in 2006–07 and rushed through the lower leagues. The women's team plays at Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion and is currently coached by Jürgen Ehrmann. | [
"Julian Nagelsmann",
"Matthias Kaltenbach",
"Alfred Schreuder",
"André Breitenreiter"
] |
|
Who was the head coach of the team 05/01/2021 Hoffenheim in Jan, 2021? | January 05, 2021 | {
"text": [
"Sebastian Hoeneß"
]
} | L2_Q22707_P286_3 | Sebastian Hoeneß is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2020 to Jun, 2022.
Alfred Schreuder is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2019 to Jun, 2020.
Matthias Kaltenbach is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jun, 2020 to Jul, 2020.
Julian Nagelsmann is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Feb, 2016 to Jun, 2019.
André Breitenreiter is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2022 to Dec, 2022. | TSG 1899 HoffenheimTurn- und Sportgemeinschaft 1899 Hoffenheim e.V., or simply TSG 1899 Hoffenheim or just Hoffenheim () is a German professional football club based in Hoffenheim, a village of Sinsheim municipality, Baden-Württemberg.Originally founded in 1899 as a gymnastics club, Hoffenheim came into being in its modern form in 1945. A fifth division side in 2000, the club rapidly advanced through the German football league system with the financial backing of alumnus and software mogul Dietmar Hopp, and in 2008 Hoffenheim was promoted to the top tier Bundesliga. In the 2017–18 season, Hoffenheim finished third in the Bundesliga (its best to date), qualifying for the UEFA Champions League group stage for the first time.Since 2009, Hoffenheim has played its home games at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena (currently known as PreZero Arena), having previously played at the Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion from 1999.The modern-day club was formed in 1945, when gymnastics club Turnverein Hoffenheim (founded 1 July 1899) and football club Fußballverein Hoffenheim (founded 1921) merged. At the beginning of the 1990s, the club was an obscure local amateur side playing in the eighth division Baden-Württemberg A-Liga. They steadily improved and by 1996 were competing in the Verbandsliga Nordbaden (V).Around 2000, alumnus Dietmar Hopp returned to the club of his youth as a financial backer. Hopp was the co-founder of software firm SAP and he put some of his money into the club. His contributions generated almost immediate results: in 2000 Hoffenheim finished first in the Verbandsliga and was promoted to the fourth-division Oberliga Baden-Württemberg. Another first-place finish moved the club up to the Regionalliga Süd (III) for the 2001–02 season. They finished 13th in their first season in the Regionalliga, but improved significantly the next year, earning a fifth-place result.Hoffenheim earned fifth and seventh-place finishes in the next two seasons, before improving to fourth in 2005–06 to earn their best result to date. The club made its first DFB-Pokal appearance in the 2003–04 competition and performed well, advancing to the quarter-finals by eliminating 2. Bundesliga sides Eintracht Trier and Karlsruher SC and Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen before being put out themselves by another 2. Bundesliga side, VfB Lübeck.Negotiations to merge TSG Hoffenheim, Astoria Walldorf, and SV Sandhausen to create "FC Heidelberg 06" in 2005 were abandoned due to the resistance of the latter two clubs, and the failure to agree on whether the new side's stadium should be located in Heidelberg or Eppelheim. Team owner Hopp clearly preferred Heidelberg, but could not overcome the resistance of local firm Wild, which had already reserved the site of the planned stadium for its new production facilities.In 2006, the club sought to improve its squad and technical staff by bringing in players with several years of Bundesliga experience, most notably Jochen Seitz and Tomislav Marić, and young talents like Sejad Salihović, while signing manager Ralf Rangnick, who managed Bundesliga teams such as SSV Ulm 1846, VfB Stuttgart, Hannover 96 and Schalke 04, to a five-year contract. The investment paid off in the 2006–07 season with the club's promotion to the 2. Bundesliga after finishing second in Regionalliga Süd.The 2007–08 season was Hoffenheim's first season in professional football. After a weak start with three losses and only one draw in the first four games, the team's performance improved remarkably and Hoffenheim climbed from 16th place on matchday four to second place on matchday 23. The team managed to defend their place until the end of the season, having scored 60 points after matchday 34. As a result of their second-place finish they received automatic promotion to the Bundesliga, the highest tier in German football, after playing in the 2. Bundesliga for just one season.Hoffenheim had a successful season in their debut in the Bundesliga, the top German division, as they went on to record a 7th place finish. The club's best players of the season were Vedad Ibišević and Demba Ba, who scored 18 and 14 respectively. In the 2009–10 Bundesliga, the club had a less successful season, recording a finish outside of the top 10, finishing 11th. The club eventually went on to finish in 11th place for the next two consecutive seasons. In the 2012–13 Bundesliga, the club came very close to suffering relegation, after they a 16th place finish, meaning they would have to play in the relegation play-offs to survive; the club went on to beat their opponents Kaiserslautern by a scoreline of 5–2 on aggregate, with Roberto Firmino scoring two goals in the first match. In the 2013–14 Bundesliga, the club had strange statistics; being the third best goalscoring team in the league, but also the worst defensive team, scoring 72 goals and conceding 70. The club's best goalscorer of the season, also their best assist provider, was Roberto Firmino, scoring 16 goals and providing 12 assists, with the player winning the Bundesliga Breakthrough Player of the Season award. In the 2014–15 Bundesliga, the club came very close to qualifying for the Europa League, with just two points separating them from Borussia Dortmund, who were in 7th place. Despite the 8th place finish, Hoffenheim still had a goal difference of −6 in the 2014–15 season. In the 2015–16 Bundesliga, the club once again came close to suffering relegation, with just one point separating them from the relegation play-offs.In the 2016–17 season, new coach Julian Nagelsmann took over, beginning to recruit several very significant players, including Andrej Kramarić, Kerem Demirbay and Sandro Wagner. Initially, the club struggled for form, with four draws in the first four games of the season, before a rise in form rose the club to third place in the league by the end of October. On 4 April 2017, the club beat Bayern Munich by a scoreline of 1–0, one of the most important wins in the club's history. On 21 April 2017, the club confirmed that they would play European football next season following a 1–1 draw with Köln. Following a 4th place finish in the 2016–17 Bundesliga, Hoffenheim confirmed Champions League football for the 2017–18 season. The club were eventually drawn to play six-time European champions Liverpool in the play-off round. The club lost the first leg tie by a scoreline of 1–2, before a 4–2 loss in the second leg confirmed Hoffenheim's elimination from the tournament, as the club lost 3–6 on aggregate. Due to their elimination from the play-off stages, the club would continue playing European football in the Europa League group stages, however, the club would suffer elimination from the tournament as they would finish bottom of their group.In the 2017–18 Bundesliga season, Hoffenheim had a successful season, finishing third, automatically qualifying for next year's UEFA Champions League.The 2018–19 season was more disappointing for Hoffenheim, as they finished bottom of their Champions League group with only 3 draws and 3 losses whilst playing against the likes of Manchester City, Lyon and Shakhtar Donetsk. This meant that they did not make it out of the group stages of a European competition again. In the Bundesliga Hoffenheim didn't fare much better, finishing a disappointing 9th place, 6 below their ranking of 3rd during the 2017–18 campaign with 51 points. This was just two places and 3 points away from the Europa League qualifying rounds. In the DFB-Pokal Hoffenheim were eliminated by RB Leipzig in a 2–0 loss with both goals from Timo Werner. The season's top scorer was Andre Kramarić, with the Croatian finding the goal 22 times in 37 appearances. The German Kerem Demirbay was the clubs top playmaker with 11 assists during the 2018–19 season. Head coach Julian Nagelsmann left the club to join RB Leipzig at the end of the season. Alfred Schreuder, former assistant coach under Huub Stevens and Julian Nagelsmann was appointed as the new head coach. Before being promoted to the 1. Bundesliga in 2008, the club played in Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion which was built in 1999 with a capacity of 5,000 (1,620 seats)."TSG 1899 Hoffenheim" made their loftier ambitions clear in 2006 when the club's management decided to build the new 30,150 seat Rhein-Neckar-Arena suitable for hosting Bundesliga matches. The stadium was originally to be built in Heidelberg before the selection of a site in Sinsheim.They opened their first season in the 1. Bundesliga at the 26,022 capacity Carl-Benz-Stadion in Mannheim and played their first match in their new stadium on 31 January 2009.Interwetten betting company has agreed to be the stadium's betting partner for TSG Hoffenheim from August 2017, to 2020.Dietmar Hopp's financial support, which transformed Hoffenheim from a local amateur club into a competitive Bundesliga club, has been strongly criticized by other clubs, fans and some in the German press. The main points of criticism are the club's lack of "tradition" and a proper fan base as the club is a historically insignificant side from a village of just 3,300 inhabitants. This situation is similar to that of now-defunct Scottish side Gretna and German clubs VfL Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen and RB Leipzig, as those teams also received large financial support by companies; Wolfsburg is wholly owned and supported by automobile manufacturer Volkswagen, Bayer Leverkusen by pharmaceutical company Bayer and RB Leipzig by Red Bull. Despite this, Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are nonetheless different from Hoffenheim because of their long history as football clubs founded by the factory workers themselves, and have been successful chiefly through their own merits rather than outside funding.On 16 August 2011, the club released a statement regarding complaints of a loudspeaker that was strategically placed under away fans during a home game against Borussia Dortmund. The loudspeaker was designed to drown out the noise of the away fans cheers and chants during the game. It was reported that the speaker was placed by the groundskeeper, although the club denied any involvement, saying he acted alone. It was also reported that the loudspeaker was used during other games, not just the home game against Dortmund.In a later statement, the club admitted that the disruptive sound assembly has been used at least five times, although club officials claim to have no knowledge of these measures.On 29 February 2020, Bayern Munich supporters unfurled an offensive banner aimed at Hoffenheim owner Dietmar Hopp, resulting the game at Hoffenheim to be suspended with less than 15 minutes remaining. After concerns that the game could be abandoned, both teams returned to finish the match, but had decided to just run down the clock to end the game in solidarity with Hopp. Rather than play on, the two sets of players began passing the ball to each other and chatting as if they were teammates.The very next day, the Bundesliga match between Vfl Wolfsburg and 1. FC Union Berlin was stopped at the 44th minute of play due to derogatory banners being unfurled, one of which showed Hopp under crosshairs. The two teams left the field to return 10 minutes later and play out the remainder of the half and subsequently the game.On 25 September 2020, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim signed a partnership agreement with MLS club FC Cincinnati.The club's honours:Recent coaches of the club:The recent season-by-season performance of the club:Hoffenheim made their debut in European competition in 2017, qualifying for the play-off round of the 2017–18 UEFA Champions League play-offs. Their first match was on 15 August 2017, losing the first leg of the play-offs 2–1 to Liverpool.The women's team started playing in 2006–07 and rushed through the lower leagues. The women's team plays at Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion and is currently coached by Jürgen Ehrmann. | [
"Julian Nagelsmann",
"Matthias Kaltenbach",
"Alfred Schreuder",
"André Breitenreiter"
] |
|
Who was the head coach of the team Jan 05, 2021 Hoffenheim in Jan, 2021? | January 05, 2021 | {
"text": [
"Sebastian Hoeneß"
]
} | L2_Q22707_P286_3 | Sebastian Hoeneß is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2020 to Jun, 2022.
Alfred Schreuder is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2019 to Jun, 2020.
Matthias Kaltenbach is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jun, 2020 to Jul, 2020.
Julian Nagelsmann is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Feb, 2016 to Jun, 2019.
André Breitenreiter is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2022 to Dec, 2022. | TSG 1899 HoffenheimTurn- und Sportgemeinschaft 1899 Hoffenheim e.V., or simply TSG 1899 Hoffenheim or just Hoffenheim () is a German professional football club based in Hoffenheim, a village of Sinsheim municipality, Baden-Württemberg.Originally founded in 1899 as a gymnastics club, Hoffenheim came into being in its modern form in 1945. A fifth division side in 2000, the club rapidly advanced through the German football league system with the financial backing of alumnus and software mogul Dietmar Hopp, and in 2008 Hoffenheim was promoted to the top tier Bundesliga. In the 2017–18 season, Hoffenheim finished third in the Bundesliga (its best to date), qualifying for the UEFA Champions League group stage for the first time.Since 2009, Hoffenheim has played its home games at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena (currently known as PreZero Arena), having previously played at the Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion from 1999.The modern-day club was formed in 1945, when gymnastics club Turnverein Hoffenheim (founded 1 July 1899) and football club Fußballverein Hoffenheim (founded 1921) merged. At the beginning of the 1990s, the club was an obscure local amateur side playing in the eighth division Baden-Württemberg A-Liga. They steadily improved and by 1996 were competing in the Verbandsliga Nordbaden (V).Around 2000, alumnus Dietmar Hopp returned to the club of his youth as a financial backer. Hopp was the co-founder of software firm SAP and he put some of his money into the club. His contributions generated almost immediate results: in 2000 Hoffenheim finished first in the Verbandsliga and was promoted to the fourth-division Oberliga Baden-Württemberg. Another first-place finish moved the club up to the Regionalliga Süd (III) for the 2001–02 season. They finished 13th in their first season in the Regionalliga, but improved significantly the next year, earning a fifth-place result.Hoffenheim earned fifth and seventh-place finishes in the next two seasons, before improving to fourth in 2005–06 to earn their best result to date. The club made its first DFB-Pokal appearance in the 2003–04 competition and performed well, advancing to the quarter-finals by eliminating 2. Bundesliga sides Eintracht Trier and Karlsruher SC and Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen before being put out themselves by another 2. Bundesliga side, VfB Lübeck.Negotiations to merge TSG Hoffenheim, Astoria Walldorf, and SV Sandhausen to create "FC Heidelberg 06" in 2005 were abandoned due to the resistance of the latter two clubs, and the failure to agree on whether the new side's stadium should be located in Heidelberg or Eppelheim. Team owner Hopp clearly preferred Heidelberg, but could not overcome the resistance of local firm Wild, which had already reserved the site of the planned stadium for its new production facilities.In 2006, the club sought to improve its squad and technical staff by bringing in players with several years of Bundesliga experience, most notably Jochen Seitz and Tomislav Marić, and young talents like Sejad Salihović, while signing manager Ralf Rangnick, who managed Bundesliga teams such as SSV Ulm 1846, VfB Stuttgart, Hannover 96 and Schalke 04, to a five-year contract. The investment paid off in the 2006–07 season with the club's promotion to the 2. Bundesliga after finishing second in Regionalliga Süd.The 2007–08 season was Hoffenheim's first season in professional football. After a weak start with three losses and only one draw in the first four games, the team's performance improved remarkably and Hoffenheim climbed from 16th place on matchday four to second place on matchday 23. The team managed to defend their place until the end of the season, having scored 60 points after matchday 34. As a result of their second-place finish they received automatic promotion to the Bundesliga, the highest tier in German football, after playing in the 2. Bundesliga for just one season.Hoffenheim had a successful season in their debut in the Bundesliga, the top German division, as they went on to record a 7th place finish. The club's best players of the season were Vedad Ibišević and Demba Ba, who scored 18 and 14 respectively. In the 2009–10 Bundesliga, the club had a less successful season, recording a finish outside of the top 10, finishing 11th. The club eventually went on to finish in 11th place for the next two consecutive seasons. In the 2012–13 Bundesliga, the club came very close to suffering relegation, after they a 16th place finish, meaning they would have to play in the relegation play-offs to survive; the club went on to beat their opponents Kaiserslautern by a scoreline of 5–2 on aggregate, with Roberto Firmino scoring two goals in the first match. In the 2013–14 Bundesliga, the club had strange statistics; being the third best goalscoring team in the league, but also the worst defensive team, scoring 72 goals and conceding 70. The club's best goalscorer of the season, also their best assist provider, was Roberto Firmino, scoring 16 goals and providing 12 assists, with the player winning the Bundesliga Breakthrough Player of the Season award. In the 2014–15 Bundesliga, the club came very close to qualifying for the Europa League, with just two points separating them from Borussia Dortmund, who were in 7th place. Despite the 8th place finish, Hoffenheim still had a goal difference of −6 in the 2014–15 season. In the 2015–16 Bundesliga, the club once again came close to suffering relegation, with just one point separating them from the relegation play-offs.In the 2016–17 season, new coach Julian Nagelsmann took over, beginning to recruit several very significant players, including Andrej Kramarić, Kerem Demirbay and Sandro Wagner. Initially, the club struggled for form, with four draws in the first four games of the season, before a rise in form rose the club to third place in the league by the end of October. On 4 April 2017, the club beat Bayern Munich by a scoreline of 1–0, one of the most important wins in the club's history. On 21 April 2017, the club confirmed that they would play European football next season following a 1–1 draw with Köln. Following a 4th place finish in the 2016–17 Bundesliga, Hoffenheim confirmed Champions League football for the 2017–18 season. The club were eventually drawn to play six-time European champions Liverpool in the play-off round. The club lost the first leg tie by a scoreline of 1–2, before a 4–2 loss in the second leg confirmed Hoffenheim's elimination from the tournament, as the club lost 3–6 on aggregate. Due to their elimination from the play-off stages, the club would continue playing European football in the Europa League group stages, however, the club would suffer elimination from the tournament as they would finish bottom of their group.In the 2017–18 Bundesliga season, Hoffenheim had a successful season, finishing third, automatically qualifying for next year's UEFA Champions League.The 2018–19 season was more disappointing for Hoffenheim, as they finished bottom of their Champions League group with only 3 draws and 3 losses whilst playing against the likes of Manchester City, Lyon and Shakhtar Donetsk. This meant that they did not make it out of the group stages of a European competition again. In the Bundesliga Hoffenheim didn't fare much better, finishing a disappointing 9th place, 6 below their ranking of 3rd during the 2017–18 campaign with 51 points. This was just two places and 3 points away from the Europa League qualifying rounds. In the DFB-Pokal Hoffenheim were eliminated by RB Leipzig in a 2–0 loss with both goals from Timo Werner. The season's top scorer was Andre Kramarić, with the Croatian finding the goal 22 times in 37 appearances. The German Kerem Demirbay was the clubs top playmaker with 11 assists during the 2018–19 season. Head coach Julian Nagelsmann left the club to join RB Leipzig at the end of the season. Alfred Schreuder, former assistant coach under Huub Stevens and Julian Nagelsmann was appointed as the new head coach. Before being promoted to the 1. Bundesliga in 2008, the club played in Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion which was built in 1999 with a capacity of 5,000 (1,620 seats)."TSG 1899 Hoffenheim" made their loftier ambitions clear in 2006 when the club's management decided to build the new 30,150 seat Rhein-Neckar-Arena suitable for hosting Bundesliga matches. The stadium was originally to be built in Heidelberg before the selection of a site in Sinsheim.They opened their first season in the 1. Bundesliga at the 26,022 capacity Carl-Benz-Stadion in Mannheim and played their first match in their new stadium on 31 January 2009.Interwetten betting company has agreed to be the stadium's betting partner for TSG Hoffenheim from August 2017, to 2020.Dietmar Hopp's financial support, which transformed Hoffenheim from a local amateur club into a competitive Bundesliga club, has been strongly criticized by other clubs, fans and some in the German press. The main points of criticism are the club's lack of "tradition" and a proper fan base as the club is a historically insignificant side from a village of just 3,300 inhabitants. This situation is similar to that of now-defunct Scottish side Gretna and German clubs VfL Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen and RB Leipzig, as those teams also received large financial support by companies; Wolfsburg is wholly owned and supported by automobile manufacturer Volkswagen, Bayer Leverkusen by pharmaceutical company Bayer and RB Leipzig by Red Bull. Despite this, Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are nonetheless different from Hoffenheim because of their long history as football clubs founded by the factory workers themselves, and have been successful chiefly through their own merits rather than outside funding.On 16 August 2011, the club released a statement regarding complaints of a loudspeaker that was strategically placed under away fans during a home game against Borussia Dortmund. The loudspeaker was designed to drown out the noise of the away fans cheers and chants during the game. It was reported that the speaker was placed by the groundskeeper, although the club denied any involvement, saying he acted alone. It was also reported that the loudspeaker was used during other games, not just the home game against Dortmund.In a later statement, the club admitted that the disruptive sound assembly has been used at least five times, although club officials claim to have no knowledge of these measures.On 29 February 2020, Bayern Munich supporters unfurled an offensive banner aimed at Hoffenheim owner Dietmar Hopp, resulting the game at Hoffenheim to be suspended with less than 15 minutes remaining. After concerns that the game could be abandoned, both teams returned to finish the match, but had decided to just run down the clock to end the game in solidarity with Hopp. Rather than play on, the two sets of players began passing the ball to each other and chatting as if they were teammates.The very next day, the Bundesliga match between Vfl Wolfsburg and 1. FC Union Berlin was stopped at the 44th minute of play due to derogatory banners being unfurled, one of which showed Hopp under crosshairs. The two teams left the field to return 10 minutes later and play out the remainder of the half and subsequently the game.On 25 September 2020, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim signed a partnership agreement with MLS club FC Cincinnati.The club's honours:Recent coaches of the club:The recent season-by-season performance of the club:Hoffenheim made their debut in European competition in 2017, qualifying for the play-off round of the 2017–18 UEFA Champions League play-offs. Their first match was on 15 August 2017, losing the first leg of the play-offs 2–1 to Liverpool.The women's team started playing in 2006–07 and rushed through the lower leagues. The women's team plays at Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion and is currently coached by Jürgen Ehrmann. | [
"Julian Nagelsmann",
"Matthias Kaltenbach",
"Alfred Schreuder",
"André Breitenreiter"
] |
|
Who was the head coach of the team 01/05/2021 Hoffenheim in Jan, 2021? | January 05, 2021 | {
"text": [
"Sebastian Hoeneß"
]
} | L2_Q22707_P286_3 | Sebastian Hoeneß is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2020 to Jun, 2022.
Alfred Schreuder is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2019 to Jun, 2020.
Matthias Kaltenbach is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jun, 2020 to Jul, 2020.
Julian Nagelsmann is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Feb, 2016 to Jun, 2019.
André Breitenreiter is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2022 to Dec, 2022. | TSG 1899 HoffenheimTurn- und Sportgemeinschaft 1899 Hoffenheim e.V., or simply TSG 1899 Hoffenheim or just Hoffenheim () is a German professional football club based in Hoffenheim, a village of Sinsheim municipality, Baden-Württemberg.Originally founded in 1899 as a gymnastics club, Hoffenheim came into being in its modern form in 1945. A fifth division side in 2000, the club rapidly advanced through the German football league system with the financial backing of alumnus and software mogul Dietmar Hopp, and in 2008 Hoffenheim was promoted to the top tier Bundesliga. In the 2017–18 season, Hoffenheim finished third in the Bundesliga (its best to date), qualifying for the UEFA Champions League group stage for the first time.Since 2009, Hoffenheim has played its home games at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena (currently known as PreZero Arena), having previously played at the Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion from 1999.The modern-day club was formed in 1945, when gymnastics club Turnverein Hoffenheim (founded 1 July 1899) and football club Fußballverein Hoffenheim (founded 1921) merged. At the beginning of the 1990s, the club was an obscure local amateur side playing in the eighth division Baden-Württemberg A-Liga. They steadily improved and by 1996 were competing in the Verbandsliga Nordbaden (V).Around 2000, alumnus Dietmar Hopp returned to the club of his youth as a financial backer. Hopp was the co-founder of software firm SAP and he put some of his money into the club. His contributions generated almost immediate results: in 2000 Hoffenheim finished first in the Verbandsliga and was promoted to the fourth-division Oberliga Baden-Württemberg. Another first-place finish moved the club up to the Regionalliga Süd (III) for the 2001–02 season. They finished 13th in their first season in the Regionalliga, but improved significantly the next year, earning a fifth-place result.Hoffenheim earned fifth and seventh-place finishes in the next two seasons, before improving to fourth in 2005–06 to earn their best result to date. The club made its first DFB-Pokal appearance in the 2003–04 competition and performed well, advancing to the quarter-finals by eliminating 2. Bundesliga sides Eintracht Trier and Karlsruher SC and Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen before being put out themselves by another 2. Bundesliga side, VfB Lübeck.Negotiations to merge TSG Hoffenheim, Astoria Walldorf, and SV Sandhausen to create "FC Heidelberg 06" in 2005 were abandoned due to the resistance of the latter two clubs, and the failure to agree on whether the new side's stadium should be located in Heidelberg or Eppelheim. Team owner Hopp clearly preferred Heidelberg, but could not overcome the resistance of local firm Wild, which had already reserved the site of the planned stadium for its new production facilities.In 2006, the club sought to improve its squad and technical staff by bringing in players with several years of Bundesliga experience, most notably Jochen Seitz and Tomislav Marić, and young talents like Sejad Salihović, while signing manager Ralf Rangnick, who managed Bundesliga teams such as SSV Ulm 1846, VfB Stuttgart, Hannover 96 and Schalke 04, to a five-year contract. The investment paid off in the 2006–07 season with the club's promotion to the 2. Bundesliga after finishing second in Regionalliga Süd.The 2007–08 season was Hoffenheim's first season in professional football. After a weak start with three losses and only one draw in the first four games, the team's performance improved remarkably and Hoffenheim climbed from 16th place on matchday four to second place on matchday 23. The team managed to defend their place until the end of the season, having scored 60 points after matchday 34. As a result of their second-place finish they received automatic promotion to the Bundesliga, the highest tier in German football, after playing in the 2. Bundesliga for just one season.Hoffenheim had a successful season in their debut in the Bundesliga, the top German division, as they went on to record a 7th place finish. The club's best players of the season were Vedad Ibišević and Demba Ba, who scored 18 and 14 respectively. In the 2009–10 Bundesliga, the club had a less successful season, recording a finish outside of the top 10, finishing 11th. The club eventually went on to finish in 11th place for the next two consecutive seasons. In the 2012–13 Bundesliga, the club came very close to suffering relegation, after they a 16th place finish, meaning they would have to play in the relegation play-offs to survive; the club went on to beat their opponents Kaiserslautern by a scoreline of 5–2 on aggregate, with Roberto Firmino scoring two goals in the first match. In the 2013–14 Bundesliga, the club had strange statistics; being the third best goalscoring team in the league, but also the worst defensive team, scoring 72 goals and conceding 70. The club's best goalscorer of the season, also their best assist provider, was Roberto Firmino, scoring 16 goals and providing 12 assists, with the player winning the Bundesliga Breakthrough Player of the Season award. In the 2014–15 Bundesliga, the club came very close to qualifying for the Europa League, with just two points separating them from Borussia Dortmund, who were in 7th place. Despite the 8th place finish, Hoffenheim still had a goal difference of −6 in the 2014–15 season. In the 2015–16 Bundesliga, the club once again came close to suffering relegation, with just one point separating them from the relegation play-offs.In the 2016–17 season, new coach Julian Nagelsmann took over, beginning to recruit several very significant players, including Andrej Kramarić, Kerem Demirbay and Sandro Wagner. Initially, the club struggled for form, with four draws in the first four games of the season, before a rise in form rose the club to third place in the league by the end of October. On 4 April 2017, the club beat Bayern Munich by a scoreline of 1–0, one of the most important wins in the club's history. On 21 April 2017, the club confirmed that they would play European football next season following a 1–1 draw with Köln. Following a 4th place finish in the 2016–17 Bundesliga, Hoffenheim confirmed Champions League football for the 2017–18 season. The club were eventually drawn to play six-time European champions Liverpool in the play-off round. The club lost the first leg tie by a scoreline of 1–2, before a 4–2 loss in the second leg confirmed Hoffenheim's elimination from the tournament, as the club lost 3–6 on aggregate. Due to their elimination from the play-off stages, the club would continue playing European football in the Europa League group stages, however, the club would suffer elimination from the tournament as they would finish bottom of their group.In the 2017–18 Bundesliga season, Hoffenheim had a successful season, finishing third, automatically qualifying for next year's UEFA Champions League.The 2018–19 season was more disappointing for Hoffenheim, as they finished bottom of their Champions League group with only 3 draws and 3 losses whilst playing against the likes of Manchester City, Lyon and Shakhtar Donetsk. This meant that they did not make it out of the group stages of a European competition again. In the Bundesliga Hoffenheim didn't fare much better, finishing a disappointing 9th place, 6 below their ranking of 3rd during the 2017–18 campaign with 51 points. This was just two places and 3 points away from the Europa League qualifying rounds. In the DFB-Pokal Hoffenheim were eliminated by RB Leipzig in a 2–0 loss with both goals from Timo Werner. The season's top scorer was Andre Kramarić, with the Croatian finding the goal 22 times in 37 appearances. The German Kerem Demirbay was the clubs top playmaker with 11 assists during the 2018–19 season. Head coach Julian Nagelsmann left the club to join RB Leipzig at the end of the season. Alfred Schreuder, former assistant coach under Huub Stevens and Julian Nagelsmann was appointed as the new head coach. Before being promoted to the 1. Bundesliga in 2008, the club played in Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion which was built in 1999 with a capacity of 5,000 (1,620 seats)."TSG 1899 Hoffenheim" made their loftier ambitions clear in 2006 when the club's management decided to build the new 30,150 seat Rhein-Neckar-Arena suitable for hosting Bundesliga matches. The stadium was originally to be built in Heidelberg before the selection of a site in Sinsheim.They opened their first season in the 1. Bundesliga at the 26,022 capacity Carl-Benz-Stadion in Mannheim and played their first match in their new stadium on 31 January 2009.Interwetten betting company has agreed to be the stadium's betting partner for TSG Hoffenheim from August 2017, to 2020.Dietmar Hopp's financial support, which transformed Hoffenheim from a local amateur club into a competitive Bundesliga club, has been strongly criticized by other clubs, fans and some in the German press. The main points of criticism are the club's lack of "tradition" and a proper fan base as the club is a historically insignificant side from a village of just 3,300 inhabitants. This situation is similar to that of now-defunct Scottish side Gretna and German clubs VfL Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen and RB Leipzig, as those teams also received large financial support by companies; Wolfsburg is wholly owned and supported by automobile manufacturer Volkswagen, Bayer Leverkusen by pharmaceutical company Bayer and RB Leipzig by Red Bull. Despite this, Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are nonetheless different from Hoffenheim because of their long history as football clubs founded by the factory workers themselves, and have been successful chiefly through their own merits rather than outside funding.On 16 August 2011, the club released a statement regarding complaints of a loudspeaker that was strategically placed under away fans during a home game against Borussia Dortmund. The loudspeaker was designed to drown out the noise of the away fans cheers and chants during the game. It was reported that the speaker was placed by the groundskeeper, although the club denied any involvement, saying he acted alone. It was also reported that the loudspeaker was used during other games, not just the home game against Dortmund.In a later statement, the club admitted that the disruptive sound assembly has been used at least five times, although club officials claim to have no knowledge of these measures.On 29 February 2020, Bayern Munich supporters unfurled an offensive banner aimed at Hoffenheim owner Dietmar Hopp, resulting the game at Hoffenheim to be suspended with less than 15 minutes remaining. After concerns that the game could be abandoned, both teams returned to finish the match, but had decided to just run down the clock to end the game in solidarity with Hopp. Rather than play on, the two sets of players began passing the ball to each other and chatting as if they were teammates.The very next day, the Bundesliga match between Vfl Wolfsburg and 1. FC Union Berlin was stopped at the 44th minute of play due to derogatory banners being unfurled, one of which showed Hopp under crosshairs. The two teams left the field to return 10 minutes later and play out the remainder of the half and subsequently the game.On 25 September 2020, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim signed a partnership agreement with MLS club FC Cincinnati.The club's honours:Recent coaches of the club:The recent season-by-season performance of the club:Hoffenheim made their debut in European competition in 2017, qualifying for the play-off round of the 2017–18 UEFA Champions League play-offs. Their first match was on 15 August 2017, losing the first leg of the play-offs 2–1 to Liverpool.The women's team started playing in 2006–07 and rushed through the lower leagues. The women's team plays at Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion and is currently coached by Jürgen Ehrmann. | [
"Julian Nagelsmann",
"Matthias Kaltenbach",
"Alfred Schreuder",
"André Breitenreiter"
] |
|
Who was the head coach of the team 05-Jan-202105-January-2021 Hoffenheim in Jan, 2021? | January 05, 2021 | {
"text": [
"Sebastian Hoeneß"
]
} | L2_Q22707_P286_3 | Sebastian Hoeneß is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2020 to Jun, 2022.
Alfred Schreuder is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2019 to Jun, 2020.
Matthias Kaltenbach is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jun, 2020 to Jul, 2020.
Julian Nagelsmann is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Feb, 2016 to Jun, 2019.
André Breitenreiter is the head coach of TSG 1899 Hoffenheim from Jul, 2022 to Dec, 2022. | TSG 1899 HoffenheimTurn- und Sportgemeinschaft 1899 Hoffenheim e.V., or simply TSG 1899 Hoffenheim or just Hoffenheim () is a German professional football club based in Hoffenheim, a village of Sinsheim municipality, Baden-Württemberg.Originally founded in 1899 as a gymnastics club, Hoffenheim came into being in its modern form in 1945. A fifth division side in 2000, the club rapidly advanced through the German football league system with the financial backing of alumnus and software mogul Dietmar Hopp, and in 2008 Hoffenheim was promoted to the top tier Bundesliga. In the 2017–18 season, Hoffenheim finished third in the Bundesliga (its best to date), qualifying for the UEFA Champions League group stage for the first time.Since 2009, Hoffenheim has played its home games at the Rhein-Neckar-Arena (currently known as PreZero Arena), having previously played at the Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion from 1999.The modern-day club was formed in 1945, when gymnastics club Turnverein Hoffenheim (founded 1 July 1899) and football club Fußballverein Hoffenheim (founded 1921) merged. At the beginning of the 1990s, the club was an obscure local amateur side playing in the eighth division Baden-Württemberg A-Liga. They steadily improved and by 1996 were competing in the Verbandsliga Nordbaden (V).Around 2000, alumnus Dietmar Hopp returned to the club of his youth as a financial backer. Hopp was the co-founder of software firm SAP and he put some of his money into the club. His contributions generated almost immediate results: in 2000 Hoffenheim finished first in the Verbandsliga and was promoted to the fourth-division Oberliga Baden-Württemberg. Another first-place finish moved the club up to the Regionalliga Süd (III) for the 2001–02 season. They finished 13th in their first season in the Regionalliga, but improved significantly the next year, earning a fifth-place result.Hoffenheim earned fifth and seventh-place finishes in the next two seasons, before improving to fourth in 2005–06 to earn their best result to date. The club made its first DFB-Pokal appearance in the 2003–04 competition and performed well, advancing to the quarter-finals by eliminating 2. Bundesliga sides Eintracht Trier and Karlsruher SC and Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen before being put out themselves by another 2. Bundesliga side, VfB Lübeck.Negotiations to merge TSG Hoffenheim, Astoria Walldorf, and SV Sandhausen to create "FC Heidelberg 06" in 2005 were abandoned due to the resistance of the latter two clubs, and the failure to agree on whether the new side's stadium should be located in Heidelberg or Eppelheim. Team owner Hopp clearly preferred Heidelberg, but could not overcome the resistance of local firm Wild, which had already reserved the site of the planned stadium for its new production facilities.In 2006, the club sought to improve its squad and technical staff by bringing in players with several years of Bundesliga experience, most notably Jochen Seitz and Tomislav Marić, and young talents like Sejad Salihović, while signing manager Ralf Rangnick, who managed Bundesliga teams such as SSV Ulm 1846, VfB Stuttgart, Hannover 96 and Schalke 04, to a five-year contract. The investment paid off in the 2006–07 season with the club's promotion to the 2. Bundesliga after finishing second in Regionalliga Süd.The 2007–08 season was Hoffenheim's first season in professional football. After a weak start with three losses and only one draw in the first four games, the team's performance improved remarkably and Hoffenheim climbed from 16th place on matchday four to second place on matchday 23. The team managed to defend their place until the end of the season, having scored 60 points after matchday 34. As a result of their second-place finish they received automatic promotion to the Bundesliga, the highest tier in German football, after playing in the 2. Bundesliga for just one season.Hoffenheim had a successful season in their debut in the Bundesliga, the top German division, as they went on to record a 7th place finish. The club's best players of the season were Vedad Ibišević and Demba Ba, who scored 18 and 14 respectively. In the 2009–10 Bundesliga, the club had a less successful season, recording a finish outside of the top 10, finishing 11th. The club eventually went on to finish in 11th place for the next two consecutive seasons. In the 2012–13 Bundesliga, the club came very close to suffering relegation, after they a 16th place finish, meaning they would have to play in the relegation play-offs to survive; the club went on to beat their opponents Kaiserslautern by a scoreline of 5–2 on aggregate, with Roberto Firmino scoring two goals in the first match. In the 2013–14 Bundesliga, the club had strange statistics; being the third best goalscoring team in the league, but also the worst defensive team, scoring 72 goals and conceding 70. The club's best goalscorer of the season, also their best assist provider, was Roberto Firmino, scoring 16 goals and providing 12 assists, with the player winning the Bundesliga Breakthrough Player of the Season award. In the 2014–15 Bundesliga, the club came very close to qualifying for the Europa League, with just two points separating them from Borussia Dortmund, who were in 7th place. Despite the 8th place finish, Hoffenheim still had a goal difference of −6 in the 2014–15 season. In the 2015–16 Bundesliga, the club once again came close to suffering relegation, with just one point separating them from the relegation play-offs.In the 2016–17 season, new coach Julian Nagelsmann took over, beginning to recruit several very significant players, including Andrej Kramarić, Kerem Demirbay and Sandro Wagner. Initially, the club struggled for form, with four draws in the first four games of the season, before a rise in form rose the club to third place in the league by the end of October. On 4 April 2017, the club beat Bayern Munich by a scoreline of 1–0, one of the most important wins in the club's history. On 21 April 2017, the club confirmed that they would play European football next season following a 1–1 draw with Köln. Following a 4th place finish in the 2016–17 Bundesliga, Hoffenheim confirmed Champions League football for the 2017–18 season. The club were eventually drawn to play six-time European champions Liverpool in the play-off round. The club lost the first leg tie by a scoreline of 1–2, before a 4–2 loss in the second leg confirmed Hoffenheim's elimination from the tournament, as the club lost 3–6 on aggregate. Due to their elimination from the play-off stages, the club would continue playing European football in the Europa League group stages, however, the club would suffer elimination from the tournament as they would finish bottom of their group.In the 2017–18 Bundesliga season, Hoffenheim had a successful season, finishing third, automatically qualifying for next year's UEFA Champions League.The 2018–19 season was more disappointing for Hoffenheim, as they finished bottom of their Champions League group with only 3 draws and 3 losses whilst playing against the likes of Manchester City, Lyon and Shakhtar Donetsk. This meant that they did not make it out of the group stages of a European competition again. In the Bundesliga Hoffenheim didn't fare much better, finishing a disappointing 9th place, 6 below their ranking of 3rd during the 2017–18 campaign with 51 points. This was just two places and 3 points away from the Europa League qualifying rounds. In the DFB-Pokal Hoffenheim were eliminated by RB Leipzig in a 2–0 loss with both goals from Timo Werner. The season's top scorer was Andre Kramarić, with the Croatian finding the goal 22 times in 37 appearances. The German Kerem Demirbay was the clubs top playmaker with 11 assists during the 2018–19 season. Head coach Julian Nagelsmann left the club to join RB Leipzig at the end of the season. Alfred Schreuder, former assistant coach under Huub Stevens and Julian Nagelsmann was appointed as the new head coach. Before being promoted to the 1. Bundesliga in 2008, the club played in Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion which was built in 1999 with a capacity of 5,000 (1,620 seats)."TSG 1899 Hoffenheim" made their loftier ambitions clear in 2006 when the club's management decided to build the new 30,150 seat Rhein-Neckar-Arena suitable for hosting Bundesliga matches. The stadium was originally to be built in Heidelberg before the selection of a site in Sinsheim.They opened their first season in the 1. Bundesliga at the 26,022 capacity Carl-Benz-Stadion in Mannheim and played their first match in their new stadium on 31 January 2009.Interwetten betting company has agreed to be the stadium's betting partner for TSG Hoffenheim from August 2017, to 2020.Dietmar Hopp's financial support, which transformed Hoffenheim from a local amateur club into a competitive Bundesliga club, has been strongly criticized by other clubs, fans and some in the German press. The main points of criticism are the club's lack of "tradition" and a proper fan base as the club is a historically insignificant side from a village of just 3,300 inhabitants. This situation is similar to that of now-defunct Scottish side Gretna and German clubs VfL Wolfsburg, Bayer Leverkusen and RB Leipzig, as those teams also received large financial support by companies; Wolfsburg is wholly owned and supported by automobile manufacturer Volkswagen, Bayer Leverkusen by pharmaceutical company Bayer and RB Leipzig by Red Bull. Despite this, Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are nonetheless different from Hoffenheim because of their long history as football clubs founded by the factory workers themselves, and have been successful chiefly through their own merits rather than outside funding.On 16 August 2011, the club released a statement regarding complaints of a loudspeaker that was strategically placed under away fans during a home game against Borussia Dortmund. The loudspeaker was designed to drown out the noise of the away fans cheers and chants during the game. It was reported that the speaker was placed by the groundskeeper, although the club denied any involvement, saying he acted alone. It was also reported that the loudspeaker was used during other games, not just the home game against Dortmund.In a later statement, the club admitted that the disruptive sound assembly has been used at least five times, although club officials claim to have no knowledge of these measures.On 29 February 2020, Bayern Munich supporters unfurled an offensive banner aimed at Hoffenheim owner Dietmar Hopp, resulting the game at Hoffenheim to be suspended with less than 15 minutes remaining. After concerns that the game could be abandoned, both teams returned to finish the match, but had decided to just run down the clock to end the game in solidarity with Hopp. Rather than play on, the two sets of players began passing the ball to each other and chatting as if they were teammates.The very next day, the Bundesliga match between Vfl Wolfsburg and 1. FC Union Berlin was stopped at the 44th minute of play due to derogatory banners being unfurled, one of which showed Hopp under crosshairs. The two teams left the field to return 10 minutes later and play out the remainder of the half and subsequently the game.On 25 September 2020, TSG 1899 Hoffenheim signed a partnership agreement with MLS club FC Cincinnati.The club's honours:Recent coaches of the club:The recent season-by-season performance of the club:Hoffenheim made their debut in European competition in 2017, qualifying for the play-off round of the 2017–18 UEFA Champions League play-offs. Their first match was on 15 August 2017, losing the first leg of the play-offs 2–1 to Liverpool.The women's team started playing in 2006–07 and rushed through the lower leagues. The women's team plays at Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion and is currently coached by Jürgen Ehrmann. | [
"Julian Nagelsmann",
"Matthias Kaltenbach",
"Alfred Schreuder",
"André Breitenreiter"
] |
|
Which political party did Yelena Mizulina belong to in Feb, 1997? | February 03, 1997 | {
"text": [
"Yabloko"
]
} | L2_Q4292925_P102_0 | Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Yabloko from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2001.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the A Just Russia from Jan, 2007 to Dec, 2022.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Union of Right Forces from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. | Yelena MizulinaYelena Borisovna Mizulina (, born December 9, 1954) is a Russian politician serving as a member of the Russian Parliament between 1995 and 2003 and again since 2007. Since 2012, she has been the center of attention in regard to a set of controversial laws concerning the rights of the LGBT community in Russia and the adoption of Russian orphan children by foreigners. She is currently Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. She has changed her political affiliation several times, having served public office on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the liberal Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties and is currently representing the region of Omsk in the Duma as a representative of the social democratic A Just Russia party.She holds a doctoral degree in Law. She has received distinctions in Russia for her work as a lawyer including the Honoured Lawyer of Russia title.Due to the Crimean crisis, she was sanctioned by Canada and the United States on March 17, 2014.Yelena Borisovna Mizulina was born on December 9, 1954, in the city of Buy in Kostroma Oblast, Soviet Union. In 1972 she began studying at the Faculty of Law and History of the Yaroslavl State University where she first met her future husband Mikhail Mizulin. They were married after their fourth year as undergraduates at university. She graduated in 1977 with a law degree and worked as a research assistant of the same university.Between 1977 and 1984, she worked as a consultant, and then from 1984, as head consultant in the Yaroslavl regional court. In parallel she obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree via distance learning from the Kazan State University. In 1983 she successfully defended a dissertation entitled "The nature of supervisory review in the criminal process (based on the material provided by the Yaroslavl Regional Court)".In 1985, she became Senior Research Associate to Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky. Her husband later confessed that he had taken advantage of his job as the head of the ideology in the Yaroslavl Oblast to obtain the job for Yelena. In 1987, Muzilina obtained the status of head of department of Russian history, heading the faculty until 1990. She remained a member of the Communist Party until 1991.In 1992, she obtained a Doctor of Science in Law degree (see Education in Russia) entitled "Criminal code: the concept of self-limiting country" at the Institute of State and Law. In regard to this dissertation Yelena Mizulina has publicly declared the following: "It seemed that what I wrote was unique, and that I was indeed a learned person of God" (in Russian "казалось, что то, что я написала — уникально, что я, действительно, учёный от Бога"). Between 1992 and 1995, she was a docent and subsequently a professor at Yaroslavl State University.In 1993, she joined the Russian legislature from the political union "The Russian Choice" and was elected to the Federal Council (upper house of parliament in the Russian Federation), where she became the Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Legislation and Judicial and Legal Matters, a member of the Committee on Regulation of Parliamentary Procedures.In 1995, she joined the opposition pro-democratic political party Yabloko and the group "Reformi – the new direction" (in Russian "Реформы — новый курс"). From 1995 and on, she was the head of the Yaroslavl regional and public organisation Ravnovsie (in Russian "Равновесие" he Federation Council).In December 1995, Muzilina was elected a member of parliament Duma from the Kirov region representing the political party Yabloko. As a result, she resigned her position in the Federation Council in January 1996.As a parliament member of the Duma, she held the position of the Deputy Chairman of Committee on Legislation and Judicial-legal Reforms and Deputy of the Subcommittee on Matters of State building and Constitutional Rights of Citizens. Muzilina was also involved in the legal implementation of the failed attempt to carry out the impeachment of Boris Yeltsin.In December 1999, she was elected member of Russian parliament, the Duma, from the Yabloko party. In July 2000, she became the head of the 'Yaroslavl Union of Democratic Forces' (in Russian "Ярославский союз демократических сил"), which was composed of members of the Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces.In February 2001, she announced that she would discontinue her membership in the Yabloko party and in June of the same year she joined the Union of Right Forces party.She explained her decision to leave Yabloko by the fact that she was "ashamed to be in a party that had obtained only 5% during elections. This had become a moral problem". Her former colleagues from Yabloko and Union of Right Forces Sergey Mitrokhin and Leonid Gozman have accused Yelena Mizulina of changing her political affiliation to keep up with political trends.After the Union of Right Forces lost the 2003 legislative elections, Mizulina, no longer an elected parliament member, was appointed to the Constitutional Court of Russia as the representative of the Duma. In this position, she was a proponent of local governors being no longer elected but rather directly nominated by the president of the Russian Federation.As a member of the Constitutional Court, she also worked as the Deputy Head of the Legal Department of the Duma and she graduated from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in 2005.In 2007, she was elected to the Duma as a member of A Just Russia party. In January 2008, she became the chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. Originally A Just Russia put forward another candidate, Svetlana Goryacheva, for this position, which was not well accepted by the United Russia party, and Mizulina's candidature was offered as a compromise.In 2010, Mizulina received a medal from the World Congress of Families.In 2011, she was re-elected to the Duma as a member of the A Just Russia party. Since December 2011, she is the Chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs.On March 17, 2014, the next day after the Crimean status referendum, Mizulina became one of the first seven persons who were put by President Obama under executive sanctions. The sanctions freeze her assets in the US and ban her from entering the United States.On January 23, 2017 she announced her intention to quit A Just Russia.Yelena Mizulina is among the lead authors of a set of controversial legislative projects including:On November 14, 2012, Yelena Muzilina declared that the 'prophylactic goals' of Internet Restriction Bill of ' acquiring a safe information space on the web without making use of punitive measures' had been accomplished. She also disclosed a possible future legislative project that would prevent access to sites previously included in the Russian Internet blacklist. Among such portals are expected to fall rublacklist.net belonging to Pirate Party of Russia.Yelena Mizulina in recent times became concerned with birth rates, in her role as Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. In an interview with Vladimir Posner she has expressed the following views: "Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survival ... I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued".Yelena Muzilina believes in limiting women's right to abortion. She has proposed to let abortions remain free of charge only for medical reasons and in cases of rape. In all other cases, she believes abortions should be billed to the abortion-seeking woman. She has also publicly spoken out against abortions being carried out in private medical institutions, and in favor of a ban on selling products that result in abortions without a prescription from a physician. She believes in obtaining the consent of the husband by all married women before carrying out an abortion, and in the case of underaged women – the consent of their parents.In July 2013, Yelena Mizulina was part of a group of members of parliament that proposed legislation affecting the Offences Code of Russia that would result in a fine of 1 million rubles on doctors and medical institutions that carried out abortions on women without providing them a 'waiting period' to reflect on their decision to abort. It was also proposed to fine the pregnant women that did not respect this "quiet time" up to 3,000–5,000 rubles.Yelena Mizulina has expressed strong views concerning the adoption of Russian children by US citizens: "This is just mean, not to say despicable. Russia has never defended its interest at the expense of children". Two month later, she voted for the Anti-Magnitsky bill, a law that bans United States citizens from adopting Russian children.In June 2012, the Duma Committee on matters of Family that Mizulina presides, rendered public a project entitled "The State Concept of Family Policy until 2025", which proposes amongst other things, several controversial elements including the following:Opposition journalists including Alexander Nikonov have speculated that the divorce of Vladimir Putin that took place two days after the publication of the legislative project was precipitated by the proposed fine on divorce.After the publication of the "Concept", it was pointed out that some of the positions described in it had been plagiarized verbatim from a school report published in a free access on the Internet, which itself was plagiarized from a curriculum on family studies in the Tomsk Polytechnic University.In this context, she has also called for the removal from Russian airwaves of the satirical cartoon "South Park".Yelena Mizulina believes in raising the age of consent in sexual relations in Russia from 16 to 18 years.Contrary to the clause 30 of Citizen's health protection Law of Russia, she proposed to ban surrogate motherhood pointing out that the latter threatens not just for Russia to survive but also to the survival of entire humanity and is an analogy to the banning of nuclear weapons.Yelena Mizulina is the author of several legislative projects directed against "propaganda of homosexuality" including the infamous Russian LGBT propaganda law. She believes that the phrase "gays are people too" should be considered potentially extremist by the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare. Yelena Mizulina is also in favor of confiscating children from gay parents, including biological parents.In July 2013, Mizulina and , her deputy in the Duma Committee, filed a complaint at the Institution of Criminal Proceedings against the LGBT rights activist Nikolay Alexeyev. According to Mizulina, Alexeyev is the "leader" of the LGBT community and has launched a campaign to discredit her, "to the detriment of Russia as a whole". Mizulina intends to ask for Alexeyev's punishment to be "in the form of compulsory work in a place where he can not proceed with propaganda, for example, driving a hearse". Representatives of the LGBT community have also appealed to the prosecutor's office with a complaint against Mizulina for inciting hatred against homosexuals and for infringing on the LGBT rights in Russia.Yelena Mizulina has accused several of her political opponents of belonging to a so-called "pedophile lobby" She first suggested that "in the depths of the United Russia party there was a "pedophile lobby" that was against toughening the law on sexual offenses against minors in 2011 during the evaluation of the Criminal Code of Russia.Those opposing the law on On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development were also accused by Yelena Mizulina of being part of a "pedophile lobby". In 2012, in regard to the Russian-language Wikipedia protest against the Duma's reading of the bill On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development, Mizulina said:This is a coverup. Wikipedia itself is not threatened. I too use Wikipedia. Notice, how only the Russian-language version was closed down. Therefore [I believe that ..] this is an attempt to blackmail the Russian parliament. Behind this there stands a lobby, and suspicions are high that it is "pedophile lobby".In June 2013, the writer and former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch published an article concerning Mizulina's son that lives in Belgium and works for the large international law firm called Mayer Brown that sponsors pro-gay associations and organizations and is among the hundreds on pro-LGBT rights organizations in Belgium, whilst his mother is waging war on homosexuality in Russia. In response to this, Mizulina accused Koch of being a member of a "pedophile lobby". The journalist Andrei Malgin wrote a piece in his blog entitled "Great: anyone that Mizulina doesn't like is a "pedophile lobby".In July 2016, "The Moscow Times "reported that Senator Mizulina had proposed amendments to present legislation to downgrade spousal and child abuse from a criminal offense to an administrative misdemeanor offense. Mizulina publicly stated her opinion that the present laws against domestic violence, in which the convicted are subject to fines and a two-year prison sentence, are "absurd" suggesting that such a punishment is excessive for "just a slap."On 11 January 2017, during the first reading of the law, 368 Russian lawmakers voted in favour of the law, one deputy voted against and another abstained.In June 2013, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal investigation concerning the alleged defamation of Mizulina by a group of people consisting of:According to Yelena Mizulina bloggers disseminated false information concerning her alleged intention to ban oral sex in Russia. Ksenia Sobchak has communicated to the press that she was interrogated by an investigator on the topic of oral sex. Similarly, Alfred Koch claims that he was interrogated for three hours concerning the "gay-oral phobia of Mizulina" and his position concerning the latter.The Russian political scientist Mark Urnov has described the laws instigated by Yelena Mizulina as "diverse, but having a single common quality – their capacity to spread intolerance. They are simply a legal expression of the intolerance and the suppression of everything that corresponds to one's personal views in regard to what is right and wrong".The writer Dmitri Bykov believes that Yelena Mizulina is "constantly providing a legislative form for things that should remain a question of personal choice, which is far more dangerous than any gay pride parade".In April 2019 Mizulina was widely quoted for her statement in defense of Russian Internet censorship laws, which were characterized as Orwellian by many journalists:Yelena Mizulina is married and has two adult children.Her husband Mikhail Muzilin holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a docent at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He was the head of the Yabloko party headquarters in Yaroslavl. He has also formerly served as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Yaroslavl State University.Her son Nikolay Mizulin lives in Brussels with his wife and two children where he works as a lawyer in the firm Mayer Brown. This family connection caused a controversy when former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch alleged that Nikolay's employer (allegedly gay-friendly) might be in breach of the anti-gay laws instigated by Russian government and spearheaded by Nikolay's mother. After the publication, Alfred Koch was interrogated by Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for three hours, based on accusations by Yelena Mizulina. Also, Mizulina was quoted as saying that Alfred Koch is a part of "paedophile lobby", trying to hinder the Russian government's campaign against sexual criminals.Mizulina's daughter Ekaterina is the head of the Moscow Fund of Social-Legal Initiatives "The Rights Capital" (in Russian "Правовая столица"), a firm that acts as a financial intermediary, publishing and advertising, which was reported to belong in fact to Yelena Mizulina.In the law proposed by Yelena Mizulina entitled "Concept of the State Family Policy until 2025." (in Russian "Концепции государственной семейной политики до 2025 года"), she has defined the 'ideal family' as marriage with the goal of commonly bringing up three or more children'. In this law she also proposes several generations of Russian parents, children and grandchildren should inhabit the same place. In a recent interview with the opposition radio station Echo of Moscow, Mizulina when asked why she herself had not conformed with the 'ideal family' she responded the following way: "I wanted three children, Misha [Mikhail – her husband] also wanted three. But things happen as they did. Fate has given us two".In 1994, a polemic broke out when she requested a larger state-provided flat in the goal of exotic cat breeding. | [
"Union of Right Forces",
"A Just Russia"
] |
|
Which political party did Yelena Mizulina belong to in 1997-02-03? | February 03, 1997 | {
"text": [
"Yabloko"
]
} | L2_Q4292925_P102_0 | Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Yabloko from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2001.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the A Just Russia from Jan, 2007 to Dec, 2022.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Union of Right Forces from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. | Yelena MizulinaYelena Borisovna Mizulina (, born December 9, 1954) is a Russian politician serving as a member of the Russian Parliament between 1995 and 2003 and again since 2007. Since 2012, she has been the center of attention in regard to a set of controversial laws concerning the rights of the LGBT community in Russia and the adoption of Russian orphan children by foreigners. She is currently Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. She has changed her political affiliation several times, having served public office on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the liberal Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties and is currently representing the region of Omsk in the Duma as a representative of the social democratic A Just Russia party.She holds a doctoral degree in Law. She has received distinctions in Russia for her work as a lawyer including the Honoured Lawyer of Russia title.Due to the Crimean crisis, she was sanctioned by Canada and the United States on March 17, 2014.Yelena Borisovna Mizulina was born on December 9, 1954, in the city of Buy in Kostroma Oblast, Soviet Union. In 1972 she began studying at the Faculty of Law and History of the Yaroslavl State University where she first met her future husband Mikhail Mizulin. They were married after their fourth year as undergraduates at university. She graduated in 1977 with a law degree and worked as a research assistant of the same university.Between 1977 and 1984, she worked as a consultant, and then from 1984, as head consultant in the Yaroslavl regional court. In parallel she obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree via distance learning from the Kazan State University. In 1983 she successfully defended a dissertation entitled "The nature of supervisory review in the criminal process (based on the material provided by the Yaroslavl Regional Court)".In 1985, she became Senior Research Associate to Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky. Her husband later confessed that he had taken advantage of his job as the head of the ideology in the Yaroslavl Oblast to obtain the job for Yelena. In 1987, Muzilina obtained the status of head of department of Russian history, heading the faculty until 1990. She remained a member of the Communist Party until 1991.In 1992, she obtained a Doctor of Science in Law degree (see Education in Russia) entitled "Criminal code: the concept of self-limiting country" at the Institute of State and Law. In regard to this dissertation Yelena Mizulina has publicly declared the following: "It seemed that what I wrote was unique, and that I was indeed a learned person of God" (in Russian "казалось, что то, что я написала — уникально, что я, действительно, учёный от Бога"). Between 1992 and 1995, she was a docent and subsequently a professor at Yaroslavl State University.In 1993, she joined the Russian legislature from the political union "The Russian Choice" and was elected to the Federal Council (upper house of parliament in the Russian Federation), where she became the Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Legislation and Judicial and Legal Matters, a member of the Committee on Regulation of Parliamentary Procedures.In 1995, she joined the opposition pro-democratic political party Yabloko and the group "Reformi – the new direction" (in Russian "Реформы — новый курс"). From 1995 and on, she was the head of the Yaroslavl regional and public organisation Ravnovsie (in Russian "Равновесие" he Federation Council).In December 1995, Muzilina was elected a member of parliament Duma from the Kirov region representing the political party Yabloko. As a result, she resigned her position in the Federation Council in January 1996.As a parliament member of the Duma, she held the position of the Deputy Chairman of Committee on Legislation and Judicial-legal Reforms and Deputy of the Subcommittee on Matters of State building and Constitutional Rights of Citizens. Muzilina was also involved in the legal implementation of the failed attempt to carry out the impeachment of Boris Yeltsin.In December 1999, she was elected member of Russian parliament, the Duma, from the Yabloko party. In July 2000, she became the head of the 'Yaroslavl Union of Democratic Forces' (in Russian "Ярославский союз демократических сил"), which was composed of members of the Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces.In February 2001, she announced that she would discontinue her membership in the Yabloko party and in June of the same year she joined the Union of Right Forces party.She explained her decision to leave Yabloko by the fact that she was "ashamed to be in a party that had obtained only 5% during elections. This had become a moral problem". Her former colleagues from Yabloko and Union of Right Forces Sergey Mitrokhin and Leonid Gozman have accused Yelena Mizulina of changing her political affiliation to keep up with political trends.After the Union of Right Forces lost the 2003 legislative elections, Mizulina, no longer an elected parliament member, was appointed to the Constitutional Court of Russia as the representative of the Duma. In this position, she was a proponent of local governors being no longer elected but rather directly nominated by the president of the Russian Federation.As a member of the Constitutional Court, she also worked as the Deputy Head of the Legal Department of the Duma and she graduated from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in 2005.In 2007, she was elected to the Duma as a member of A Just Russia party. In January 2008, she became the chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. Originally A Just Russia put forward another candidate, Svetlana Goryacheva, for this position, which was not well accepted by the United Russia party, and Mizulina's candidature was offered as a compromise.In 2010, Mizulina received a medal from the World Congress of Families.In 2011, she was re-elected to the Duma as a member of the A Just Russia party. Since December 2011, she is the Chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs.On March 17, 2014, the next day after the Crimean status referendum, Mizulina became one of the first seven persons who were put by President Obama under executive sanctions. The sanctions freeze her assets in the US and ban her from entering the United States.On January 23, 2017 she announced her intention to quit A Just Russia.Yelena Mizulina is among the lead authors of a set of controversial legislative projects including:On November 14, 2012, Yelena Muzilina declared that the 'prophylactic goals' of Internet Restriction Bill of ' acquiring a safe information space on the web without making use of punitive measures' had been accomplished. She also disclosed a possible future legislative project that would prevent access to sites previously included in the Russian Internet blacklist. Among such portals are expected to fall rublacklist.net belonging to Pirate Party of Russia.Yelena Mizulina in recent times became concerned with birth rates, in her role as Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. In an interview with Vladimir Posner she has expressed the following views: "Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survival ... I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued".Yelena Muzilina believes in limiting women's right to abortion. She has proposed to let abortions remain free of charge only for medical reasons and in cases of rape. In all other cases, she believes abortions should be billed to the abortion-seeking woman. She has also publicly spoken out against abortions being carried out in private medical institutions, and in favor of a ban on selling products that result in abortions without a prescription from a physician. She believes in obtaining the consent of the husband by all married women before carrying out an abortion, and in the case of underaged women – the consent of their parents.In July 2013, Yelena Mizulina was part of a group of members of parliament that proposed legislation affecting the Offences Code of Russia that would result in a fine of 1 million rubles on doctors and medical institutions that carried out abortions on women without providing them a 'waiting period' to reflect on their decision to abort. It was also proposed to fine the pregnant women that did not respect this "quiet time" up to 3,000–5,000 rubles.Yelena Mizulina has expressed strong views concerning the adoption of Russian children by US citizens: "This is just mean, not to say despicable. Russia has never defended its interest at the expense of children". Two month later, she voted for the Anti-Magnitsky bill, a law that bans United States citizens from adopting Russian children.In June 2012, the Duma Committee on matters of Family that Mizulina presides, rendered public a project entitled "The State Concept of Family Policy until 2025", which proposes amongst other things, several controversial elements including the following:Opposition journalists including Alexander Nikonov have speculated that the divorce of Vladimir Putin that took place two days after the publication of the legislative project was precipitated by the proposed fine on divorce.After the publication of the "Concept", it was pointed out that some of the positions described in it had been plagiarized verbatim from a school report published in a free access on the Internet, which itself was plagiarized from a curriculum on family studies in the Tomsk Polytechnic University.In this context, she has also called for the removal from Russian airwaves of the satirical cartoon "South Park".Yelena Mizulina believes in raising the age of consent in sexual relations in Russia from 16 to 18 years.Contrary to the clause 30 of Citizen's health protection Law of Russia, she proposed to ban surrogate motherhood pointing out that the latter threatens not just for Russia to survive but also to the survival of entire humanity and is an analogy to the banning of nuclear weapons.Yelena Mizulina is the author of several legislative projects directed against "propaganda of homosexuality" including the infamous Russian LGBT propaganda law. She believes that the phrase "gays are people too" should be considered potentially extremist by the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare. Yelena Mizulina is also in favor of confiscating children from gay parents, including biological parents.In July 2013, Mizulina and , her deputy in the Duma Committee, filed a complaint at the Institution of Criminal Proceedings against the LGBT rights activist Nikolay Alexeyev. According to Mizulina, Alexeyev is the "leader" of the LGBT community and has launched a campaign to discredit her, "to the detriment of Russia as a whole". Mizulina intends to ask for Alexeyev's punishment to be "in the form of compulsory work in a place where he can not proceed with propaganda, for example, driving a hearse". Representatives of the LGBT community have also appealed to the prosecutor's office with a complaint against Mizulina for inciting hatred against homosexuals and for infringing on the LGBT rights in Russia.Yelena Mizulina has accused several of her political opponents of belonging to a so-called "pedophile lobby" She first suggested that "in the depths of the United Russia party there was a "pedophile lobby" that was against toughening the law on sexual offenses against minors in 2011 during the evaluation of the Criminal Code of Russia.Those opposing the law on On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development were also accused by Yelena Mizulina of being part of a "pedophile lobby". In 2012, in regard to the Russian-language Wikipedia protest against the Duma's reading of the bill On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development, Mizulina said:This is a coverup. Wikipedia itself is not threatened. I too use Wikipedia. Notice, how only the Russian-language version was closed down. Therefore [I believe that ..] this is an attempt to blackmail the Russian parliament. Behind this there stands a lobby, and suspicions are high that it is "pedophile lobby".In June 2013, the writer and former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch published an article concerning Mizulina's son that lives in Belgium and works for the large international law firm called Mayer Brown that sponsors pro-gay associations and organizations and is among the hundreds on pro-LGBT rights organizations in Belgium, whilst his mother is waging war on homosexuality in Russia. In response to this, Mizulina accused Koch of being a member of a "pedophile lobby". The journalist Andrei Malgin wrote a piece in his blog entitled "Great: anyone that Mizulina doesn't like is a "pedophile lobby".In July 2016, "The Moscow Times "reported that Senator Mizulina had proposed amendments to present legislation to downgrade spousal and child abuse from a criminal offense to an administrative misdemeanor offense. Mizulina publicly stated her opinion that the present laws against domestic violence, in which the convicted are subject to fines and a two-year prison sentence, are "absurd" suggesting that such a punishment is excessive for "just a slap."On 11 January 2017, during the first reading of the law, 368 Russian lawmakers voted in favour of the law, one deputy voted against and another abstained.In June 2013, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal investigation concerning the alleged defamation of Mizulina by a group of people consisting of:According to Yelena Mizulina bloggers disseminated false information concerning her alleged intention to ban oral sex in Russia. Ksenia Sobchak has communicated to the press that she was interrogated by an investigator on the topic of oral sex. Similarly, Alfred Koch claims that he was interrogated for three hours concerning the "gay-oral phobia of Mizulina" and his position concerning the latter.The Russian political scientist Mark Urnov has described the laws instigated by Yelena Mizulina as "diverse, but having a single common quality – their capacity to spread intolerance. They are simply a legal expression of the intolerance and the suppression of everything that corresponds to one's personal views in regard to what is right and wrong".The writer Dmitri Bykov believes that Yelena Mizulina is "constantly providing a legislative form for things that should remain a question of personal choice, which is far more dangerous than any gay pride parade".In April 2019 Mizulina was widely quoted for her statement in defense of Russian Internet censorship laws, which were characterized as Orwellian by many journalists:Yelena Mizulina is married and has two adult children.Her husband Mikhail Muzilin holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a docent at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He was the head of the Yabloko party headquarters in Yaroslavl. He has also formerly served as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Yaroslavl State University.Her son Nikolay Mizulin lives in Brussels with his wife and two children where he works as a lawyer in the firm Mayer Brown. This family connection caused a controversy when former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch alleged that Nikolay's employer (allegedly gay-friendly) might be in breach of the anti-gay laws instigated by Russian government and spearheaded by Nikolay's mother. After the publication, Alfred Koch was interrogated by Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for three hours, based on accusations by Yelena Mizulina. Also, Mizulina was quoted as saying that Alfred Koch is a part of "paedophile lobby", trying to hinder the Russian government's campaign against sexual criminals.Mizulina's daughter Ekaterina is the head of the Moscow Fund of Social-Legal Initiatives "The Rights Capital" (in Russian "Правовая столица"), a firm that acts as a financial intermediary, publishing and advertising, which was reported to belong in fact to Yelena Mizulina.In the law proposed by Yelena Mizulina entitled "Concept of the State Family Policy until 2025." (in Russian "Концепции государственной семейной политики до 2025 года"), she has defined the 'ideal family' as marriage with the goal of commonly bringing up three or more children'. In this law she also proposes several generations of Russian parents, children and grandchildren should inhabit the same place. In a recent interview with the opposition radio station Echo of Moscow, Mizulina when asked why she herself had not conformed with the 'ideal family' she responded the following way: "I wanted three children, Misha [Mikhail – her husband] also wanted three. But things happen as they did. Fate has given us two".In 1994, a polemic broke out when she requested a larger state-provided flat in the goal of exotic cat breeding. | [
"Union of Right Forces",
"A Just Russia"
] |
|
Which political party did Yelena Mizulina belong to in 03/02/1997? | February 03, 1997 | {
"text": [
"Yabloko"
]
} | L2_Q4292925_P102_0 | Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Yabloko from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2001.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the A Just Russia from Jan, 2007 to Dec, 2022.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Union of Right Forces from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. | Yelena MizulinaYelena Borisovna Mizulina (, born December 9, 1954) is a Russian politician serving as a member of the Russian Parliament between 1995 and 2003 and again since 2007. Since 2012, she has been the center of attention in regard to a set of controversial laws concerning the rights of the LGBT community in Russia and the adoption of Russian orphan children by foreigners. She is currently Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. She has changed her political affiliation several times, having served public office on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the liberal Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties and is currently representing the region of Omsk in the Duma as a representative of the social democratic A Just Russia party.She holds a doctoral degree in Law. She has received distinctions in Russia for her work as a lawyer including the Honoured Lawyer of Russia title.Due to the Crimean crisis, she was sanctioned by Canada and the United States on March 17, 2014.Yelena Borisovna Mizulina was born on December 9, 1954, in the city of Buy in Kostroma Oblast, Soviet Union. In 1972 she began studying at the Faculty of Law and History of the Yaroslavl State University where she first met her future husband Mikhail Mizulin. They were married after their fourth year as undergraduates at university. She graduated in 1977 with a law degree and worked as a research assistant of the same university.Between 1977 and 1984, she worked as a consultant, and then from 1984, as head consultant in the Yaroslavl regional court. In parallel she obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree via distance learning from the Kazan State University. In 1983 she successfully defended a dissertation entitled "The nature of supervisory review in the criminal process (based on the material provided by the Yaroslavl Regional Court)".In 1985, she became Senior Research Associate to Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky. Her husband later confessed that he had taken advantage of his job as the head of the ideology in the Yaroslavl Oblast to obtain the job for Yelena. In 1987, Muzilina obtained the status of head of department of Russian history, heading the faculty until 1990. She remained a member of the Communist Party until 1991.In 1992, she obtained a Doctor of Science in Law degree (see Education in Russia) entitled "Criminal code: the concept of self-limiting country" at the Institute of State and Law. In regard to this dissertation Yelena Mizulina has publicly declared the following: "It seemed that what I wrote was unique, and that I was indeed a learned person of God" (in Russian "казалось, что то, что я написала — уникально, что я, действительно, учёный от Бога"). Between 1992 and 1995, she was a docent and subsequently a professor at Yaroslavl State University.In 1993, she joined the Russian legislature from the political union "The Russian Choice" and was elected to the Federal Council (upper house of parliament in the Russian Federation), where she became the Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Legislation and Judicial and Legal Matters, a member of the Committee on Regulation of Parliamentary Procedures.In 1995, she joined the opposition pro-democratic political party Yabloko and the group "Reformi – the new direction" (in Russian "Реформы — новый курс"). From 1995 and on, she was the head of the Yaroslavl regional and public organisation Ravnovsie (in Russian "Равновесие" he Federation Council).In December 1995, Muzilina was elected a member of parliament Duma from the Kirov region representing the political party Yabloko. As a result, she resigned her position in the Federation Council in January 1996.As a parliament member of the Duma, she held the position of the Deputy Chairman of Committee on Legislation and Judicial-legal Reforms and Deputy of the Subcommittee on Matters of State building and Constitutional Rights of Citizens. Muzilina was also involved in the legal implementation of the failed attempt to carry out the impeachment of Boris Yeltsin.In December 1999, she was elected member of Russian parliament, the Duma, from the Yabloko party. In July 2000, she became the head of the 'Yaroslavl Union of Democratic Forces' (in Russian "Ярославский союз демократических сил"), which was composed of members of the Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces.In February 2001, she announced that she would discontinue her membership in the Yabloko party and in June of the same year she joined the Union of Right Forces party.She explained her decision to leave Yabloko by the fact that she was "ashamed to be in a party that had obtained only 5% during elections. This had become a moral problem". Her former colleagues from Yabloko and Union of Right Forces Sergey Mitrokhin and Leonid Gozman have accused Yelena Mizulina of changing her political affiliation to keep up with political trends.After the Union of Right Forces lost the 2003 legislative elections, Mizulina, no longer an elected parliament member, was appointed to the Constitutional Court of Russia as the representative of the Duma. In this position, she was a proponent of local governors being no longer elected but rather directly nominated by the president of the Russian Federation.As a member of the Constitutional Court, she also worked as the Deputy Head of the Legal Department of the Duma and she graduated from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in 2005.In 2007, she was elected to the Duma as a member of A Just Russia party. In January 2008, she became the chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. Originally A Just Russia put forward another candidate, Svetlana Goryacheva, for this position, which was not well accepted by the United Russia party, and Mizulina's candidature was offered as a compromise.In 2010, Mizulina received a medal from the World Congress of Families.In 2011, she was re-elected to the Duma as a member of the A Just Russia party. Since December 2011, she is the Chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs.On March 17, 2014, the next day after the Crimean status referendum, Mizulina became one of the first seven persons who were put by President Obama under executive sanctions. The sanctions freeze her assets in the US and ban her from entering the United States.On January 23, 2017 she announced her intention to quit A Just Russia.Yelena Mizulina is among the lead authors of a set of controversial legislative projects including:On November 14, 2012, Yelena Muzilina declared that the 'prophylactic goals' of Internet Restriction Bill of ' acquiring a safe information space on the web without making use of punitive measures' had been accomplished. She also disclosed a possible future legislative project that would prevent access to sites previously included in the Russian Internet blacklist. Among such portals are expected to fall rublacklist.net belonging to Pirate Party of Russia.Yelena Mizulina in recent times became concerned with birth rates, in her role as Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. In an interview with Vladimir Posner she has expressed the following views: "Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survival ... I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued".Yelena Muzilina believes in limiting women's right to abortion. She has proposed to let abortions remain free of charge only for medical reasons and in cases of rape. In all other cases, she believes abortions should be billed to the abortion-seeking woman. She has also publicly spoken out against abortions being carried out in private medical institutions, and in favor of a ban on selling products that result in abortions without a prescription from a physician. She believes in obtaining the consent of the husband by all married women before carrying out an abortion, and in the case of underaged women – the consent of their parents.In July 2013, Yelena Mizulina was part of a group of members of parliament that proposed legislation affecting the Offences Code of Russia that would result in a fine of 1 million rubles on doctors and medical institutions that carried out abortions on women without providing them a 'waiting period' to reflect on their decision to abort. It was also proposed to fine the pregnant women that did not respect this "quiet time" up to 3,000–5,000 rubles.Yelena Mizulina has expressed strong views concerning the adoption of Russian children by US citizens: "This is just mean, not to say despicable. Russia has never defended its interest at the expense of children". Two month later, she voted for the Anti-Magnitsky bill, a law that bans United States citizens from adopting Russian children.In June 2012, the Duma Committee on matters of Family that Mizulina presides, rendered public a project entitled "The State Concept of Family Policy until 2025", which proposes amongst other things, several controversial elements including the following:Opposition journalists including Alexander Nikonov have speculated that the divorce of Vladimir Putin that took place two days after the publication of the legislative project was precipitated by the proposed fine on divorce.After the publication of the "Concept", it was pointed out that some of the positions described in it had been plagiarized verbatim from a school report published in a free access on the Internet, which itself was plagiarized from a curriculum on family studies in the Tomsk Polytechnic University.In this context, she has also called for the removal from Russian airwaves of the satirical cartoon "South Park".Yelena Mizulina believes in raising the age of consent in sexual relations in Russia from 16 to 18 years.Contrary to the clause 30 of Citizen's health protection Law of Russia, she proposed to ban surrogate motherhood pointing out that the latter threatens not just for Russia to survive but also to the survival of entire humanity and is an analogy to the banning of nuclear weapons.Yelena Mizulina is the author of several legislative projects directed against "propaganda of homosexuality" including the infamous Russian LGBT propaganda law. She believes that the phrase "gays are people too" should be considered potentially extremist by the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare. Yelena Mizulina is also in favor of confiscating children from gay parents, including biological parents.In July 2013, Mizulina and , her deputy in the Duma Committee, filed a complaint at the Institution of Criminal Proceedings against the LGBT rights activist Nikolay Alexeyev. According to Mizulina, Alexeyev is the "leader" of the LGBT community and has launched a campaign to discredit her, "to the detriment of Russia as a whole". Mizulina intends to ask for Alexeyev's punishment to be "in the form of compulsory work in a place where he can not proceed with propaganda, for example, driving a hearse". Representatives of the LGBT community have also appealed to the prosecutor's office with a complaint against Mizulina for inciting hatred against homosexuals and for infringing on the LGBT rights in Russia.Yelena Mizulina has accused several of her political opponents of belonging to a so-called "pedophile lobby" She first suggested that "in the depths of the United Russia party there was a "pedophile lobby" that was against toughening the law on sexual offenses against minors in 2011 during the evaluation of the Criminal Code of Russia.Those opposing the law on On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development were also accused by Yelena Mizulina of being part of a "pedophile lobby". In 2012, in regard to the Russian-language Wikipedia protest against the Duma's reading of the bill On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development, Mizulina said:This is a coverup. Wikipedia itself is not threatened. I too use Wikipedia. Notice, how only the Russian-language version was closed down. Therefore [I believe that ..] this is an attempt to blackmail the Russian parliament. Behind this there stands a lobby, and suspicions are high that it is "pedophile lobby".In June 2013, the writer and former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch published an article concerning Mizulina's son that lives in Belgium and works for the large international law firm called Mayer Brown that sponsors pro-gay associations and organizations and is among the hundreds on pro-LGBT rights organizations in Belgium, whilst his mother is waging war on homosexuality in Russia. In response to this, Mizulina accused Koch of being a member of a "pedophile lobby". The journalist Andrei Malgin wrote a piece in his blog entitled "Great: anyone that Mizulina doesn't like is a "pedophile lobby".In July 2016, "The Moscow Times "reported that Senator Mizulina had proposed amendments to present legislation to downgrade spousal and child abuse from a criminal offense to an administrative misdemeanor offense. Mizulina publicly stated her opinion that the present laws against domestic violence, in which the convicted are subject to fines and a two-year prison sentence, are "absurd" suggesting that such a punishment is excessive for "just a slap."On 11 January 2017, during the first reading of the law, 368 Russian lawmakers voted in favour of the law, one deputy voted against and another abstained.In June 2013, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal investigation concerning the alleged defamation of Mizulina by a group of people consisting of:According to Yelena Mizulina bloggers disseminated false information concerning her alleged intention to ban oral sex in Russia. Ksenia Sobchak has communicated to the press that she was interrogated by an investigator on the topic of oral sex. Similarly, Alfred Koch claims that he was interrogated for three hours concerning the "gay-oral phobia of Mizulina" and his position concerning the latter.The Russian political scientist Mark Urnov has described the laws instigated by Yelena Mizulina as "diverse, but having a single common quality – their capacity to spread intolerance. They are simply a legal expression of the intolerance and the suppression of everything that corresponds to one's personal views in regard to what is right and wrong".The writer Dmitri Bykov believes that Yelena Mizulina is "constantly providing a legislative form for things that should remain a question of personal choice, which is far more dangerous than any gay pride parade".In April 2019 Mizulina was widely quoted for her statement in defense of Russian Internet censorship laws, which were characterized as Orwellian by many journalists:Yelena Mizulina is married and has two adult children.Her husband Mikhail Muzilin holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a docent at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He was the head of the Yabloko party headquarters in Yaroslavl. He has also formerly served as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Yaroslavl State University.Her son Nikolay Mizulin lives in Brussels with his wife and two children where he works as a lawyer in the firm Mayer Brown. This family connection caused a controversy when former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch alleged that Nikolay's employer (allegedly gay-friendly) might be in breach of the anti-gay laws instigated by Russian government and spearheaded by Nikolay's mother. After the publication, Alfred Koch was interrogated by Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for three hours, based on accusations by Yelena Mizulina. Also, Mizulina was quoted as saying that Alfred Koch is a part of "paedophile lobby", trying to hinder the Russian government's campaign against sexual criminals.Mizulina's daughter Ekaterina is the head of the Moscow Fund of Social-Legal Initiatives "The Rights Capital" (in Russian "Правовая столица"), a firm that acts as a financial intermediary, publishing and advertising, which was reported to belong in fact to Yelena Mizulina.In the law proposed by Yelena Mizulina entitled "Concept of the State Family Policy until 2025." (in Russian "Концепции государственной семейной политики до 2025 года"), she has defined the 'ideal family' as marriage with the goal of commonly bringing up three or more children'. In this law she also proposes several generations of Russian parents, children and grandchildren should inhabit the same place. In a recent interview with the opposition radio station Echo of Moscow, Mizulina when asked why she herself had not conformed with the 'ideal family' she responded the following way: "I wanted three children, Misha [Mikhail – her husband] also wanted three. But things happen as they did. Fate has given us two".In 1994, a polemic broke out when she requested a larger state-provided flat in the goal of exotic cat breeding. | [
"Union of Right Forces",
"A Just Russia"
] |
|
Which political party did Yelena Mizulina belong to in Feb 03, 1997? | February 03, 1997 | {
"text": [
"Yabloko"
]
} | L2_Q4292925_P102_0 | Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Yabloko from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2001.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the A Just Russia from Jan, 2007 to Dec, 2022.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Union of Right Forces from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. | Yelena MizulinaYelena Borisovna Mizulina (, born December 9, 1954) is a Russian politician serving as a member of the Russian Parliament between 1995 and 2003 and again since 2007. Since 2012, she has been the center of attention in regard to a set of controversial laws concerning the rights of the LGBT community in Russia and the adoption of Russian orphan children by foreigners. She is currently Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. She has changed her political affiliation several times, having served public office on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the liberal Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties and is currently representing the region of Omsk in the Duma as a representative of the social democratic A Just Russia party.She holds a doctoral degree in Law. She has received distinctions in Russia for her work as a lawyer including the Honoured Lawyer of Russia title.Due to the Crimean crisis, she was sanctioned by Canada and the United States on March 17, 2014.Yelena Borisovna Mizulina was born on December 9, 1954, in the city of Buy in Kostroma Oblast, Soviet Union. In 1972 she began studying at the Faculty of Law and History of the Yaroslavl State University where she first met her future husband Mikhail Mizulin. They were married after their fourth year as undergraduates at university. She graduated in 1977 with a law degree and worked as a research assistant of the same university.Between 1977 and 1984, she worked as a consultant, and then from 1984, as head consultant in the Yaroslavl regional court. In parallel she obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree via distance learning from the Kazan State University. In 1983 she successfully defended a dissertation entitled "The nature of supervisory review in the criminal process (based on the material provided by the Yaroslavl Regional Court)".In 1985, she became Senior Research Associate to Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky. Her husband later confessed that he had taken advantage of his job as the head of the ideology in the Yaroslavl Oblast to obtain the job for Yelena. In 1987, Muzilina obtained the status of head of department of Russian history, heading the faculty until 1990. She remained a member of the Communist Party until 1991.In 1992, she obtained a Doctor of Science in Law degree (see Education in Russia) entitled "Criminal code: the concept of self-limiting country" at the Institute of State and Law. In regard to this dissertation Yelena Mizulina has publicly declared the following: "It seemed that what I wrote was unique, and that I was indeed a learned person of God" (in Russian "казалось, что то, что я написала — уникально, что я, действительно, учёный от Бога"). Between 1992 and 1995, she was a docent and subsequently a professor at Yaroslavl State University.In 1993, she joined the Russian legislature from the political union "The Russian Choice" and was elected to the Federal Council (upper house of parliament in the Russian Federation), where she became the Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Legislation and Judicial and Legal Matters, a member of the Committee on Regulation of Parliamentary Procedures.In 1995, she joined the opposition pro-democratic political party Yabloko and the group "Reformi – the new direction" (in Russian "Реформы — новый курс"). From 1995 and on, she was the head of the Yaroslavl regional and public organisation Ravnovsie (in Russian "Равновесие" he Federation Council).In December 1995, Muzilina was elected a member of parliament Duma from the Kirov region representing the political party Yabloko. As a result, she resigned her position in the Federation Council in January 1996.As a parliament member of the Duma, she held the position of the Deputy Chairman of Committee on Legislation and Judicial-legal Reforms and Deputy of the Subcommittee on Matters of State building and Constitutional Rights of Citizens. Muzilina was also involved in the legal implementation of the failed attempt to carry out the impeachment of Boris Yeltsin.In December 1999, she was elected member of Russian parliament, the Duma, from the Yabloko party. In July 2000, she became the head of the 'Yaroslavl Union of Democratic Forces' (in Russian "Ярославский союз демократических сил"), which was composed of members of the Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces.In February 2001, she announced that she would discontinue her membership in the Yabloko party and in June of the same year she joined the Union of Right Forces party.She explained her decision to leave Yabloko by the fact that she was "ashamed to be in a party that had obtained only 5% during elections. This had become a moral problem". Her former colleagues from Yabloko and Union of Right Forces Sergey Mitrokhin and Leonid Gozman have accused Yelena Mizulina of changing her political affiliation to keep up with political trends.After the Union of Right Forces lost the 2003 legislative elections, Mizulina, no longer an elected parliament member, was appointed to the Constitutional Court of Russia as the representative of the Duma. In this position, she was a proponent of local governors being no longer elected but rather directly nominated by the president of the Russian Federation.As a member of the Constitutional Court, she also worked as the Deputy Head of the Legal Department of the Duma and she graduated from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in 2005.In 2007, she was elected to the Duma as a member of A Just Russia party. In January 2008, she became the chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. Originally A Just Russia put forward another candidate, Svetlana Goryacheva, for this position, which was not well accepted by the United Russia party, and Mizulina's candidature was offered as a compromise.In 2010, Mizulina received a medal from the World Congress of Families.In 2011, she was re-elected to the Duma as a member of the A Just Russia party. Since December 2011, she is the Chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs.On March 17, 2014, the next day after the Crimean status referendum, Mizulina became one of the first seven persons who were put by President Obama under executive sanctions. The sanctions freeze her assets in the US and ban her from entering the United States.On January 23, 2017 she announced her intention to quit A Just Russia.Yelena Mizulina is among the lead authors of a set of controversial legislative projects including:On November 14, 2012, Yelena Muzilina declared that the 'prophylactic goals' of Internet Restriction Bill of ' acquiring a safe information space on the web without making use of punitive measures' had been accomplished. She also disclosed a possible future legislative project that would prevent access to sites previously included in the Russian Internet blacklist. Among such portals are expected to fall rublacklist.net belonging to Pirate Party of Russia.Yelena Mizulina in recent times became concerned with birth rates, in her role as Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. In an interview with Vladimir Posner she has expressed the following views: "Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survival ... I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued".Yelena Muzilina believes in limiting women's right to abortion. She has proposed to let abortions remain free of charge only for medical reasons and in cases of rape. In all other cases, she believes abortions should be billed to the abortion-seeking woman. She has also publicly spoken out against abortions being carried out in private medical institutions, and in favor of a ban on selling products that result in abortions without a prescription from a physician. She believes in obtaining the consent of the husband by all married women before carrying out an abortion, and in the case of underaged women – the consent of their parents.In July 2013, Yelena Mizulina was part of a group of members of parliament that proposed legislation affecting the Offences Code of Russia that would result in a fine of 1 million rubles on doctors and medical institutions that carried out abortions on women without providing them a 'waiting period' to reflect on their decision to abort. It was also proposed to fine the pregnant women that did not respect this "quiet time" up to 3,000–5,000 rubles.Yelena Mizulina has expressed strong views concerning the adoption of Russian children by US citizens: "This is just mean, not to say despicable. Russia has never defended its interest at the expense of children". Two month later, she voted for the Anti-Magnitsky bill, a law that bans United States citizens from adopting Russian children.In June 2012, the Duma Committee on matters of Family that Mizulina presides, rendered public a project entitled "The State Concept of Family Policy until 2025", which proposes amongst other things, several controversial elements including the following:Opposition journalists including Alexander Nikonov have speculated that the divorce of Vladimir Putin that took place two days after the publication of the legislative project was precipitated by the proposed fine on divorce.After the publication of the "Concept", it was pointed out that some of the positions described in it had been plagiarized verbatim from a school report published in a free access on the Internet, which itself was plagiarized from a curriculum on family studies in the Tomsk Polytechnic University.In this context, she has also called for the removal from Russian airwaves of the satirical cartoon "South Park".Yelena Mizulina believes in raising the age of consent in sexual relations in Russia from 16 to 18 years.Contrary to the clause 30 of Citizen's health protection Law of Russia, she proposed to ban surrogate motherhood pointing out that the latter threatens not just for Russia to survive but also to the survival of entire humanity and is an analogy to the banning of nuclear weapons.Yelena Mizulina is the author of several legislative projects directed against "propaganda of homosexuality" including the infamous Russian LGBT propaganda law. She believes that the phrase "gays are people too" should be considered potentially extremist by the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare. Yelena Mizulina is also in favor of confiscating children from gay parents, including biological parents.In July 2013, Mizulina and , her deputy in the Duma Committee, filed a complaint at the Institution of Criminal Proceedings against the LGBT rights activist Nikolay Alexeyev. According to Mizulina, Alexeyev is the "leader" of the LGBT community and has launched a campaign to discredit her, "to the detriment of Russia as a whole". Mizulina intends to ask for Alexeyev's punishment to be "in the form of compulsory work in a place where he can not proceed with propaganda, for example, driving a hearse". Representatives of the LGBT community have also appealed to the prosecutor's office with a complaint against Mizulina for inciting hatred against homosexuals and for infringing on the LGBT rights in Russia.Yelena Mizulina has accused several of her political opponents of belonging to a so-called "pedophile lobby" She first suggested that "in the depths of the United Russia party there was a "pedophile lobby" that was against toughening the law on sexual offenses against minors in 2011 during the evaluation of the Criminal Code of Russia.Those opposing the law on On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development were also accused by Yelena Mizulina of being part of a "pedophile lobby". In 2012, in regard to the Russian-language Wikipedia protest against the Duma's reading of the bill On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development, Mizulina said:This is a coverup. Wikipedia itself is not threatened. I too use Wikipedia. Notice, how only the Russian-language version was closed down. Therefore [I believe that ..] this is an attempt to blackmail the Russian parliament. Behind this there stands a lobby, and suspicions are high that it is "pedophile lobby".In June 2013, the writer and former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch published an article concerning Mizulina's son that lives in Belgium and works for the large international law firm called Mayer Brown that sponsors pro-gay associations and organizations and is among the hundreds on pro-LGBT rights organizations in Belgium, whilst his mother is waging war on homosexuality in Russia. In response to this, Mizulina accused Koch of being a member of a "pedophile lobby". The journalist Andrei Malgin wrote a piece in his blog entitled "Great: anyone that Mizulina doesn't like is a "pedophile lobby".In July 2016, "The Moscow Times "reported that Senator Mizulina had proposed amendments to present legislation to downgrade spousal and child abuse from a criminal offense to an administrative misdemeanor offense. Mizulina publicly stated her opinion that the present laws against domestic violence, in which the convicted are subject to fines and a two-year prison sentence, are "absurd" suggesting that such a punishment is excessive for "just a slap."On 11 January 2017, during the first reading of the law, 368 Russian lawmakers voted in favour of the law, one deputy voted against and another abstained.In June 2013, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal investigation concerning the alleged defamation of Mizulina by a group of people consisting of:According to Yelena Mizulina bloggers disseminated false information concerning her alleged intention to ban oral sex in Russia. Ksenia Sobchak has communicated to the press that she was interrogated by an investigator on the topic of oral sex. Similarly, Alfred Koch claims that he was interrogated for three hours concerning the "gay-oral phobia of Mizulina" and his position concerning the latter.The Russian political scientist Mark Urnov has described the laws instigated by Yelena Mizulina as "diverse, but having a single common quality – their capacity to spread intolerance. They are simply a legal expression of the intolerance and the suppression of everything that corresponds to one's personal views in regard to what is right and wrong".The writer Dmitri Bykov believes that Yelena Mizulina is "constantly providing a legislative form for things that should remain a question of personal choice, which is far more dangerous than any gay pride parade".In April 2019 Mizulina was widely quoted for her statement in defense of Russian Internet censorship laws, which were characterized as Orwellian by many journalists:Yelena Mizulina is married and has two adult children.Her husband Mikhail Muzilin holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a docent at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He was the head of the Yabloko party headquarters in Yaroslavl. He has also formerly served as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Yaroslavl State University.Her son Nikolay Mizulin lives in Brussels with his wife and two children where he works as a lawyer in the firm Mayer Brown. This family connection caused a controversy when former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch alleged that Nikolay's employer (allegedly gay-friendly) might be in breach of the anti-gay laws instigated by Russian government and spearheaded by Nikolay's mother. After the publication, Alfred Koch was interrogated by Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for three hours, based on accusations by Yelena Mizulina. Also, Mizulina was quoted as saying that Alfred Koch is a part of "paedophile lobby", trying to hinder the Russian government's campaign against sexual criminals.Mizulina's daughter Ekaterina is the head of the Moscow Fund of Social-Legal Initiatives "The Rights Capital" (in Russian "Правовая столица"), a firm that acts as a financial intermediary, publishing and advertising, which was reported to belong in fact to Yelena Mizulina.In the law proposed by Yelena Mizulina entitled "Concept of the State Family Policy until 2025." (in Russian "Концепции государственной семейной политики до 2025 года"), she has defined the 'ideal family' as marriage with the goal of commonly bringing up three or more children'. In this law she also proposes several generations of Russian parents, children and grandchildren should inhabit the same place. In a recent interview with the opposition radio station Echo of Moscow, Mizulina when asked why she herself had not conformed with the 'ideal family' she responded the following way: "I wanted three children, Misha [Mikhail – her husband] also wanted three. But things happen as they did. Fate has given us two".In 1994, a polemic broke out when she requested a larger state-provided flat in the goal of exotic cat breeding. | [
"Union of Right Forces",
"A Just Russia"
] |
|
Which political party did Yelena Mizulina belong to in 02/03/1997? | February 03, 1997 | {
"text": [
"Yabloko"
]
} | L2_Q4292925_P102_0 | Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Yabloko from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2001.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the A Just Russia from Jan, 2007 to Dec, 2022.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Union of Right Forces from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. | Yelena MizulinaYelena Borisovna Mizulina (, born December 9, 1954) is a Russian politician serving as a member of the Russian Parliament between 1995 and 2003 and again since 2007. Since 2012, she has been the center of attention in regard to a set of controversial laws concerning the rights of the LGBT community in Russia and the adoption of Russian orphan children by foreigners. She is currently Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. She has changed her political affiliation several times, having served public office on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the liberal Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties and is currently representing the region of Omsk in the Duma as a representative of the social democratic A Just Russia party.She holds a doctoral degree in Law. She has received distinctions in Russia for her work as a lawyer including the Honoured Lawyer of Russia title.Due to the Crimean crisis, she was sanctioned by Canada and the United States on March 17, 2014.Yelena Borisovna Mizulina was born on December 9, 1954, in the city of Buy in Kostroma Oblast, Soviet Union. In 1972 she began studying at the Faculty of Law and History of the Yaroslavl State University where she first met her future husband Mikhail Mizulin. They were married after their fourth year as undergraduates at university. She graduated in 1977 with a law degree and worked as a research assistant of the same university.Between 1977 and 1984, she worked as a consultant, and then from 1984, as head consultant in the Yaroslavl regional court. In parallel she obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree via distance learning from the Kazan State University. In 1983 she successfully defended a dissertation entitled "The nature of supervisory review in the criminal process (based on the material provided by the Yaroslavl Regional Court)".In 1985, she became Senior Research Associate to Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky. Her husband later confessed that he had taken advantage of his job as the head of the ideology in the Yaroslavl Oblast to obtain the job for Yelena. In 1987, Muzilina obtained the status of head of department of Russian history, heading the faculty until 1990. She remained a member of the Communist Party until 1991.In 1992, she obtained a Doctor of Science in Law degree (see Education in Russia) entitled "Criminal code: the concept of self-limiting country" at the Institute of State and Law. In regard to this dissertation Yelena Mizulina has publicly declared the following: "It seemed that what I wrote was unique, and that I was indeed a learned person of God" (in Russian "казалось, что то, что я написала — уникально, что я, действительно, учёный от Бога"). Between 1992 and 1995, she was a docent and subsequently a professor at Yaroslavl State University.In 1993, she joined the Russian legislature from the political union "The Russian Choice" and was elected to the Federal Council (upper house of parliament in the Russian Federation), where she became the Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Legislation and Judicial and Legal Matters, a member of the Committee on Regulation of Parliamentary Procedures.In 1995, she joined the opposition pro-democratic political party Yabloko and the group "Reformi – the new direction" (in Russian "Реформы — новый курс"). From 1995 and on, she was the head of the Yaroslavl regional and public organisation Ravnovsie (in Russian "Равновесие" he Federation Council).In December 1995, Muzilina was elected a member of parliament Duma from the Kirov region representing the political party Yabloko. As a result, she resigned her position in the Federation Council in January 1996.As a parliament member of the Duma, she held the position of the Deputy Chairman of Committee on Legislation and Judicial-legal Reforms and Deputy of the Subcommittee on Matters of State building and Constitutional Rights of Citizens. Muzilina was also involved in the legal implementation of the failed attempt to carry out the impeachment of Boris Yeltsin.In December 1999, she was elected member of Russian parliament, the Duma, from the Yabloko party. In July 2000, she became the head of the 'Yaroslavl Union of Democratic Forces' (in Russian "Ярославский союз демократических сил"), which was composed of members of the Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces.In February 2001, she announced that she would discontinue her membership in the Yabloko party and in June of the same year she joined the Union of Right Forces party.She explained her decision to leave Yabloko by the fact that she was "ashamed to be in a party that had obtained only 5% during elections. This had become a moral problem". Her former colleagues from Yabloko and Union of Right Forces Sergey Mitrokhin and Leonid Gozman have accused Yelena Mizulina of changing her political affiliation to keep up with political trends.After the Union of Right Forces lost the 2003 legislative elections, Mizulina, no longer an elected parliament member, was appointed to the Constitutional Court of Russia as the representative of the Duma. In this position, she was a proponent of local governors being no longer elected but rather directly nominated by the president of the Russian Federation.As a member of the Constitutional Court, she also worked as the Deputy Head of the Legal Department of the Duma and she graduated from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in 2005.In 2007, she was elected to the Duma as a member of A Just Russia party. In January 2008, she became the chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. Originally A Just Russia put forward another candidate, Svetlana Goryacheva, for this position, which was not well accepted by the United Russia party, and Mizulina's candidature was offered as a compromise.In 2010, Mizulina received a medal from the World Congress of Families.In 2011, she was re-elected to the Duma as a member of the A Just Russia party. Since December 2011, she is the Chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs.On March 17, 2014, the next day after the Crimean status referendum, Mizulina became one of the first seven persons who were put by President Obama under executive sanctions. The sanctions freeze her assets in the US and ban her from entering the United States.On January 23, 2017 she announced her intention to quit A Just Russia.Yelena Mizulina is among the lead authors of a set of controversial legislative projects including:On November 14, 2012, Yelena Muzilina declared that the 'prophylactic goals' of Internet Restriction Bill of ' acquiring a safe information space on the web without making use of punitive measures' had been accomplished. She also disclosed a possible future legislative project that would prevent access to sites previously included in the Russian Internet blacklist. Among such portals are expected to fall rublacklist.net belonging to Pirate Party of Russia.Yelena Mizulina in recent times became concerned with birth rates, in her role as Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. In an interview with Vladimir Posner she has expressed the following views: "Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survival ... I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued".Yelena Muzilina believes in limiting women's right to abortion. She has proposed to let abortions remain free of charge only for medical reasons and in cases of rape. In all other cases, she believes abortions should be billed to the abortion-seeking woman. She has also publicly spoken out against abortions being carried out in private medical institutions, and in favor of a ban on selling products that result in abortions without a prescription from a physician. She believes in obtaining the consent of the husband by all married women before carrying out an abortion, and in the case of underaged women – the consent of their parents.In July 2013, Yelena Mizulina was part of a group of members of parliament that proposed legislation affecting the Offences Code of Russia that would result in a fine of 1 million rubles on doctors and medical institutions that carried out abortions on women without providing them a 'waiting period' to reflect on their decision to abort. It was also proposed to fine the pregnant women that did not respect this "quiet time" up to 3,000–5,000 rubles.Yelena Mizulina has expressed strong views concerning the adoption of Russian children by US citizens: "This is just mean, not to say despicable. Russia has never defended its interest at the expense of children". Two month later, she voted for the Anti-Magnitsky bill, a law that bans United States citizens from adopting Russian children.In June 2012, the Duma Committee on matters of Family that Mizulina presides, rendered public a project entitled "The State Concept of Family Policy until 2025", which proposes amongst other things, several controversial elements including the following:Opposition journalists including Alexander Nikonov have speculated that the divorce of Vladimir Putin that took place two days after the publication of the legislative project was precipitated by the proposed fine on divorce.After the publication of the "Concept", it was pointed out that some of the positions described in it had been plagiarized verbatim from a school report published in a free access on the Internet, which itself was plagiarized from a curriculum on family studies in the Tomsk Polytechnic University.In this context, she has also called for the removal from Russian airwaves of the satirical cartoon "South Park".Yelena Mizulina believes in raising the age of consent in sexual relations in Russia from 16 to 18 years.Contrary to the clause 30 of Citizen's health protection Law of Russia, she proposed to ban surrogate motherhood pointing out that the latter threatens not just for Russia to survive but also to the survival of entire humanity and is an analogy to the banning of nuclear weapons.Yelena Mizulina is the author of several legislative projects directed against "propaganda of homosexuality" including the infamous Russian LGBT propaganda law. She believes that the phrase "gays are people too" should be considered potentially extremist by the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare. Yelena Mizulina is also in favor of confiscating children from gay parents, including biological parents.In July 2013, Mizulina and , her deputy in the Duma Committee, filed a complaint at the Institution of Criminal Proceedings against the LGBT rights activist Nikolay Alexeyev. According to Mizulina, Alexeyev is the "leader" of the LGBT community and has launched a campaign to discredit her, "to the detriment of Russia as a whole". Mizulina intends to ask for Alexeyev's punishment to be "in the form of compulsory work in a place where he can not proceed with propaganda, for example, driving a hearse". Representatives of the LGBT community have also appealed to the prosecutor's office with a complaint against Mizulina for inciting hatred against homosexuals and for infringing on the LGBT rights in Russia.Yelena Mizulina has accused several of her political opponents of belonging to a so-called "pedophile lobby" She first suggested that "in the depths of the United Russia party there was a "pedophile lobby" that was against toughening the law on sexual offenses against minors in 2011 during the evaluation of the Criminal Code of Russia.Those opposing the law on On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development were also accused by Yelena Mizulina of being part of a "pedophile lobby". In 2012, in regard to the Russian-language Wikipedia protest against the Duma's reading of the bill On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development, Mizulina said:This is a coverup. Wikipedia itself is not threatened. I too use Wikipedia. Notice, how only the Russian-language version was closed down. Therefore [I believe that ..] this is an attempt to blackmail the Russian parliament. Behind this there stands a lobby, and suspicions are high that it is "pedophile lobby".In June 2013, the writer and former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch published an article concerning Mizulina's son that lives in Belgium and works for the large international law firm called Mayer Brown that sponsors pro-gay associations and organizations and is among the hundreds on pro-LGBT rights organizations in Belgium, whilst his mother is waging war on homosexuality in Russia. In response to this, Mizulina accused Koch of being a member of a "pedophile lobby". The journalist Andrei Malgin wrote a piece in his blog entitled "Great: anyone that Mizulina doesn't like is a "pedophile lobby".In July 2016, "The Moscow Times "reported that Senator Mizulina had proposed amendments to present legislation to downgrade spousal and child abuse from a criminal offense to an administrative misdemeanor offense. Mizulina publicly stated her opinion that the present laws against domestic violence, in which the convicted are subject to fines and a two-year prison sentence, are "absurd" suggesting that such a punishment is excessive for "just a slap."On 11 January 2017, during the first reading of the law, 368 Russian lawmakers voted in favour of the law, one deputy voted against and another abstained.In June 2013, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal investigation concerning the alleged defamation of Mizulina by a group of people consisting of:According to Yelena Mizulina bloggers disseminated false information concerning her alleged intention to ban oral sex in Russia. Ksenia Sobchak has communicated to the press that she was interrogated by an investigator on the topic of oral sex. Similarly, Alfred Koch claims that he was interrogated for three hours concerning the "gay-oral phobia of Mizulina" and his position concerning the latter.The Russian political scientist Mark Urnov has described the laws instigated by Yelena Mizulina as "diverse, but having a single common quality – their capacity to spread intolerance. They are simply a legal expression of the intolerance and the suppression of everything that corresponds to one's personal views in regard to what is right and wrong".The writer Dmitri Bykov believes that Yelena Mizulina is "constantly providing a legislative form for things that should remain a question of personal choice, which is far more dangerous than any gay pride parade".In April 2019 Mizulina was widely quoted for her statement in defense of Russian Internet censorship laws, which were characterized as Orwellian by many journalists:Yelena Mizulina is married and has two adult children.Her husband Mikhail Muzilin holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a docent at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He was the head of the Yabloko party headquarters in Yaroslavl. He has also formerly served as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Yaroslavl State University.Her son Nikolay Mizulin lives in Brussels with his wife and two children where he works as a lawyer in the firm Mayer Brown. This family connection caused a controversy when former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch alleged that Nikolay's employer (allegedly gay-friendly) might be in breach of the anti-gay laws instigated by Russian government and spearheaded by Nikolay's mother. After the publication, Alfred Koch was interrogated by Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for three hours, based on accusations by Yelena Mizulina. Also, Mizulina was quoted as saying that Alfred Koch is a part of "paedophile lobby", trying to hinder the Russian government's campaign against sexual criminals.Mizulina's daughter Ekaterina is the head of the Moscow Fund of Social-Legal Initiatives "The Rights Capital" (in Russian "Правовая столица"), a firm that acts as a financial intermediary, publishing and advertising, which was reported to belong in fact to Yelena Mizulina.In the law proposed by Yelena Mizulina entitled "Concept of the State Family Policy until 2025." (in Russian "Концепции государственной семейной политики до 2025 года"), she has defined the 'ideal family' as marriage with the goal of commonly bringing up three or more children'. In this law she also proposes several generations of Russian parents, children and grandchildren should inhabit the same place. In a recent interview with the opposition radio station Echo of Moscow, Mizulina when asked why she herself had not conformed with the 'ideal family' she responded the following way: "I wanted three children, Misha [Mikhail – her husband] also wanted three. But things happen as they did. Fate has given us two".In 1994, a polemic broke out when she requested a larger state-provided flat in the goal of exotic cat breeding. | [
"Union of Right Forces",
"A Just Russia"
] |
|
Which political party did Yelena Mizulina belong to in 03-Feb-199703-February-1997? | February 03, 1997 | {
"text": [
"Yabloko"
]
} | L2_Q4292925_P102_0 | Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Yabloko from Jan, 1995 to Jan, 2001.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the A Just Russia from Jan, 2007 to Dec, 2022.
Yelena Mizulina is a member of the Union of Right Forces from Jan, 2001 to Jan, 2003. | Yelena MizulinaYelena Borisovna Mizulina (, born December 9, 1954) is a Russian politician serving as a member of the Russian Parliament between 1995 and 2003 and again since 2007. Since 2012, she has been the center of attention in regard to a set of controversial laws concerning the rights of the LGBT community in Russia and the adoption of Russian orphan children by foreigners. She is currently Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. She has changed her political affiliation several times, having served public office on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the liberal Yabloko and Union of Right Forces parties and is currently representing the region of Omsk in the Duma as a representative of the social democratic A Just Russia party.She holds a doctoral degree in Law. She has received distinctions in Russia for her work as a lawyer including the Honoured Lawyer of Russia title.Due to the Crimean crisis, she was sanctioned by Canada and the United States on March 17, 2014.Yelena Borisovna Mizulina was born on December 9, 1954, in the city of Buy in Kostroma Oblast, Soviet Union. In 1972 she began studying at the Faculty of Law and History of the Yaroslavl State University where she first met her future husband Mikhail Mizulin. They were married after their fourth year as undergraduates at university. She graduated in 1977 with a law degree and worked as a research assistant of the same university.Between 1977 and 1984, she worked as a consultant, and then from 1984, as head consultant in the Yaroslavl regional court. In parallel she obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree via distance learning from the Kazan State University. In 1983 she successfully defended a dissertation entitled "The nature of supervisory review in the criminal process (based on the material provided by the Yaroslavl Regional Court)".In 1985, she became Senior Research Associate to Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky. Her husband later confessed that he had taken advantage of his job as the head of the ideology in the Yaroslavl Oblast to obtain the job for Yelena. In 1987, Muzilina obtained the status of head of department of Russian history, heading the faculty until 1990. She remained a member of the Communist Party until 1991.In 1992, she obtained a Doctor of Science in Law degree (see Education in Russia) entitled "Criminal code: the concept of self-limiting country" at the Institute of State and Law. In regard to this dissertation Yelena Mizulina has publicly declared the following: "It seemed that what I wrote was unique, and that I was indeed a learned person of God" (in Russian "казалось, что то, что я написала — уникально, что я, действительно, учёный от Бога"). Between 1992 and 1995, she was a docent and subsequently a professor at Yaroslavl State University.In 1993, she joined the Russian legislature from the political union "The Russian Choice" and was elected to the Federal Council (upper house of parliament in the Russian Federation), where she became the Deputy Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Legislation and Judicial and Legal Matters, a member of the Committee on Regulation of Parliamentary Procedures.In 1995, she joined the opposition pro-democratic political party Yabloko and the group "Reformi – the new direction" (in Russian "Реформы — новый курс"). From 1995 and on, she was the head of the Yaroslavl regional and public organisation Ravnovsie (in Russian "Равновесие" he Federation Council).In December 1995, Muzilina was elected a member of parliament Duma from the Kirov region representing the political party Yabloko. As a result, she resigned her position in the Federation Council in January 1996.As a parliament member of the Duma, she held the position of the Deputy Chairman of Committee on Legislation and Judicial-legal Reforms and Deputy of the Subcommittee on Matters of State building and Constitutional Rights of Citizens. Muzilina was also involved in the legal implementation of the failed attempt to carry out the impeachment of Boris Yeltsin.In December 1999, she was elected member of Russian parliament, the Duma, from the Yabloko party. In July 2000, she became the head of the 'Yaroslavl Union of Democratic Forces' (in Russian "Ярославский союз демократических сил"), which was composed of members of the Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces.In February 2001, she announced that she would discontinue her membership in the Yabloko party and in June of the same year she joined the Union of Right Forces party.She explained her decision to leave Yabloko by the fact that she was "ashamed to be in a party that had obtained only 5% during elections. This had become a moral problem". Her former colleagues from Yabloko and Union of Right Forces Sergey Mitrokhin and Leonid Gozman have accused Yelena Mizulina of changing her political affiliation to keep up with political trends.After the Union of Right Forces lost the 2003 legislative elections, Mizulina, no longer an elected parliament member, was appointed to the Constitutional Court of Russia as the representative of the Duma. In this position, she was a proponent of local governors being no longer elected but rather directly nominated by the president of the Russian Federation.As a member of the Constitutional Court, she also worked as the Deputy Head of the Legal Department of the Duma and she graduated from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in 2005.In 2007, she was elected to the Duma as a member of A Just Russia party. In January 2008, she became the chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. Originally A Just Russia put forward another candidate, Svetlana Goryacheva, for this position, which was not well accepted by the United Russia party, and Mizulina's candidature was offered as a compromise.In 2010, Mizulina received a medal from the World Congress of Families.In 2011, she was re-elected to the Duma as a member of the A Just Russia party. Since December 2011, she is the Chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs.On March 17, 2014, the next day after the Crimean status referendum, Mizulina became one of the first seven persons who were put by President Obama under executive sanctions. The sanctions freeze her assets in the US and ban her from entering the United States.On January 23, 2017 she announced her intention to quit A Just Russia.Yelena Mizulina is among the lead authors of a set of controversial legislative projects including:On November 14, 2012, Yelena Muzilina declared that the 'prophylactic goals' of Internet Restriction Bill of ' acquiring a safe information space on the web without making use of punitive measures' had been accomplished. She also disclosed a possible future legislative project that would prevent access to sites previously included in the Russian Internet blacklist. Among such portals are expected to fall rublacklist.net belonging to Pirate Party of Russia.Yelena Mizulina in recent times became concerned with birth rates, in her role as Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs. In an interview with Vladimir Posner she has expressed the following views: "Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survival ... I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued".Yelena Muzilina believes in limiting women's right to abortion. She has proposed to let abortions remain free of charge only for medical reasons and in cases of rape. In all other cases, she believes abortions should be billed to the abortion-seeking woman. She has also publicly spoken out against abortions being carried out in private medical institutions, and in favor of a ban on selling products that result in abortions without a prescription from a physician. She believes in obtaining the consent of the husband by all married women before carrying out an abortion, and in the case of underaged women – the consent of their parents.In July 2013, Yelena Mizulina was part of a group of members of parliament that proposed legislation affecting the Offences Code of Russia that would result in a fine of 1 million rubles on doctors and medical institutions that carried out abortions on women without providing them a 'waiting period' to reflect on their decision to abort. It was also proposed to fine the pregnant women that did not respect this "quiet time" up to 3,000–5,000 rubles.Yelena Mizulina has expressed strong views concerning the adoption of Russian children by US citizens: "This is just mean, not to say despicable. Russia has never defended its interest at the expense of children". Two month later, she voted for the Anti-Magnitsky bill, a law that bans United States citizens from adopting Russian children.In June 2012, the Duma Committee on matters of Family that Mizulina presides, rendered public a project entitled "The State Concept of Family Policy until 2025", which proposes amongst other things, several controversial elements including the following:Opposition journalists including Alexander Nikonov have speculated that the divorce of Vladimir Putin that took place two days after the publication of the legislative project was precipitated by the proposed fine on divorce.After the publication of the "Concept", it was pointed out that some of the positions described in it had been plagiarized verbatim from a school report published in a free access on the Internet, which itself was plagiarized from a curriculum on family studies in the Tomsk Polytechnic University.In this context, she has also called for the removal from Russian airwaves of the satirical cartoon "South Park".Yelena Mizulina believes in raising the age of consent in sexual relations in Russia from 16 to 18 years.Contrary to the clause 30 of Citizen's health protection Law of Russia, she proposed to ban surrogate motherhood pointing out that the latter threatens not just for Russia to survive but also to the survival of entire humanity and is an analogy to the banning of nuclear weapons.Yelena Mizulina is the author of several legislative projects directed against "propaganda of homosexuality" including the infamous Russian LGBT propaganda law. She believes that the phrase "gays are people too" should be considered potentially extremist by the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare. Yelena Mizulina is also in favor of confiscating children from gay parents, including biological parents.In July 2013, Mizulina and , her deputy in the Duma Committee, filed a complaint at the Institution of Criminal Proceedings against the LGBT rights activist Nikolay Alexeyev. According to Mizulina, Alexeyev is the "leader" of the LGBT community and has launched a campaign to discredit her, "to the detriment of Russia as a whole". Mizulina intends to ask for Alexeyev's punishment to be "in the form of compulsory work in a place where he can not proceed with propaganda, for example, driving a hearse". Representatives of the LGBT community have also appealed to the prosecutor's office with a complaint against Mizulina for inciting hatred against homosexuals and for infringing on the LGBT rights in Russia.Yelena Mizulina has accused several of her political opponents of belonging to a so-called "pedophile lobby" She first suggested that "in the depths of the United Russia party there was a "pedophile lobby" that was against toughening the law on sexual offenses against minors in 2011 during the evaluation of the Criminal Code of Russia.Those opposing the law on On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development were also accused by Yelena Mizulina of being part of a "pedophile lobby". In 2012, in regard to the Russian-language Wikipedia protest against the Duma's reading of the bill On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development, Mizulina said:This is a coverup. Wikipedia itself is not threatened. I too use Wikipedia. Notice, how only the Russian-language version was closed down. Therefore [I believe that ..] this is an attempt to blackmail the Russian parliament. Behind this there stands a lobby, and suspicions are high that it is "pedophile lobby".In June 2013, the writer and former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch published an article concerning Mizulina's son that lives in Belgium and works for the large international law firm called Mayer Brown that sponsors pro-gay associations and organizations and is among the hundreds on pro-LGBT rights organizations in Belgium, whilst his mother is waging war on homosexuality in Russia. In response to this, Mizulina accused Koch of being a member of a "pedophile lobby". The journalist Andrei Malgin wrote a piece in his blog entitled "Great: anyone that Mizulina doesn't like is a "pedophile lobby".In July 2016, "The Moscow Times "reported that Senator Mizulina had proposed amendments to present legislation to downgrade spousal and child abuse from a criminal offense to an administrative misdemeanor offense. Mizulina publicly stated her opinion that the present laws against domestic violence, in which the convicted are subject to fines and a two-year prison sentence, are "absurd" suggesting that such a punishment is excessive for "just a slap."On 11 January 2017, during the first reading of the law, 368 Russian lawmakers voted in favour of the law, one deputy voted against and another abstained.In June 2013, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal investigation concerning the alleged defamation of Mizulina by a group of people consisting of:According to Yelena Mizulina bloggers disseminated false information concerning her alleged intention to ban oral sex in Russia. Ksenia Sobchak has communicated to the press that she was interrogated by an investigator on the topic of oral sex. Similarly, Alfred Koch claims that he was interrogated for three hours concerning the "gay-oral phobia of Mizulina" and his position concerning the latter.The Russian political scientist Mark Urnov has described the laws instigated by Yelena Mizulina as "diverse, but having a single common quality – their capacity to spread intolerance. They are simply a legal expression of the intolerance and the suppression of everything that corresponds to one's personal views in regard to what is right and wrong".The writer Dmitri Bykov believes that Yelena Mizulina is "constantly providing a legislative form for things that should remain a question of personal choice, which is far more dangerous than any gay pride parade".In April 2019 Mizulina was widely quoted for her statement in defense of Russian Internet censorship laws, which were characterized as Orwellian by many journalists:Yelena Mizulina is married and has two adult children.Her husband Mikhail Muzilin holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a docent at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. He was the head of the Yabloko party headquarters in Yaroslavl. He has also formerly served as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Yaroslavl State University.Her son Nikolay Mizulin lives in Brussels with his wife and two children where he works as a lawyer in the firm Mayer Brown. This family connection caused a controversy when former Russian Vice Prime Minister Alfred Koch alleged that Nikolay's employer (allegedly gay-friendly) might be in breach of the anti-gay laws instigated by Russian government and spearheaded by Nikolay's mother. After the publication, Alfred Koch was interrogated by Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for three hours, based on accusations by Yelena Mizulina. Also, Mizulina was quoted as saying that Alfred Koch is a part of "paedophile lobby", trying to hinder the Russian government's campaign against sexual criminals.Mizulina's daughter Ekaterina is the head of the Moscow Fund of Social-Legal Initiatives "The Rights Capital" (in Russian "Правовая столица"), a firm that acts as a financial intermediary, publishing and advertising, which was reported to belong in fact to Yelena Mizulina.In the law proposed by Yelena Mizulina entitled "Concept of the State Family Policy until 2025." (in Russian "Концепции государственной семейной политики до 2025 года"), she has defined the 'ideal family' as marriage with the goal of commonly bringing up three or more children'. In this law she also proposes several generations of Russian parents, children and grandchildren should inhabit the same place. In a recent interview with the opposition radio station Echo of Moscow, Mizulina when asked why she herself had not conformed with the 'ideal family' she responded the following way: "I wanted three children, Misha [Mikhail – her husband] also wanted three. But things happen as they did. Fate has given us two".In 1994, a polemic broke out when she requested a larger state-provided flat in the goal of exotic cat breeding. | [
"Union of Right Forces",
"A Just Russia"
] |
|
Which team did Kyle Macy play for in Nov, 1977? | November 21, 1977 | {
"text": [
"Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball"
]
} | L2_Q1155161_P54_1 | Kyle Macy plays for Pallacanestro Treviso from Jan, 1988 to Jan, 1990.
Kyle Macy plays for Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball from Jan, 1977 to Jan, 1980.
Kyle Macy plays for Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1976. | Kyle MacyKyle Paul Macy (born April 9, 1957) is an assistant coach for the Transylvania University Pioneers men's basketball team. Macy, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in Peru, Indiana, played college basketball at Purdue University and the University of Kentucky, and spent seven years in the NBA with the Phoenix Suns, Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers; he then spent three seasons in the Italian Lega Serie A. After his playing career, he has held various basketball-related positions, including coach, general manager, and broadcaster.The 1975 Indiana "Mr. Basketball" Award winner from Peru High School, where he played for his father, Bob; chose to attend Purdue University, coached by head coach, Fred Schaus. Macy averaged 13.8 points a game as a freshman, while leading the Boilermakers in free throws, shooting .859 percent from the line on the season. He started in 25 of 27 games, helping them to a 16–11 season record.After playing his freshman year at Purdue, Macy transferred to the University of Kentucky in 1976. After sitting out the 1976–77 season as mandated by NCAA rules, he started playing at Kentucky in 1977. Macy had a very successful college career, as a three-time All-America and three-time All-SEC player. The 1978 team on which Macy was a starter won the 1978 NCAA National Championship. In his senior year of 1979–80, he became the first Kentucky player ever to be named consensus Southeastern Conference Player of the Year.Macy was selected with the 22nd pick of the 1979 NBA Draft by the Phoenix Suns, even though he had a year of college eligibility remaining. Macy played out his last year of college, and started playing for the Suns in 1980. Macy spent five years with the Suns, averaging 10.6 points and 4.0 assists per game. Macy spent one year each with the Chicago Bulls (1985–86) and the Indiana Pacers (1986–87) before retiring from the NBA. Then he played professionally in Italy for Dietor Bologna (1987–88) and Benetton Treviso (1988–90). Macy was also one of the original participants of the NBA All-Star Three Point Contest when it debuted in 1986.Macy was an excellent free throw shooter throughout his career. During the 1981-82 NBA season he led the NBA in free throw percentage. He still holds the career free throw shooting percentage record at the University of Kentucky, and his .884 career percentage is second only to Steve Nash (.907) on the Phoenix Suns' career leaders list.Macy was head coach of the Morehead State University Eagles of the Ohio Valley Conference for nine years. In 2003, Macy coached the Eagles to 20 wins, its most in 19 years, and a share of the OVC regular season championship. However, the 2004–05 season was less successful, as Morehead failed to qualify for the OVC tournament. Following that season, Macy coached a group of Sports Reach collegiate all-stars that toured China and finished with a perfect 7–0 record against several Chinese professional teams. After a disastrous 4–23 season in 2005–06, Macy resigned as head coach on February 28, 2006.Macy emphasized free throw shooting in his coaching, and the emphasis paid off, as his Morehead State teams were perennially among the Division I leaders in free throw shooting percentage.Later in 2006, Macy accepted the head coaching position on the Lexington Christian Academy Eagles Men's tennis team. In his first season they had their first winning season since 2003. In November 2007, Macy was named general manager of the East Kentucky Miners, an expansion team of the Continental Basketball Association, based in Pikeville, Kentucky. Later, he served as the color commentator for University of Kentucky telecasts. In October 2016, Macy joined the staff of head coach Brian Lane at Transylvania University. | [
"Pallacanestro Treviso",
"Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball"
] |
|
Which team did Kyle Macy play for in 1977-11-21? | November 21, 1977 | {
"text": [
"Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball"
]
} | L2_Q1155161_P54_1 | Kyle Macy plays for Pallacanestro Treviso from Jan, 1988 to Jan, 1990.
Kyle Macy plays for Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball from Jan, 1977 to Jan, 1980.
Kyle Macy plays for Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1976. | Kyle MacyKyle Paul Macy (born April 9, 1957) is an assistant coach for the Transylvania University Pioneers men's basketball team. Macy, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in Peru, Indiana, played college basketball at Purdue University and the University of Kentucky, and spent seven years in the NBA with the Phoenix Suns, Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers; he then spent three seasons in the Italian Lega Serie A. After his playing career, he has held various basketball-related positions, including coach, general manager, and broadcaster.The 1975 Indiana "Mr. Basketball" Award winner from Peru High School, where he played for his father, Bob; chose to attend Purdue University, coached by head coach, Fred Schaus. Macy averaged 13.8 points a game as a freshman, while leading the Boilermakers in free throws, shooting .859 percent from the line on the season. He started in 25 of 27 games, helping them to a 16–11 season record.After playing his freshman year at Purdue, Macy transferred to the University of Kentucky in 1976. After sitting out the 1976–77 season as mandated by NCAA rules, he started playing at Kentucky in 1977. Macy had a very successful college career, as a three-time All-America and three-time All-SEC player. The 1978 team on which Macy was a starter won the 1978 NCAA National Championship. In his senior year of 1979–80, he became the first Kentucky player ever to be named consensus Southeastern Conference Player of the Year.Macy was selected with the 22nd pick of the 1979 NBA Draft by the Phoenix Suns, even though he had a year of college eligibility remaining. Macy played out his last year of college, and started playing for the Suns in 1980. Macy spent five years with the Suns, averaging 10.6 points and 4.0 assists per game. Macy spent one year each with the Chicago Bulls (1985–86) and the Indiana Pacers (1986–87) before retiring from the NBA. Then he played professionally in Italy for Dietor Bologna (1987–88) and Benetton Treviso (1988–90). Macy was also one of the original participants of the NBA All-Star Three Point Contest when it debuted in 1986.Macy was an excellent free throw shooter throughout his career. During the 1981-82 NBA season he led the NBA in free throw percentage. He still holds the career free throw shooting percentage record at the University of Kentucky, and his .884 career percentage is second only to Steve Nash (.907) on the Phoenix Suns' career leaders list.Macy was head coach of the Morehead State University Eagles of the Ohio Valley Conference for nine years. In 2003, Macy coached the Eagles to 20 wins, its most in 19 years, and a share of the OVC regular season championship. However, the 2004–05 season was less successful, as Morehead failed to qualify for the OVC tournament. Following that season, Macy coached a group of Sports Reach collegiate all-stars that toured China and finished with a perfect 7–0 record against several Chinese professional teams. After a disastrous 4–23 season in 2005–06, Macy resigned as head coach on February 28, 2006.Macy emphasized free throw shooting in his coaching, and the emphasis paid off, as his Morehead State teams were perennially among the Division I leaders in free throw shooting percentage.Later in 2006, Macy accepted the head coaching position on the Lexington Christian Academy Eagles Men's tennis team. In his first season they had their first winning season since 2003. In November 2007, Macy was named general manager of the East Kentucky Miners, an expansion team of the Continental Basketball Association, based in Pikeville, Kentucky. Later, he served as the color commentator for University of Kentucky telecasts. In October 2016, Macy joined the staff of head coach Brian Lane at Transylvania University. | [
"Pallacanestro Treviso",
"Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball"
] |
|
Which team did Kyle Macy play for in 21/11/1977? | November 21, 1977 | {
"text": [
"Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball"
]
} | L2_Q1155161_P54_1 | Kyle Macy plays for Pallacanestro Treviso from Jan, 1988 to Jan, 1990.
Kyle Macy plays for Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball from Jan, 1977 to Jan, 1980.
Kyle Macy plays for Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1976. | Kyle MacyKyle Paul Macy (born April 9, 1957) is an assistant coach for the Transylvania University Pioneers men's basketball team. Macy, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in Peru, Indiana, played college basketball at Purdue University and the University of Kentucky, and spent seven years in the NBA with the Phoenix Suns, Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers; he then spent three seasons in the Italian Lega Serie A. After his playing career, he has held various basketball-related positions, including coach, general manager, and broadcaster.The 1975 Indiana "Mr. Basketball" Award winner from Peru High School, where he played for his father, Bob; chose to attend Purdue University, coached by head coach, Fred Schaus. Macy averaged 13.8 points a game as a freshman, while leading the Boilermakers in free throws, shooting .859 percent from the line on the season. He started in 25 of 27 games, helping them to a 16–11 season record.After playing his freshman year at Purdue, Macy transferred to the University of Kentucky in 1976. After sitting out the 1976–77 season as mandated by NCAA rules, he started playing at Kentucky in 1977. Macy had a very successful college career, as a three-time All-America and three-time All-SEC player. The 1978 team on which Macy was a starter won the 1978 NCAA National Championship. In his senior year of 1979–80, he became the first Kentucky player ever to be named consensus Southeastern Conference Player of the Year.Macy was selected with the 22nd pick of the 1979 NBA Draft by the Phoenix Suns, even though he had a year of college eligibility remaining. Macy played out his last year of college, and started playing for the Suns in 1980. Macy spent five years with the Suns, averaging 10.6 points and 4.0 assists per game. Macy spent one year each with the Chicago Bulls (1985–86) and the Indiana Pacers (1986–87) before retiring from the NBA. Then he played professionally in Italy for Dietor Bologna (1987–88) and Benetton Treviso (1988–90). Macy was also one of the original participants of the NBA All-Star Three Point Contest when it debuted in 1986.Macy was an excellent free throw shooter throughout his career. During the 1981-82 NBA season he led the NBA in free throw percentage. He still holds the career free throw shooting percentage record at the University of Kentucky, and his .884 career percentage is second only to Steve Nash (.907) on the Phoenix Suns' career leaders list.Macy was head coach of the Morehead State University Eagles of the Ohio Valley Conference for nine years. In 2003, Macy coached the Eagles to 20 wins, its most in 19 years, and a share of the OVC regular season championship. However, the 2004–05 season was less successful, as Morehead failed to qualify for the OVC tournament. Following that season, Macy coached a group of Sports Reach collegiate all-stars that toured China and finished with a perfect 7–0 record against several Chinese professional teams. After a disastrous 4–23 season in 2005–06, Macy resigned as head coach on February 28, 2006.Macy emphasized free throw shooting in his coaching, and the emphasis paid off, as his Morehead State teams were perennially among the Division I leaders in free throw shooting percentage.Later in 2006, Macy accepted the head coaching position on the Lexington Christian Academy Eagles Men's tennis team. In his first season they had their first winning season since 2003. In November 2007, Macy was named general manager of the East Kentucky Miners, an expansion team of the Continental Basketball Association, based in Pikeville, Kentucky. Later, he served as the color commentator for University of Kentucky telecasts. In October 2016, Macy joined the staff of head coach Brian Lane at Transylvania University. | [
"Pallacanestro Treviso",
"Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball"
] |
|
Which team did Kyle Macy play for in Nov 21, 1977? | November 21, 1977 | {
"text": [
"Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball"
]
} | L2_Q1155161_P54_1 | Kyle Macy plays for Pallacanestro Treviso from Jan, 1988 to Jan, 1990.
Kyle Macy plays for Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball from Jan, 1977 to Jan, 1980.
Kyle Macy plays for Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1976. | Kyle MacyKyle Paul Macy (born April 9, 1957) is an assistant coach for the Transylvania University Pioneers men's basketball team. Macy, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in Peru, Indiana, played college basketball at Purdue University and the University of Kentucky, and spent seven years in the NBA with the Phoenix Suns, Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers; he then spent three seasons in the Italian Lega Serie A. After his playing career, he has held various basketball-related positions, including coach, general manager, and broadcaster.The 1975 Indiana "Mr. Basketball" Award winner from Peru High School, where he played for his father, Bob; chose to attend Purdue University, coached by head coach, Fred Schaus. Macy averaged 13.8 points a game as a freshman, while leading the Boilermakers in free throws, shooting .859 percent from the line on the season. He started in 25 of 27 games, helping them to a 16–11 season record.After playing his freshman year at Purdue, Macy transferred to the University of Kentucky in 1976. After sitting out the 1976–77 season as mandated by NCAA rules, he started playing at Kentucky in 1977. Macy had a very successful college career, as a three-time All-America and three-time All-SEC player. The 1978 team on which Macy was a starter won the 1978 NCAA National Championship. In his senior year of 1979–80, he became the first Kentucky player ever to be named consensus Southeastern Conference Player of the Year.Macy was selected with the 22nd pick of the 1979 NBA Draft by the Phoenix Suns, even though he had a year of college eligibility remaining. Macy played out his last year of college, and started playing for the Suns in 1980. Macy spent five years with the Suns, averaging 10.6 points and 4.0 assists per game. Macy spent one year each with the Chicago Bulls (1985–86) and the Indiana Pacers (1986–87) before retiring from the NBA. Then he played professionally in Italy for Dietor Bologna (1987–88) and Benetton Treviso (1988–90). Macy was also one of the original participants of the NBA All-Star Three Point Contest when it debuted in 1986.Macy was an excellent free throw shooter throughout his career. During the 1981-82 NBA season he led the NBA in free throw percentage. He still holds the career free throw shooting percentage record at the University of Kentucky, and his .884 career percentage is second only to Steve Nash (.907) on the Phoenix Suns' career leaders list.Macy was head coach of the Morehead State University Eagles of the Ohio Valley Conference for nine years. In 2003, Macy coached the Eagles to 20 wins, its most in 19 years, and a share of the OVC regular season championship. However, the 2004–05 season was less successful, as Morehead failed to qualify for the OVC tournament. Following that season, Macy coached a group of Sports Reach collegiate all-stars that toured China and finished with a perfect 7–0 record against several Chinese professional teams. After a disastrous 4–23 season in 2005–06, Macy resigned as head coach on February 28, 2006.Macy emphasized free throw shooting in his coaching, and the emphasis paid off, as his Morehead State teams were perennially among the Division I leaders in free throw shooting percentage.Later in 2006, Macy accepted the head coaching position on the Lexington Christian Academy Eagles Men's tennis team. In his first season they had their first winning season since 2003. In November 2007, Macy was named general manager of the East Kentucky Miners, an expansion team of the Continental Basketball Association, based in Pikeville, Kentucky. Later, he served as the color commentator for University of Kentucky telecasts. In October 2016, Macy joined the staff of head coach Brian Lane at Transylvania University. | [
"Pallacanestro Treviso",
"Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball"
] |
|
Which team did Kyle Macy play for in 11/21/1977? | November 21, 1977 | {
"text": [
"Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball"
]
} | L2_Q1155161_P54_1 | Kyle Macy plays for Pallacanestro Treviso from Jan, 1988 to Jan, 1990.
Kyle Macy plays for Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball from Jan, 1977 to Jan, 1980.
Kyle Macy plays for Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1976. | Kyle MacyKyle Paul Macy (born April 9, 1957) is an assistant coach for the Transylvania University Pioneers men's basketball team. Macy, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in Peru, Indiana, played college basketball at Purdue University and the University of Kentucky, and spent seven years in the NBA with the Phoenix Suns, Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers; he then spent three seasons in the Italian Lega Serie A. After his playing career, he has held various basketball-related positions, including coach, general manager, and broadcaster.The 1975 Indiana "Mr. Basketball" Award winner from Peru High School, where he played for his father, Bob; chose to attend Purdue University, coached by head coach, Fred Schaus. Macy averaged 13.8 points a game as a freshman, while leading the Boilermakers in free throws, shooting .859 percent from the line on the season. He started in 25 of 27 games, helping them to a 16–11 season record.After playing his freshman year at Purdue, Macy transferred to the University of Kentucky in 1976. After sitting out the 1976–77 season as mandated by NCAA rules, he started playing at Kentucky in 1977. Macy had a very successful college career, as a three-time All-America and three-time All-SEC player. The 1978 team on which Macy was a starter won the 1978 NCAA National Championship. In his senior year of 1979–80, he became the first Kentucky player ever to be named consensus Southeastern Conference Player of the Year.Macy was selected with the 22nd pick of the 1979 NBA Draft by the Phoenix Suns, even though he had a year of college eligibility remaining. Macy played out his last year of college, and started playing for the Suns in 1980. Macy spent five years with the Suns, averaging 10.6 points and 4.0 assists per game. Macy spent one year each with the Chicago Bulls (1985–86) and the Indiana Pacers (1986–87) before retiring from the NBA. Then he played professionally in Italy for Dietor Bologna (1987–88) and Benetton Treviso (1988–90). Macy was also one of the original participants of the NBA All-Star Three Point Contest when it debuted in 1986.Macy was an excellent free throw shooter throughout his career. During the 1981-82 NBA season he led the NBA in free throw percentage. He still holds the career free throw shooting percentage record at the University of Kentucky, and his .884 career percentage is second only to Steve Nash (.907) on the Phoenix Suns' career leaders list.Macy was head coach of the Morehead State University Eagles of the Ohio Valley Conference for nine years. In 2003, Macy coached the Eagles to 20 wins, its most in 19 years, and a share of the OVC regular season championship. However, the 2004–05 season was less successful, as Morehead failed to qualify for the OVC tournament. Following that season, Macy coached a group of Sports Reach collegiate all-stars that toured China and finished with a perfect 7–0 record against several Chinese professional teams. After a disastrous 4–23 season in 2005–06, Macy resigned as head coach on February 28, 2006.Macy emphasized free throw shooting in his coaching, and the emphasis paid off, as his Morehead State teams were perennially among the Division I leaders in free throw shooting percentage.Later in 2006, Macy accepted the head coaching position on the Lexington Christian Academy Eagles Men's tennis team. In his first season they had their first winning season since 2003. In November 2007, Macy was named general manager of the East Kentucky Miners, an expansion team of the Continental Basketball Association, based in Pikeville, Kentucky. Later, he served as the color commentator for University of Kentucky telecasts. In October 2016, Macy joined the staff of head coach Brian Lane at Transylvania University. | [
"Pallacanestro Treviso",
"Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball"
] |
|
Which team did Kyle Macy play for in 21-Nov-197721-November-1977? | November 21, 1977 | {
"text": [
"Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball"
]
} | L2_Q1155161_P54_1 | Kyle Macy plays for Pallacanestro Treviso from Jan, 1988 to Jan, 1990.
Kyle Macy plays for Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball from Jan, 1977 to Jan, 1980.
Kyle Macy plays for Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball from Jan, 1975 to Jan, 1976. | Kyle MacyKyle Paul Macy (born April 9, 1957) is an assistant coach for the Transylvania University Pioneers men's basketball team. Macy, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in Peru, Indiana, played college basketball at Purdue University and the University of Kentucky, and spent seven years in the NBA with the Phoenix Suns, Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers; he then spent three seasons in the Italian Lega Serie A. After his playing career, he has held various basketball-related positions, including coach, general manager, and broadcaster.The 1975 Indiana "Mr. Basketball" Award winner from Peru High School, where he played for his father, Bob; chose to attend Purdue University, coached by head coach, Fred Schaus. Macy averaged 13.8 points a game as a freshman, while leading the Boilermakers in free throws, shooting .859 percent from the line on the season. He started in 25 of 27 games, helping them to a 16–11 season record.After playing his freshman year at Purdue, Macy transferred to the University of Kentucky in 1976. After sitting out the 1976–77 season as mandated by NCAA rules, he started playing at Kentucky in 1977. Macy had a very successful college career, as a three-time All-America and three-time All-SEC player. The 1978 team on which Macy was a starter won the 1978 NCAA National Championship. In his senior year of 1979–80, he became the first Kentucky player ever to be named consensus Southeastern Conference Player of the Year.Macy was selected with the 22nd pick of the 1979 NBA Draft by the Phoenix Suns, even though he had a year of college eligibility remaining. Macy played out his last year of college, and started playing for the Suns in 1980. Macy spent five years with the Suns, averaging 10.6 points and 4.0 assists per game. Macy spent one year each with the Chicago Bulls (1985–86) and the Indiana Pacers (1986–87) before retiring from the NBA. Then he played professionally in Italy for Dietor Bologna (1987–88) and Benetton Treviso (1988–90). Macy was also one of the original participants of the NBA All-Star Three Point Contest when it debuted in 1986.Macy was an excellent free throw shooter throughout his career. During the 1981-82 NBA season he led the NBA in free throw percentage. He still holds the career free throw shooting percentage record at the University of Kentucky, and his .884 career percentage is second only to Steve Nash (.907) on the Phoenix Suns' career leaders list.Macy was head coach of the Morehead State University Eagles of the Ohio Valley Conference for nine years. In 2003, Macy coached the Eagles to 20 wins, its most in 19 years, and a share of the OVC regular season championship. However, the 2004–05 season was less successful, as Morehead failed to qualify for the OVC tournament. Following that season, Macy coached a group of Sports Reach collegiate all-stars that toured China and finished with a perfect 7–0 record against several Chinese professional teams. After a disastrous 4–23 season in 2005–06, Macy resigned as head coach on February 28, 2006.Macy emphasized free throw shooting in his coaching, and the emphasis paid off, as his Morehead State teams were perennially among the Division I leaders in free throw shooting percentage.Later in 2006, Macy accepted the head coaching position on the Lexington Christian Academy Eagles Men's tennis team. In his first season they had their first winning season since 2003. In November 2007, Macy was named general manager of the East Kentucky Miners, an expansion team of the Continental Basketball Association, based in Pikeville, Kentucky. Later, he served as the color commentator for University of Kentucky telecasts. In October 2016, Macy joined the staff of head coach Brian Lane at Transylvania University. | [
"Pallacanestro Treviso",
"Purdue Boilermakers men's basketball"
] |
|
Which team did Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti play for in Mar, 2017? | March 05, 2017 | {
"text": [
"Morocco national football team",
"Ittihad Tangier"
]
} | L2_Q28529932_P54_4 | Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Mohammed VI Football Academy from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Ittihad Tangier from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2018.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Wydad Casablanca from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2017.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Nahdat Berkane from Jan, 2014 to Jan, 2017. | Ahmed Reda TagnaoutiAhmed Reda Tagnaouti (; born 5 April 1996) is a Moroccan footballer who plays as goalkeeper for Wydad AC and Morocco national football team.In May 2018 he was named in Morocco's 23-man squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.IR Tanger Wydad ACMoroccoIndividual | [
"Mohammed VI Football Academy",
"Nahdat Berkane",
"Wydad Casablanca"
] |
|
Which team did Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti play for in 2017-03-05? | March 05, 2017 | {
"text": [
"Morocco national football team",
"Ittihad Tangier"
]
} | L2_Q28529932_P54_4 | Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Mohammed VI Football Academy from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Ittihad Tangier from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2018.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Wydad Casablanca from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2017.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Nahdat Berkane from Jan, 2014 to Jan, 2017. | Ahmed Reda TagnaoutiAhmed Reda Tagnaouti (; born 5 April 1996) is a Moroccan footballer who plays as goalkeeper for Wydad AC and Morocco national football team.In May 2018 he was named in Morocco's 23-man squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.IR Tanger Wydad ACMoroccoIndividual | [
"Mohammed VI Football Academy",
"Nahdat Berkane",
"Wydad Casablanca"
] |
|
Which team did Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti play for in 05/03/2017? | March 05, 2017 | {
"text": [
"Morocco national football team",
"Ittihad Tangier"
]
} | L2_Q28529932_P54_4 | Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Mohammed VI Football Academy from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Ittihad Tangier from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2018.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Wydad Casablanca from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2017.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Nahdat Berkane from Jan, 2014 to Jan, 2017. | Ahmed Reda TagnaoutiAhmed Reda Tagnaouti (; born 5 April 1996) is a Moroccan footballer who plays as goalkeeper for Wydad AC and Morocco national football team.In May 2018 he was named in Morocco's 23-man squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.IR Tanger Wydad ACMoroccoIndividual | [
"Mohammed VI Football Academy",
"Nahdat Berkane",
"Wydad Casablanca"
] |
|
Which team did Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti play for in Mar 05, 2017? | March 05, 2017 | {
"text": [
"Morocco national football team",
"Ittihad Tangier"
]
} | L2_Q28529932_P54_4 | Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Mohammed VI Football Academy from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Ittihad Tangier from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2018.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Wydad Casablanca from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2017.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Nahdat Berkane from Jan, 2014 to Jan, 2017. | Ahmed Reda TagnaoutiAhmed Reda Tagnaouti (; born 5 April 1996) is a Moroccan footballer who plays as goalkeeper for Wydad AC and Morocco national football team.In May 2018 he was named in Morocco's 23-man squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.IR Tanger Wydad ACMoroccoIndividual | [
"Mohammed VI Football Academy",
"Nahdat Berkane",
"Wydad Casablanca"
] |
|
Which team did Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti play for in 03/05/2017? | March 05, 2017 | {
"text": [
"Morocco national football team",
"Ittihad Tangier"
]
} | L2_Q28529932_P54_4 | Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Mohammed VI Football Academy from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Ittihad Tangier from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2018.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Wydad Casablanca from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2017.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Nahdat Berkane from Jan, 2014 to Jan, 2017. | Ahmed Reda TagnaoutiAhmed Reda Tagnaouti (; born 5 April 1996) is a Moroccan footballer who plays as goalkeeper for Wydad AC and Morocco national football team.In May 2018 he was named in Morocco's 23-man squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.IR Tanger Wydad ACMoroccoIndividual | [
"Mohammed VI Football Academy",
"Nahdat Berkane",
"Wydad Casablanca"
] |
|
Which team did Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti play for in 05-Mar-201705-March-2017? | March 05, 2017 | {
"text": [
"Morocco national football team",
"Ittihad Tangier"
]
} | L2_Q28529932_P54_4 | Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Mohammed VI Football Academy from Jan, 2013 to Jan, 2014.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Ittihad Tangier from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2018.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Wydad Casablanca from Jan, 2017 to Jan, 2017.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Morocco national football team from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Ahmed Reda Tagnaouti plays for Nahdat Berkane from Jan, 2014 to Jan, 2017. | Ahmed Reda TagnaoutiAhmed Reda Tagnaouti (; born 5 April 1996) is a Moroccan footballer who plays as goalkeeper for Wydad AC and Morocco national football team.In May 2018 he was named in Morocco's 23-man squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.IR Tanger Wydad ACMoroccoIndividual | [
"Mohammed VI Football Academy",
"Nahdat Berkane",
"Wydad Casablanca"
] |
|
Which employer did Charles Coulson work for in Aug, 1944? | August 01, 1944 | {
"text": [
"University of Dundee"
]
} | L2_Q900605_P108_0 | Charles Coulson works for University of Oxford from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1973.
Charles Coulson works for King's College London from Jan, 1947 to Jan, 1952.
Charles Coulson works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945. | Charles CoulsonCharles Alfred Coulson (13 December 1910 – 7 January 1974) was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist.Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.The parents of Charles Coulson and his younger twin brother John Metcalfe Coulson were educators who hailed from the Midlands. The twins were born when their father, Alfred, was principal of Dudley Technical College and superintendent of the Methodist Sunday School, and their mother Annie Sincere Hancock was Headmistress of Tipton Elementary School, close by. Coulson's parents maintained a religious Methodist home.When the Coulson brothers were 10, their father was appointed Superintendent of Technical Colleges for the South-West of England, and the family moved to Bristol. When Charles was 13 he was awarded a scholarship to Clifton College in Bristol, which placed a strong emphasis on science and mathematics.Coulson's academic success at Clifton earned him an Entrance Scholarship in Mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1928.His brother John also excelled at school, and went on to become Professor of Chemical Engineering at Newcastle University, and author of a major series of texts on chemical engineering.At Cambridge, Coulson first studied the Mathematics Tripos. He was awarded a College Senior Scholarship during his studies, and received a First Class in the university examinations in 1931. He continued to take the Physics Part II examination a year later, receiving another First. He was awarded several College and University prizes during his undergraduate days. Lord Rutherford, J. J. Thomson, A.S. Besicovitch, Sir Arthur Eddington, G.H. Hardy, J.E. Littlewood, F.P. Ramsey and Ebenezer Cunningham were amongst his teachers.In 1932, Coulson started graduate work with R. H. Fowler but switched to Sir John Lennard-Jones, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1936 for work on the electronic structure of methane. By this time, he had published 11 papers. He continued as a research Fellow at Cambridge for another two years.Coulson was accredited as a lay preacher in 1929, but he said his religion was perfunctory until a particular event in 1930, which he described in a documented sermon that he gave the following year. His religious beliefs were influenced by the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the theologian Charles Raven and, in particular, by Alex(ander) Wood, Fellow of Emmanuel College, authority on acoustics and pacifist., and Labour parliamentary candidate.On the social side, Eileen Florence Burrett was studying in Cambridge to become a school teacher when Charles was an undergraduate. They came together in meetings of the University Methodists. They married in 1938, and had three children: Christopher, Janet and Wendy.In 1939, Coulson was appointed as senior lecturer in mathematics at University College, Dundee. Administratively, this was still part of the University of St. Andrews. Coulson was a conscientious objector during World War II. He carried a very heavy work load, teaching mathematics, physics and chemistry. E. T. Copson was head of department, on the main St. Andrews campus. Coulson collaborated with C. E. Duncanson at University College, London, brought George Stanley Rushbrooke from Cambridge and acted technically as his Ph.D. supervisor, and wrote the first edition of "Waves".In 1941 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1950 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.In 1945, Coulson became a lecturer in physical chemistry, attached to University College and, concurrently, held a Fellowship awarded by Imperial Chemical Industries. Coulson's students at Oxford included:In 1947, Coulson accepted a university chair in theoretical physics at King's College, London. A news item in "Nature" described him as "among the foremost workers in Great Britain on the wave-mechanical side of quantum theory". It extolled his breadth of interests that took in the action of radiation on bacteria and the theory of liquids and solutions, besides the molecular orbital treatment of small molecules and ions, the approximation methods needed for large organic molecules for studies of bond lengths in coronene and conductivity of graphite, chemical reactivity, the treatment of momentum distribution functions and Compton-line profiles and his "well deserved reputation for his kindly and helpful encouragement of younger research workers."Initially, Coulson's group were assigned offices on the top floor of a building (reached by a rickety wooden staircase) that overlooked the Strand, with considerable benefit when cavalcades paraded by on Lord Mayor's Day and Royal occasions. In 1952, the group moved down to offices in the new Physics Department, interspersed with Biophysics and other experimental groups. With developments in computing opening new vistas for the theoreticians, along with the developments in laboratory methods, the entire department enjoyed the intellectual ferment of the 1950s.In his account of the official opening of the new Physics Department, Maurice Wilkins wrote: "the theoretical group deals with applications of wave mechanics and statistical mechanics ... the theory of the chemical bond ... questions of chemical reactivity ... stability of crystal structures, biological properties of cancer-producing compounds and other molecules, electrical and magnetic properties of metals, ... properties of electrolytes and colloidal solutions, including ... electrophoresis ... more than one hundred papers have been published during the past five years."Coulson's group consisted of (1) graduate students who conducted research on electronic structure and valence theory, for a Ph.D. degree directly under Coulson's supervision, (2) students working for a Ph.D. in statistical thermodynamics under the supervision of Fred Booth and, later, in nuclear physics supervised by Louis Elton and then Dr. Percy, (3) students working for an M.Sc. on topics in applied mathematics to be followed by a Ph.D. with another supervisor in the Mathematics Department, and (4) visitors, some of whom held senior academic and industrial appointments. The valence theory Ph.D. students included Simon J. Altmann, Michael P Barnett, Aagje Bozeman, Peter J. Davies, Harry H. Greenwood, Peter Higgs, Julianne Jacobs, Roland Lefebvre, George Lester, John Maddox, Norman H. March, and Robert Taylor. Statistical mechanics was pursued by Geoffrey V. Chester, John Enderby, Alec Gaines and Alan B. Lidiard. The students who went on to the Mathematics Department included Godfrey Lance, Eric Milner and Geoffrey Sewell. Collectively, these wrote nearly 30 books in later years. Visitors who stayed for months included Professor Inga Fischer-Hjalmars of the University of Stockholm, Dr. John van der Waals of Shell Oil, and Dr. Joop der Heer from the University of Amsterdam.In 1952, Coulson was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. The chair was held previously by E. A. Milne, the mathematician and astrophysicist, and Roger Penrose succeeded Coulson. His inaugural lecture expressed the following view of applied mathematics: "an intellectual adventure in which are combined creative imagination and authentic canons of beauty and fitness; they combine to give us insight into the nature of that world of which we ourselves, and our minds, are part."Coulson was active in the formation of the Mathematical Institute, and soon became its director. On the institute website Coulson is described as "a man who packed into his life twice as much as any normal academic person ... he had a gift for lucid exposition and was ... indefatigable in his work, not only for science and mathematics, but also on behalf of people, whether black or white, young or old."In 1972, Coulson was appointed to the newly created chair of theoretical chemistry.Coulson wrote several books. "Valence", first published in 1952, and also reissued posthumously, was the most influential. Coulson also wrote popular works on atomic and molecular structure:Coulson was a founder member of the board of the journal "Molecular Physics" and its first editor.Beside his scientific works, Coulson wrote "Science, Technology and the Christian" (1953) and "Science and Christian Belief" (1955), integrating his scientific and religious views. Coulson apparently coined the phrase God of the gaps. Coulson believed religious faith was essential for the responsible use of science. He was a pacifist and conscientious objector, but championed the development of nuclear energy. He encouraged scientists to help improve Third World food production. He was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971. Charles' widest religious impact on the general public was in his BBC broadcasts. In these, and in general interaction with people, he conveyed his religiosity in a gentle and sometimes humorous manner, for example, when he claimed in his inaugural lecture at King's College, that he had received mail addressed to him as Professor of Theological Physics. | [
"University of Oxford",
"King's College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Charles Coulson work for in 1944-08-01? | August 01, 1944 | {
"text": [
"University of Dundee"
]
} | L2_Q900605_P108_0 | Charles Coulson works for University of Oxford from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1973.
Charles Coulson works for King's College London from Jan, 1947 to Jan, 1952.
Charles Coulson works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945. | Charles CoulsonCharles Alfred Coulson (13 December 1910 – 7 January 1974) was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist.Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.The parents of Charles Coulson and his younger twin brother John Metcalfe Coulson were educators who hailed from the Midlands. The twins were born when their father, Alfred, was principal of Dudley Technical College and superintendent of the Methodist Sunday School, and their mother Annie Sincere Hancock was Headmistress of Tipton Elementary School, close by. Coulson's parents maintained a religious Methodist home.When the Coulson brothers were 10, their father was appointed Superintendent of Technical Colleges for the South-West of England, and the family moved to Bristol. When Charles was 13 he was awarded a scholarship to Clifton College in Bristol, which placed a strong emphasis on science and mathematics.Coulson's academic success at Clifton earned him an Entrance Scholarship in Mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1928.His brother John also excelled at school, and went on to become Professor of Chemical Engineering at Newcastle University, and author of a major series of texts on chemical engineering.At Cambridge, Coulson first studied the Mathematics Tripos. He was awarded a College Senior Scholarship during his studies, and received a First Class in the university examinations in 1931. He continued to take the Physics Part II examination a year later, receiving another First. He was awarded several College and University prizes during his undergraduate days. Lord Rutherford, J. J. Thomson, A.S. Besicovitch, Sir Arthur Eddington, G.H. Hardy, J.E. Littlewood, F.P. Ramsey and Ebenezer Cunningham were amongst his teachers.In 1932, Coulson started graduate work with R. H. Fowler but switched to Sir John Lennard-Jones, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1936 for work on the electronic structure of methane. By this time, he had published 11 papers. He continued as a research Fellow at Cambridge for another two years.Coulson was accredited as a lay preacher in 1929, but he said his religion was perfunctory until a particular event in 1930, which he described in a documented sermon that he gave the following year. His religious beliefs were influenced by the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the theologian Charles Raven and, in particular, by Alex(ander) Wood, Fellow of Emmanuel College, authority on acoustics and pacifist., and Labour parliamentary candidate.On the social side, Eileen Florence Burrett was studying in Cambridge to become a school teacher when Charles was an undergraduate. They came together in meetings of the University Methodists. They married in 1938, and had three children: Christopher, Janet and Wendy.In 1939, Coulson was appointed as senior lecturer in mathematics at University College, Dundee. Administratively, this was still part of the University of St. Andrews. Coulson was a conscientious objector during World War II. He carried a very heavy work load, teaching mathematics, physics and chemistry. E. T. Copson was head of department, on the main St. Andrews campus. Coulson collaborated with C. E. Duncanson at University College, London, brought George Stanley Rushbrooke from Cambridge and acted technically as his Ph.D. supervisor, and wrote the first edition of "Waves".In 1941 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1950 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.In 1945, Coulson became a lecturer in physical chemistry, attached to University College and, concurrently, held a Fellowship awarded by Imperial Chemical Industries. Coulson's students at Oxford included:In 1947, Coulson accepted a university chair in theoretical physics at King's College, London. A news item in "Nature" described him as "among the foremost workers in Great Britain on the wave-mechanical side of quantum theory". It extolled his breadth of interests that took in the action of radiation on bacteria and the theory of liquids and solutions, besides the molecular orbital treatment of small molecules and ions, the approximation methods needed for large organic molecules for studies of bond lengths in coronene and conductivity of graphite, chemical reactivity, the treatment of momentum distribution functions and Compton-line profiles and his "well deserved reputation for his kindly and helpful encouragement of younger research workers."Initially, Coulson's group were assigned offices on the top floor of a building (reached by a rickety wooden staircase) that overlooked the Strand, with considerable benefit when cavalcades paraded by on Lord Mayor's Day and Royal occasions. In 1952, the group moved down to offices in the new Physics Department, interspersed with Biophysics and other experimental groups. With developments in computing opening new vistas for the theoreticians, along with the developments in laboratory methods, the entire department enjoyed the intellectual ferment of the 1950s.In his account of the official opening of the new Physics Department, Maurice Wilkins wrote: "the theoretical group deals with applications of wave mechanics and statistical mechanics ... the theory of the chemical bond ... questions of chemical reactivity ... stability of crystal structures, biological properties of cancer-producing compounds and other molecules, electrical and magnetic properties of metals, ... properties of electrolytes and colloidal solutions, including ... electrophoresis ... more than one hundred papers have been published during the past five years."Coulson's group consisted of (1) graduate students who conducted research on electronic structure and valence theory, for a Ph.D. degree directly under Coulson's supervision, (2) students working for a Ph.D. in statistical thermodynamics under the supervision of Fred Booth and, later, in nuclear physics supervised by Louis Elton and then Dr. Percy, (3) students working for an M.Sc. on topics in applied mathematics to be followed by a Ph.D. with another supervisor in the Mathematics Department, and (4) visitors, some of whom held senior academic and industrial appointments. The valence theory Ph.D. students included Simon J. Altmann, Michael P Barnett, Aagje Bozeman, Peter J. Davies, Harry H. Greenwood, Peter Higgs, Julianne Jacobs, Roland Lefebvre, George Lester, John Maddox, Norman H. March, and Robert Taylor. Statistical mechanics was pursued by Geoffrey V. Chester, John Enderby, Alec Gaines and Alan B. Lidiard. The students who went on to the Mathematics Department included Godfrey Lance, Eric Milner and Geoffrey Sewell. Collectively, these wrote nearly 30 books in later years. Visitors who stayed for months included Professor Inga Fischer-Hjalmars of the University of Stockholm, Dr. John van der Waals of Shell Oil, and Dr. Joop der Heer from the University of Amsterdam.In 1952, Coulson was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. The chair was held previously by E. A. Milne, the mathematician and astrophysicist, and Roger Penrose succeeded Coulson. His inaugural lecture expressed the following view of applied mathematics: "an intellectual adventure in which are combined creative imagination and authentic canons of beauty and fitness; they combine to give us insight into the nature of that world of which we ourselves, and our minds, are part."Coulson was active in the formation of the Mathematical Institute, and soon became its director. On the institute website Coulson is described as "a man who packed into his life twice as much as any normal academic person ... he had a gift for lucid exposition and was ... indefatigable in his work, not only for science and mathematics, but also on behalf of people, whether black or white, young or old."In 1972, Coulson was appointed to the newly created chair of theoretical chemistry.Coulson wrote several books. "Valence", first published in 1952, and also reissued posthumously, was the most influential. Coulson also wrote popular works on atomic and molecular structure:Coulson was a founder member of the board of the journal "Molecular Physics" and its first editor.Beside his scientific works, Coulson wrote "Science, Technology and the Christian" (1953) and "Science and Christian Belief" (1955), integrating his scientific and religious views. Coulson apparently coined the phrase God of the gaps. Coulson believed religious faith was essential for the responsible use of science. He was a pacifist and conscientious objector, but championed the development of nuclear energy. He encouraged scientists to help improve Third World food production. He was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971. Charles' widest religious impact on the general public was in his BBC broadcasts. In these, and in general interaction with people, he conveyed his religiosity in a gentle and sometimes humorous manner, for example, when he claimed in his inaugural lecture at King's College, that he had received mail addressed to him as Professor of Theological Physics. | [
"University of Oxford",
"King's College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Charles Coulson work for in 01/08/1944? | August 01, 1944 | {
"text": [
"University of Dundee"
]
} | L2_Q900605_P108_0 | Charles Coulson works for University of Oxford from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1973.
Charles Coulson works for King's College London from Jan, 1947 to Jan, 1952.
Charles Coulson works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945. | Charles CoulsonCharles Alfred Coulson (13 December 1910 – 7 January 1974) was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist.Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.The parents of Charles Coulson and his younger twin brother John Metcalfe Coulson were educators who hailed from the Midlands. The twins were born when their father, Alfred, was principal of Dudley Technical College and superintendent of the Methodist Sunday School, and their mother Annie Sincere Hancock was Headmistress of Tipton Elementary School, close by. Coulson's parents maintained a religious Methodist home.When the Coulson brothers were 10, their father was appointed Superintendent of Technical Colleges for the South-West of England, and the family moved to Bristol. When Charles was 13 he was awarded a scholarship to Clifton College in Bristol, which placed a strong emphasis on science and mathematics.Coulson's academic success at Clifton earned him an Entrance Scholarship in Mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1928.His brother John also excelled at school, and went on to become Professor of Chemical Engineering at Newcastle University, and author of a major series of texts on chemical engineering.At Cambridge, Coulson first studied the Mathematics Tripos. He was awarded a College Senior Scholarship during his studies, and received a First Class in the university examinations in 1931. He continued to take the Physics Part II examination a year later, receiving another First. He was awarded several College and University prizes during his undergraduate days. Lord Rutherford, J. J. Thomson, A.S. Besicovitch, Sir Arthur Eddington, G.H. Hardy, J.E. Littlewood, F.P. Ramsey and Ebenezer Cunningham were amongst his teachers.In 1932, Coulson started graduate work with R. H. Fowler but switched to Sir John Lennard-Jones, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1936 for work on the electronic structure of methane. By this time, he had published 11 papers. He continued as a research Fellow at Cambridge for another two years.Coulson was accredited as a lay preacher in 1929, but he said his religion was perfunctory until a particular event in 1930, which he described in a documented sermon that he gave the following year. His religious beliefs were influenced by the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the theologian Charles Raven and, in particular, by Alex(ander) Wood, Fellow of Emmanuel College, authority on acoustics and pacifist., and Labour parliamentary candidate.On the social side, Eileen Florence Burrett was studying in Cambridge to become a school teacher when Charles was an undergraduate. They came together in meetings of the University Methodists. They married in 1938, and had three children: Christopher, Janet and Wendy.In 1939, Coulson was appointed as senior lecturer in mathematics at University College, Dundee. Administratively, this was still part of the University of St. Andrews. Coulson was a conscientious objector during World War II. He carried a very heavy work load, teaching mathematics, physics and chemistry. E. T. Copson was head of department, on the main St. Andrews campus. Coulson collaborated with C. E. Duncanson at University College, London, brought George Stanley Rushbrooke from Cambridge and acted technically as his Ph.D. supervisor, and wrote the first edition of "Waves".In 1941 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1950 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.In 1945, Coulson became a lecturer in physical chemistry, attached to University College and, concurrently, held a Fellowship awarded by Imperial Chemical Industries. Coulson's students at Oxford included:In 1947, Coulson accepted a university chair in theoretical physics at King's College, London. A news item in "Nature" described him as "among the foremost workers in Great Britain on the wave-mechanical side of quantum theory". It extolled his breadth of interests that took in the action of radiation on bacteria and the theory of liquids and solutions, besides the molecular orbital treatment of small molecules and ions, the approximation methods needed for large organic molecules for studies of bond lengths in coronene and conductivity of graphite, chemical reactivity, the treatment of momentum distribution functions and Compton-line profiles and his "well deserved reputation for his kindly and helpful encouragement of younger research workers."Initially, Coulson's group were assigned offices on the top floor of a building (reached by a rickety wooden staircase) that overlooked the Strand, with considerable benefit when cavalcades paraded by on Lord Mayor's Day and Royal occasions. In 1952, the group moved down to offices in the new Physics Department, interspersed with Biophysics and other experimental groups. With developments in computing opening new vistas for the theoreticians, along with the developments in laboratory methods, the entire department enjoyed the intellectual ferment of the 1950s.In his account of the official opening of the new Physics Department, Maurice Wilkins wrote: "the theoretical group deals with applications of wave mechanics and statistical mechanics ... the theory of the chemical bond ... questions of chemical reactivity ... stability of crystal structures, biological properties of cancer-producing compounds and other molecules, electrical and magnetic properties of metals, ... properties of electrolytes and colloidal solutions, including ... electrophoresis ... more than one hundred papers have been published during the past five years."Coulson's group consisted of (1) graduate students who conducted research on electronic structure and valence theory, for a Ph.D. degree directly under Coulson's supervision, (2) students working for a Ph.D. in statistical thermodynamics under the supervision of Fred Booth and, later, in nuclear physics supervised by Louis Elton and then Dr. Percy, (3) students working for an M.Sc. on topics in applied mathematics to be followed by a Ph.D. with another supervisor in the Mathematics Department, and (4) visitors, some of whom held senior academic and industrial appointments. The valence theory Ph.D. students included Simon J. Altmann, Michael P Barnett, Aagje Bozeman, Peter J. Davies, Harry H. Greenwood, Peter Higgs, Julianne Jacobs, Roland Lefebvre, George Lester, John Maddox, Norman H. March, and Robert Taylor. Statistical mechanics was pursued by Geoffrey V. Chester, John Enderby, Alec Gaines and Alan B. Lidiard. The students who went on to the Mathematics Department included Godfrey Lance, Eric Milner and Geoffrey Sewell. Collectively, these wrote nearly 30 books in later years. Visitors who stayed for months included Professor Inga Fischer-Hjalmars of the University of Stockholm, Dr. John van der Waals of Shell Oil, and Dr. Joop der Heer from the University of Amsterdam.In 1952, Coulson was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. The chair was held previously by E. A. Milne, the mathematician and astrophysicist, and Roger Penrose succeeded Coulson. His inaugural lecture expressed the following view of applied mathematics: "an intellectual adventure in which are combined creative imagination and authentic canons of beauty and fitness; they combine to give us insight into the nature of that world of which we ourselves, and our minds, are part."Coulson was active in the formation of the Mathematical Institute, and soon became its director. On the institute website Coulson is described as "a man who packed into his life twice as much as any normal academic person ... he had a gift for lucid exposition and was ... indefatigable in his work, not only for science and mathematics, but also on behalf of people, whether black or white, young or old."In 1972, Coulson was appointed to the newly created chair of theoretical chemistry.Coulson wrote several books. "Valence", first published in 1952, and also reissued posthumously, was the most influential. Coulson also wrote popular works on atomic and molecular structure:Coulson was a founder member of the board of the journal "Molecular Physics" and its first editor.Beside his scientific works, Coulson wrote "Science, Technology and the Christian" (1953) and "Science and Christian Belief" (1955), integrating his scientific and religious views. Coulson apparently coined the phrase God of the gaps. Coulson believed religious faith was essential for the responsible use of science. He was a pacifist and conscientious objector, but championed the development of nuclear energy. He encouraged scientists to help improve Third World food production. He was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971. Charles' widest religious impact on the general public was in his BBC broadcasts. In these, and in general interaction with people, he conveyed his religiosity in a gentle and sometimes humorous manner, for example, when he claimed in his inaugural lecture at King's College, that he had received mail addressed to him as Professor of Theological Physics. | [
"University of Oxford",
"King's College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Charles Coulson work for in Aug 01, 1944? | August 01, 1944 | {
"text": [
"University of Dundee"
]
} | L2_Q900605_P108_0 | Charles Coulson works for University of Oxford from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1973.
Charles Coulson works for King's College London from Jan, 1947 to Jan, 1952.
Charles Coulson works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945. | Charles CoulsonCharles Alfred Coulson (13 December 1910 – 7 January 1974) was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist.Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.The parents of Charles Coulson and his younger twin brother John Metcalfe Coulson were educators who hailed from the Midlands. The twins were born when their father, Alfred, was principal of Dudley Technical College and superintendent of the Methodist Sunday School, and their mother Annie Sincere Hancock was Headmistress of Tipton Elementary School, close by. Coulson's parents maintained a religious Methodist home.When the Coulson brothers were 10, their father was appointed Superintendent of Technical Colleges for the South-West of England, and the family moved to Bristol. When Charles was 13 he was awarded a scholarship to Clifton College in Bristol, which placed a strong emphasis on science and mathematics.Coulson's academic success at Clifton earned him an Entrance Scholarship in Mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1928.His brother John also excelled at school, and went on to become Professor of Chemical Engineering at Newcastle University, and author of a major series of texts on chemical engineering.At Cambridge, Coulson first studied the Mathematics Tripos. He was awarded a College Senior Scholarship during his studies, and received a First Class in the university examinations in 1931. He continued to take the Physics Part II examination a year later, receiving another First. He was awarded several College and University prizes during his undergraduate days. Lord Rutherford, J. J. Thomson, A.S. Besicovitch, Sir Arthur Eddington, G.H. Hardy, J.E. Littlewood, F.P. Ramsey and Ebenezer Cunningham were amongst his teachers.In 1932, Coulson started graduate work with R. H. Fowler but switched to Sir John Lennard-Jones, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1936 for work on the electronic structure of methane. By this time, he had published 11 papers. He continued as a research Fellow at Cambridge for another two years.Coulson was accredited as a lay preacher in 1929, but he said his religion was perfunctory until a particular event in 1930, which he described in a documented sermon that he gave the following year. His religious beliefs were influenced by the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the theologian Charles Raven and, in particular, by Alex(ander) Wood, Fellow of Emmanuel College, authority on acoustics and pacifist., and Labour parliamentary candidate.On the social side, Eileen Florence Burrett was studying in Cambridge to become a school teacher when Charles was an undergraduate. They came together in meetings of the University Methodists. They married in 1938, and had three children: Christopher, Janet and Wendy.In 1939, Coulson was appointed as senior lecturer in mathematics at University College, Dundee. Administratively, this was still part of the University of St. Andrews. Coulson was a conscientious objector during World War II. He carried a very heavy work load, teaching mathematics, physics and chemistry. E. T. Copson was head of department, on the main St. Andrews campus. Coulson collaborated with C. E. Duncanson at University College, London, brought George Stanley Rushbrooke from Cambridge and acted technically as his Ph.D. supervisor, and wrote the first edition of "Waves".In 1941 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1950 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.In 1945, Coulson became a lecturer in physical chemistry, attached to University College and, concurrently, held a Fellowship awarded by Imperial Chemical Industries. Coulson's students at Oxford included:In 1947, Coulson accepted a university chair in theoretical physics at King's College, London. A news item in "Nature" described him as "among the foremost workers in Great Britain on the wave-mechanical side of quantum theory". It extolled his breadth of interests that took in the action of radiation on bacteria and the theory of liquids and solutions, besides the molecular orbital treatment of small molecules and ions, the approximation methods needed for large organic molecules for studies of bond lengths in coronene and conductivity of graphite, chemical reactivity, the treatment of momentum distribution functions and Compton-line profiles and his "well deserved reputation for his kindly and helpful encouragement of younger research workers."Initially, Coulson's group were assigned offices on the top floor of a building (reached by a rickety wooden staircase) that overlooked the Strand, with considerable benefit when cavalcades paraded by on Lord Mayor's Day and Royal occasions. In 1952, the group moved down to offices in the new Physics Department, interspersed with Biophysics and other experimental groups. With developments in computing opening new vistas for the theoreticians, along with the developments in laboratory methods, the entire department enjoyed the intellectual ferment of the 1950s.In his account of the official opening of the new Physics Department, Maurice Wilkins wrote: "the theoretical group deals with applications of wave mechanics and statistical mechanics ... the theory of the chemical bond ... questions of chemical reactivity ... stability of crystal structures, biological properties of cancer-producing compounds and other molecules, electrical and magnetic properties of metals, ... properties of electrolytes and colloidal solutions, including ... electrophoresis ... more than one hundred papers have been published during the past five years."Coulson's group consisted of (1) graduate students who conducted research on electronic structure and valence theory, for a Ph.D. degree directly under Coulson's supervision, (2) students working for a Ph.D. in statistical thermodynamics under the supervision of Fred Booth and, later, in nuclear physics supervised by Louis Elton and then Dr. Percy, (3) students working for an M.Sc. on topics in applied mathematics to be followed by a Ph.D. with another supervisor in the Mathematics Department, and (4) visitors, some of whom held senior academic and industrial appointments. The valence theory Ph.D. students included Simon J. Altmann, Michael P Barnett, Aagje Bozeman, Peter J. Davies, Harry H. Greenwood, Peter Higgs, Julianne Jacobs, Roland Lefebvre, George Lester, John Maddox, Norman H. March, and Robert Taylor. Statistical mechanics was pursued by Geoffrey V. Chester, John Enderby, Alec Gaines and Alan B. Lidiard. The students who went on to the Mathematics Department included Godfrey Lance, Eric Milner and Geoffrey Sewell. Collectively, these wrote nearly 30 books in later years. Visitors who stayed for months included Professor Inga Fischer-Hjalmars of the University of Stockholm, Dr. John van der Waals of Shell Oil, and Dr. Joop der Heer from the University of Amsterdam.In 1952, Coulson was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. The chair was held previously by E. A. Milne, the mathematician and astrophysicist, and Roger Penrose succeeded Coulson. His inaugural lecture expressed the following view of applied mathematics: "an intellectual adventure in which are combined creative imagination and authentic canons of beauty and fitness; they combine to give us insight into the nature of that world of which we ourselves, and our minds, are part."Coulson was active in the formation of the Mathematical Institute, and soon became its director. On the institute website Coulson is described as "a man who packed into his life twice as much as any normal academic person ... he had a gift for lucid exposition and was ... indefatigable in his work, not only for science and mathematics, but also on behalf of people, whether black or white, young or old."In 1972, Coulson was appointed to the newly created chair of theoretical chemistry.Coulson wrote several books. "Valence", first published in 1952, and also reissued posthumously, was the most influential. Coulson also wrote popular works on atomic and molecular structure:Coulson was a founder member of the board of the journal "Molecular Physics" and its first editor.Beside his scientific works, Coulson wrote "Science, Technology and the Christian" (1953) and "Science and Christian Belief" (1955), integrating his scientific and religious views. Coulson apparently coined the phrase God of the gaps. Coulson believed religious faith was essential for the responsible use of science. He was a pacifist and conscientious objector, but championed the development of nuclear energy. He encouraged scientists to help improve Third World food production. He was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971. Charles' widest religious impact on the general public was in his BBC broadcasts. In these, and in general interaction with people, he conveyed his religiosity in a gentle and sometimes humorous manner, for example, when he claimed in his inaugural lecture at King's College, that he had received mail addressed to him as Professor of Theological Physics. | [
"University of Oxford",
"King's College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Charles Coulson work for in 08/01/1944? | August 01, 1944 | {
"text": [
"University of Dundee"
]
} | L2_Q900605_P108_0 | Charles Coulson works for University of Oxford from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1973.
Charles Coulson works for King's College London from Jan, 1947 to Jan, 1952.
Charles Coulson works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945. | Charles CoulsonCharles Alfred Coulson (13 December 1910 – 7 January 1974) was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist.Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.The parents of Charles Coulson and his younger twin brother John Metcalfe Coulson were educators who hailed from the Midlands. The twins were born when their father, Alfred, was principal of Dudley Technical College and superintendent of the Methodist Sunday School, and their mother Annie Sincere Hancock was Headmistress of Tipton Elementary School, close by. Coulson's parents maintained a religious Methodist home.When the Coulson brothers were 10, their father was appointed Superintendent of Technical Colleges for the South-West of England, and the family moved to Bristol. When Charles was 13 he was awarded a scholarship to Clifton College in Bristol, which placed a strong emphasis on science and mathematics.Coulson's academic success at Clifton earned him an Entrance Scholarship in Mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1928.His brother John also excelled at school, and went on to become Professor of Chemical Engineering at Newcastle University, and author of a major series of texts on chemical engineering.At Cambridge, Coulson first studied the Mathematics Tripos. He was awarded a College Senior Scholarship during his studies, and received a First Class in the university examinations in 1931. He continued to take the Physics Part II examination a year later, receiving another First. He was awarded several College and University prizes during his undergraduate days. Lord Rutherford, J. J. Thomson, A.S. Besicovitch, Sir Arthur Eddington, G.H. Hardy, J.E. Littlewood, F.P. Ramsey and Ebenezer Cunningham were amongst his teachers.In 1932, Coulson started graduate work with R. H. Fowler but switched to Sir John Lennard-Jones, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1936 for work on the electronic structure of methane. By this time, he had published 11 papers. He continued as a research Fellow at Cambridge for another two years.Coulson was accredited as a lay preacher in 1929, but he said his religion was perfunctory until a particular event in 1930, which he described in a documented sermon that he gave the following year. His religious beliefs were influenced by the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the theologian Charles Raven and, in particular, by Alex(ander) Wood, Fellow of Emmanuel College, authority on acoustics and pacifist., and Labour parliamentary candidate.On the social side, Eileen Florence Burrett was studying in Cambridge to become a school teacher when Charles was an undergraduate. They came together in meetings of the University Methodists. They married in 1938, and had three children: Christopher, Janet and Wendy.In 1939, Coulson was appointed as senior lecturer in mathematics at University College, Dundee. Administratively, this was still part of the University of St. Andrews. Coulson was a conscientious objector during World War II. He carried a very heavy work load, teaching mathematics, physics and chemistry. E. T. Copson was head of department, on the main St. Andrews campus. Coulson collaborated with C. E. Duncanson at University College, London, brought George Stanley Rushbrooke from Cambridge and acted technically as his Ph.D. supervisor, and wrote the first edition of "Waves".In 1941 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1950 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.In 1945, Coulson became a lecturer in physical chemistry, attached to University College and, concurrently, held a Fellowship awarded by Imperial Chemical Industries. Coulson's students at Oxford included:In 1947, Coulson accepted a university chair in theoretical physics at King's College, London. A news item in "Nature" described him as "among the foremost workers in Great Britain on the wave-mechanical side of quantum theory". It extolled his breadth of interests that took in the action of radiation on bacteria and the theory of liquids and solutions, besides the molecular orbital treatment of small molecules and ions, the approximation methods needed for large organic molecules for studies of bond lengths in coronene and conductivity of graphite, chemical reactivity, the treatment of momentum distribution functions and Compton-line profiles and his "well deserved reputation for his kindly and helpful encouragement of younger research workers."Initially, Coulson's group were assigned offices on the top floor of a building (reached by a rickety wooden staircase) that overlooked the Strand, with considerable benefit when cavalcades paraded by on Lord Mayor's Day and Royal occasions. In 1952, the group moved down to offices in the new Physics Department, interspersed with Biophysics and other experimental groups. With developments in computing opening new vistas for the theoreticians, along with the developments in laboratory methods, the entire department enjoyed the intellectual ferment of the 1950s.In his account of the official opening of the new Physics Department, Maurice Wilkins wrote: "the theoretical group deals with applications of wave mechanics and statistical mechanics ... the theory of the chemical bond ... questions of chemical reactivity ... stability of crystal structures, biological properties of cancer-producing compounds and other molecules, electrical and magnetic properties of metals, ... properties of electrolytes and colloidal solutions, including ... electrophoresis ... more than one hundred papers have been published during the past five years."Coulson's group consisted of (1) graduate students who conducted research on electronic structure and valence theory, for a Ph.D. degree directly under Coulson's supervision, (2) students working for a Ph.D. in statistical thermodynamics under the supervision of Fred Booth and, later, in nuclear physics supervised by Louis Elton and then Dr. Percy, (3) students working for an M.Sc. on topics in applied mathematics to be followed by a Ph.D. with another supervisor in the Mathematics Department, and (4) visitors, some of whom held senior academic and industrial appointments. The valence theory Ph.D. students included Simon J. Altmann, Michael P Barnett, Aagje Bozeman, Peter J. Davies, Harry H. Greenwood, Peter Higgs, Julianne Jacobs, Roland Lefebvre, George Lester, John Maddox, Norman H. March, and Robert Taylor. Statistical mechanics was pursued by Geoffrey V. Chester, John Enderby, Alec Gaines and Alan B. Lidiard. The students who went on to the Mathematics Department included Godfrey Lance, Eric Milner and Geoffrey Sewell. Collectively, these wrote nearly 30 books in later years. Visitors who stayed for months included Professor Inga Fischer-Hjalmars of the University of Stockholm, Dr. John van der Waals of Shell Oil, and Dr. Joop der Heer from the University of Amsterdam.In 1952, Coulson was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. The chair was held previously by E. A. Milne, the mathematician and astrophysicist, and Roger Penrose succeeded Coulson. His inaugural lecture expressed the following view of applied mathematics: "an intellectual adventure in which are combined creative imagination and authentic canons of beauty and fitness; they combine to give us insight into the nature of that world of which we ourselves, and our minds, are part."Coulson was active in the formation of the Mathematical Institute, and soon became its director. On the institute website Coulson is described as "a man who packed into his life twice as much as any normal academic person ... he had a gift for lucid exposition and was ... indefatigable in his work, not only for science and mathematics, but also on behalf of people, whether black or white, young or old."In 1972, Coulson was appointed to the newly created chair of theoretical chemistry.Coulson wrote several books. "Valence", first published in 1952, and also reissued posthumously, was the most influential. Coulson also wrote popular works on atomic and molecular structure:Coulson was a founder member of the board of the journal "Molecular Physics" and its first editor.Beside his scientific works, Coulson wrote "Science, Technology and the Christian" (1953) and "Science and Christian Belief" (1955), integrating his scientific and religious views. Coulson apparently coined the phrase God of the gaps. Coulson believed religious faith was essential for the responsible use of science. He was a pacifist and conscientious objector, but championed the development of nuclear energy. He encouraged scientists to help improve Third World food production. He was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971. Charles' widest religious impact on the general public was in his BBC broadcasts. In these, and in general interaction with people, he conveyed his religiosity in a gentle and sometimes humorous manner, for example, when he claimed in his inaugural lecture at King's College, that he had received mail addressed to him as Professor of Theological Physics. | [
"University of Oxford",
"King's College London"
] |
|
Which employer did Charles Coulson work for in 01-Aug-194401-August-1944? | August 01, 1944 | {
"text": [
"University of Dundee"
]
} | L2_Q900605_P108_0 | Charles Coulson works for University of Oxford from Jan, 1952 to Jan, 1973.
Charles Coulson works for King's College London from Jan, 1947 to Jan, 1952.
Charles Coulson works for University of Dundee from Jan, 1938 to Jan, 1945. | Charles CoulsonCharles Alfred Coulson (13 December 1910 – 7 January 1974) was a British applied mathematician and theoretical chemist.Coulson's major scientific work was as a pioneer of the application of the quantum theory of valency to problems of molecular structure, dynamics and reactivity. He was also a Methodist lay preacher, served on the World Council of Churches from 1962 to 1968, and was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971.The parents of Charles Coulson and his younger twin brother John Metcalfe Coulson were educators who hailed from the Midlands. The twins were born when their father, Alfred, was principal of Dudley Technical College and superintendent of the Methodist Sunday School, and their mother Annie Sincere Hancock was Headmistress of Tipton Elementary School, close by. Coulson's parents maintained a religious Methodist home.When the Coulson brothers were 10, their father was appointed Superintendent of Technical Colleges for the South-West of England, and the family moved to Bristol. When Charles was 13 he was awarded a scholarship to Clifton College in Bristol, which placed a strong emphasis on science and mathematics.Coulson's academic success at Clifton earned him an Entrance Scholarship in Mathematics to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1928.His brother John also excelled at school, and went on to become Professor of Chemical Engineering at Newcastle University, and author of a major series of texts on chemical engineering.At Cambridge, Coulson first studied the Mathematics Tripos. He was awarded a College Senior Scholarship during his studies, and received a First Class in the university examinations in 1931. He continued to take the Physics Part II examination a year later, receiving another First. He was awarded several College and University prizes during his undergraduate days. Lord Rutherford, J. J. Thomson, A.S. Besicovitch, Sir Arthur Eddington, G.H. Hardy, J.E. Littlewood, F.P. Ramsey and Ebenezer Cunningham were amongst his teachers.In 1932, Coulson started graduate work with R. H. Fowler but switched to Sir John Lennard-Jones, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1936 for work on the electronic structure of methane. By this time, he had published 11 papers. He continued as a research Fellow at Cambridge for another two years.Coulson was accredited as a lay preacher in 1929, but he said his religion was perfunctory until a particular event in 1930, which he described in a documented sermon that he gave the following year. His religious beliefs were influenced by the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the theologian Charles Raven and, in particular, by Alex(ander) Wood, Fellow of Emmanuel College, authority on acoustics and pacifist., and Labour parliamentary candidate.On the social side, Eileen Florence Burrett was studying in Cambridge to become a school teacher when Charles was an undergraduate. They came together in meetings of the University Methodists. They married in 1938, and had three children: Christopher, Janet and Wendy.In 1939, Coulson was appointed as senior lecturer in mathematics at University College, Dundee. Administratively, this was still part of the University of St. Andrews. Coulson was a conscientious objector during World War II. He carried a very heavy work load, teaching mathematics, physics and chemistry. E. T. Copson was head of department, on the main St. Andrews campus. Coulson collaborated with C. E. Duncanson at University College, London, brought George Stanley Rushbrooke from Cambridge and acted technically as his Ph.D. supervisor, and wrote the first edition of "Waves".In 1941 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1950 as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.In 1945, Coulson became a lecturer in physical chemistry, attached to University College and, concurrently, held a Fellowship awarded by Imperial Chemical Industries. Coulson's students at Oxford included:In 1947, Coulson accepted a university chair in theoretical physics at King's College, London. A news item in "Nature" described him as "among the foremost workers in Great Britain on the wave-mechanical side of quantum theory". It extolled his breadth of interests that took in the action of radiation on bacteria and the theory of liquids and solutions, besides the molecular orbital treatment of small molecules and ions, the approximation methods needed for large organic molecules for studies of bond lengths in coronene and conductivity of graphite, chemical reactivity, the treatment of momentum distribution functions and Compton-line profiles and his "well deserved reputation for his kindly and helpful encouragement of younger research workers."Initially, Coulson's group were assigned offices on the top floor of a building (reached by a rickety wooden staircase) that overlooked the Strand, with considerable benefit when cavalcades paraded by on Lord Mayor's Day and Royal occasions. In 1952, the group moved down to offices in the new Physics Department, interspersed with Biophysics and other experimental groups. With developments in computing opening new vistas for the theoreticians, along with the developments in laboratory methods, the entire department enjoyed the intellectual ferment of the 1950s.In his account of the official opening of the new Physics Department, Maurice Wilkins wrote: "the theoretical group deals with applications of wave mechanics and statistical mechanics ... the theory of the chemical bond ... questions of chemical reactivity ... stability of crystal structures, biological properties of cancer-producing compounds and other molecules, electrical and magnetic properties of metals, ... properties of electrolytes and colloidal solutions, including ... electrophoresis ... more than one hundred papers have been published during the past five years."Coulson's group consisted of (1) graduate students who conducted research on electronic structure and valence theory, for a Ph.D. degree directly under Coulson's supervision, (2) students working for a Ph.D. in statistical thermodynamics under the supervision of Fred Booth and, later, in nuclear physics supervised by Louis Elton and then Dr. Percy, (3) students working for an M.Sc. on topics in applied mathematics to be followed by a Ph.D. with another supervisor in the Mathematics Department, and (4) visitors, some of whom held senior academic and industrial appointments. The valence theory Ph.D. students included Simon J. Altmann, Michael P Barnett, Aagje Bozeman, Peter J. Davies, Harry H. Greenwood, Peter Higgs, Julianne Jacobs, Roland Lefebvre, George Lester, John Maddox, Norman H. March, and Robert Taylor. Statistical mechanics was pursued by Geoffrey V. Chester, John Enderby, Alec Gaines and Alan B. Lidiard. The students who went on to the Mathematics Department included Godfrey Lance, Eric Milner and Geoffrey Sewell. Collectively, these wrote nearly 30 books in later years. Visitors who stayed for months included Professor Inga Fischer-Hjalmars of the University of Stockholm, Dr. John van der Waals of Shell Oil, and Dr. Joop der Heer from the University of Amsterdam.In 1952, Coulson was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and Fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. The chair was held previously by E. A. Milne, the mathematician and astrophysicist, and Roger Penrose succeeded Coulson. His inaugural lecture expressed the following view of applied mathematics: "an intellectual adventure in which are combined creative imagination and authentic canons of beauty and fitness; they combine to give us insight into the nature of that world of which we ourselves, and our minds, are part."Coulson was active in the formation of the Mathematical Institute, and soon became its director. On the institute website Coulson is described as "a man who packed into his life twice as much as any normal academic person ... he had a gift for lucid exposition and was ... indefatigable in his work, not only for science and mathematics, but also on behalf of people, whether black or white, young or old."In 1972, Coulson was appointed to the newly created chair of theoretical chemistry.Coulson wrote several books. "Valence", first published in 1952, and also reissued posthumously, was the most influential. Coulson also wrote popular works on atomic and molecular structure:Coulson was a founder member of the board of the journal "Molecular Physics" and its first editor.Beside his scientific works, Coulson wrote "Science, Technology and the Christian" (1953) and "Science and Christian Belief" (1955), integrating his scientific and religious views. Coulson apparently coined the phrase God of the gaps. Coulson believed religious faith was essential for the responsible use of science. He was a pacifist and conscientious objector, but championed the development of nuclear energy. He encouraged scientists to help improve Third World food production. He was chairman of Oxfam from 1965 to 1971. Charles' widest religious impact on the general public was in his BBC broadcasts. In these, and in general interaction with people, he conveyed his religiosity in a gentle and sometimes humorous manner, for example, when he claimed in his inaugural lecture at King's College, that he had received mail addressed to him as Professor of Theological Physics. | [
"University of Oxford",
"King's College London"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in May, 1990? | May 18, 1990 | {
"text": [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French National Assembly"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_1 | François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Minister of Agriculture",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in 1990-05-18? | May 18, 1990 | {
"text": [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French National Assembly"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_1 | François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Minister of Agriculture",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in 18/05/1990? | May 18, 1990 | {
"text": [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French National Assembly"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_1 | François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Minister of Agriculture",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in May 18, 1990? | May 18, 1990 | {
"text": [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French National Assembly"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_1 | François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Minister of Agriculture",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in 05/18/1990? | May 18, 1990 | {
"text": [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French National Assembly"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_1 | François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Minister of Agriculture",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in 18-May-199018-May-1990? | May 18, 1990 | {
"text": [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French National Assembly"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_1 | François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Minister of Agriculture",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Who was the head of Odense Municipality in Jul, 2020? | July 19, 2020 | {
"text": [
"Peter Rahbæk Juel"
]
} | L2_Q21146_P6_4 | Holger Larsen is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1970 to Jan, 1973.
Jan Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2006 to Dec, 2009.
Peter Rahbæk Juel is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Verner Dalskov is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1973 to Jan, 1993.
Anker Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2010 to Dec, 2016. | Odense MunicipalityOdense Municipality () is a Danish municipality ("kommune") in Southern Denmark on the island of Funen in central Denmark. The municipality covers an area of , and has a population of 204,895 (1 January 2020). It is the most populous municipality in Region of Southern Denmark.The main town and the site of its municipal council is the city of Odense. Including the social sector, 17,000 people are employed by the municipality. The municipal budget is 6,881 million DKK as of 2006. The municipality runs 37 schools; Odense is also the home of 13 private schools.Neighboring municipalities are Kerteminde to the east, Faaborg-Midtfyn to the south, Assens to the west, and Nordfyn to the north.The Odense municipality is located near the Odense Fjord. The Odense Canal ("Odense Kanal") flows out from the fjord and forms three ports in the city's industrial area. The Odense River ("Odense Å") also flows out from the fjord and meanders through the municipality, including Odense town center where Sankt Jørgens Park and Munke Mose are located on its banks. The river springs from Lake Arreskov ("Arreskov Sø") in Faaborg-Midtfyn municipality.The highest point in the municipality is Dyred Banke which is located at above sea level.The municipality, a former "Provincial municipality" was re-created 1 April 1970 as Odense municipality as the result of a ("Municipal Reform") that merged a number of existing "Provincial"- "Parish"- and "Village"- municipalities: Allerup-Davinde, Allese-Næsbyhoved, Broby, Brændekilde, Bellinge, Dalum, Fraugde, Korup-Ubberud, Lumby, Odense, Paarup, Sanderum, Stenløse-Fangel, the "coalition-municipality" of Fjordager (which had been created in 1966 by merging Agedrup and Seden-Åsum municipalities), and Højby parish.Odense municipality was not merged with other municipalities by 1 January 2007 as the result of the nationwide "Kommunalreformen" ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007). Before this reform, the list of neighboring municipalities were Langeskov to the east, Munkebo to the northeast, Otterup to the north, Søndersø, Vissenbjerg, and Tommerup to the west, and Broby and Årslev to the south. Odense belonged to Funen County 1970-2006 and before this to Odense County.Odense's municipal council consists of 29 members, elected every four years. The municipal council has five political committees.Below are the municipal councils elected since the Municipal Reform of 2007.Odense's mayor is , representing the Social Democrats, since 1 January 2018.The former mayor of Odense Municipality, Anker Boye, is a member of the Social Democratic Party. His first term was from 1993 to 2005 when he was defeated by Jan Boye, a Conservative. He was re-elected in the 2009 election, forming a coalition with the Red–Green Alliance, the Socialist People's Party and the Social Democrats.The following is a list of mayors since 1792:After the city of Odense itself, the next most populous locations in the Municipality are:The municipality of Odense is divided into 11 different sectors. Neighbourhoods, suburbs and surrounding villages of the city of Odense include:Odense is the third largest city in Denmark, and one of country's oldest settlements. The first record of its existence dates from 988 and the town celebrated its 1,000th anniversary in 1988. The name refers to Odin in Norse mythology— "Odins Vi" ("Odin's Sanctuary"). The shrine of Canute the Saint was a great resort of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. His relics are still preserved in Saint Canute's Cathedral. In the 16th century the town was the meeting-place of several parliaments, and down to 1805 it was the seat of the provincial assembly of Funen.Denmark's famous author and poet Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805. Museums honouring him have been created both in a house in the old part of Odense with a large collection of his works and belongings, and his childhood home, which is also located in the city.Odense also has a museum honouring the classical composer Carl Nielsen, who was born in Nr. Lynelse near Odense.The municipality is connected with all points on the island with an extensive system of roads, including the major E20 Funish Motorway ("Fynske Motorvej") which runs across the island through the town of Odense and connect the island on the east to the island of Zealand over the Great Belt Bridge and on the west to the Danish mainland, Jutland over the Little Belt Bridge. A motorway built 2006-2009 connects Odense to the island's second-largest city, Svendborg, which also has a railroad connection (Svendborgbanen). The town of Odense is also a major stop on the national railroad system lines. | [
"Verner Dalskov",
"Jan Boye",
"Holger Larsen",
"Anker Boye"
] |
|
Who was the head of Odense Municipality in 2020-07-19? | July 19, 2020 | {
"text": [
"Peter Rahbæk Juel"
]
} | L2_Q21146_P6_4 | Holger Larsen is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1970 to Jan, 1973.
Jan Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2006 to Dec, 2009.
Peter Rahbæk Juel is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Verner Dalskov is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1973 to Jan, 1993.
Anker Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2010 to Dec, 2016. | Odense MunicipalityOdense Municipality () is a Danish municipality ("kommune") in Southern Denmark on the island of Funen in central Denmark. The municipality covers an area of , and has a population of 204,895 (1 January 2020). It is the most populous municipality in Region of Southern Denmark.The main town and the site of its municipal council is the city of Odense. Including the social sector, 17,000 people are employed by the municipality. The municipal budget is 6,881 million DKK as of 2006. The municipality runs 37 schools; Odense is also the home of 13 private schools.Neighboring municipalities are Kerteminde to the east, Faaborg-Midtfyn to the south, Assens to the west, and Nordfyn to the north.The Odense municipality is located near the Odense Fjord. The Odense Canal ("Odense Kanal") flows out from the fjord and forms three ports in the city's industrial area. The Odense River ("Odense Å") also flows out from the fjord and meanders through the municipality, including Odense town center where Sankt Jørgens Park and Munke Mose are located on its banks. The river springs from Lake Arreskov ("Arreskov Sø") in Faaborg-Midtfyn municipality.The highest point in the municipality is Dyred Banke which is located at above sea level.The municipality, a former "Provincial municipality" was re-created 1 April 1970 as Odense municipality as the result of a ("Municipal Reform") that merged a number of existing "Provincial"- "Parish"- and "Village"- municipalities: Allerup-Davinde, Allese-Næsbyhoved, Broby, Brændekilde, Bellinge, Dalum, Fraugde, Korup-Ubberud, Lumby, Odense, Paarup, Sanderum, Stenløse-Fangel, the "coalition-municipality" of Fjordager (which had been created in 1966 by merging Agedrup and Seden-Åsum municipalities), and Højby parish.Odense municipality was not merged with other municipalities by 1 January 2007 as the result of the nationwide "Kommunalreformen" ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007). Before this reform, the list of neighboring municipalities were Langeskov to the east, Munkebo to the northeast, Otterup to the north, Søndersø, Vissenbjerg, and Tommerup to the west, and Broby and Årslev to the south. Odense belonged to Funen County 1970-2006 and before this to Odense County.Odense's municipal council consists of 29 members, elected every four years. The municipal council has five political committees.Below are the municipal councils elected since the Municipal Reform of 2007.Odense's mayor is , representing the Social Democrats, since 1 January 2018.The former mayor of Odense Municipality, Anker Boye, is a member of the Social Democratic Party. His first term was from 1993 to 2005 when he was defeated by Jan Boye, a Conservative. He was re-elected in the 2009 election, forming a coalition with the Red–Green Alliance, the Socialist People's Party and the Social Democrats.The following is a list of mayors since 1792:After the city of Odense itself, the next most populous locations in the Municipality are:The municipality of Odense is divided into 11 different sectors. Neighbourhoods, suburbs and surrounding villages of the city of Odense include:Odense is the third largest city in Denmark, and one of country's oldest settlements. The first record of its existence dates from 988 and the town celebrated its 1,000th anniversary in 1988. The name refers to Odin in Norse mythology— "Odins Vi" ("Odin's Sanctuary"). The shrine of Canute the Saint was a great resort of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. His relics are still preserved in Saint Canute's Cathedral. In the 16th century the town was the meeting-place of several parliaments, and down to 1805 it was the seat of the provincial assembly of Funen.Denmark's famous author and poet Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805. Museums honouring him have been created both in a house in the old part of Odense with a large collection of his works and belongings, and his childhood home, which is also located in the city.Odense also has a museum honouring the classical composer Carl Nielsen, who was born in Nr. Lynelse near Odense.The municipality is connected with all points on the island with an extensive system of roads, including the major E20 Funish Motorway ("Fynske Motorvej") which runs across the island through the town of Odense and connect the island on the east to the island of Zealand over the Great Belt Bridge and on the west to the Danish mainland, Jutland over the Little Belt Bridge. A motorway built 2006-2009 connects Odense to the island's second-largest city, Svendborg, which also has a railroad connection (Svendborgbanen). The town of Odense is also a major stop on the national railroad system lines. | [
"Verner Dalskov",
"Jan Boye",
"Holger Larsen",
"Anker Boye"
] |
|
Who was the head of Odense Municipality in 19/07/2020? | July 19, 2020 | {
"text": [
"Peter Rahbæk Juel"
]
} | L2_Q21146_P6_4 | Holger Larsen is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1970 to Jan, 1973.
Jan Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2006 to Dec, 2009.
Peter Rahbæk Juel is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Verner Dalskov is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1973 to Jan, 1993.
Anker Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2010 to Dec, 2016. | Odense MunicipalityOdense Municipality () is a Danish municipality ("kommune") in Southern Denmark on the island of Funen in central Denmark. The municipality covers an area of , and has a population of 204,895 (1 January 2020). It is the most populous municipality in Region of Southern Denmark.The main town and the site of its municipal council is the city of Odense. Including the social sector, 17,000 people are employed by the municipality. The municipal budget is 6,881 million DKK as of 2006. The municipality runs 37 schools; Odense is also the home of 13 private schools.Neighboring municipalities are Kerteminde to the east, Faaborg-Midtfyn to the south, Assens to the west, and Nordfyn to the north.The Odense municipality is located near the Odense Fjord. The Odense Canal ("Odense Kanal") flows out from the fjord and forms three ports in the city's industrial area. The Odense River ("Odense Å") also flows out from the fjord and meanders through the municipality, including Odense town center where Sankt Jørgens Park and Munke Mose are located on its banks. The river springs from Lake Arreskov ("Arreskov Sø") in Faaborg-Midtfyn municipality.The highest point in the municipality is Dyred Banke which is located at above sea level.The municipality, a former "Provincial municipality" was re-created 1 April 1970 as Odense municipality as the result of a ("Municipal Reform") that merged a number of existing "Provincial"- "Parish"- and "Village"- municipalities: Allerup-Davinde, Allese-Næsbyhoved, Broby, Brændekilde, Bellinge, Dalum, Fraugde, Korup-Ubberud, Lumby, Odense, Paarup, Sanderum, Stenløse-Fangel, the "coalition-municipality" of Fjordager (which had been created in 1966 by merging Agedrup and Seden-Åsum municipalities), and Højby parish.Odense municipality was not merged with other municipalities by 1 January 2007 as the result of the nationwide "Kommunalreformen" ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007). Before this reform, the list of neighboring municipalities were Langeskov to the east, Munkebo to the northeast, Otterup to the north, Søndersø, Vissenbjerg, and Tommerup to the west, and Broby and Årslev to the south. Odense belonged to Funen County 1970-2006 and before this to Odense County.Odense's municipal council consists of 29 members, elected every four years. The municipal council has five political committees.Below are the municipal councils elected since the Municipal Reform of 2007.Odense's mayor is , representing the Social Democrats, since 1 January 2018.The former mayor of Odense Municipality, Anker Boye, is a member of the Social Democratic Party. His first term was from 1993 to 2005 when he was defeated by Jan Boye, a Conservative. He was re-elected in the 2009 election, forming a coalition with the Red–Green Alliance, the Socialist People's Party and the Social Democrats.The following is a list of mayors since 1792:After the city of Odense itself, the next most populous locations in the Municipality are:The municipality of Odense is divided into 11 different sectors. Neighbourhoods, suburbs and surrounding villages of the city of Odense include:Odense is the third largest city in Denmark, and one of country's oldest settlements. The first record of its existence dates from 988 and the town celebrated its 1,000th anniversary in 1988. The name refers to Odin in Norse mythology— "Odins Vi" ("Odin's Sanctuary"). The shrine of Canute the Saint was a great resort of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. His relics are still preserved in Saint Canute's Cathedral. In the 16th century the town was the meeting-place of several parliaments, and down to 1805 it was the seat of the provincial assembly of Funen.Denmark's famous author and poet Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805. Museums honouring him have been created both in a house in the old part of Odense with a large collection of his works and belongings, and his childhood home, which is also located in the city.Odense also has a museum honouring the classical composer Carl Nielsen, who was born in Nr. Lynelse near Odense.The municipality is connected with all points on the island with an extensive system of roads, including the major E20 Funish Motorway ("Fynske Motorvej") which runs across the island through the town of Odense and connect the island on the east to the island of Zealand over the Great Belt Bridge and on the west to the Danish mainland, Jutland over the Little Belt Bridge. A motorway built 2006-2009 connects Odense to the island's second-largest city, Svendborg, which also has a railroad connection (Svendborgbanen). The town of Odense is also a major stop on the national railroad system lines. | [
"Verner Dalskov",
"Jan Boye",
"Holger Larsen",
"Anker Boye"
] |
|
Who was the head of Odense Municipality in Jul 19, 2020? | July 19, 2020 | {
"text": [
"Peter Rahbæk Juel"
]
} | L2_Q21146_P6_4 | Holger Larsen is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1970 to Jan, 1973.
Jan Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2006 to Dec, 2009.
Peter Rahbæk Juel is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Verner Dalskov is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1973 to Jan, 1993.
Anker Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2010 to Dec, 2016. | Odense MunicipalityOdense Municipality () is a Danish municipality ("kommune") in Southern Denmark on the island of Funen in central Denmark. The municipality covers an area of , and has a population of 204,895 (1 January 2020). It is the most populous municipality in Region of Southern Denmark.The main town and the site of its municipal council is the city of Odense. Including the social sector, 17,000 people are employed by the municipality. The municipal budget is 6,881 million DKK as of 2006. The municipality runs 37 schools; Odense is also the home of 13 private schools.Neighboring municipalities are Kerteminde to the east, Faaborg-Midtfyn to the south, Assens to the west, and Nordfyn to the north.The Odense municipality is located near the Odense Fjord. The Odense Canal ("Odense Kanal") flows out from the fjord and forms three ports in the city's industrial area. The Odense River ("Odense Å") also flows out from the fjord and meanders through the municipality, including Odense town center where Sankt Jørgens Park and Munke Mose are located on its banks. The river springs from Lake Arreskov ("Arreskov Sø") in Faaborg-Midtfyn municipality.The highest point in the municipality is Dyred Banke which is located at above sea level.The municipality, a former "Provincial municipality" was re-created 1 April 1970 as Odense municipality as the result of a ("Municipal Reform") that merged a number of existing "Provincial"- "Parish"- and "Village"- municipalities: Allerup-Davinde, Allese-Næsbyhoved, Broby, Brændekilde, Bellinge, Dalum, Fraugde, Korup-Ubberud, Lumby, Odense, Paarup, Sanderum, Stenløse-Fangel, the "coalition-municipality" of Fjordager (which had been created in 1966 by merging Agedrup and Seden-Åsum municipalities), and Højby parish.Odense municipality was not merged with other municipalities by 1 January 2007 as the result of the nationwide "Kommunalreformen" ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007). Before this reform, the list of neighboring municipalities were Langeskov to the east, Munkebo to the northeast, Otterup to the north, Søndersø, Vissenbjerg, and Tommerup to the west, and Broby and Årslev to the south. Odense belonged to Funen County 1970-2006 and before this to Odense County.Odense's municipal council consists of 29 members, elected every four years. The municipal council has five political committees.Below are the municipal councils elected since the Municipal Reform of 2007.Odense's mayor is , representing the Social Democrats, since 1 January 2018.The former mayor of Odense Municipality, Anker Boye, is a member of the Social Democratic Party. His first term was from 1993 to 2005 when he was defeated by Jan Boye, a Conservative. He was re-elected in the 2009 election, forming a coalition with the Red–Green Alliance, the Socialist People's Party and the Social Democrats.The following is a list of mayors since 1792:After the city of Odense itself, the next most populous locations in the Municipality are:The municipality of Odense is divided into 11 different sectors. Neighbourhoods, suburbs and surrounding villages of the city of Odense include:Odense is the third largest city in Denmark, and one of country's oldest settlements. The first record of its existence dates from 988 and the town celebrated its 1,000th anniversary in 1988. The name refers to Odin in Norse mythology— "Odins Vi" ("Odin's Sanctuary"). The shrine of Canute the Saint was a great resort of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. His relics are still preserved in Saint Canute's Cathedral. In the 16th century the town was the meeting-place of several parliaments, and down to 1805 it was the seat of the provincial assembly of Funen.Denmark's famous author and poet Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805. Museums honouring him have been created both in a house in the old part of Odense with a large collection of his works and belongings, and his childhood home, which is also located in the city.Odense also has a museum honouring the classical composer Carl Nielsen, who was born in Nr. Lynelse near Odense.The municipality is connected with all points on the island with an extensive system of roads, including the major E20 Funish Motorway ("Fynske Motorvej") which runs across the island through the town of Odense and connect the island on the east to the island of Zealand over the Great Belt Bridge and on the west to the Danish mainland, Jutland over the Little Belt Bridge. A motorway built 2006-2009 connects Odense to the island's second-largest city, Svendborg, which also has a railroad connection (Svendborgbanen). The town of Odense is also a major stop on the national railroad system lines. | [
"Verner Dalskov",
"Jan Boye",
"Holger Larsen",
"Anker Boye"
] |
|
Who was the head of Odense Municipality in 07/19/2020? | July 19, 2020 | {
"text": [
"Peter Rahbæk Juel"
]
} | L2_Q21146_P6_4 | Holger Larsen is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1970 to Jan, 1973.
Jan Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2006 to Dec, 2009.
Peter Rahbæk Juel is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Verner Dalskov is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1973 to Jan, 1993.
Anker Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2010 to Dec, 2016. | Odense MunicipalityOdense Municipality () is a Danish municipality ("kommune") in Southern Denmark on the island of Funen in central Denmark. The municipality covers an area of , and has a population of 204,895 (1 January 2020). It is the most populous municipality in Region of Southern Denmark.The main town and the site of its municipal council is the city of Odense. Including the social sector, 17,000 people are employed by the municipality. The municipal budget is 6,881 million DKK as of 2006. The municipality runs 37 schools; Odense is also the home of 13 private schools.Neighboring municipalities are Kerteminde to the east, Faaborg-Midtfyn to the south, Assens to the west, and Nordfyn to the north.The Odense municipality is located near the Odense Fjord. The Odense Canal ("Odense Kanal") flows out from the fjord and forms three ports in the city's industrial area. The Odense River ("Odense Å") also flows out from the fjord and meanders through the municipality, including Odense town center where Sankt Jørgens Park and Munke Mose are located on its banks. The river springs from Lake Arreskov ("Arreskov Sø") in Faaborg-Midtfyn municipality.The highest point in the municipality is Dyred Banke which is located at above sea level.The municipality, a former "Provincial municipality" was re-created 1 April 1970 as Odense municipality as the result of a ("Municipal Reform") that merged a number of existing "Provincial"- "Parish"- and "Village"- municipalities: Allerup-Davinde, Allese-Næsbyhoved, Broby, Brændekilde, Bellinge, Dalum, Fraugde, Korup-Ubberud, Lumby, Odense, Paarup, Sanderum, Stenløse-Fangel, the "coalition-municipality" of Fjordager (which had been created in 1966 by merging Agedrup and Seden-Åsum municipalities), and Højby parish.Odense municipality was not merged with other municipalities by 1 January 2007 as the result of the nationwide "Kommunalreformen" ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007). Before this reform, the list of neighboring municipalities were Langeskov to the east, Munkebo to the northeast, Otterup to the north, Søndersø, Vissenbjerg, and Tommerup to the west, and Broby and Årslev to the south. Odense belonged to Funen County 1970-2006 and before this to Odense County.Odense's municipal council consists of 29 members, elected every four years. The municipal council has five political committees.Below are the municipal councils elected since the Municipal Reform of 2007.Odense's mayor is , representing the Social Democrats, since 1 January 2018.The former mayor of Odense Municipality, Anker Boye, is a member of the Social Democratic Party. His first term was from 1993 to 2005 when he was defeated by Jan Boye, a Conservative. He was re-elected in the 2009 election, forming a coalition with the Red–Green Alliance, the Socialist People's Party and the Social Democrats.The following is a list of mayors since 1792:After the city of Odense itself, the next most populous locations in the Municipality are:The municipality of Odense is divided into 11 different sectors. Neighbourhoods, suburbs and surrounding villages of the city of Odense include:Odense is the third largest city in Denmark, and one of country's oldest settlements. The first record of its existence dates from 988 and the town celebrated its 1,000th anniversary in 1988. The name refers to Odin in Norse mythology— "Odins Vi" ("Odin's Sanctuary"). The shrine of Canute the Saint was a great resort of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. His relics are still preserved in Saint Canute's Cathedral. In the 16th century the town was the meeting-place of several parliaments, and down to 1805 it was the seat of the provincial assembly of Funen.Denmark's famous author and poet Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805. Museums honouring him have been created both in a house in the old part of Odense with a large collection of his works and belongings, and his childhood home, which is also located in the city.Odense also has a museum honouring the classical composer Carl Nielsen, who was born in Nr. Lynelse near Odense.The municipality is connected with all points on the island with an extensive system of roads, including the major E20 Funish Motorway ("Fynske Motorvej") which runs across the island through the town of Odense and connect the island on the east to the island of Zealand over the Great Belt Bridge and on the west to the Danish mainland, Jutland over the Little Belt Bridge. A motorway built 2006-2009 connects Odense to the island's second-largest city, Svendborg, which also has a railroad connection (Svendborgbanen). The town of Odense is also a major stop on the national railroad system lines. | [
"Verner Dalskov",
"Jan Boye",
"Holger Larsen",
"Anker Boye"
] |
|
Who was the head of Odense Municipality in 19-Jul-202019-July-2020? | July 19, 2020 | {
"text": [
"Peter Rahbæk Juel"
]
} | L2_Q21146_P6_4 | Holger Larsen is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1970 to Jan, 1973.
Jan Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2006 to Dec, 2009.
Peter Rahbæk Juel is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
Verner Dalskov is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 1973 to Jan, 1993.
Anker Boye is the head of the government of Odense Municipality from Jan, 2010 to Dec, 2016. | Odense MunicipalityOdense Municipality () is a Danish municipality ("kommune") in Southern Denmark on the island of Funen in central Denmark. The municipality covers an area of , and has a population of 204,895 (1 January 2020). It is the most populous municipality in Region of Southern Denmark.The main town and the site of its municipal council is the city of Odense. Including the social sector, 17,000 people are employed by the municipality. The municipal budget is 6,881 million DKK as of 2006. The municipality runs 37 schools; Odense is also the home of 13 private schools.Neighboring municipalities are Kerteminde to the east, Faaborg-Midtfyn to the south, Assens to the west, and Nordfyn to the north.The Odense municipality is located near the Odense Fjord. The Odense Canal ("Odense Kanal") flows out from the fjord and forms three ports in the city's industrial area. The Odense River ("Odense Å") also flows out from the fjord and meanders through the municipality, including Odense town center where Sankt Jørgens Park and Munke Mose are located on its banks. The river springs from Lake Arreskov ("Arreskov Sø") in Faaborg-Midtfyn municipality.The highest point in the municipality is Dyred Banke which is located at above sea level.The municipality, a former "Provincial municipality" was re-created 1 April 1970 as Odense municipality as the result of a ("Municipal Reform") that merged a number of existing "Provincial"- "Parish"- and "Village"- municipalities: Allerup-Davinde, Allese-Næsbyhoved, Broby, Brændekilde, Bellinge, Dalum, Fraugde, Korup-Ubberud, Lumby, Odense, Paarup, Sanderum, Stenløse-Fangel, the "coalition-municipality" of Fjordager (which had been created in 1966 by merging Agedrup and Seden-Åsum municipalities), and Højby parish.Odense municipality was not merged with other municipalities by 1 January 2007 as the result of the nationwide "Kommunalreformen" ("The Municipal Reform" of 2007). Before this reform, the list of neighboring municipalities were Langeskov to the east, Munkebo to the northeast, Otterup to the north, Søndersø, Vissenbjerg, and Tommerup to the west, and Broby and Årslev to the south. Odense belonged to Funen County 1970-2006 and before this to Odense County.Odense's municipal council consists of 29 members, elected every four years. The municipal council has five political committees.Below are the municipal councils elected since the Municipal Reform of 2007.Odense's mayor is , representing the Social Democrats, since 1 January 2018.The former mayor of Odense Municipality, Anker Boye, is a member of the Social Democratic Party. His first term was from 1993 to 2005 when he was defeated by Jan Boye, a Conservative. He was re-elected in the 2009 election, forming a coalition with the Red–Green Alliance, the Socialist People's Party and the Social Democrats.The following is a list of mayors since 1792:After the city of Odense itself, the next most populous locations in the Municipality are:The municipality of Odense is divided into 11 different sectors. Neighbourhoods, suburbs and surrounding villages of the city of Odense include:Odense is the third largest city in Denmark, and one of country's oldest settlements. The first record of its existence dates from 988 and the town celebrated its 1,000th anniversary in 1988. The name refers to Odin in Norse mythology— "Odins Vi" ("Odin's Sanctuary"). The shrine of Canute the Saint was a great resort of pilgrims throughout the Middle Ages. His relics are still preserved in Saint Canute's Cathedral. In the 16th century the town was the meeting-place of several parliaments, and down to 1805 it was the seat of the provincial assembly of Funen.Denmark's famous author and poet Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805. Museums honouring him have been created both in a house in the old part of Odense with a large collection of his works and belongings, and his childhood home, which is also located in the city.Odense also has a museum honouring the classical composer Carl Nielsen, who was born in Nr. Lynelse near Odense.The municipality is connected with all points on the island with an extensive system of roads, including the major E20 Funish Motorway ("Fynske Motorvej") which runs across the island through the town of Odense and connect the island on the east to the island of Zealand over the Great Belt Bridge and on the west to the Danish mainland, Jutland over the Little Belt Bridge. A motorway built 2006-2009 connects Odense to the island's second-largest city, Svendborg, which also has a railroad connection (Svendborgbanen). The town of Odense is also a major stop on the national railroad system lines. | [
"Verner Dalskov",
"Jan Boye",
"Holger Larsen",
"Anker Boye"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in Mar, 2002? | March 14, 2002 | {
"text": [
"Minister of Agriculture"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_3 | François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the French National Assembly",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in 2002-03-14? | March 14, 2002 | {
"text": [
"Minister of Agriculture"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_3 | François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the French National Assembly",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in 14/03/2002? | March 14, 2002 | {
"text": [
"Minister of Agriculture"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_3 | François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the French National Assembly",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in Mar 14, 2002? | March 14, 2002 | {
"text": [
"Minister of Agriculture"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_3 | François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the French National Assembly",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in 03/14/2002? | March 14, 2002 | {
"text": [
"Minister of Agriculture"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_3 | François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the French National Assembly",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Which position did François Patriat hold in 14-Mar-200214-March-2002? | March 14, 2002 | {
"text": [
"Minister of Agriculture"
]
} | L2_Q3085525_P39_3 | François Patriat holds the position of Minister of Agriculture from Feb, 2002 to May, 2002.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council from Jan, 1993 to Jan, 1994.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the French National Assembly from Jun, 1988 to Apr, 1993.
François Patriat holds the position of Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon from Jan, 1989 to Jan, 2001.
François Patriat holds the position of member of the Senate of France from Jan, 2008 to Dec, 2022. | François PatriatFrançois Patriat (born 21 March 1943) is a French politician of La République En Marche! (LREM) who has been serving as president of the party's group in the Senate since 2017. He has represented the Côte-d'Or department in the Senate since 2008. Patriat also served as Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries in 2002 and President of the Regional Council of Burgundy from 2004 until 2015. He was a member of the Socialist Party before joining La République En Marche! in 2017.Born in Semur-en-Auxois, Côte-d'Or, Patriat graduated from École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort (ENVA) in 1968. Patriat joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1974 and was elected to the General Council of Côte-d'Or for the canton of Pouilly-en-Auxois in 1976, a position he retained until 2008. In 1981, he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1989, Patriat became Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon, an office he held until 2001.In 2000, Patriat was appointed Secretary of State in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, trade and crafts at the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry under minister Laurent Fabius in the government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2002, he was appointed Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. He left office when Jean-Pierre Raffarin became Prime Minister.In the 2004 regional elections, Patriat led a list that defeated the list conducted by incumbent Regional Council President Jean-Pierre Soisson. Reelected in 2010, he left the position in 2015, before the region was merged with Franche-Comté.Ahead of the 2012 French presidential election, Patriat publicly endorsed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist Party's candidate.Patriat was elected to the Senate in 2008. Reelected in 2014, he joined La République En Marche! (REM) in 2017. After supporting Emmanuel Macron's successful candidacy for the presidency of the French Republic in the 2017 presidential election and rallying enough of his fellow senators to form a group affiliated with REM in the Senate, he became the new group's president.Since November 2017, Patriat has been part of LREM's executive board under the leadership of the party's successive chairmen Christophe Castaner and Stanislas Guerini. | [
"Mayor of Chailly-sur-Armançon",
"member of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council",
"member of the French National Assembly",
"member of the Senate of France"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary in Mar, 1919? | March 22, 1919 | {
"text": [
"John Thomas McNally"
]
} | L2_Q611386_P488_0 | Peter Joseph Monahan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1932 to Jun, 1935.
William Terrence McGrattan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
John Thomas Kidd is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1925 to Jul, 1931.
John Thomas McNally is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Apr, 1913 to Aug, 1924.
Paul John O'Byrne is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1968 to Jan, 1998.
Francis Joseph Klein is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1967 to Feb, 1968.
Francis Patrick Carroll is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Dec, 1935 to Dec, 1966. | Roman Catholic Diocese of CalgaryThe Diocese of Calgary () is a Latin suffragan diocese of the Metropolitan of Edmonton.Its cathedral episcopal see is St. Mary’s Cathedral, Calgary, Alberta.It is currently led by Bishop William McGrattan.Established on 1912.11.30 as Diocese of Calgary, Latin adjective "", on territory split off from the Diocese of Saint Albert.It includes the Calgary Region, all of southern Alberta and the extreme lower half of the Alberta's Rockies region.As per 2014 it pastorally served 538,000 Catholics (45.5% of 1,183,000 total) on 110,500 km² in 69 parishes with 158 priests (123 diocesan, 35 religious), 50 deacons, 166 lay religious (46 brothers, 120 sisters) and 10 seminarians.The diocese contains 82+ parishes and missions specifically: 37 parishes in Calgary alone; of which, 10 are ethnic parishes, an additional university parish to serve the University of Calgary and 45+ parishes and missions designated for southern Alberta and the Rockies lower region. On December 3, 2017 Bishop McGrattan announced his intention to make Our Lady of the Rockies Parish in Canmore into a Diocesan Marian Shrine in the spring of 2019.In 2006: 87 diocesan priests, 38 religious priests427,200 Catholics.110 women religious, 48 religious brothers and 30 permanent deacons make up the spiritual work force in Calgary not including the other regions.AirdrieBanffBeisekerBlairmore (Crowsnest Pass)Bow IslandBrocketBrooksCanmoreCarstairsChestermereClaresholmClunyCoaldaleCochraneDrumhellerFort MacleodHannaHigh RiverLethbridgeMedicine HatMilk RiverOkotoksOyenPicture ButtePincher CreekRockyfordSiksika NationStandoffStrathmoreTaberVauxhall | [
"Francis Patrick Carroll",
"Francis Joseph Klein",
"Peter Joseph Monahan",
"John Thomas Kidd",
"William Terrence McGrattan",
"Paul John O'Byrne"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary in 1919-03-22? | March 22, 1919 | {
"text": [
"John Thomas McNally"
]
} | L2_Q611386_P488_0 | Peter Joseph Monahan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1932 to Jun, 1935.
William Terrence McGrattan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
John Thomas Kidd is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1925 to Jul, 1931.
John Thomas McNally is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Apr, 1913 to Aug, 1924.
Paul John O'Byrne is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1968 to Jan, 1998.
Francis Joseph Klein is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1967 to Feb, 1968.
Francis Patrick Carroll is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Dec, 1935 to Dec, 1966. | Roman Catholic Diocese of CalgaryThe Diocese of Calgary () is a Latin suffragan diocese of the Metropolitan of Edmonton.Its cathedral episcopal see is St. Mary’s Cathedral, Calgary, Alberta.It is currently led by Bishop William McGrattan.Established on 1912.11.30 as Diocese of Calgary, Latin adjective "", on territory split off from the Diocese of Saint Albert.It includes the Calgary Region, all of southern Alberta and the extreme lower half of the Alberta's Rockies region.As per 2014 it pastorally served 538,000 Catholics (45.5% of 1,183,000 total) on 110,500 km² in 69 parishes with 158 priests (123 diocesan, 35 religious), 50 deacons, 166 lay religious (46 brothers, 120 sisters) and 10 seminarians.The diocese contains 82+ parishes and missions specifically: 37 parishes in Calgary alone; of which, 10 are ethnic parishes, an additional university parish to serve the University of Calgary and 45+ parishes and missions designated for southern Alberta and the Rockies lower region. On December 3, 2017 Bishop McGrattan announced his intention to make Our Lady of the Rockies Parish in Canmore into a Diocesan Marian Shrine in the spring of 2019.In 2006: 87 diocesan priests, 38 religious priests427,200 Catholics.110 women religious, 48 religious brothers and 30 permanent deacons make up the spiritual work force in Calgary not including the other regions.AirdrieBanffBeisekerBlairmore (Crowsnest Pass)Bow IslandBrocketBrooksCanmoreCarstairsChestermereClaresholmClunyCoaldaleCochraneDrumhellerFort MacleodHannaHigh RiverLethbridgeMedicine HatMilk RiverOkotoksOyenPicture ButtePincher CreekRockyfordSiksika NationStandoffStrathmoreTaberVauxhall | [
"Francis Patrick Carroll",
"Francis Joseph Klein",
"Peter Joseph Monahan",
"John Thomas Kidd",
"William Terrence McGrattan",
"Paul John O'Byrne"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary in 22/03/1919? | March 22, 1919 | {
"text": [
"John Thomas McNally"
]
} | L2_Q611386_P488_0 | Peter Joseph Monahan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1932 to Jun, 1935.
William Terrence McGrattan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
John Thomas Kidd is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1925 to Jul, 1931.
John Thomas McNally is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Apr, 1913 to Aug, 1924.
Paul John O'Byrne is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1968 to Jan, 1998.
Francis Joseph Klein is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1967 to Feb, 1968.
Francis Patrick Carroll is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Dec, 1935 to Dec, 1966. | Roman Catholic Diocese of CalgaryThe Diocese of Calgary () is a Latin suffragan diocese of the Metropolitan of Edmonton.Its cathedral episcopal see is St. Mary’s Cathedral, Calgary, Alberta.It is currently led by Bishop William McGrattan.Established on 1912.11.30 as Diocese of Calgary, Latin adjective "", on territory split off from the Diocese of Saint Albert.It includes the Calgary Region, all of southern Alberta and the extreme lower half of the Alberta's Rockies region.As per 2014 it pastorally served 538,000 Catholics (45.5% of 1,183,000 total) on 110,500 km² in 69 parishes with 158 priests (123 diocesan, 35 religious), 50 deacons, 166 lay religious (46 brothers, 120 sisters) and 10 seminarians.The diocese contains 82+ parishes and missions specifically: 37 parishes in Calgary alone; of which, 10 are ethnic parishes, an additional university parish to serve the University of Calgary and 45+ parishes and missions designated for southern Alberta and the Rockies lower region. On December 3, 2017 Bishop McGrattan announced his intention to make Our Lady of the Rockies Parish in Canmore into a Diocesan Marian Shrine in the spring of 2019.In 2006: 87 diocesan priests, 38 religious priests427,200 Catholics.110 women religious, 48 religious brothers and 30 permanent deacons make up the spiritual work force in Calgary not including the other regions.AirdrieBanffBeisekerBlairmore (Crowsnest Pass)Bow IslandBrocketBrooksCanmoreCarstairsChestermereClaresholmClunyCoaldaleCochraneDrumhellerFort MacleodHannaHigh RiverLethbridgeMedicine HatMilk RiverOkotoksOyenPicture ButtePincher CreekRockyfordSiksika NationStandoffStrathmoreTaberVauxhall | [
"Francis Patrick Carroll",
"Francis Joseph Klein",
"Peter Joseph Monahan",
"John Thomas Kidd",
"William Terrence McGrattan",
"Paul John O'Byrne"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary in Mar 22, 1919? | March 22, 1919 | {
"text": [
"John Thomas McNally"
]
} | L2_Q611386_P488_0 | Peter Joseph Monahan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1932 to Jun, 1935.
William Terrence McGrattan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
John Thomas Kidd is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1925 to Jul, 1931.
John Thomas McNally is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Apr, 1913 to Aug, 1924.
Paul John O'Byrne is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1968 to Jan, 1998.
Francis Joseph Klein is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1967 to Feb, 1968.
Francis Patrick Carroll is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Dec, 1935 to Dec, 1966. | Roman Catholic Diocese of CalgaryThe Diocese of Calgary () is a Latin suffragan diocese of the Metropolitan of Edmonton.Its cathedral episcopal see is St. Mary’s Cathedral, Calgary, Alberta.It is currently led by Bishop William McGrattan.Established on 1912.11.30 as Diocese of Calgary, Latin adjective "", on territory split off from the Diocese of Saint Albert.It includes the Calgary Region, all of southern Alberta and the extreme lower half of the Alberta's Rockies region.As per 2014 it pastorally served 538,000 Catholics (45.5% of 1,183,000 total) on 110,500 km² in 69 parishes with 158 priests (123 diocesan, 35 religious), 50 deacons, 166 lay religious (46 brothers, 120 sisters) and 10 seminarians.The diocese contains 82+ parishes and missions specifically: 37 parishes in Calgary alone; of which, 10 are ethnic parishes, an additional university parish to serve the University of Calgary and 45+ parishes and missions designated for southern Alberta and the Rockies lower region. On December 3, 2017 Bishop McGrattan announced his intention to make Our Lady of the Rockies Parish in Canmore into a Diocesan Marian Shrine in the spring of 2019.In 2006: 87 diocesan priests, 38 religious priests427,200 Catholics.110 women religious, 48 religious brothers and 30 permanent deacons make up the spiritual work force in Calgary not including the other regions.AirdrieBanffBeisekerBlairmore (Crowsnest Pass)Bow IslandBrocketBrooksCanmoreCarstairsChestermereClaresholmClunyCoaldaleCochraneDrumhellerFort MacleodHannaHigh RiverLethbridgeMedicine HatMilk RiverOkotoksOyenPicture ButtePincher CreekRockyfordSiksika NationStandoffStrathmoreTaberVauxhall | [
"Francis Patrick Carroll",
"Francis Joseph Klein",
"Peter Joseph Monahan",
"John Thomas Kidd",
"William Terrence McGrattan",
"Paul John O'Byrne"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary in 03/22/1919? | March 22, 1919 | {
"text": [
"John Thomas McNally"
]
} | L2_Q611386_P488_0 | Peter Joseph Monahan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1932 to Jun, 1935.
William Terrence McGrattan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
John Thomas Kidd is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1925 to Jul, 1931.
John Thomas McNally is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Apr, 1913 to Aug, 1924.
Paul John O'Byrne is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1968 to Jan, 1998.
Francis Joseph Klein is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1967 to Feb, 1968.
Francis Patrick Carroll is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Dec, 1935 to Dec, 1966. | Roman Catholic Diocese of CalgaryThe Diocese of Calgary () is a Latin suffragan diocese of the Metropolitan of Edmonton.Its cathedral episcopal see is St. Mary’s Cathedral, Calgary, Alberta.It is currently led by Bishop William McGrattan.Established on 1912.11.30 as Diocese of Calgary, Latin adjective "", on territory split off from the Diocese of Saint Albert.It includes the Calgary Region, all of southern Alberta and the extreme lower half of the Alberta's Rockies region.As per 2014 it pastorally served 538,000 Catholics (45.5% of 1,183,000 total) on 110,500 km² in 69 parishes with 158 priests (123 diocesan, 35 religious), 50 deacons, 166 lay religious (46 brothers, 120 sisters) and 10 seminarians.The diocese contains 82+ parishes and missions specifically: 37 parishes in Calgary alone; of which, 10 are ethnic parishes, an additional university parish to serve the University of Calgary and 45+ parishes and missions designated for southern Alberta and the Rockies lower region. On December 3, 2017 Bishop McGrattan announced his intention to make Our Lady of the Rockies Parish in Canmore into a Diocesan Marian Shrine in the spring of 2019.In 2006: 87 diocesan priests, 38 religious priests427,200 Catholics.110 women religious, 48 religious brothers and 30 permanent deacons make up the spiritual work force in Calgary not including the other regions.AirdrieBanffBeisekerBlairmore (Crowsnest Pass)Bow IslandBrocketBrooksCanmoreCarstairsChestermereClaresholmClunyCoaldaleCochraneDrumhellerFort MacleodHannaHigh RiverLethbridgeMedicine HatMilk RiverOkotoksOyenPicture ButtePincher CreekRockyfordSiksika NationStandoffStrathmoreTaberVauxhall | [
"Francis Patrick Carroll",
"Francis Joseph Klein",
"Peter Joseph Monahan",
"John Thomas Kidd",
"William Terrence McGrattan",
"Paul John O'Byrne"
] |
|
Who was the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary in 22-Mar-191922-March-1919? | March 22, 1919 | {
"text": [
"John Thomas McNally"
]
} | L2_Q611386_P488_0 | Peter Joseph Monahan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1932 to Jun, 1935.
William Terrence McGrattan is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jan, 2017 to Dec, 2022.
John Thomas Kidd is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1925 to Jul, 1931.
John Thomas McNally is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Apr, 1913 to Aug, 1924.
Paul John O'Byrne is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Jun, 1968 to Jan, 1998.
Francis Joseph Klein is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Feb, 1967 to Feb, 1968.
Francis Patrick Carroll is the chair of Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary from Dec, 1935 to Dec, 1966. | Roman Catholic Diocese of CalgaryThe Diocese of Calgary () is a Latin suffragan diocese of the Metropolitan of Edmonton.Its cathedral episcopal see is St. Mary’s Cathedral, Calgary, Alberta.It is currently led by Bishop William McGrattan.Established on 1912.11.30 as Diocese of Calgary, Latin adjective "", on territory split off from the Diocese of Saint Albert.It includes the Calgary Region, all of southern Alberta and the extreme lower half of the Alberta's Rockies region.As per 2014 it pastorally served 538,000 Catholics (45.5% of 1,183,000 total) on 110,500 km² in 69 parishes with 158 priests (123 diocesan, 35 religious), 50 deacons, 166 lay religious (46 brothers, 120 sisters) and 10 seminarians.The diocese contains 82+ parishes and missions specifically: 37 parishes in Calgary alone; of which, 10 are ethnic parishes, an additional university parish to serve the University of Calgary and 45+ parishes and missions designated for southern Alberta and the Rockies lower region. On December 3, 2017 Bishop McGrattan announced his intention to make Our Lady of the Rockies Parish in Canmore into a Diocesan Marian Shrine in the spring of 2019.In 2006: 87 diocesan priests, 38 religious priests427,200 Catholics.110 women religious, 48 religious brothers and 30 permanent deacons make up the spiritual work force in Calgary not including the other regions.AirdrieBanffBeisekerBlairmore (Crowsnest Pass)Bow IslandBrocketBrooksCanmoreCarstairsChestermereClaresholmClunyCoaldaleCochraneDrumhellerFort MacleodHannaHigh RiverLethbridgeMedicine HatMilk RiverOkotoksOyenPicture ButtePincher CreekRockyfordSiksika NationStandoffStrathmoreTaberVauxhall | [
"Francis Patrick Carroll",
"Francis Joseph Klein",
"Peter Joseph Monahan",
"John Thomas Kidd",
"William Terrence McGrattan",
"Paul John O'Byrne"
] |
|
Which position did Andrew Robathan hold in Feb, 2009? | February 16, 2009 | {
"text": [
"Member of the 54th Parliament of the United Kingdom"
]
} | L2_Q501089_P39_3 | Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 52nd Parliament of the United Kingdom from May, 1997 to May, 2001.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 51st Parliament of the United Kingdom from Apr, 1992 to Apr, 1997.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 53rd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jun, 2001 to Apr, 2005.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Minister of State for Northern Ireland from Oct, 2013 to Jul, 2014.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 55th Parliament of the United Kingdom from May, 2010 to Mar, 2015.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the House of Lords from Oct, 2015 to Dec, 2022.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Minister of State for the Armed Forces from Sep, 2012 to Oct, 2013.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 54th Parliament of the United Kingdom from May, 2005 to Apr, 2010. | Andrew RobathanAndrew Robert George Robathan, Baron Robathan, (born 17 July 1951) is a British Conservative politician, who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for South Leicestershire (previously Blaby) in Leicestershire as well as a government minister.In September 2014 Robathan announced he would stand down at the 2015 general election, and was nominated for a life peerage in 2015 Dissolution Honours, being created Baron Robathan, of Poultney in the County of Leicestershire, on 13 October 2015.Robathan was born on 17 July 1951. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, an all-boys public school in Northwood, London. He went up to read Modern History at Oriel College, University of Oxford, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1973, later proceeding Master of Arts.Robathan was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards as a Second Lieutenant (on probation) (University Candidate) on 6 October 1974. He was given the service number 498738. His commission was confirmed and he was given seniority as a Second Lieutenant from 6 April 1971. He was promoted to Lieutenant, back dated to 6 October 1974, with seniority from 6 April 1973. Having attended the Staff College, Camberley, he was promoted to Major on 30 September 1984. He served for a period of time with the Special Air Service (SAS), and retired on 27 August 1989 being appointed to the Reserve of Officers.He worked for BP from 1991–92, but volunteered to return to the Army between January and April 1991 during the First Gulf War, serving as Chief of Staff of the Prisoner of War Guard Force in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait.Robathan was elected to Hammersmith and Fulham Council in May 1990, defeating the then-Labour Mayor in the Eel Brook Ward.He resigned as a Councillor in late 1991 to fight the 1992 general election, elected as MP for Blaby in 1992 succeeding Nigel Lawson, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Blaby had a 37% Conservative majority in 1992, but it was considerably reduced by the national swing against the Conservatives and major boundary changes in 1997, creating a rise in Labour support within the constituency. Following a public enquiry by the Electoral Commission and submissions from the public including Robathan, the Blaby constituency was reconfigured as South Leicestershire.Robathan served four years on the Defence Select Committee between 1997 and 2001; he was also Chairman of the All-Party Cycling Group, and Vice-Chairman of the All-Party Renewable and Sustainable Energy Group, whilst an MP.Robathan was John Redwood's Parliamentary Private Secretary to Iain Sproat, Minister for Sport, in the Major administration before returning to the backbenches when the Conservatives lost the 1997 general election. He returned to the front-bench as Trade and Industry Spokesman in 2002.In the 2001 Conservative Party leadership election, Robathan was a notable supporter of Michael Portillo. After six months on the backbenches, Robathan was appointed Commons Liaison to the Lords and then a Defence Spokesman in which capacity he fought the 2005 general election.In the 2005 Conservative leadership election, Robathan was one of the first MPs to declare his support for David Cameron being rewarded with one of only five paid posts as Opposition Deputy Chief Whip.In May 2010, he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence with responsibility for Welfare and Veterans.In 2011, he was a member of the Special Select Committee set up to scrutinise the Bill that became the Armed Forces Act 2011.In December 2011, campaigners called for him to be sacked after he compared the medal claims of 66,500 veterans of the Arctic convoys of World War II to the proliferation of honours made by "authoritarian regimes" and "dictators":Some 3000 sailors died on the convoys - which Winston Churchill described as the "worst journey in the world." Portsmouth MPs described his behaviour as "shameful" and "sickening."In October 2012 Robathan was told to calm down by Lindsay Hoyle, the Deputy Speaker, after complaining about noise levels from the public gallery. Soldiers from the "historic" 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers who face being disbanded were "politely applauding MPs who spoke up on their behalf". A former captain contrasted MoD advice that they went to Afghanistan and Iraq to help democracy with the reality of their own threatened ejection from Parliament.Robathan claimed the maximum second home entitlement of £24,006 in the period 2008–09 though he was not one of the 343 MPs required to repay money by the Legg Report. He was one of 177 MPs listed by "The Daily Telegraph" who employed family members. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority report published two years later, whilst tightening the rules, confirmed that a member may employ one relative subject to general conditions relating to expenses. Robathan's expenses were generally in the bottom half of all MPs.On 24 August 2009, he was quoted in "The Times" newspaper suggesting that MP's salaries be increased to £110,000. These comments were heavily frowned upon by his colleagues in Parliament and the media.On 4 November 2013, it was reported in "The Leicester Mercury" newspaper and on "BBC Radio Leicester" that Robathan had claimed £4,587 expenses to pay for energy bills for his second home.He married Rachael Maunder in December 1991 in Westminster. They have a son (born December 1996) and daughter (born July 1999). Rachael has been a Conservative councillor on Westminster City Council since 2010, representing Knightsbridge and Belgravia ward. In 2020, she became Leader of the Council.Robathan speaks French and German, and has been admitted as a Freeman of the City of London. | [
"Member of the 51st Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"Member of the House of Lords",
"Member of the 55th Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"Minister of State for Northern Ireland",
"Member of the 53rd Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"Minister of State for the Armed Forces",
"Member of the 52nd Parliament of the United Kingdom"
] |
|
Which position did Andrew Robathan hold in 2009-02-16? | February 16, 2009 | {
"text": [
"Member of the 54th Parliament of the United Kingdom"
]
} | L2_Q501089_P39_3 | Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 52nd Parliament of the United Kingdom from May, 1997 to May, 2001.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 51st Parliament of the United Kingdom from Apr, 1992 to Apr, 1997.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 53rd Parliament of the United Kingdom from Jun, 2001 to Apr, 2005.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Minister of State for Northern Ireland from Oct, 2013 to Jul, 2014.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 55th Parliament of the United Kingdom from May, 2010 to Mar, 2015.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the House of Lords from Oct, 2015 to Dec, 2022.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Minister of State for the Armed Forces from Sep, 2012 to Oct, 2013.
Andrew Robathan holds the position of Member of the 54th Parliament of the United Kingdom from May, 2005 to Apr, 2010. | Andrew RobathanAndrew Robert George Robathan, Baron Robathan, (born 17 July 1951) is a British Conservative politician, who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for South Leicestershire (previously Blaby) in Leicestershire as well as a government minister.In September 2014 Robathan announced he would stand down at the 2015 general election, and was nominated for a life peerage in 2015 Dissolution Honours, being created Baron Robathan, of Poultney in the County of Leicestershire, on 13 October 2015.Robathan was born on 17 July 1951. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, an all-boys public school in Northwood, London. He went up to read Modern History at Oriel College, University of Oxford, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1973, later proceeding Master of Arts.Robathan was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards as a Second Lieutenant (on probation) (University Candidate) on 6 October 1974. He was given the service number 498738. His commission was confirmed and he was given seniority as a Second Lieutenant from 6 April 1971. He was promoted to Lieutenant, back dated to 6 October 1974, with seniority from 6 April 1973. Having attended the Staff College, Camberley, he was promoted to Major on 30 September 1984. He served for a period of time with the Special Air Service (SAS), and retired on 27 August 1989 being appointed to the Reserve of Officers.He worked for BP from 1991–92, but volunteered to return to the Army between January and April 1991 during the First Gulf War, serving as Chief of Staff of the Prisoner of War Guard Force in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait.Robathan was elected to Hammersmith and Fulham Council in May 1990, defeating the then-Labour Mayor in the Eel Brook Ward.He resigned as a Councillor in late 1991 to fight the 1992 general election, elected as MP for Blaby in 1992 succeeding Nigel Lawson, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Blaby had a 37% Conservative majority in 1992, but it was considerably reduced by the national swing against the Conservatives and major boundary changes in 1997, creating a rise in Labour support within the constituency. Following a public enquiry by the Electoral Commission and submissions from the public including Robathan, the Blaby constituency was reconfigured as South Leicestershire.Robathan served four years on the Defence Select Committee between 1997 and 2001; he was also Chairman of the All-Party Cycling Group, and Vice-Chairman of the All-Party Renewable and Sustainable Energy Group, whilst an MP.Robathan was John Redwood's Parliamentary Private Secretary to Iain Sproat, Minister for Sport, in the Major administration before returning to the backbenches when the Conservatives lost the 1997 general election. He returned to the front-bench as Trade and Industry Spokesman in 2002.In the 2001 Conservative Party leadership election, Robathan was a notable supporter of Michael Portillo. After six months on the backbenches, Robathan was appointed Commons Liaison to the Lords and then a Defence Spokesman in which capacity he fought the 2005 general election.In the 2005 Conservative leadership election, Robathan was one of the first MPs to declare his support for David Cameron being rewarded with one of only five paid posts as Opposition Deputy Chief Whip.In May 2010, he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence with responsibility for Welfare and Veterans.In 2011, he was a member of the Special Select Committee set up to scrutinise the Bill that became the Armed Forces Act 2011.In December 2011, campaigners called for him to be sacked after he compared the medal claims of 66,500 veterans of the Arctic convoys of World War II to the proliferation of honours made by "authoritarian regimes" and "dictators":Some 3000 sailors died on the convoys - which Winston Churchill described as the "worst journey in the world." Portsmouth MPs described his behaviour as "shameful" and "sickening."In October 2012 Robathan was told to calm down by Lindsay Hoyle, the Deputy Speaker, after complaining about noise levels from the public gallery. Soldiers from the "historic" 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers who face being disbanded were "politely applauding MPs who spoke up on their behalf". A former captain contrasted MoD advice that they went to Afghanistan and Iraq to help democracy with the reality of their own threatened ejection from Parliament.Robathan claimed the maximum second home entitlement of £24,006 in the period 2008–09 though he was not one of the 343 MPs required to repay money by the Legg Report. He was one of 177 MPs listed by "The Daily Telegraph" who employed family members. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority report published two years later, whilst tightening the rules, confirmed that a member may employ one relative subject to general conditions relating to expenses. Robathan's expenses were generally in the bottom half of all MPs.On 24 August 2009, he was quoted in "The Times" newspaper suggesting that MP's salaries be increased to £110,000. These comments were heavily frowned upon by his colleagues in Parliament and the media.On 4 November 2013, it was reported in "The Leicester Mercury" newspaper and on "BBC Radio Leicester" that Robathan had claimed £4,587 expenses to pay for energy bills for his second home.He married Rachael Maunder in December 1991 in Westminster. They have a son (born December 1996) and daughter (born July 1999). Rachael has been a Conservative councillor on Westminster City Council since 2010, representing Knightsbridge and Belgravia ward. In 2020, she became Leader of the Council.Robathan speaks French and German, and has been admitted as a Freeman of the City of London. | [
"Member of the 51st Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"Member of the House of Lords",
"Member of the 55th Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"Minister of State for Northern Ireland",
"Member of the 53rd Parliament of the United Kingdom",
"Minister of State for the Armed Forces",
"Member of the 52nd Parliament of the United Kingdom"
] |
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