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Former People
In the Russian language and culture, "former people" () are people who lost their high social status. The expression went into a wide circulation in the Russian Empire after the 1897 short story of Maxim Gorky, ''Byvshiye lyudi'' (Бывшие люди), translated in English as '' Creatures That Once Were Men'', about people fallen from prosperity into an abyss of misery. At that time, at the end of the 19th century, for Gorky, "former people" were objects of pity and compassion, but with the establishment of Soviet power, "former people" in a new sense became the target of various forms of persecution. After the October Revolution, the expression referred to people who lost their social status after the revolution: aristocracy, imperial military, bureaucracy, clergy, etc. "Former people" in Soviet Russia While the "former people" of Gorky were the object of pity and compassion, from the very first days of the Soviet power, the "former people" in the new meaning had become a tar ...
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Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughly one-sixth of the world's landmass, making it the list of largest empires, third-largest empire in history, behind only the British Empire, British and Mongol Empire, Mongol empires. It also Russian colonization of North America, colonized Alaska between 1799 and 1867. The empire's 1897 census, the only one it conducted, found a population of 125.6 million with considerable ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socioeconomic diversity. From the 10th to 17th centuries, the Russians had been ruled by a noble class known as the boyars, above whom was the tsar, an absolute monarch. The groundwork of the Russian Empire was laid by Ivan III (), who greatly expanded his domain, established a centralized Russian national state, and secured inde ...
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Dvoryans
The Russian nobility or ''dvoryanstvo'' () arose in the Middle Ages. In 1914, it consisted of approximately 1,900,000 members, out of a total population of 138,200,000. Up until the February Revolution of 1917, the Russian noble estates staffed most of the Russian government and possessed a self-governing body, the Assembly of the Nobility. The Russian language, Russian word for nobility, ''dvoryanstvo'' derives from Slavonic ''dvor'' (двор), meaning the noble court, court of a prince or duke (''knyaz''), and later, of the tsar or emperor. Here, ''dvor'' originally referred to servants at the estate of an aristocrat. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the system of hierarchy was a system of seniority known as ''mestnichestvo''. The word ''dvoryane'' described the highest rank of gentry, who performed duties at the royal court, lived in it (''Moskovskie zhiltsy'', "Moscow dwellers"), or were candidates to it, as for many boyar scions (''dvorovye deti boyarskie'', ''v ...
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Social History Of Russia
Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not. Etymology The word "social" derives from the Latin word ''socii'' ("allies"). It is particularly derived from the Italian '' Socii'' states, historical allies of the Roman Republic (although they rebelled against Rome in the Social War of 91–87 BC). Social theorists In the view of Karl Marx,Morrison, Ken. ''Marx, Durkheim, Weber. Formations of modern social thought'' human beings are intrinsically, necessarily and by definition social beings who, beyond being "gregarious creatures", cannot survive and meet their needs other than through social co-operation and association. Their social characteristics are therefore to a large extent an objectively given fact, stamped on them from birth and affirmed by socialization processes; and, according to Marx, in producing and reproduc ...
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Unperson
In the dystopian novel ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (also published as ''1984''), by George Orwell, Newspeak is the fictional language of Oceania, a totalitarian superstate. To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person's ability for critical thinking. The Newspeak language thus limits the person's ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will, which are thoughtcrimes, acts of personal independence that contradict the ideological orthodoxy of Ingsoc collectivism. In the appendix to the novel, "The Principles of Newspeak", Orwell explains that Newspeak follows most rules of English grammar, yet is a language characterised by a continually diminishing vocabulary; complete thoughts are reduced to simple terms of simplistic meaning. The political contractio ...
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Ci-devant
In post-Revolutionary France, ''ci-devant'' nobility were those nobles who refused to be reconstituted into the new social order or to accept any of the political, cultural, or social changes brought about in France by the French Revolution. They were often distinguished by their manners as much as by their political views, both of which remained loyal to the attitudes and values of pre-Revolutionary France. Meaning The term ''ci-devant'' , itself often derogatory, comes from the French language, French, meaning "from before" and technically applied to members of the French nobility of the ''ancien régime'' (House of Bourbon, pre-Revolutionary French society) after they had lost their titles and privileges during the French Revolution. Despite the formal abolition of the titles of nobility by the First French Republic, First Republic, most aristocrats did not accept the legality of this move and there are still numerous families in France with aristocratic titles today. "Ci-devan ...
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Lishenets
A ''lishenets'' ( rus, лишенец, p=lʲɪˈʂenʲɪt͡s), лишение ''deprivation'' + -ец '' -ee''; "disenfranchised"; plural ''lishentsy'', ) was a disenfranchised person in Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1936. History The 1918 Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic enumerated the categories of disenfranchised people: * Persons who used hired labor to obtain increase in profits * Persons who have income without doing any work, such as interests from capital, receipts from property, etc. * Private merchants, trade and commercial brokers * Monks and clergy of all denominations * Persons who were policemen or military officers before the October Revolution * Persons who have been declared demented or mentally deficient, persons under guardianship, etc. The Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) used disfranchisement as a means of repression against categories of the population that were classified as " enemies of the working people", first in ...
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New People (Cambodia)
New People ( or អ្នកថ្មី or អ្នក១៧មេសា, ''neak dap pram pii mesa,'' ' April 17th people') were civilian Cambodians who were controlled and exploited by Angkar and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (officially then known as Democratic Kampuchea) after taking power on 17 April 1975. On 5 January 1976, the Maoist dictator Pol Pot (''Saloth Sâr'' or ''Brother Number One'') turned Cambodia into a secretive society isolated from the rest of the world, including Southeast Asia, aspiring for the country to become akin to the Khmer Empire, with its final ruler Borom Reachea II as king. The Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) ordered the evacuation of all urban centers, sending the entire urban population into the countryside to work as farmers, as the CPK tried to reshape society into a model that Angkar had conceived. The Cambodian population was divided into several classes such as ''Feudalists'', ''Capitalists'', ''petite bourgeoisie'', ''Peasants'', ...
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Social Revolutionary Party
The Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR; ,, ) was a major socialist political party in the late Russian Empire, during both phases of the Russian Revolution, and in early Soviet Russia. The party members were known as Esers (). The SRs were agrarian socialists and supporters of a democratic socialist Russian republic. The ideological heirs of the Narodniks, the SRs won a mass following among the Russian peasantry by endorsing the overthrow of the Tsar and the redistribution of land to the peasants. The SRs boycotted the elections to the First Duma following the Revolution of 1905 alongside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but chose to run in the elections to the Second Duma and received the majority of the few seats allotted to the peasantry. Following the 1907 coup, the SRs boycotted all subsequent Dumas until the fall of the Tsar in the February Revolution of March 1917. Controversially, the party leadership endorsed the Russian Provisional Government and participa ...
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Lunacharsky
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (, born ''Anatoly Aleksandrovich Antonov''; – 26 December 1933) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Soviet People's Commissar (minister) of Education, as well as an active playwright, critic, essayist, and journalist throughout his career. Background Lunacharsky was born on 23 or 24 November 1875 in Poltava, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), as the illegitimate child of Alexander Antonov and Alexandra Lunacharskaya, née Rostovtseva. His mother was then married to statesman Vasily Lunacharsky, a nobleman of Polish origin, whence Anatoly's surname and patronym. She later divorced Vasily Lunacharsky and married Antonov, but Anatoly kept his former name. In 1890, at the age of 15, Lunacharsky became a Marxist. From 1894, he studied at the University of Zurich under Richard Avenarius for two years without taking a degree. In Zürich he met European socialists, including Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, and joined the Ru ...
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A Gentleman In Moscow
''A Gentleman in Moscow'' is a 2016 novel by Amor Towles. It is his second novel, published five years after ''Rules of Civility'' (2011). Background The protagonist is the fictional Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 24 October 1889. He was raised on his Rostov family's estate, Idlehour, in Nizhny Novgorod. Rostov's godfather was his father's comrade in the cavalry, Grand Duke Demidov. When the Count's parents die of cholera within hours of each other in 1900, Demidov became the 11-year-old's guardian. Demidov counseled him to be strong for his sister Helena, because "...adversity presents itself in many forms, and if a man does not master his circumstances, then he is bound to be mastered by them." The Rostov siblings grow up into well-adjusted socialites, making numerous visits to nearby estates by horse-drawn ''troika'' or sleigh. As a young man, the Count was sent out of the country by his grandmother for wounding a cad in defense of ...
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Amor Towles
Amor Towles (born 1964) is an American novelist. He is best known for his bestselling novels ''Rules of Civility'' (2011), ''A Gentleman in Moscow'' (2016), and '' The Lincoln Highway'' (2021). Towles began writing following a career in investment banking. Early life and education Towles was born and raised in Boston, to Stokley Porter Towles, an investment banker at Brown Brothers Harriman and a philanthropist, and Holly Hollingsworth. His parents later divorced. He has a brother, Stokley Jr.; a sister, Kimbrough; and two stepbrothers. When Towles was 10 years old, he threw a bottle with a message into the Atlantic Ocean. Several weeks later, he received a letter from Harrison Salisbury, then managing editor of ''The New York Times'', who had found the bottle. Towles and Salisbury corresponded for many years afterward. He graduated from Yale College and received a Master of Arts degree in English from Stanford University, where he was a Scowcroft Fellow. The thesis for his M. ...
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