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In the history of geographical discovery and exploration, a well-known cast of European characters and events takes center stage. While the importance of achievements by Columbus, Cortes, Magellan, Cook, Lewis and Clark, and Neil Armstrong remains unassailable, the participation of Russia in the European era of exploration, conquest, expansion, and colonization deserves equal attention. This study provides a narrative survey and critical analysis of a rich but overlooked tradition of geographical exploration by Russians and others in Russian service since 1580. Following Russian pioneers across Siberia, Alaska, Brazil, Hawaii and the Pacific, Central Asia, Australasia, the Arctic and Antarctic, and into space, this work establishes Russia in the history of world exploration and connects the Russian experience of exploration to Russian national identity past and present.
In the history of geographical discovery and exploration, a well-known cast of European characters and events takes center stage. While the importance of achievements by Columbus, Cortes, Magellan, Cook, Lewis and Clark, and Neil Armstrong remains unassailable, the participation of Russia in the European era of exploration, conquest, expansion, and colonization deserves equal attention. This study provides a narrative survey and critical analysis of a rich but overlooked tradition of geographical exploration by Russians and others in Russian service since 1580. Following Russian pioneers across Siberia, Alaska, Brazil, Hawaii and the Pacific, Central Asia, Australasia, the Arctic and Antarctic, and into space, this work establishes Russia in the history of world exploration and connects the Russian experience of exploration to Russian national identity past and present.
This book tells the story of the Soviet and Russian lunar programme, from its origins to the present-day federal Russian space programme. Brian Harvey describes the techniques devised by the USSR for lunar landing, from the LK lunar module to the LOK lunar orbiter and versions tested in Earth’s orbit. He asks whether these systems would have worked and examines how well they were tested. He concludes that political mismanagement rather than technology prevented the Soviet Union from landing cosmonauts on the moon. The book is well timed for the return to the moon by the United States and the first missions there by China and India.
Soviet Robots in the Solar System provides a history of the Soviet robotic lunar and planetary exploration program from its inception, with the attempted launch of a lunar impactor on September 23, 1958, to the last launch in the Russian national scientific space program in the 20th Century, Mars 96, on November 16, 1996. This title makes a unique contribution to understanding the scientific and engineering accomplishments of the Soviet Union’s robotic space exploration enterprise from its infancy to its demise with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The authors provide a comprehensive account of Soviet robotic exploration of the Solar System for both popular space enthusiasts and professionals in the field. Technical details and science results are provided and put into an historical and political perspective in a single volume for the first time. The book is divided into two parts. Part I describes the key players and the key institutions that build and operate the hardware, the rockets that provide access to space, and the spacecraft that carry out the enterprise. Part II is about putting these pieces together to enable space flight and mission campaigns. Part II is written in chronological order beginning with the first launches to the Moon. Each chapter covers a particular period when specific mission campaigns were undertaken during celestially-determined launch windows. Each chapter begins with a short overview of the flight missions that occurred during the time period and the political and historical context for the flight mission campaigns, including what the Americans were doing at the time. The bulk of each chapter is devoted to the scientific and engineering details of that flight campaign. The spacecraft and payloads are examined with as much technical detail as is available today, the progress is described, and a synopsis of the scientific result is given.
A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia, Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history—its science, economics, and politics—with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again. With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known—Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)—to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia—a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.
In A Siberian History of Soviet Film, Caroline Damiens explores how the depictions of the indigenous 'Peoples of the North' in Soviet cinema and television evolved between 1920 and 1980. Damiens combines a detailed analysis of key works such as Forest People (1928), Igdenbu (1930), Dersu Uzala (1961 & 1975), Tymancha's Friend (1969) and The Most Beautiful Ships (1972), with primary sources like press articles, archives, and interviews, to reveal how these cinematic portrayals were created and negotiated, providing insight into the concepts of progress and authenticity in the Soviet context. She emphasises the role of indigenous individuals in shaping their cinematic image, both in front of and behind the camera, highlighting the works of lesser-known figures like Suntsai Geonka, Zinaida Pikunova, and Iurii Rytkheu. In doing so, Damiens emphasises the multifaceted nature of film, where interpretations differ based on the perspectives of those involved. Using a decolonial approach and drawing from extensive archival materials, Damiens prompts a re-evaluation of the Soviet cinematic past and present by centring indigenous voices in the narrative. In doing so, she provides a thorough exploration of the intricate relationship between culture, representation, and identity in Soviet cinema.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of the very rich thinking about environmental issues which has grown up in Russia since the nineteenth century, a body of knowledge and thought which is not well known to Western scholars and environmentalists. It shows how in the late nineteenth century there emerged in Russia distinct and strongly articulated representations of the earth’s physical systems within many branches of the natural sciences, representations which typically emphasised the completely integrated nature of natural systems. It stresses the importance in these developments of V V Dokuchaev who significantly advanced the field of soil science. It goes on to discuss how this distinctly Russian approach to the environment developed further through the work of geographers and other environmental scientists down to the late Soviet period.
Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Union's collapse? In this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Russia's geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin. Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russia's greatest assets––its gigantic size and Siberia's natural resources––are now the source of one its greatest weaknesses. For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories and million-person cities to support them. Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist planners put them––not where market forces or free choice would have placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized Siberia is the key to Russia's prosperity. As a result, the country is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia pays a steep price for continuing this folly––it wastes the very resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism. Hill and Gaddy contend that Russia's future prosperity requires that it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past, by shrinking Siberia's cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to western Russia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberia will be a costly and wrenching proce
The story of European-Russian collaboration in space is little known and its importance all too often understated. Because France was the principal interlocutor between these nations, such cooperation did not receive the attention it deserved in English-language literature. This book rectifies that history, showing how Russia and Europe forged a successful partnership that has continued to the present day. Space writer Brian Harvey provides an in-depth picture of how this European-Russian relationship evolved and what factors—scientific, political and industrial—propelled it over the decades. The history begins in the cold war period with the first collaborative ventures between the Soviet Union and European countries, primarily France, followed later by Germany and other European countries. Next, the chapters turn to the missions when European astronauts flew to Russian space stations, the Soyuz rocket made a new home in European territory in the South American jungle and science missions were flown to study deep space. Their climax is the joint mission to explore Mars, called ExoMars, which has already sent a mission to Mars. Through this close examination of these European-Russian efforts, readers will appreciate an altogether new perspective on the history of space exploration, no longer defined by competition, but rather by collaboration and cooperation.
In The Merchants of Siberia, Erika Monahan reconsiders commerce in early modern Russia by reconstructing the trading world of Siberia and the careers of merchants who traded there. She follows the histories of three merchant families from various social ranks who conducted trade in Siberia for well over a century. These include the Filat'evs, who were among Russia’s most illustrious merchant elite; the Shababins, Muslim immigrants who mastered local and long-distance trade while balancing private endeavors with service to the Russian state; and the Noritsyns, traders of more modest status who worked sometimes for themselves, sometimes for bigger merchants, and participated in the emerging Russia-China trade. Monahan demonstrates that trade was a key component of how the Muscovite state sought to assert its authority in the Siberian periphery. The state’s recognition of the benefits of commerce meant that Russian state- and empire-building in Siberia were characterized by accommodation; in this diverse borderland, instrumentality trumped ideology and the Orthodox state welcomed Central Asian merchants of Islamic faith. This reconsideration of Siberian trade invites us to rethink Russia’s place in the early modern world. The burgeoning market at Lake Yamysh, an inner-Eurasian trading post along the Irtysh River, illuminates a vibrant seventeenth-century Eurasian caravan trade even as Europe-Asia maritime trade increased. By contextualizing merchants and places of Siberian trade in the increasingly connected economies of the early modern period, Monahan argues that, commercially speaking, Russia was not the "outlier" that most twentieth-century characterizations portrayed.