Vampire
Vendôme Column, the
Volgograd Sheep
Vpered!
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Vampire
The Big Soviet
Encyclopaedia (third edition, English version, v.4 p.494) provides
the following survey of the different Slavic words for vampires, together
with a helpful concluding comment.
"In Slavic
folk-beliefs, a corpse that comes out of the grave to harm people
- to suck their blood. The vampire is known in the superstitions of
the Russian (upyr'), Ukrainians (upyr, vampir),
Byelorussians (vupar), Poles (upiór, upierzica),
Czechs (upír), Serbs (in the 15th and 16th centuries,
upir; later vampir), and Bulgarians (vapir, vupir).
A cult that offered sacrifices to vampires (to oupir) existed
among the ancient Slavs. In a figurative sense, "vampire"
is also used to refer to an extortionist, a cruel person, or an exploiter.
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Vendôme
Column, the
The Vendôme
Column stands 43m high in the Place Vendôme in the centre of Paris.
It is made out of the bronze of captured cannon from Napoleon's 1805
campaign, and was completed in 1810. A statue of Napoleon stands atop.
It served as a powerful symbol of Bonapartist militarism, one which
Marx invokes in the closing passage of the 18th
Brumaire and which the Paris Commune decreed should be pulled
down. It was, on May 16, 1871. Four years later it was restored by the
Third Republic, and it still stands there today.
There is a useful
discussion of the removal of the column on the web here, in the pages of Sculpture magazine.
The article is by Maureen Sherlock, and it is illustrated with a contemporary
photograph showing the empty base of the column in the Place Vendôme,
as well as with an engraving of the destruction of the column itself.
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Volgograd
Sheep
The Big Soviet
Encyclopaedia is characteristically informative (3rd ed., English
version, v.5 p.569):
"A breed
of fine-fleeced sheep developed at the Romarshovskii Sovkohz in Volgograd
Oblast (1935-63) by crossing local coarse-fleeced fat-tailed sheep
with fine-fleeced rams mainly of a neo-Caucasian type and the French
Soissonnais type. After a long period of intra-breeding the hybrids,
the Caucasian and Groznen breeds were introduced. Volgograd sheep
have a strong constitution and a regular build. The weight of the
rams ranges from 95-110 kg and that of the ewes from 55 to 60 kg.
The wool clip from rams averages 11-12 kg, that of ewes 4.5-5.5 kg.
The wool is primarily of the 64th quality; the yield of pure wool
is 45-47 percent. The fertility rate is 130-140 lambs for 100 ewes.
Volgograd sheep are bred in Volgograd Oblast."
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Vpered!
The Big Soviet
Encyclopaedia is helpful (3rd ed., English version, v.5 p.623):
"Forward!
The name of two Russian publications, a journal and a newspaper, edited
by P. L. Lavrov and published abroad during the 1870s; organs of the
Lavrov orinetation in the revolutionary Narodnik (Populist) movement.
The journal Vpered!, an irregularly published review, first
appeared in Zurich, 1 August (or 13, New Style) 1873, and then from
1874 to 1877 came out in London. There were five issues of 2,000 copies
each. The journal carried theoretical articles, published material
on political life in Russia under the rubric "What is happening
in the Homeland?" and informed Russian revolutionaries about
the international workers' movement in the section "Chronicles
of the Workers' Movement". The newspaper Vpered! was published
every two weeks in London during 1875-76; there were 48 issues with
a circulation of 2,000 in 1875 and 3,000 in 1876.
"The views
expressed in the Vpered! publications were different from other
currents in the revolutionary Narodnik movement primarily in that
they advocated propaganda among the people as the tactic of revolutionary
struggle. They were popular in various Russian revolutionary circles.
The conciliatory position of Vpered! in the struggle between Marxists
and the followers of Bakunin in the First International was criticized
by F. Engels. Some of the articles in Vpered! received the
approval of K. Marx and F. Engels."
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