title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: Rolling Hills Estates had the longest city name in California with 19 letters until January 1, 2000, when the title was ceded to Rancho Santa Margarita (20 letters) upon the latter's incorporation.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The City is a general law city and operates under the council-manager form of government. Rancho Santa Margarita is a contract city. Police services are provided through contract with the Orange County Sheriff. Fire Protection services are provided through the Orange County Fire Authority.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: Rancho Santa Margarita is located at (33.641518, -117.594524). It occupies much of a high plateau known as Plano Trabuco.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of . of it is land and of it (0.27%) is water.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: Rancho Santa Margarita is bordered by the city of Mission Viejo on the west, the census-designated Coto de Caza and Las Flores on the south, Trabuco Canyon on the north, and the Cleveland National Forest on the east.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: Vehicular access is provided by California State Route 241 (a toll road), in addition to several surface streets.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The majority of the neighborhoods in Rancho Santa Margarita are maintained by larger homeowners associations including SAMLARC, Dove Canyon, Rancho Cielo, Robinson Ranch, Walden and Trabuco Highlands. Dove Canyon, Trabuco Highlands, Robinson Ranch, Walden and Rancho Cielo were all established before Rancho Santa Margarita was an incorporated community. East of Plano Trabuco Road is designated with a Trabuco Canyon (92679) zip code even though the area falls within the City of Rancho Santa Margarita boundary.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: According to the City's 2020 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top 10 employers in the city are:


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The 2020 United States Census reported a population of 48,119. The racial makeup was 75.5% White, 2.2% African American, 10.9% Asian, and 21.7% Hispanic or Latino of any race.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The 2010 United States Census reported that Rancho Santa Margarita had a population of 47,853. The population density was . The racial makeup of Rancho Santa Margarita was 37,421 (78.2%) White (67.0% Non-Hispanic White), 887 (1.9%) African American, 182 (0.4%) Native American, 4,350 (9.1%) Asian, 102 (0.2%) Pacific Islander, 2,674 (5.6%) from other races, and 2,237 (4.7%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 8,902 persons (18.6%).


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: 31.8% of the population possessed a bachelor's degree, with 16.4% possessing a Graduate or Professional Degree. The educational attainment level in Rancho Santa Margarita significantly exceeds the averages throughout the rest of California.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The Census reported that 47,851 people (100% of the population) lived in households, 2 (0%) lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 0 (0%) were institutionalized.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: There were 16,665 households, out of which 7,699 (46.2%) had children under the age of 18 living in them, 10,144 (60.9%) were opposite-sex married couples living together, 1,703 (10.2%) had a female householder with no husband present, 700 (4.2%) had a male householder with no wife present. There were 747 (4.5%) unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, and 103 (0.6%) same-sex married couples or partnerships. 3,199 households (19.2%) were made up of individuals, and 761 (4.6%) had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.87. There were 12,547 families (75.3% of all households); the average family size was 3.33.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The population was spread out, with 13,879 people (29.0%) under the age of 18, 3,793 people (7.9%) aged 18 to 24, 13,706 people (28.6%) aged 25 to 44, 13,764 people (28.8%) aged 45 to 64, and 2,711 people (5.7%) who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36.0 years. For every 100 females, there were 95.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 92.1 males.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: There were 17,260 housing units at an average density of , of which 11,906 (71.4%) were owner-occupied, and 4,759 (28.6%) were occupied by renters. The homeowner vacancy rate was 1.2%; the rental vacancy rate was 5.6%. 35,737 people (74.7% of the population) lived in owner-occupied housing units and 12,114 people (25.3%) lived in rental housing units.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: During 2009–2013, Rancho Santa Margarita had a median household income of $104,113, with 3.9% of the population living below the federal poverty line.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: According to the California Secretary of State, as of February 10, 2019, Rancho Santa Margarita has 28,462 registered voters. Of those, 11,877 (41.73%) are registered Republicans, 7,511 (26.39%) are registered Democrats, and 7,819 (27.47%) have no political party preference/are independents.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: Rancho Santa Margarita has voted Republican in every presidential election since the city's incorporation, although Donald J. Trump came quite close to losing the city in his reelection bid in 2020 to Joe Biden.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The city is served by Saddleback Valley Unified School District and the Capistrano Unified School District.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The television series "The Real Housewives of Orange County", although based in Coto De Caza, is mainly filmed in Rancho Santa Margarita where many of the housewives do business, shopping, commuting, dentistry, and dining.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: The city's name often creates confusion: people in the Las Flores, Dove Canyon, Rancho Cielo, or Robinson Ranch neighborhoods, for example, can receive mail addressed to them at Rancho Santa Margarita, Dove Canyon, Coto de Caza, Robinson Ranch or Trabuco Canyon. This is due to them all having the same ZIP code: 92679, although the 92688 ZIP code is far more common in the Rancho Santa Margarita area.


title: Rancho Santa Margarita, California

text: A map of Orange County seen in season four of "Arrested Development" places the fictional Bluth Company-developed community of Sudden Valley northeast of Mission Viejo and Las Flores, in the approximate location of Rancho Santa Margarita.


title: Minority Report (TV series)

text: Minority Report is an American science fiction crime drama television series that aired on Fox from September 21 to November 30, 2015. It was developed by Max Borenstein and is a sequel adaptation of the 2002 film of the same name based on the 1956 science fiction short story "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick. It was produced by Amblin Television, Paramount Television (whose film studio co-owns the film via the pre-2005 DreamWorks library), and 20th Century Fox Television (whose film studio co-produced the film). It is the first Steven Spielberg–directed film to be adapted for television. On October 9, 2015, Fox announced that the series order was cut from 13 episodes to 10. Fox cancelled the series on May 13, 2016.


title: Minority Report (TV series)

text: In 2065 Washington, D.C., Dash (Sands), a Precog, has the ability to predict crimes. The Precrime Unit was dismantled in 2054, forcing law enforcement to rely on newer methods to fight crime. Before it was dismantled, Dash, his twin brother Arthur (Zano), and their foster sister Agatha (Regan) were part of the program that gave them their unique gifts. Now, Dash is using his ability to assist Detective Lara Vega (Good) in preventing crimes, and at the same time trying to keep his gift from being revealed, as there are those who want to obtain the Precogs at any cost, and use their abilities once more.


title: Minority Report (TV series)

text: On September 9, 2014, it was announced that Fox had ordered a pilot for a follow-up television series to the movie. Max Borenstein wrote the script and served as executive producer alongside Steven Spielberg, Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank. Set 11 years after the movie, the series focuses on a male Precog who teams up with a female detective to find a purpose to his gift.


title: Minority Report (TV series)

text: On February 13, 2015, Daniel London and Li Jun Li joined the cast. On February 24, 2015, Laura Regan was cast as Agatha Lively. In March 2015, Stark Sands and Meagan Good landed the lead roles with Sands playing Dash, one of the two male Precogs, and Good playing Lara Vega, a detective haunted by her past who will work with Dash to help him find a purpose for his gift. Li Jun Li plays Akeela, a crime scene technician; Daniel London reprises his role as Wally the Caretaker from the original 2002 film; and Wilmer Valderrama plays a police detective. The show was picked up to series by Fox on May 8, 2015. On July 1, 2015, it was reported that Nick Zano was cast to play Arthur, Dash's fraternal twin brother. Originally, Sands was going to play dual roles of both brothers (as identical twins).


title: Minority Report (TV series)

text: In Canada, the series was simulcast with the American broadcast, airing on Global, and the Canadian premiere had 637,000 viewers. In Australia, the series was broadcast in 2016 on One, part of the Ten network.


title: Minority Report (TV series)

text: The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 29% approval rating and an average rating of 5.4/10 based on 58 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "Lacking either the action or the imagination of its big-screen predecessor, "Minority Report" is a pedestrian spinoff that fails to capture the vision of the film." On Metacritic, the series has a score of 51 out of 100 based on 31 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The Lunar Flag Assembly (LFA) was a kit containing a flag of the United States designed to be erected on the Moon during the Apollo program. Six such flag assemblies were planted on the Moon. The nylon flags were hung on telescoping staffs and horizontal bars constructed of one-inch anodized aluminum tubes. The flags were carried on the outside of the Apollo Lunar Module (LM), most of them on the descent ladder inside a thermally insulated tubular case to protect them from exhaust gas temperatures calculated to reach . The assembly was designed and supervised by Jack Kinzler, head of technical services at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas. Six of the flags (including one for Apollo 13 which was not planted on the Moon) were ordered from a government supply catalog and measured ; the last one planted on the Moon was the slightly larger, -wide flag which had hung in the MSC Mission Operations Control Room for most of the Apollo program.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: Building on President John F. Kennedy's 1961 plan to land a man on the Moon in the 1960s and bring him safely back to Earth, in January 1969 President Richard Nixon set an international tone for the Apollo program in his inaugural address:


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: This inspired an idea within NASA to have astronauts plant a United Nations flag on the first landing. Top brass at NASA were surveyed, and the overwhelming consensus was to plant an American flag. The American public was canvassed and supported the idea. Deke Slayton was fine with leaving symbolic items on the Moon as long as they did not affect the crew's training schedule and that the items met dimensional and weight requirements. Acting NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine created the Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing and appointed Willis Shapley as the chair on February 25. Paine instructed the committee to select symbolic activities that would not jeopardize crew safety or interfere with mission objectives; that would "signalize the first lunar landing as an historic forward step of all mankind that has been accomplished by the United States", and that would not give the impression that the United States was "taking possession of the moon" in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The committee was to decide on three things: items to be brought to the Moon and left there, items to be attached to the descent module, and items to be taken to the Moon and back to Earth. For items to be left on the Moon, the committee considered several options, including leaving the UN flag, a United States flag, a set of miniature flags of all nations, and another commemorative marker on the surface. The committee solicited suggestions from the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the Archivist of the United States, the NASA Historical Advisory Committee, the Space Council, and congressional committees. The most common proposal among those solicited was to plant a flag.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The committee recommended planting the U.S. flag on the Moon. They also recommended installing a plaque onto the lunar module (LM) descent stage (which would be left on the Moon) bearing the inscription: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind."


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: Some Americans anticipated possible controversy over planting the United States flag on the Moon, since the Outer Space Treaty prohibited territorial claims to any extraterrestrial body. Since it was made clear the United States had no intention of making a territorial claim to the Moon, no serious controversy materialized. Four months after the Apollo 11 landing, the United States Congress passed a bill in November 1969, which was signed into law by President Nixon, stating:


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: About three months prior to the July 1969 Apollo 11 mission, Robert Gilruth, director of the MSC and a member of the Committee on Symbolic Activities, still needed to select someone to design the flag assembly. He asked Jack Kinzler, head of technical services at MSC, also known as "Mr. Fix It", to take on the task. Inspired by the memory of his mother hanging curtains during his childhood, Kinzler came up with the idea of inserting a horizontal pole through a hemmed pocket in the top of the flag to support it. This would make it appear to fly on the airless Moon as it would float in the wind on Earth. He worked out the details over several days, assisted by Deputy Division Chief Dave McCraw. Kinzler also suggested, designed, and oversaw the creation of the commemorative plaques affixed to the Apollo Lunar Modules.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: Though the flag itself was a simple, government supply nylon flag altered only by sewing the top hem, its packaging, tolerance of environmental conditions, and means of deployment presented minor engineering challenges. The horizontal and vertical poles were each made of one-inch aluminum tubes in two telescoping parts, anodized with a gold color. Due to the limits of the astronauts' spacesuits, the total height of the flagpole was limited to their minimum and maximum reach. The flag cost $5.50 and the tubing cost $75.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: Though Annin & Co. is generally accepted to be the manufacturer of the flags used in the Lunar Flag Assemblies and is cited as such by NASA, there is some uncertainty about the manufacturer; according to a NASA contractor report published in the 1990's, labels and bindings were removed from the flags to make them easier to attach to the aluminium staff, thus removing any identifying information about the company that produced the flags.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The assembly had to be designed with the astronauts' physical limitations in mind. Because of their thick spacesuits, the astronauts had limited range of motion and manual dexterity. The flag assembly was designed to work within those limitations.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The flag assembly was stored immediately behind the left side of the LM ladder. Due to the heat of the exhaust from the descent engine, temperatures were calculated to be for most of the landing, however they would increase to during the final 13 seconds at touchdown. To insulate the flag from these extreme conditions, it had to be packed inside a dual-walled protective shroud consisting of a stainless steel outer case separated from an aluminum layer by Thermoflex insulation, with several layers of Kapton thermal insulation foil between the inner case and the flag. The insulation limited the temperature to which the flag was subjected to . The shroud was estimated to cost several hundred dollars. The flags deployed on the last three landing flights were carried in the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA, an equipment drawer which opened from the side of the Lunar Module) rather than on the ladder. This eliminated the need for the thermal protection shroud.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The complete package needed to be as light as possible so as not to cut into the lunar payload and weighed .


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The flag which had hung in the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) in the Mission Control Center through the prior Apollo landings was flown to the Moon on the final mission, Apollo 17. This flag measured 20% wider and taller than the others requiring a long horizontal pole. Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt carried a second, identical flag to the Moon and back, and presented it to flight controller Gene Kranz after the flight, to replace the one left on the Moon.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: Flags were planted on each Apollo mission that landed on the Moon. Deploying the flag during the Apollo 11 mission proved to be a challenge. Armstrong and Aldrin had trouble inserting the pole into the lunar surface, and only managed to get it about seven inches deep. When they backed away from the flag, it proved it could stand on its own. Scientists discovered later that the lunar dust has a different profile than terrestrial dust. Dust from Earth has rounded edges; dust from the Moon has sharp edges. The sharp edges of the lunar dust make them catch against each other, making it difficult to insert items into them. Buzz Aldrin reported that the Apollo 11 flag, placed about from the centerline of the "Eagle" landing craft, was blown over by the blast of the rocket exhaust during takeoff. As a result, care was taken by subsequent crews to place the flags at greater distances from the Lunar Module.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, the crew of Apollo 12, had trouble with the latch mechanism which was supposed to keep the supporting pole horizontal, so the flag they deployed drooped at an angle. In response to this, the assembly was improved to include a double-latch locking mechanism for later missions.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The landing of Apollo 13 was aborted due to a major spacecraft malfunction encountered before reaching the Moon. The flag was stored externally in the MESA, and was destroyed with the Lunar Module "Aquarius" when it reentered the Earth's atmosphere.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: Because of issues the Apollo 15 crew had deploying experiments, the flag planting happened later in the mission than intended; at the end of the second EVA rather than the first. The LFA was stored in the MESA on the side of the descent stage of the LM. Astronauts David Scott and James Irwin had practiced on Earth how to arrange themselves, the flag, and the Lunar Roving Vehicle around the LM for the best photography.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: The flag deployed during Apollo 17 has a unique history. It traveled to the Moon and back on Apollo 11, and hung on the wall of Mission Control afterwards. On the first day of the mission, Gene Cernan erected it in Taurus–Littrow lunar valley. As he deployed it, Cernan said, "This was one of the proudest moments of my life. I guarantee it."


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: Since the nylon flag was purchased from a government catalog, it was not designed to handle the harsh conditions of space. Some experts theorize that the colors of some flags may have faded to white due to sunlight and space radiation, or that the fabric might have disintegrated entirely. A review of photographs taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) indicates that flags placed during the Apollo 12, 16, and 17 missions were still standing . Due to the resolution of the LRO cameras, shadows from the fabric of the flag can be seen but the pole cannot, showing that the flags did not disintegrate entirely.


title: Lunar Flag Assembly

text: A photo review of the Apollo 11 site shows that Aldrin's observation that the flag fell over was likely correct, as no flag was seen in the images. , experts were unable to determine if the Apollo 14 and 15 flags were still standing.


title: Indigenous language

text: An indigenous language, or autochthonous language, is a language that is native to a region and spoken by indigenous peoples. This language is from a linguistically distinct community that originated in the area. Indigenous languages are not necessarily national languages but they can be; for example, Aymara is an official language of Bolivia. Also, national languages are not necessarily indigenous to the country.


title: Indigenous language

text: Many indigenous peoples worldwide have stopped passing on their ancestral languages to the next generation and have instead adopted the majority language as part of their acculturation into the majority culture. Furthermore, many indigenous languages have been subject to linguicide (language killing). Recognizing their vulnerability, the United Nations proclaimed 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages "to draw attention to the critical loss of indigenous languages and the urgent need to preserve, revitalize and promote indigenous languages."


title: Indigenous language

text: Indigenous languages are disappearing for various reasons, including the mass extinction of entire speaker communities by natural disaster or genocide, aging communities in which the language is not passed on, and oppressive language planning policies that actively seek to eradicate languages.


title: Indigenous language

text: In North America since 1600, at least 52 Native American languages have disappeared. There may be more than 7,000 languages that exist in the world today, though many of them have not been recorded because they belong to tribes in rural areas of the world or are not easily accessible. It is estimated that 6,809 "living" languages exist in the world today, with 90% having fewer than 100,000 speakers. That means that roughly 6,100 languages are facing a risk of eventual extinction. Some languages are very close to disappearing:


title: Indigenous language

text: Forty six languages are known to have just one native speaker while 357 languages have fewer than 50 speakers. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than more common ones.


title: Indigenous language

text: Oklahoma provides the backdrop for an example of language loss in the developed world. It boasts the highest density of indigenous languages in the United States. That includes languages originally spoken in the region, as well as those of Native American tribes from other areas that were forcibly relocated onto reservations there. The US government drove the Yuchi from Tennessee to Oklahoma in the early 19th century. Until the early 20th century, most Yuchi tribe members spoke the language fluently. Then, government boarding schools severely punished American Indian students who were overheard speaking their own language. To avoid beatings and other punishments, Yuchi and other Indian children abandoned their native languages in favor of English.


title: Indigenous language

text: In 2005, only five elderly members of the Yuchi tribe were fluent in the language. These remaining speakers spoke Yuchi fluently before they went to school and have maintained the language despite strong pressure to abandon it.


title: Indigenous language

text: The situation was not limited to Oklahoma. In the Northwest Pacific plateau, there are no speakers left of the indigenous tribal languages from that area all the way to British Columbia.


title: Indigenous language

text: Oregon's Siletz reservation, established in 1855, was home to the endangered language Siletz Dee-ni. The reservation held members of 27 different Indian bands speaking many languages. In order to communicate, people adopted Chinook Jargon, a pidgin or hybrid language. Between the use of Chinook Jargon and the increased presence of English, the number of speakers of indigenous languages dwindled.


title: Indigenous language

text: Other tribes of Native Americans were also forced into government schools and reservations. They were also treated badly if they did not become "civilized," which meant they were to go to Christian churches and speak English. They were forced to give up their tribal religious beliefs and languages. Now, Native Americans are trying to regain some of their lost heritage. They gather at "pow-wow" to share culture, stories, remedies, dances, music, rhythms, recipes and heritage with anyone who wants to learn them.


title: Indigenous language

text: In January 2008, in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to 89 year old Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. "As they bid her farewell, they also bid farewell to the Eyak language as Marie was the last fluent speaker of the language."


title: Indigenous language

text: Hundreds of indigenous languages around the world are taught by traditional means, including vocabulary, grammar, readings, and recordings.


title: Indigenous language

text: About 6,000 others can be learned to some extent by listening to recordings made for other purposes, such as religious texts for which translations are available in more widely-known languages.


title: Indigenous language

text: The term "treasure language" was proposed by the Rama people of Nicaragua as an alternative to heritage language, indigenous language, and "ethnic language" since those names are considered pejorative in the local context. The term is now also used in the context of public storytelling events.


title: Indigenous language

text: The term "treasure language" references the desire of speakers to sustain the use of their mother tongue into the future:


title: Indigenous language

text: Accordingly, the term may be considered to be distinct from endangered language for which objective criteria are available, or heritage language, which describes an end-state for a language for which individuals are more fluent in a dominant language.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In the USSR, during the eleven-year period from the death of Joseph Stalin (1953) to the political ouster of Nikita Khrushchev (1964), the national politics were dominated by the Cold War, including the U.S.–USSR struggle for the global spread of their respective socio-economic systems and ideology, and the defense of hegemonic spheres of influence. Since the mid-1950s, despite the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) having disowned Stalinism, the political culture of Stalinism — a very powerful General Secretary of the CPSU—remained in place, albeit weakened.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: After Stalin died in March 1953, he was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Georgi Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union. However the central figure in the immediate post-Stalin period was the former head of the state security apparatus, Lavrentiy Beria.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Stalin had left the Soviet Union in an unenviable state when he died. At least 2.5 million people languished in prison and in labor camps, science and the arts had been subjugated to socialist realism, and agriculture productivity on the whole was meager. The country had only one quarter of the livestock it had had in 1928 and in some areas, there were fewer animals than there had been at the start of World War I. Private plots accounted for at least three quarters of meat, dairy, and produce output. Living standards were low and consumer goods scarce. Moscow was also remarkably isolated and friendless on the international stage; Eastern Europe excluding Yugoslavia was held to the Soviet yoke by military occupation and soon after Stalin's death, protests and revolts would break out in some Eastern Bloc countries. China paid homage to the departed Soviet leader, but held a series of grudges that would soon boil over. The United States had military bases and nuclear-equipped bomber aircraft surrounding the Soviet Union on three sides, and American aircraft regularly overflew Soviet territory on reconnaissance missions and to parachute agents in. Although the Soviet authorities shot down many of these aircraft and captured most of the agents dropped onto their soil, the psychological effect was immense.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: American fears of Soviet military and especially nuclear capabilities were strong and heavily exaggerated; Moscow's only heavy bomber, the Tu-4, was a direct clone of the B-29 and had no way to get to the United States except on a one way suicide mission and the Soviet nuclear arsenal contained only a handful of weapons.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Lavrentiy Beria, despite his record as part of Stalin's terror state, initiated a period of relative liberalisation, including the release of some political prisoners. Almost as soon as Stalin was buried, Beria ordered Vyacheslav Molotov's wife freed from imprisonment and personally delivered her to the Soviet foreign minister. He also directed the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) to reexamine the Doctors' Plot and other "false" cases. Beria next proposed stripping the MVD of some of its economic assets and transferring control of them to other ministries, followed by the proposal to stop using forced labour on construction projects. He then announced that 1.1 million non-political prisoners were to be freed from captivity, that the Ministry of Justice should assume control of labour camps from the MVD, and that the Doctors' Plot was false. Finally, he ordered a halt to physical and psychological abuse of prisoners. Beria also declared a halt to forced Russification of the Soviet republics; Beria himself was a non-Russian.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The leadership also began allowing some criticism of Stalin, saying that his one-man dictatorship went against the principles laid down by Vladimir Lenin. The war hysteria that characterized his last years was toned down, and government bureaucrats and factory managers were ordered to wear civilian clothing instead of military-style outfits. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were given serious prospects of national autonomy, possibly similarly to other Soviet satellite states in Europe.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Beria also turned his attention to foreign policy. A secret letter found among his papers after his death, suggested restoring relations with Titoist Yugoslavia. He also criticized Soviet handling of Eastern Europe and the numerous "mini-Stalins" such as Hungary's Mátyás Rákosi. East Germany particularly was in a tenuous situation in 1953 as the attempt by its premier Walter Ulbricht to impose all-out Stalinism had cause a mass exodus of people to the West. Beria suggested that East Germany should just be forgotten about entirely and there was "no purpose" for its existence. He revived the proposal Stalin had made to the Allies in 1946 for the creation of a united, neutral Germany.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Beria displayed a considerable degree of contempt for the rest of the Politburo, letting it be known that they were "complicit" in Stalin's crimes. However, it was not deep-rooted ideological disagreements that turned them against Beria. Khrushchev in particular was appalled at the idea of abandoning East Germany and allowing the restoration of capitalism there, but that alone was not enough to plot Beria's downfall and he even supported the new, more enlightened policy towards non-Russian nationalities. The Politburo soon began stonewalling Beria's reforms and trying to prevent them from passing. One proposal, to reduce sentences handed down by the MVD to 10 years max, was later claimed by Khrushchev to be a ruse. "He wants to be able to sentence people to ten years in the camps, and then when they're freed, sentence them to another ten years. This is his way of grinding them down." Molotov was the strongest opponent of abandoning East Germany, and found in Khrushchev an unexpected ally.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: By late June, it was decided that Beria could not simply be ignored or stonewalled, he had to be taken out. They had him arrested on 26 June with the support of the armed forces. At the end of the year, he was shot following a show trial where he was accused of spying for the West, committing sabotage, and plotting to restore capitalism. The secret police were disarmed and reorganized into the KGB, ensuring that they were completely under the control of the party and would never again be able to wage mass terror.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: For a time after Beria's deposition, Georgi Malenkov was the seniormost figure in the Politburo. Malenkov, an artistic-minded man who courted intellectuals and artists, had little use for bloodshed or state terror. He called for greater support of private agricultural plots and liberation of the arts from rigid socialist realism and he also criticized the pseudoscience of biologist Trofim Lysenko. In a November 1953 speech, Malenkov denounced corruption in various government agencies. He also reappraised Soviet views of the outside world and relations with the West, arguing that there were no disputes with the United States and her allies that could not be resolved peacefully, and that nuclear war with the West would simply bring about the destruction of all parties involved.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In the post-Beria period, Khrushchev rapidly began to emerge as the key figure. Khrushchev proposed greater agricultural reforms, although he still refused to abandon the concept of collective farming and continued to support Lysenko's pseudoscience. In a 1955 speech, he argued that Soviet agriculture needed a shot in the arm and that it was silly to keep blaming low productivity and failed harvests on Tsar Nicholas II, dead for almost 40 years. He also began allowing ordinary people to stroll the grounds of the Kremlin, which had been closed off except to high ranking state officials for over 20 years.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The late Stalin's reputation meanwhile started diminishing. His 75th birthday in December 1954 had been marked by extensive eulogies and commemorations in the state media as was the second anniversary of his death in March 1955. However, his 76th birthday at the end of the year was hardly mentioned.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The new leadership declared an amnesty for some serving prison sentences for criminal offenses, announced price cuts, and relaxed the restrictions on private plots. De-Stalinisation would come to spell an end to the role of large-scale forced labour in the economy.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: During the period of collective leadership, Khrushchev gradually rose to power while Malenkov's power waned. Malenkov was criticised for his economic reform proposals and desire to reduce the CPSU's direct involvement in the day-to-day running of the state. Molotov called his warning that nuclear war would end all of civilisation to be "nonsense" since according to Karl Marx, the collapse of capitalism was a historical inevitability. Khrushchev accused Malenkov of supporting Beria's plan to abandon East Germany, and of being a "capitulationist, social democrat, and a Menshevist".


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev was also headed for a showdown with Molotov, after having initially respected and left him alone in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death. Molotov began criticizing some of Khrushchev's ideas and the latter accused him in turn of being an out-of-touch ideologue who never left his dacha or the Kremlin to visit farms or factories. Molotov attacked Khrushchev's suggestions for agricultural reform and also his plans to construct cheap, prefab apartments to alleviate Moscow's severe housing shortages. Khrushchev also endorsed restoring ties with Yugoslavia, the split with Belgrade having been heavily engineered by Molotov, who continued to denounce Tito as a fascist. A 1955 visit by Khrushchev to Yugoslavia patched up relations with that country, but Molotov refused to back down. The near-total isolation of the Soviet Union from the outside world was also blamed by Khrushchev on Molotov's handling of foreign policy and the former admitted in a speech to the Central Committee the obvious Soviet complicity in starting the Korean War.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: At a closed session of the 20th Congress of the CPSU on 25 February 1956, Khrushchev shocked his listeners by denouncing Stalin's dictatorial rule and cult of personality in a speech entitled "On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences". He also attacked the crimes committed by Stalin's closest associates. Furthermore, he stated that the orthodox view of war between the capitalist and communist worlds being inevitable was no longer true. He advocated competition with the West rather than outright hostility, stating that capitalism would decay from within and that world socialism would triumph peacefully. But, he added, if the capitalists did desire war, the Soviet Union would respond in kind.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The impact of the 20th Congress on Soviet politics was immense. Khrushchev's speech stripped the legitimacy of his remaining Stalinist rivals, dramatically boosting his power domestically. Afterwards, Khrushchev eased restrictions and freed over a million prisoners from the Gulag, leaving an estimated 1.5 million prisoners living in a semi-reformed prison system (though a wave of counter-reform followed in the 1960s). Communists around the world were shocked and confused by his condemnation of Stalin, and the speech "...caused a veritable revolution (the word is not too strong) in peoples attitudes throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was the single factor in breaking down the mixture of fear, fanaticism, naivety and 'doublethink' with which everyone...had reacted to Communist rule".


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Many Soviet intellectuals groused that Khrushchev and the rest of the Central Committee had willingly aided and abetted Stalin's crimes and that the late tyrant could not possibly have done everything himself. Furthermore, they asked why it had taken three years to condemn him and noted that Khrushchev mostly criticised what had happened to fellow Party members while completely overlooking far greater atrocities such as the Holodomor and mass deportations from the Baltic States during and after World War II, none of which were allowed to be mentioned in the Soviet press until the end of the 1980s. During the Secret Speech, Khrushchev had tried in an awkward manner to explain why he and his colleagues had not raised their voices against Stalin by saying that they all feared their own destruction if they did not comply with his demands.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In Stalin's native Georgia, massive crowds of pro-Stalin demonstrators rioted in the streets of Tbilisi and even demanded that Georgia secede from the USSR. Army troops had to be called in to restore order, with 20 deaths, 60 injuries, and scores of arrests.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In April 1956, there were reports that Stalin busts and portraits around the country had been vandalized or pulled down and some student groups rioted and demanded that Stalin be posthumously expelled from the party and his body taken down from its spot next to Lenin. Party and student meetings called for proper rule of law in the country and even free elections. A 25 year old Mikhail Gorbachev, then a member of the Komsomol in Stavropol reported that reaction to the Secret Speech was explosive and there were strong reactions between people, particularly, young, educated people, who supported it and hated Stalin, others who denounced it and still held the late tyrant in awe, and others who thought it was irrelevant compared to grassroots issues such as food and housing availability. The Presidium responded by issuing a resolution condemning "anti-party" and "anti-Soviet" slanderers and the April 7 "Pravda" reprinted an editorial from China's "People's Daily" calling on party members to study Stalin's teachings and honour his memory. A Central Committee meeting on 30 June issued a resolution criticising Stalin merely for "serious errors" and "practicing a cult of personality" but holding the Soviet system itself blameless.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Some of the communist world, in particular China, North Korea, and Albania, stridently rejected de-Stalinisation. An editorial in the "People's Daily" argued that "Stalin made some mistakes, but on the whole he was a good, honest Marxist and his positives outweighed the negatives." Mao Zedong had many quarrels with Stalin, but thought that condemning him undermined the entire legitimacy of world socialism; "Stalin needed to be criticised, not killed" he said.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: By late 1955, thousands of political prisoners had been freed, but Soviet prisons and labour camps still held around 800,000 inmates and no attempt was made to investigate the Moscow Trials or rehabilitate their victims. Eventually several hundred thousand of Stalin's victims were rehabilitated, but the party officials purged in the Moscow Trials remained off the table. Khrushchev ordered an investigation into the trials of Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other army officers. The committee found that the charges leveled against them were baseless and their posthumous rehabilitation was announced in early 1957, but another investigation into the trials of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin declared that all three had engaged in "anti-Soviet activity" and would not be rehabilitated. After Khrushchev defeated the "anti-party group" in 1957, he promised to re-open the cases, but ultimately never did so, in part because of the embarrassing fact that he himself had celebrated the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks during the purges.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: As part of de-Stalinisation, Khrushchev set about renaming the numerous towns, cities, factories, natural features, and kholkozes around the country named in honor of Stalin and his aides, most notably Stalingrad, site of the great WWII battle, was renamed to Volgograd in 1961.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In 1957, Khrushchev had defeated a concerted Stalinist attempt to recapture power, decisively defeating the so-called "Anti-Party Group"; this event illustrated the new nature of Soviet politics. The most decisive attack on the Stalinists was delivered by defense minister Georgy Zhukov, who and the implied threat to the plotters was clear; however, none of the "anti-party group" were killed or even arrested, and Khrushchev disposed of them quite cleverly: Georgy Malenkov was sent to manage a power station in Kazakhstan, and Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the most die-hard Stalinists, was made ambassador to Mongolia.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Eventually however, Molotov was reassigned to be the Soviet representative of the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna after the Kremlin decided to put some safe distance between him and China since Molotov was becoming increasingly cozy with the anti-Khrushchev Chinese Communist Party leadership. Molotov continued to attack Khrushchev every opportunity he got, and in 1960, on the occasion of Lenin's 90th birthday, wrote a piece describing his personal memories of the Soviet founding father and thus implying that he was closer to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. In 1961, just prior to the 22nd CPSU Congress, Molotov wrote a vociferous denunciation of Khrushchev's party platform and was rewarded for this action with expulsion from the party.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev's attack on the "anti-party group" drew negative reactions from China; the People's Daily remarked "How can [Molotov], one of the founding fathers of the CPSU, be a member of an anti-party group?"


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Like Molotov, Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov also met the chopping block when he was sent to manage the Kirghizia Institute of Economics. Later, when he was appointed as a delegate to the Communist Party of Kirghizia conference, Khrushchev deputy Leonid Brezhnev intervened and ordered Shepilov dropped from the conference. He and his wife were evicted from their Moscow apartment and then reassigned to a smaller one that lay exposed to the fumes from a nearby food processing plant, and he was dropped from membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences before being expelled from the party. Kliment Voroshilov held the ceremonial title of head of state despite his advancing age and declining health; he retired in 1960. Nikolai Bulganin ended up managing the Stavropol Economic Council. Also banished was Lazar Kaganovich, sent to manage a potash works in the Urals before being expelled from the party along with Molotov in 1962.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Despite his strong support for Khrushchev during the removal of Beria and the anti-party group, Zhukov was too popular and beloved of a figure for Khrushchev's comfort, so he was removed as well. In addition, while leading the attack against Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich, he also insinuated that Khrushchev himself had been complicit in the 1930s purges, which in fact he had. While Zhukov was on a visit to Albania in October 1957, Khrushchev plotted his downfall. When Zhukov returned to Moscow, he was promptly accused of trying to remove the Soviet military from party control, creating a cult of personality around himself, and of plotting to seize power in a coup. Several Soviet generals went on to accuse Zhukov of "egomania", "shameless self-aggrandizement", and of tyrannical behaviour during WWII. Zhukov was expelled from his post as defense minister and forced into retirement from the military on the grounds of his "advanced age" (he was 62). Marshal Rodin Malinovsky took Zhukov's place as defense minister.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev was elected Premier on 27 March 1958, consolidating his power—the tradition followed by all his predecessors and successors. This was the final stage in the transition from the earlier period of post-Stalin collective leadership. He was now the ultimate source of authority in the Soviet Union, but would never possess the absolute power Stalin had.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In 1959, between 27 January and 5 February, the 21st Congress of the CPSU took place; it was an "Extraordinary" Congress, timed so that Khrushchev could consolidate his power over rivals not long after the attempted coup of the "anti-party group" in 1957. It was during this congress that the unusual Seven-Year Plan was adopted, cutting short and replacing the Sixth Five-Year Plan that had been adopted in 1956. The Seven-Year Plan would itself be cut short two years before its completion, retroactively becoming the seventh five-year plan.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The 22nd Congress of the CPSU, which convened from 17–21 October 1961, marked the apex of Khrushchev's power and prestige, despite there being already mounting doubts about his policies. However, the real opposition to him had yet to come and he glowed in the praise of the CPSU delegates as he read off the general report of the Central Committee and the party program, two monumental speeches that lasted a total of ten hours. Within a decade, Khrushchev declared, the Soviet people would have equal living standards and material comforts with the United States and Western Europe. In addition, the 22nd Congress saw a renewed attack on Stalin, which culminated in the expulsion of remaining Old Bolsheviks like Molotov and Kaganovich from the party. Stalin's embalmed body, which still lay in Red Square next to Lenin, was immediately removed and reburied in the Kremlin Wall.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In October 1964, while Khrushchev was on holiday in Crimea, the Presidium unanimously voted him out of office and refused to permit him to take his case to the Central Committee. He retired as a private citizen after an editorial in Pravda denounced him for "hare-brained schemes, half−baked conclusions, hasty decisions, and actions divorced from reality".


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev initiated "The Thaw", a complex shift in political, cultural, and economic life in the Soviet Union. That included some openness and contact with other countries and new social and economic policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing living standards to rise dramatically while maintaining high levels of economic growth. Censorship was relaxed as well. Some subtle critiques of the Soviet society were tolerated, and artists were not expected to produce only works which had government-approved political context. Still, artists, most of whom were proud of both the country and the Party, were careful not to get into trouble. However, he reintroduced aggressive anti-religious campaigns, closing down many houses of worship.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Such loosening of controls also caused an enormous impact on other socialist countries in Central Europe, many of which were resentful of Soviet influence in their affairs. Riots broke out in Poland in the summer of 1956, which led to reprisals from national forces there. A political convulsion soon followed, leading to the rise of Władysław Gomułka to power in October. This almost triggered a Soviet invasion when Polish Communists elected him without consulting the Kremlin in advance, but in the end, Khrushchev backed down due to Gomułka's widespread popularity in the country. Poland would still remain a member of the Warsaw Pact (established a year earlier), and in return, the Soviet Union seldom intervened in its neighbors' domestic and external affairs. Khrushchev also began reaching out to newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, which was in sharp contrast to Stalin's Europe-centered foreign policy. And in September 1959, he became the first Soviet leader to visit the US.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In November 1956, the Hungarian Revolution was brutally suppressed by Soviet troops. About 2,500–3,000 Hungarian insurgents and 700 Soviet troops were killed, thousands more were wounded, and nearly a quarter million left the country as refugees. The Hungarian uprising was a blow to Western communists; many who had formerly supported the Soviet Union began to criticize it in the wake of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Back in the early 1950s, Khrushchev had defended private plots as part of the collective leadership, which had introduced important innovations in the area of Soviet agriculture. It had encouraged peasants to grow more on their private plots, increased payments for crops grown on collective farms, and invested more heavily in agriculture.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: However, beginning in the late 1950s, Khrushchev spoke of communal farming as inevitable. After Khrushchev had defeated his rivals and secured his position, he set his attention to economic reforms, particularly in the field of agriculture. "If a capitalist farmer required eight kilos of grain to produce one kilo of meat," he told a farmers' council, "he would lose his pants. Yet if a state farm director here does the same, he manages to keep his pants. Why? Because no one will hold him accountable for it".


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev's administration abolished the Machine Tractor Stations, which were rural agencies to provide farming equipment, and had them sell their inventory directly to the farmers, but the latter ended up incurring huge debts buying the farming equipment, which ended up being used less effectively than the MTS had done.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev continued to believe in the theories of the biologist Trofim Lysenko, a carryover from the Stalin era, however, the Soviet leader looked to his country's greatest rival for inspiration. As far back as the 1940s, he had promoted the use of American farming techniques and even obtained seeds from the US, in particular from a cagey Iowa farmer named Roswell Garst, who believed positive trade and business relations with Moscow would ease superpower tensions. This led to Khrushchev's soon to be notorious fascination with growing maize, although most of the Soviet Union outside of Ukraine lacked a suitable climate and much of the infrastructure used by American farmers, including adequate mechanized equipment, knowledge of advanced farming techniques, and proper use of fertilizer and pesticides, was in short supply. Although Khrushchev's corn obsession was exaggerated by popular myth, he did nonetheless advocate any number of unrealistic ideas such as planting corn in Siberia.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: During the Virgin Lands Campaign in the mid-1950s, many tracts of land were opened to farming in Kazakhstan and neighbouring areas of Russia. These new farmlands turned out to be susceptible to droughts, but in some years they produced excellent harvests. Later agricultural reforms by Khrushchev, however, proved counterproductive. His plans for growing corn and increasing meat and dairy production failed, and his reorganisation of collective farms into larger units produced confusion in the countryside.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In a politically motivated move to weaken the central state bureaucracy in 1957, Khrushchev did away with the industrial ministries in Moscow and replaced them with regional economic councils (sovnarkhozes).


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Although he intended these economic councils to be more responsive to local needs, the decentralisation of industry led to disruption and inefficiency. Connected with this decentralisation was Khrushchev's decision in 1962 to recast party organisations along economic, rather than administrative, lines. The resulting bifurcation of the party apparatus into industrial and agricultural sectors at the oblast (province) level and below contributed to the disarray and alienated many party officials at all levels. Symptomatic of the country's economic difficulties was the abandonment in 1963 of Khrushchev's special seven-year economic plan (1959–65) two years short of its completion.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev significantly reduced Soviet defense spending and the size of conventional forces, accusing the army of being "metal eaters" and "If you let the army have their way, they will eat up the country's entire resources and still claim it's not enough." Several warships under construction were scrapped as Khrushchev considered them useless, as well as plans for long range bombers. Orders for fighter planes slowed and several military airfields were converted to civilian use. Although he alienated the Soviet military establishment, he insisted that the country could not match the United States for conventional military capabilities and that the nuclear arsenal was sufficient deterrence. There were also practical reasons for this stance as the low birth rate of the 1940s caused a shortage of military-aged men.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The size of the Soviet military was reduced by nearly 2 million men in 1955–57, and further cuts followed in 1958 and 1960. These cuts in troop strength were not well planned out and many soldiers and officers were left jobless and homeless. Discontent in the military started building up.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Despite Khrushchev's boasts about Soviet missile capabilities, they were mostly bluster. The R-7 ICBM used to launch Sputnik was almost useless as a workable ICBM and Soviet missiles were launched from above-ground surface pads which were completely exposed to enemy attack. When Khrushchev suggested putting them in underground silos, Soviet rocket engineers argued that it could not be done until he stumbled across an article in an American technical journal describing the use of silos to house missiles. He admonished the rocket engineers for failing to pay attention to American technical developments and when the first Soviet silo launch took place in September 1959, Khrushchev took it as a personal triumph.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Aid to developing countries and scientific research, especially into space technology and weaponry, maintained the Soviet Union as one of the world's two major world powers. The Soviet Union launched the first ever artificial Earth satellite in history, Sputnik 1, which orbited the Earth in 1957. The Soviets also sent the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev attempted to restore relations with Tito's Yugoslavia with a visit to Belgrade in May 1955, however the Yugoslavian leader was unmoved by an attempt by Khrushchev to blame Beria for the break with Yugoslavia. Khrushchev persisted and began urging the Eastern European bloc to restore ties with Yugoslavia. He also disbanded the Cominform, used as a club to beat Belgrade over the head with. The trip was reciprocated by a visit of Josip Broz Tito to Moscow in May 1956 where he was given a regal welcome and immense crowds dispatched to greet him. The Politburo members attempted to outdo each other in courting Tito and apologizing for Stalin, but the visit had no ultimate effect on Tito's foreign policy stance and he still refused to join the Soviet bloc, abandon his nonaligned stance, or cut off economic and military ties with the West. Worse than that, Tito began offering his nonaligned socialism to other countries, in particular Poland and Hungary.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: After Hungarian leader Imre Nagy briefly took refuge in the Yugoslavian embassy in Budapest during the events of October 1956, Tito stayed aloof from the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt and Soviet-Yugoslav relations waned from that point onward. Tito declined to attend the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1957 and continued to actively promote his nonaligned stance at the Yugoslavian Communist Party's congress the following March. Khrushchev refused to send any delegates to the congress and authorized a lengthy denunciation of it in "Pravda". Accusing Tito of being a traitor similar to Imre Nagy, Khrushchev ordered the execution of the Hungarian leader, who had been incarcerated for the last several months.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The uprisings in Poland and Hungary during 1956, which coincided with a softening of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin course (he told guests in a reception at the Chinese embassy in Moscow that "Stalinism is inseparable from Marxism") brought about renewed protests from various elements of Soviet society. Aside from the usual complaints from intellectuals, there were student demonstrations and reports of portraits of Soviet leaders in factories being vandalized or torn down. Despite the small scale of this public dissent, the Central Committee quickly approved harsh countermeasures and several hundred people were arrested during early 1957 and sentenced to several years in labour camps.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: East Germany continued to be a sticky situation. Khrushchev had initially hoped to obtain recognition for the GDR from the Western powers, but ended up making things worse. A mass exodus of GDR citizens to West Germany, mostly young, fit adults, continued unabated, which left the GDR's labour force drained of manpower. GDR leader Walter Ulbricht requested the use of Soviet guest workers to make up for labour shortages, a proposal that alarmed Khrushchev as it drew reminders of the use of Soviet slave labourers by Nazi Germany during WWII. On top of this, West German citizens were traveling to the East to buy low cost goods subsidized by Moscow, further increasing the amount of debt money the GDR owed to the USSR.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The problem of signing a peace treaty with West Germany loomed large and posed nearly insurmountable issues. Signing a peace treaty would likely result in an economic embargo of the GDR by West Germany which would require a twofold increase in Soviet assistance, something Moscow could ill afford.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev ran afoul of China when he proposed a joint Sino-Soviet fleet in the Pacific to counter the US Seventh Fleet. Soviet ambassador to China Pavel Yudin was rebuffed by Mao Zedong in a July 1958 meeting. Mao demanded to talk to Khrushchev in person, so the latter obliged and flew to Beijing. The meeting proved no more successful than the previous one with Yudin and Mao continued to reject the idea of a joint fleet, allowing Soviet Navy warships to dock at Chinese ports in peacetime, and operating joint radar stations as an infringement on Chinese sovereignty. Shortly after Khrushchev went home, the Chinese People's Liberation Army shelled the islands of Kinmen (Quemoy) and Matsu in the Formosa Strait, provoking the US Seventh Fleet to the area in a major show of force. Moscow supported the Chinese shelling of the islands with reluctance and after American threats of force on China, Mao told an appalled Andrei Gromyko that he was more than willing to start a nuclear war with the imperialist powers.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: After this, Sino-Soviet relations calmed during the next six months only to worsen again during the summer of 1959 when Khrushchev criticized the Great Leap Forward and remained noncommittal during a Chinese border clash with India. On 20 August, Moscow informed Beijing that they would not give them a proposed sample atomic bomb. When Khrushchev headed to Beijing in late September, just after his US trip, he was given an icy reception and further alienated the Chinese with his warm accounts of Americans and of Eisenhower. A suggestion by the Soviet premier to free American pilots captured by China during the Korean War was rejected as well as Beijing's recent actions in the Formosa Strait and the Indian border. The talks ended after only three days and Khrushchev went home despondent.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In September 1959, Khrushchev became the first Russian head of state to visit the United States. This groundbreaking trip was made on the new Tu-114 long range airliner despite still being an experimental aircraft, since the Soviet Union did not have any other plane capable of nonstop trans-Atlantic travel. The 13 day trip included meetings with American businessmen and labour leaders, Hollywood actors, and Roswell Garst's farm in Iowa. Khrushchev became openly dismayed when he was told he could not visit Disneyland because it was too difficult to guarantee his security there.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev anxiously awaited the results of the 1960 United States presidential election, preferring Kennedy to Richard Nixon, whom he took as a hardline anti-communist cold warrior, and openly celebrated the former's victory on November 8. In truth however, Khrushchev's opinion of Kennedy was mixed. He knew that the new president was from a wealthy background and Harvard-educated. On the other, Kennedy was the youngest elected US president at 43 and gave off the impression of inexperience and "a boy wearing his father's pants" that Khrushchev assumed he could pounce on and dominate. If however Kennedy was that weak, there stood the possibility that he could merely be a puppet of "reactionary" forces and the US military-industrial complex. Almost immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, Khrushchev attempted to barrage the president-elect with proposals and the hope of improved US-Soviet relations, specifically turning the clock back to the accommodating diplomatic atmosphere of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's time. However, Khrushchev was informed that he was acting too quickly and it would not be possible to have a formal summit with Kennedy until he took office in January, and even then, arranging such a meeting would still take time.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev was pleased by Kennedy's inaugural address on 20 January 1961 and immediately offered to release American pilots shot down over the Soviet Union as an olive branch. Kennedy in his turn ordered a halt to US Postal Service censorship of Soviet publications, lifted a ban on the importation of Soviet crab meat, and ordered military officials to tone down anti-Soviet rhetoric in speeches.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: In a report on January 6 concerning a world conference of 81 communist parties in Moscow the previous fall, Khrushchev stated that the triumph of socialism over capitalism was inevitable, but at the same time, a major conflict between the great powers on the scale of the two world wars was now unthinkable in the age of nuclear weapons. He also stated that local wars must be avoided, for they could erupt into major ones as had been the case with World War I. The only acceptable conflicts as Khrushchev saw it were anti-colonial wars of national liberation along the lines of Algeria's war of independence against France.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Although Eisenhower would have likely dismissed this speech as so much Soviet bluster, the inexperienced Kennedy became nervous and took it as a call to arms by Moscow. In his first State of the Union address on 30 January, he cautioned that "No one should think that either the Soviet Union or China has given up their desire for world domination, ambitions they forcefully restated only a short time ago. On the contrary, our aim is to show that aggression and subversion on their part is not an acceptable means to achieve these aims." These remarks were followed two days later by the first test launch of a Minuteman ICBM.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev's initial hopes for Kennedy gradually dimmed during the next few months. When Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated, Khrushchev blamed it on Western colonialist forces. Khrushchev's boasts about Soviet missile forces provided John F. Kennedy with a key issue to use against Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election—the so-called 'missile gap'. But all Khrushchev's (probably sincere) attempts to build a strong personal relationship with the new president failed, as his typical combination of bluster, miscalculation and mishap resulted in the Cuban Missile Crises. After the Berlin and Cuba crises, tensions tapered off between the two superpowers.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Khrushchev openly wept at the news of Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 and feared that new US president Lyndon Johnson would pursue a more aggressive anti-Soviet stance. Johnson turned out to be more in favor of détente than Khrushchev had assumed, but would end up letting superpower relations take a backseat to his Great Society programs and the Vietnam War.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Since Stalin's death, Soviet agricultural output had improved measurably—gains in meat, dairy, and grain output were in the area of 130-150%, which led to Khrushchev making overconfident target dates for overtaking American farm production that eventually became a subject of derision.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Alexsei Larionov, local party leader in Ryazan, attempted to triple meat production in the province after overall Soviet meat output for 1958 had been lacking (the grain harvest for comparison had been a strong one). The scheme, which was similar in nature to China's contemporary Great Leap Forward, involved setting unrealistic quotas and frantically slaughtering every animal in the province, including dairy cows and breeding stock, in an attempt to meet them. When the quotas still could not be met, Ryazan farmers tried to steal livestock from neighboring provinces, which took measures to protect their own farms such as police roadblocks. The Ryazan farmers resorted to theft of cattle under cover of darkness and Larionov, growing ever more desperate, made taxes payable in meat. In the end, Ryazan produced just 30,000 tons of meat for 1959, when they had promised 180,000 tons. The disgraced Larionov committed suicide shortly thereafter.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The harvest for 1960 proved the worst since Stalin's death, and the Virgin Lands were especially disappointing. During the fall and winter of 1960–61, Khrushchev embarked on a furious campaign to improve agricultural shortcomings, most of which amounted to criticizing incompetent "kholkoz" managers and promoting Lysenkoism and other quack scientific ideas while overlooking the real problem, which was the fundamental defects of collectivized agriculture.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: The harvest for 1961 was disappointing, with agricultural output a mere 0.7% higher than 1960 and meat production actually less than the previous two years. Discontent began building, and in the face of it, Khrushchev continued to offer new proposals to improve farm output and condemnation of inefficient farming practices. Despite complaints from farmers that they lacked enough funding for tools and farm equipment, Khrushchev argued that he had no spare money to allot to agriculture. His only solution was to add yet more bureaucracy to the agricultural sector.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: Price increases of meat and dairy in the spring of 1962, combined with attempts to convince industrial workers to work harder for the same or less pay, paved the way for a mounting disaster. The price increases went into effect on 1 June and were immediately greeted by strikes and demonstrations in several cities, the biggest and most cataclysmic in the city of Novocherkassk where workers went on strike to protest rising costs of living and poor workplace conditions. The following day, workers at the Budenny Electric Locomotive Factory marched to the central square of the city where army units fired on them, killing 23. Another 116 demonstrators were arrested, with 14 tried for "anti-Soviet agitation" and seven of them sentenced to death. The other seven received 10–15 years in prison. Smaller riots in other cities were also put down with several fatalities. Khrushchev made a speech the same day half-apologizing for the price increases, but insisted that he had no choice. He never fully came to terms with the Novocherrkask Massacre and did not bring it up in his memoirs.


title: History of the Soviet Union (1953–1964)

text: During 1963, Khrushchev increasingly despaired over his inability to cure the perennial ailments of Soviet agriculture. He accused farmers of needlessly wasting fertilizer, adding that a farmer in the United States would be out of business if he did the same and he also complained about aging "kholkoz" managers who should have retired and made way for younger men, but continued to hold onto their jobs. Drought affected a large portion of the west-central USSR during the fall months and overall the 1963 harvest was an abject failure with a mere 107 million tons of grain produced and there was serious consideration given to rationing. Khrushchev could offer no solutions other than empty sloganeering and criticizing incompetent managers. After initially bristling at the idea of importing grain from overseas, he finally gave in after learning that Soviet grain stocks were almost depleted.


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms () is a 1940 motion picture directed by David Yashin which documents Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms.


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: The heart-lung machine demonstrated in the film, the "autojektor", was designed and constructed by Sergei Brukhonenko, whose work in the film is said to have led to the first operations on heart valves. The "autojektor" device demonstrated in the film is similar to modern ECMO machines, as well as the systems commonly used for renal dialysis in modern nephrology.


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: The film depicts and discusses a series of medical experiments. The English version of the film begins with British scientist J. B. S. Haldane appearing and discussing how he has personally seen the procedures carried out in the film and have saved lives during the war. The Russian version lacks this explanation. The experiments start with a heart of a canine, which is shown being isolated from a body; four tubes are then connected to the organ. Using an apparatus to supply it with blood, the heart beats in the same manner as if it were in a living organism. The film then shows a lung in a tray, which is operated by bellows that oxygenate the blood.


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: Following the lung scene, the audience is then shown the "autojektor", a heart-lung machine, composed of a pair of linear diaphragm pumps, venous and arterial, exchanging oxygen with a water reservoir. It is then seen supplying a canine head with oxygenated blood. The head is presented with external stimuli, which it responds to. Finally, a dog is brought to clinical death (depicted primarily through an animated diagram of lung and heart activity) by draining all blood from it. It is then left for ten minutes and connected to the heart-lung machine, which gradually returns the blood into the animal's circulation. After several minutes, the heart fibrillates, then restarts a normal rhythm. Respiration likewise resumes and the machine is removed. Over the ensuing ten days, the dog recovers from the procedure and continues living a healthy life. According to the film, several dogs were brought back to life using this method, including one which is an offspring of parents who were both also resuscitated.


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: The film was shot at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, in Moscow. The operations are credited to Doctor Sergei Brukhonenko and Boris Levinskovsky, who were demonstrating a special heart-lung apparatus called the "autojektor", also referred to as the heart-lung machine, to the Second Congress of Russian Pathologists in Moscow.


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: The film was shown to an audience of a thousand US scientists in 1943 in the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship. The audience considered that the film "might move many supposed biological impossibilities into the realm of the possible."


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: Brukhonenko's decapitation experiment was remarked upon by George Bernard Shaw, who stated, "I am even tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature."


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: Brukhonenko developed a new version of the "autojektor" for use on human patients in the same year; it can be seen today on display at the Museum of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Bakulev Scientific Center of Cardiovascular Surgery in Russia. Brukhonenko was posthumously awarded the prestigious Lenin Prize.


title: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms

text: Some commentators have questioned the film's authenticity, given that none of the more dubious experiments are shown in any full-frame shots. According to some scientists who claim to have seen the experiments in the film, the severed dog head only survived for a few minutes when attached to the artificial heart, as opposed to the hours claimed in the film. Another source of skepticism are the dogs drained of blood and then brought back to life, as after 10 minutes of death they should have experienced serious brain damage. According to the institute’s records, the dogs only survived for a few days, not several years as the film claimed.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: Oliver Plunkett (or Oliver Plunket) (), (1 November 1625 – 1 July 1681) was the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland who was the last victim of the Popish Plot. He was beatified in 1920 and canonised in 1975, thus becoming the first new Irish saint in almost seven hundred years.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: Oliver Plunkett was born on 1 November 1625 (earlier biographers gave his date of birth as 1 November 1629, but 1625 has been the consensus since the 1930s) in Loughcrew, County Meath, Ireland, to well-to-do parents with Hiberno-Norman ancestors. A grandson of James Plunket, 8th Baron Killeen (died 1595), he was related by birth to a number of landed families, such as the recently ennobled Earls of Roscommon, as well as the long-established Earls of Fingall, Lords Louth, and Lords Dunsany. Until his sixteenth year, the boy's education was entrusted to his cousin Patrick Plunkett, Abbot of St Mary's, Dublin and brother of Luke Plunkett, the first Earl of Fingall, who later became successively Bishop of Ardagh and of Meath. As an aspirant to the priesthood, he set out for Rome in 1647, under the care of Father Pierfrancesco Scarampi of the Roman Oratory. At this time the Irish Confederate Wars were raging in Ireland; these were essentially conflicts between native Irish Catholics, English and Irish Anglicans and Nonconformists. Scarampi was the Papal envoy to the Catholic movement known as the Confederation of Ireland. Many of Plunkett's relatives were involved in this organisation.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: He was admitted to the Irish College in Rome and proved to be an able pupil. He was ordained a priest in 1654, and deputed by the Irish bishops to act as their representative in Rome. Meanwhile, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649–53) had defeated the Catholic cause in Ireland; in the aftermath, the public practice of Catholicism was banned and Catholic clergy were executed. As a result, it was impossible for Plunkett to return to Ireland for many years. He petitioned to remain in Rome and, in 1657, became a professor of theology. Throughout the period of the Commonwealth and the first years of Charles II's reign, he successfully pleaded the cause of the Irish Catholic Church, and also served as theological professor at the College of Propaganda Fide. At the Congregation of Propaganda Fide on 9 July 1669 he was appointed Archbishop of Armagh, the Irish primatial see, and was consecrated on 30 November at Ghent by the Bishop of Ghent, Eugeen-Albert, count d'Allamont. He eventually set foot on Irish soil again on 7 March 1670, as the English Restoration of 1660 had begun on a basis of toleration. The pallium was granted him in the Consistory of 28 July 1670.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: After arriving back in Ireland, he tackled drunkenness among the clergy, writing: "Let us remove this defect from an Irish priest, and he will be a saint". The Penal Laws had been relaxed in line with the Declaration of Breda in 1660 and he was able to establish a Jesuit College in Drogheda in 1670. A year later 150 students attended the college, no fewer than 40 of whom were Protestant, making this college the first integrated school in Ireland. His ministry was a successful one and he is said to have confirmed 48,000 Catholics over a 4-year period. The government in Dublin, especially under the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Ormonde (the Protestant son of Catholic parents) extended a generous measure of toleration to the Catholic hierarchy until the mid-1670s. Plunkett was executed in Tyburn, England on 1 July 1681. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason and “promoting the Roman faith."


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: On the enactment of the Test Act in 1673, to which Plunkett would not agree for doctrinal reasons, the college was closed and demolished. Plunkett went into hiding, travelling only in disguise, and refused a government edict to register at a seaport to await passage into exile. For the next few years he was largely left in peace since the Dublin government, except when put under pressure from the English government in London, preferred to leave the Catholic bishops alone.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: In 1678 the so-called Popish Plot, concocted in England by clergyman Titus Oates, led to further anti-Catholic action. Archbishop Peter Talbot of Dublin was arrested, and Plunkett again went into hiding. The Privy Council of England, in Westminster, was told that Plunkett had plotted a French invasion. The moving spirit behind the campaign is said to have been Arthur Capell, the first Earl of Essex, who had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1672-77 and hoped to resume the office by discrediting the Duke of Ormonde. However Essex was not normally a ruthless or unprincipled man, and his later plea for mercy suggests that he had never intended that Plunkett should actually die.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: Despite being on the run and with a price on his head, Plunkett refused to leave his flock. At some point before his final incarceration, he took refuge in a church that once stood in the townland of Killartry, in the parish of Clogherhead in County Louth, seven miles outside Drogheda. He was arrested in Dublin on 6 December 1679 and imprisoned in Dublin Castle, where he gave absolution to the dying Talbot. Plunkett was tried at Dundalk for conspiring against the state by allegedly plotting to bring 20,000 French soldiers into the country, and for levying a tax on his clergy to support 70,000 men for rebellion. Though this was unproven, some in government circles were worried about the possibility that a repetition of the Irish rebellion of 1641 was being planned and in any case, this was a convenient excuse for proceeding against Plunkett. The Duke of Ormonde, aware that Lord Essex was using the crisis to undermine him, did not defend Plunkett in public. In private however, he made clear his belief in Plunkett's innocence and his contempt for the informers against him: "silly drunken vagabonds... whom no schoolboy would trust to rob an orchard".


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: Plunkett did not object to facing an all-Protestant jury, but the trial soon collapsed as the prosecution witnesses were themselves wanted men and afraid to turn up in court. Lord Shaftesbury knew Plunkett would never be convicted in Ireland, irrespective of the jury's composition, and so had Plunkett moved to Newgate Prison in London in order to face trial at Westminster Hall. The first grand jury found no true bill, but he was not released. The second trial has generally been regarded as a serious miscarriage of justice; Plunkett was denied defending counsel (although Hugh Reily acted as his legal advisor) and time to assemble his defence witnesses, and he was also frustrated in his attempts to obtain the criminal records of those who were to give evidence against him. His servant James McKenna, and a relative, John Plunkett, had travelled back to Ireland and failed within the time available to bring back witnesses and evidence for the defence. During the trial, Archbishop Plunkett had disputed the right of the court to try him in England and he also drew attention to the criminal past of the witnesses, but to no avail. Lord Chief Justice Sir Francis Pemberton addressing these complaints said to Plunkett: "Look you, Mr. Plunket, it is in vain for you to talk and make this discourse here now..." and later on again: "Look you, Mr. Plunket, don't mis-spend your own time; for the more you trifle in these things, the less time you will have for your defence".


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: The Scottish clergyman and future Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, an eyewitness to the Plot trials, had no doubt of the innocence of Plunkett, whom he praised as a wise and sober man who wished only to live peacefully and tend to his congregation. Writing in the 19th century, Lord Campbell said of the judge, Pemberton, that the trial was a disgrace to himself and his country. More recently the High Court judge Sir James Comyn called it a grave mistake: while Plunkett, by virtue of his office, was clearly guilty of "promoting the Catholic faith", and may possibly have had some dealings with the French, there was never the slightest evidence that he had conspired against the King's life.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: Archbishop Plunkett was found guilty of high treason in June 1681 "for promoting the Roman faith", and was condemned to death. In passing judgement, the Chief Justice said: "You have done as much as you could to dishonour God in this case; for the bottom of your treason was your setting up your false religion, than which there is not any thing more displeasing to God, or more pernicious to mankind in the world". The jury returned within fifteen minutes with a guilty verdict and Archbishop Plunkett replied: ""Deo Gratias"" (Latin for "Thanks be to God").


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: Numerous pleas for mercy were made but Charles II, although himself a reputed crypto-Catholic, thought it too politically dangerous to spare Plunkett. The French ambassador to England, Paul Barillon, conveyed a plea for mercy from his king, Louis XIV. Charles told him frankly that he knew Plunkett to be innocent, but that the time was not right to take so bold a step as to pardon him. Lord Essex, apparently realising too late that his intrigues had led to the condemnation of an innocent man, made a similar plea for mercy. The King, normally the most self-controlled of men, turned on Essex in fury, saying: "his blood be on your head – you could have saved him but would not, I would save him and dare not".


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: Plunkett was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 1 July 1681 (11 July NS), aged 55, the last Catholic martyr to die in England. His body was initially buried in two tin boxes, next to five Jesuits who had died previously, in the courtyard of St Giles in the Fields church. The remains were exhumed in 1683 and moved to the Benedictine monastery at Lamspringe, near Hildesheim in Germany. The head was brought to Rome, and from there to Armagh, and eventually to Drogheda where since 29 June 1921 it has rested in Saint Peter's Church. Most of the body was brought to Downside Abbey, England, where the major part is located today, with some parts remaining at Lamspringe. On the occasion of his canonization in 1975 his casket was opened and some parts of his body were given to St Peter's Church in Drogheda Ireland.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: Oliver Plunkett was beatified in 1920 and canonized in 1975, the first new Irish saint for almost seven hundred years, and the first of the Irish martyrs to be beatified. For the canonisation, the customary second miracle was waived. He has since been followed by 17 other Irish martyrs who were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1992. Among them were Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley, Margaret Ball, and the Wexford Martyrs.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: As a spectacle alone, a rally and Mass for St Oliver Plunkett on London's Clapham Common was a remarkable triumph. The Common was virtually taken over for a celebration of the 300th anniversary of Plunkett's martyrdom. Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, twenty enrobed bishops and a number of abbots mounted a stage beneath a scaffolding shelter on 1 July 1981. Ó Fiaich had flown there in a helicopter with Plunkett's head. The occasion attracted thousands of pilgrims to the park.


title: Oliver Plunkett

text: In 1997 Plunkett was made a patron saint for peace and reconciliation in Ireland, adopted by the prayer group campaigning for peace in Ireland, "St. Oliver Plunkett for Peace and Reconciliation".


title: Insane in the Brain

text: "Insane in the Brain" is a 1993 song by American hip hop group Cypress Hill, released as the first single from their second album, "Black Sunday" (1993). In addition to hitting number one on the US rap chart, the song also was a mainstream hit, reaching number 19 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in 1993. It earned a gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America and sold 600,000 copies domestically.


title: Insane in the Brain

text: According to B-Real, the song was actually a diss song aimed at Chubb Rock. The group felt Chubb had ridiculed their style on his 1992 album, "I Gotta Get Mine Yo". DJ Muggs credited "Jump Around" by House of Pain, also produced by himself, as a major influence.


title: Insane in the Brain

text: The song is built around many samples: a drum break from organist George Semper's cover version of Lee Dorsey's "Get Out of My Life, Woman"; a sample of James Brown grunting from the opening of his song "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud"; a sample of the line "insane in the brain" from Cypress Hill's own song "Hole in the Head"; the opening keyboard from Sly and the Family Stone's "Life", a sample of the line "I think I'm going crazy" from the Youngbloods' "All Over the World (La La)" which concludes the track and the most prominent sample throughout the song, a repeating sample of, in which DJ Muggs initially claimed, a pitched blues guitar, although shortly after, he changed his story and claimed that that sound is a horn, as explained below:


title: Insane in the Brain

text: Many sources claim that the alleged pitched blues guitar sample was actually a sample of a horse from Mel and Tim's "Good Guys Only Win in the Movies", but during an interview with "Sound on Sound" in December 2018 on the production techniques used, DJ Muggs refuted the sample:


title: Insane in the Brain

text: That's weird, everybody thinks that's a horse, but it isn't. I've seen that a bunch of times on these sample sites. That's a sound I made from a blues guitar pitched. At the time I used to run some sounds through guitar amps. When I heard that horse thing, I was like, 'Oh, that sounds just like it.' Honestly to God, those sample sites get a lot wrong. They have some shit right, but I'll go, 'I never used that.' I don't know where they gather their information. Sometimes, they're spot on, but sometimes, I'm like, 'Yo, you guys are off.'


title: Insane in the Brain

text: However, less than two months later in an interview with British newspaper "The Guardian", Muggs then claimed the sound effect was made by a horn and not a guitar. This has since caused disbelief that Muggs is telling the truth and that the sample may well be the horse from Mel and Tim's "Good Guys Only Win in the Movies", as Muggs has claimed himself that he has "a foggy memory when it comes to the samples used on 'Insane in the Brain'" due to the fact that at the time of the song's production, "there was a lot of weed smoked."


title: Insane in the Brain

text: Jesse Ducker from Albumism described "Insane in the Brain" as a "upbeat, pulsing, almost circus-like track." Larry Flick from "Billboard" wrote, "One of the hip-hop community's leading acts returns with a slammin' romp. Resting on a beat-bed of loopy samples and nimble scratches, act drops rhymes that are even sharper than on previous efforts. A head-bobbin' midtempo groove leads them into a brain-embedding hook that will help knock down urban and pop radio doors." A reviewer from "Music & Media" commented, "If you think you're going slightly mad, you haven't heard this Hispanic gangsta rap outfit yet. They drive you nuts, introducing neighing horses as backup singers." Andy Beevers from "Music Week" rated it three out of five, calling it an "excellent new single from LA's celebrated smokers" and "a tough funky track." He added that "it sounds similar to the House Of Pain hits, but not as commercial." James Hamilton from the magazine's "RM" Dance Update described it as a "Public Enemy-ish mildly jaunty jolting jiggly roller". Another editor, Richard Russell wrote, "While this covers pretty much the same ground as the debut LP, it will help to satiate the appetite of countless Cypress fans hungry for new material. B-Real's nasal whine is now one of the most distinctive sounds in hip hop, here complaining about "cops trying to snatch his crops". Tom Doyle from "Smash Hits" gave the song four out of five, saying, "Any single that begins with someone murmuring "Don'tchoo know I'm loco?" is sure to be good." He stated further that Cypress Hill "are the best American rap stars for ages".


title: Insane in the Brain

text: A music video for the track was filmed at San Francisco's DNA Lounge. It was directed by American director Josh Taft and features the group performing at what appears to be a rave, makes heavy use of strobing effects and "psychedelic" colorations, alongside numerous shots of marijuana usage, all of which seemingly corresponds with the album's drug-filled recording process, as described by the group. The video was later published on Cypress Hill's official YouTube channel in October 2009. It has amassed more than 177 million views as of October 2022.


title: Christopher (The Sopranos)

text: "Christopher" is the 42nd episode of the HBO original series "The Sopranos" and the third episode of the show's fourth season. Its teleplay was written by Michael Imperioli, from a story idea by Imperioli and Maria Laurino. It was directed by Tim Van Patten and originally aired on September 29, 2002.


title: Christopher (The Sopranos)

text: Silvio wants to take action against Native Americans protesting the Columbus Day parade, believing their actions to be insulting to Italian-Americans. When, without Tony's approval, he, Patsy, and Artie attempt to break up the protest, Little Paulie and several others are injured. Ralphie threatens the protest leader, Professor Del Redclay, that he will make it known that Iron Eyes Cody, a popular Native American figure, is actually an Italian-American. Tony unsuccessfully appeals to Assemblyman Ron Zellman and to an Indian chief to convince Redclay to cancel the protest. The chief invites Tony and his crew to his casino. Both the parade and protest occur without mob intervention, which upsets Silvio. Tony forcefully argues to Silvio that his achievements came through his own abilities, not through his heritage, and scorns the idea that everyone belongs to a victimized group.


title: Christopher (The Sopranos)

text: At a luncheon meant to instill Italian pride in women, the "mob wives" feel singled out when the speaker attempts to dissociate Italian culture from the Mafia. After the luncheon, Gabriella lectures Father Phil about how much the mob wives, especially Carmela, have given to the parish, and says he had no right to bring in a guest speaker who intended to shame them.


title: Christopher (The Sopranos)

text: The Soprano and Lupertazzi families meet over a meal: Johnny, speaking for Carmine, demands a share of the profit Tony made from Junior's warehouse, which was recently flipped. Tony agrees, but comes to the conclusion that someone from his organization is leaking information to the Lupertazzi family. Now that Johnny knows of Ralphie's joke about his wife, he is furiously hostile to him, but will not say why.


title: Christopher (The Sopranos)

text: Bobby's wife Karen is killed in a road accident. The mob wives feel sympathy for Bobby during the wake and discuss his having never taken a "comare". Spending time with him in his home, Janice is touched by his sincere grief.


title: Christopher (The Sopranos)

text: Janice is now living with Ralphie, who has left Rosalie, but after a discussion with her therapist, Janice wills herself to break up with him. When Ralphie returns home, she yells for him to leave and shoves him down the stairs, injuring his back. Janice locks herself in her room as Ralphie hobbles back to his car, bags in hand.


title: Christopher (The Sopranos)

text: The episode created a controversy when cast members of "The Sopranos" (specifically Dominic Chianese and Lorraine Bracco) were banned from marching in the Columbus Day Parade in New York City, despite having received an invitation to participate in the event from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.


title: Christopher (The Sopranos)

text: Joe Pantoliano won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series at the 55th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2003 for his work in this episode and Whoever Did This.


title: Chris Orbach

text: Christopher Ben Orbach (born November 11, 1968) is an American actor who is the younger son of late "Law & Order" star Jerry Orbach and his first wife, Marta Curro.


title: Chris Orbach

text: Orbach graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in New York City in 1986, studied acting briefly at SUNY Purchase, and went on to get a BFA in film and television production from New York University.