Latest news with #Stalin-era
Local Germany
3 days ago
- Business
- Local Germany
German town offers free accommodation in bid to attract residents
Eisenhüttenstadt in Brandenburg, on the Polish border, will offer a free furnished flat for two weeks in September to applicants interested in trying life in the town. The town's authorities said the scheme was aimed at attracting skilled workers, former residents who have moved away and self-employed workers looking for a change of scenery. Those selected will be offered city tours to 'give them a real feeling' for the town, as well as introduced to local job prospects and internships. Before they leave, they will asked to write a 'love letter to Eisenhüttenstadt' in which they share their impressions of their stay. Those interested can apply until early July. The population of Eisenhüttenstadt has dropped by over half since German reunification in 1990. Like many areas of eastern Germany, it has suffered from depopulation as young people move because of a lack of job opportunities and prospects. The modern town was founded by East German authorities as a socialist model city after the end of WWII alongside a massive steel mill, the town's largest industry. It was known as Stalinstadt between 1953 and 1961. Advertisement The city is considered one of the preeminent examples of socialist architecture in Germany. Its town combines Stalin-era neoclassicism and more modern Plattenbau blocks of flats. After reunification, the steel mill was privatised, causing thousands of employees to lose their jobs. Today, the steelworks has been modernised and employs about 2,500 people.
Washington Post
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A play about the 2017 Charlottesville rally, and a rock musical with the devil
Do you associate the Devil only with evil? Think again. In the savory new musical 'Professor Woland's Black Magic Rock Show' the archfiend leaves justice in his wake. The Spooky Action Theater production is one of several current shows that ponder polarized extremes: Peace and violence. Inclusive and exclusionary visions of America. Cosmic yins and yangs. 'Professor Woland' adapts 'The Master and Margarita,' Mikhail Bulgakov's Stalin-era novel about the Devil and his retinue wreaking havoc in Soviet Moscow. The musical's creators, including book writers Jesse Rasmussen and Elizabeth Dinkova (the latter directs), shrewdly reimagine the tale's demonic characters as louche but charismatic rock musicians performing in a dive bar. Strutting around a cabaret stage, the Satan-esque Woland (Fran Tapia, radiating shady bravado) introduces us to a mortal Moscow writer, the Master (Camilo Linares), whom authorities have forcibly disappeared after they perceived his Pontius Pilate-themed novel to be subversive. His lover, Margarita (Jordyn Taylor), is in agony until Woland's team recruits her to host a consequential diabolical ball. Dinkova and her colleagues made some savvy choices in condensing Bulgakov's epic masterpiece, preserving its wicked humor and elegiac sadness, while necessarily sacrificing much anti-Stalinist satire. The musical's plot twists and numerous characters may dizzy audiences new to the tale, and the Master-Margarita love affair, which is not the most interesting part of Bulgakov's novel, gets too much focus. But the prog rock score, an intoxicating weave of haunting hooks and propulsive verses, composed by Michael Pemberton, who wrote the lyrics with Andrea Pemberton, is an excellent match for Woland's anarchic energy. It helps that most actors double as musicians. Bassist Danny Santiago nails the rascally fallen angel Azazello, while ace guitarist Oliver Dyer, cellist Jeremy Allen Crawford and music director Marika Countouris vividly channel additional demons, and flutist Stephen Russell Murray sings beautifully as a crazed poet. Luis Garcia's projections are vital to capturing a phantasmagoric world. The musical's final song, 'Time to Go (Moscow Goodbye),' does reach too overtly for political relevance. By contrast, such relevance is essential to Priyanka Shetty's '#Charlottesville,' a methodical, sometimes stirring solo play recalling the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in the college town. Now in a world premiere run at the Keegan Theatre in partnership with Voices Festival Productions, the play draws on interviews with more than a hundred Charlottesville-area residents, plus court transcripts and news reports. Directed by Yury Urnov, Shetty does a reasonable job calibrating diction and mannerisms as she channels people who witnessed, or were affected by, the 2017 events: A sweetly callow student. A seething local musician. And, most movingly, the desolate mother of Heather D. Heyer, who died when an avowed neo-Nazi rammed his car through a crowd. Other moments chillingly summon alt-right voices, sometimes through Shetty's mimicry and sometimes with video of white supremacists and their memes. (Dylan Uremovitch designed the projections and lighting.) Interwoven with Shetty's own experiences as a University of Virginia graduate student, and unfurling on Matthew J. Keenan's cracked-marble-like set, which evokes national ideals, '#Charlottesville' asks whether Unite the Right was an aberration or a strand in long-term American bigotry. A more abstract confrontation between civilization and savagery drives German author Rebekka Kricheldorf's blunt-force satire 'Testosterone,' running in Neil Blackadder's English translation in an ExPats Theatre production. The 2012 fable tells of smug doctors Solveig and Ingo (Amberrain Andrews and Elgin Martin), who live in a walled, moated community, initially safe from a violent dystopia. But when their well-intentioned plan to help a sex worker change profession irks a crime boss (Bruce Alan Rauscher, all jovial menace), only Ingo's amoral and hyper-macho brother Raul (a swaggering Gary DuBreuil) can help. As Raul boasts about his kills, weight-lifts with furniture and flaunts his victims' mutilated body parts, the play explores how primal urges like aggression and sexual desire might make a mockery of society's rules of behavior. Director Karin Rosnizeck's production boasts effective touches, like baroquely grim news footage (Jonathan Dahm Robertson is scenic/projections designer), but scenes can be stiff, and the play's Grand Guignol swerves will not appeal to everyone. Still, the concepts here, as in the other two shows, are a reminder that theater can offer bracing ideas that help us navigate reality. Professor Woland's Black Magic Rock Show, through April 13 at the Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington. About 2 hours including intermission. #Charlottesville, through April 13 at the Keegan Theatre in Washington. About 70 minutes, no intermission. Testosterone, through April 6 at Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington. About 90 minutes, no intermission.
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why we shouldn't let lower fertility rates fuel pronatalist policies
Buried in the Donald Trump administration's recent avalanche of executive orders in the United States was a starkly revealing provision: A Department of Transportation order requiring projects to prioritize federal highway and transit funding to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average. Those with declining birth and marriage rates could face funding cuts. In my work as a planetary health researcher, I understand the complex dynamics between reproductive rights, population dynamics and environmental sustainability. This new executive order has me worried. Accounting for demographic trends is indeed fundamental when planning for a country's infrastructure and transportation needs. But this executive order has nothing to do with sound infrastructure planning. Rather, it reflects the Trump administration's ideological shift towards mainstreaming 'pronatalist' policies across sectors far beyond reproductive rights and healthcare. Pronatalism is a political ideology that seeks to increase birth rates with policies that encourage people to have more children. Pronatalism can be motivated by cultural, religious, geopolitical or economic imperatives. Pronatalist policies can manifest in many ways. These could range from soft measures (such as stigmatizing those who choose not to have children) to hard measures (such as restricting access to contraception. The shift towards pronatalist policy is not unique to the United States. Worldwide, governments are reacting to demographic shifts with alarm, introducing measures to incentivize childbirth. However, these measures fail to acknowledge that the global population is actually still increasing. For example, Poland and South Korea both offer cash transfers for babies. Russia revived the Stalin-era 'Mother Heroine' award for women who have 10 children in less than 10 years. China has replaced its anti-natalist 'one-child policy' with an aggressive pronatalist regime — clamping down on vasectomies and tracking menstrual cycles. Until recently, high infant and child mortality rates meant having many children was essential for maintaining stable populations. But advances in healthcare, sanitation and living standards have significantly reduced mortality rates. This has caused a decline in fertility rates which has reshaped the role of reproduction in modern societies. Yet many countries view this demographic shift with concern. These fears are largely rooted in cultural, economic and political motivations — fuelling a rise in pronatalist policies globally. But population policies that prioritize demographic targets over reproductive autonomy — a person's power to make their own reproductive choices — have repeatedly led to devastating consequences. For example, until 1989, Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu enforced strict pronatalist policies. Abortions were banned, contraception was restricted and women were subjected to invasive pregnancy surveillance. Those without children faced punitive taxation. These measures led to a surge in unsafe abortions, high maternal mortality, overcrowded orphanages and lasting social trauma. Pronatalist policies also seem to go against what most people want. Across cultures and religions, people overwhelmingly seek to control their fertility when given the choice. Research also shows that when women have access to education and contraception, they tend to choose smaller families. Alarmist narratives about falling fertility rates distract from a more personal reality as well: that half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended. Pronatalist policies thus appear to go against the advancement of reproductive autonomy. Pronatalist narratives also undermine efforts to reduce humanity's impact on the environment. Population size and growth are both major drivers of environmental degradation and climate change. Embracing the lower fertility rates we're seeing could help drive transformative changes needed to ease pressure on natural resources, shrink greenhouse gas emissions and ensure a more sustainable future. The world's population is expected to grow by an additional two billion people in the coming decades. But we don't actually know how many people the planet can sustainably support. Its carrying capacity is not a fixed measure. It's contingent upon technological advancements, consumption patterns, economic structures and the ever-evolving interactions between humans and the environment. Some ecological economists have even calculated that in order for everyone to have a reasonable standard of living, a truly sustainable global population would be around around 3.2 billion people. Although these estimates are far from certain, what's clear is that a smaller global population would improve our chances to restore balance. The fear of population decline and push for pronatalist policies obscures the critical fact that we have yet to address the consequences of the rapid population growth we've experienced since the 1950s. Environmental degradation and climate change have both been driven in large part by this rapid growth. A major argument pronatalists use is that a shrinking population will lead to economic decline. This reasoning is outdated — rooted in economic models that assume perpetual growth and ignore ever-pressing planetary boundaries. While it's clear that an ageing society presents challenges, lower birth rates don't necessarily mean lower living standards. On the contrary, a smaller population can be conducive to labour productivity and fairer wealth distribution. The past two centuries of explosive economic and population growth were an anomaly in human history. The idea that we must endlessly expand is a modern fiction — not a historical norm. We're now entering 'the age of depopulation' — a period characterized by lower fertility levels, and, in time, population decline. We must prepare and embrace this shift instead of trying to reverse it. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organisation bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Céline Delacroix, L'Université d'Ottawa/University of Ottawa Read more: Trad wives hearken back to an imagined past of white Christian womanhood Demography and reproductive rights are environmental issues: Insights from sub-Saharan Africa Fiction about abortion confronts the complicated history of gender, sexuality and women's rights Céline Delacroix is a Senior Fellow with the Population Institute (USA).
Telegraph
16-02-2025
- General
- Telegraph
The Soviet Union's forgotten ‘golden city' is now the gem of Central Asia
I was standing outside the grand Stalin-era Science Academy when I saw it. A flicker of the past, beautifully forged into the pastel yellow that surrounds it: a giant hammer and sickle. 'The caretaker tells me that he gets calls from locals every day to remove it,' Dennis Keen told me in his Californian drawl. He cut an odd figure as an American, but as the authority on Kazakhstan, his knowledge knew no bounds. Together, we took a brisk walk through the history of Almaty, the former capital, from the ancient shells embedded in almost every building – transported, along with granite, from an extinct sea in the west – to the streets lined by Russian imperial structures and brutalist architecture. From the off, Almaty's long and tragic story was evident – though in strange contradiction to its upbeat modern energy; its clean, leafy avenues lined with chic cafés, bakeries, and restaurants, a far cry from the dictatorship that ruled for the 55 years that Kazakhstan was a part of the USSR, invaded and given status as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic by its hungry neighbour. You could be forgiven for thinking, then, that locals might despair at the presence of Soviet symbolism – a constant reminder of their former oppressor. On the whole, this is true, 'but the science academy is a real anomaly,' said Keen. 'People in this city are for the most part passionate about preserving such history, good or bad.' Strolling along the quiet thoroughfares of the Golden Quarter – once reserved for the Soviet elite – we passed more reminders of the past: Kunaev Street, where communist artists, musicians, politicians and decorated war veterans lived; a monument to Mukhtar Auezov, a famed and committed Soviet writer who we now know, through Keen's translations of his diaries, secretly loved capitalist America; not to mention the many unbelievably detailed mosaics that depict stunning stories of Kazakh history and Soviet comradeship. Not far away were the city's world-beating museums, from the yurt-shaped National History museum to the 20th-century quirky wooden house that hosts the Museum of Musical Instruments of Kazakhstan. 'Almaty is a city of art, of culture, of history' said Keen. 'It is truly a unique space in Central Asia.' His words were echoed by local Alexandra Stepnika, who took me for dinner on Panfilov Street, somewhere she described as having turned the city into the 'gastronomic capital of Central Asia'. She wasn't wrong: the street wouldn't have looked out of place in Central or Eastern Europe. We skirted around the bright Ascension Cathedral, the tallest wooden Orthodox Church in the world, then ducked into the warmth of Bitanga, a Ukrainian restaurant opened by former London trader Ermek Smailov. It might seem an odd place to find such a restaurant, but dishes like borscht are as local to Kazakhs as beshparmek (the national dish of horse-meat stew) – a legacy of Stalin's grim mass deportations that transported both cultures and cuisines across the Soviet Union. I watched the chefs move with a chaotic grace in the open-view kitchen, until a delicious bowl of aromatic beetroot borscht and an organic berry drink appeared in front of me, followed a moment later by owner Smailov himself. After hearing I hadn't tried Salo, a dish made from cured pork fatback or belly, he quickly went about rectifying the situation. I made positive noises as I chewed through the fatty, salty blob – helped down by lashings of vodka. The next day – slightly the worse for wear – I headed for the ancient Kolsai Lake and Charyn Canyon, accompanied by guide Mauletkazy Miras, an expert on Almaty's natural history and a PhD student in aviation maintenance. 'Kazakhstan is a young country,' he said, with sage-like wisdom, as we arrived at Kolsai. 'We've only had independence for 33 years. People are still learning how to function in a democracy, so they don't follow traditional routes into certain types of work. I love planes, but I also love nature. Why can't I do both?' We were surrounded on all sides by enormous mountains, covered by foliage in a shade of green I didn't think possible, while giant eagles circled overhead. It was a scene plucked from a Bob Ross painting, and immediately clear why it is known as the 'Pearl of the Tian Shan' (Heavenly Mountain in Mandarin). As we cast off across the lower of the three lakes in a small boat, the air was pure and the water crystal clear. These immense bodies of water were created by powerful earthquakes in the late 19th-century, and afforded national park status in 2007 – now a vital lifeline in the preservation of Kazakhstan's wildlife. More than 50 species of mammals – and 704 plants, including 12 rare ones – call it home, and though Miras winked when he said we might spot a snow leopard, the fact is that we really might have. A staggering 72 per cent of Kolsai is under strict protection, with a smattering – 13 per cent – allocated to tourism. A Unesco World Network Biosphere Reserves park, fewer than 2 million visitors explore its wild paths each year, most of them hailing from India and China. Departing the lakes, we set out next for Charyn Canyon, the second largest in the world. Within an hour, the landscape changed from spruce and alpine meadows to total desolation, a lifeless plain pockmarked by ground-up rock and dusty steppe. The only giveaway that we were still on Earth was a radiant speck of water that periodically came into view – the Charyn river. 'It is ancient,' said Miras. 'It snakes along the Kyrgyz border for miles. It was once considered holy, and held all sorts of mythology. My ancestors believed the water and the mountains here held magical properties, and that the mountaintops themselves were the gates to heaven.' Soon enough, we arrived at the canyon, a huge gulf of jagged red rock, 12 million years old, created by the gushing waters which rise in the Tian Shan. Coupled with biting winds, their power set into motion a process of erosion that carved today's gravity-defying drops and giant ashen rocks that sit atop each other like delicate towers. The temperature dropped 10C in as many minutes, and the sky dulled to a moody grey. 'The problem with this landscape is that the weather can change at a moment's notice,' said Miras – words which proved prophetic, when we walked to the end of the ridge and Miras pointed to a bell that rings if winds exceed 21km/h, serving as a warning for visitors to retreat. Barely five minutes later, it began to ring frantically, and we hastily withdrew. Back in the city, I spent my final evening wandering solo, then musing over the unorthodox artwork at Dala – a restaurant where the walls retell Kazakhstan's nomadic story, including one covered entirely in a reimagining of Charyn Canyon – while eating thinly sliced horse-meat salad and beshparmek, washed down with a glass of sour horse milk accompanied by even sourer camel milk. Walking back to my hotel, as the sun's dying rays danced along the mountains above Almaty, I took in the city one last time. Its depth and duality had astounded me – a place brimming with life and refusing to be defined by its past. At eight hours' flight from the UK, it may be too far for a city break, but this is a place that makes up in lasting impressions what it lacks in proximity. Truly, it is a city which leaves its imprint, and one that is unlike anywhere else on Earth. Essentials Air Astana flies direct from London to Almaty from £518 return. The Soviet-era four-star Kazakhstan Hotel (007 7272 91 91 01) has doubles from £52 per night, with breakfast.
