Word: siberias
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Whatever it was that rocked Central Siberia back in 1908, echoes of the explosion still reverberate in scientific argument. Farmers 40 miles away from the center of the blast were knocked down by the pressure wave and burned by the flash; trees 30 miles from the center were blown over. But no one is yet sure what actually happened...
...Tartar. Nureyev was in fact born in motion-on a train rattling across the icy stretches of Siberia. It was 1938, and his peasant mother was en route to visit his father, a soldier assigned to teach Communist doctrine to a Russian artillery unit stationed just then in Vladivostok. But Nureyev does not feel Russian. Both his parents, he proudly points out, are descendants of the "magnificent race of Bashkir warriors," and therefore "I am Tartar, not Russian." The Tartar temperament, he explains, is a "curious mixture of tenderness and brutality...
Sought Bridge. Perhaps the first irony was that private Russian initiative developed Alaska for the imperialist Czars. In 1741, when Russia sent two ships east from the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia, it was interested mainly in settling a debate over the existence of a land link between Asia and America...
That first voyage contributed nothing to either side of the argument. But by avoiding the treacherous northern route, which would have taken them to that point where Asia and America nearly touch, the voyagers found the more southerly Aleutian Islands chain. And Siberia's promyshlenniki (freelance explorers) drooled at the thought of the cargo brought back by the crew: fox, seal and otter pelts. Soon these 18th century venture capitalists, some in flimsy river boats that were bound with leather thongs, were spanning the 1,500 sea miles to the Aleutian fingertip and beyond...
...distant and tiniest ally, and jetted on to Algeria and Egypt where he reportedly urged Ahmed ben Bella and Gamal Abdel Nasser not to invite Russia to the second Bandung-style conference of Afro-Asian nations scheduled for June in Algiers. Chou's point: despite its possession of Siberia, Russia is essentially a European country...