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Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic

The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic or Moldavian SSR (Republica Sovietică Socialistă Moldovenească, ), also known as the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, Moldovan SSR, Soviet Moldavia, Soviet Moldova, or simply Moldavia or Moldova, was one of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union which existed from 1940 to 1991. The republic was formed on 2 August 1940 from parts of Bessarabia, a region annexed from Romania on 28 June of that year, and parts of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, an autonomous Soviet republic within the Ukrainian SSR.

After the Declaration of Sovereignty on 23 June 1990, and until 23 May 1991, it was officially known as the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova. From 23 May 1991 until the declaration of independence on 27 August 1991, it was renamed the Republic of Moldova while remaining a constituent republic of the USSR. Its independence was recognized on 26 December of that year when the USSR was dissolved.

Geographically, the Moldavian SSR was bordered by the Socialist Republic of Romania to the west and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to the north, east, and south.

Background
After the failure of the Tatarbunary Uprising, the Soviets promoted the newly created Moldavian Autonomous Oblast existing within the Ukrainian SSR on part of the territory between the Dniester and Bug rivers, to a Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Moldavian ASSR), on 12 October 1924, as a way to primarily prop up the Soviet propaganda effort in Bessarabia, but also to exert pressure on Bucharest in the negotiations on Bessarabia, and even to help a possible Communist revolution in Romania.

On 24 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a 10-year non-aggression treaty, called the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. The pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The secret protocol placed the province of Bessarabia, at the time controlled by Romania, in the Soviet "sphere of influence." Thereafter, both the Soviet Union and Germany invaded their respective portions of Poland, while the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia in June 1940, and waged war upon Finland.

Establishment
On 26 June 1940, four days after the end of the battle of France, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to the Romanian Kingdom, demanding the latter cede Bessarabia and Bukovina. After the Soviets agreed with Germany that they would limit their claims in Bukovina, which was outside the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocols, to Northern Bukovina, Germany urged Romania to accept the ultimatum, which Romania did two days later. On 28 June, Soviet troops entered the area, and on 9 July the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was formed and applied to the Supreme Soviet for formal incorporation into the Soviet Union.

On 2 August 1940, the Supreme Soviet unanimously approved to dissolve the old Moldavian ASSR and organize the Moldavian SSR, from six full counties and small parts of three other Moldavian counties of Bessarabia (about 65 percent of its territory), and the six westernmost rayons of the Moldavian ASSR (about 40 percent of its territory). Ninety percent of the territory of MSSR was west of the river Dniester, which had been the border between the USSR and Romania prior to 1940, and 10 percent east. Northern and southern parts of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940 (the current Chernivtsi Oblast and Budjak), which were more heterogeneous ethnically, were transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, although their population also included 337,000 Moldavians. As such, the strategically important Black Sea coast and Danube frontage were given to the Ukrainian SSR, considered more reliable than the Moldavian SSR, which could have been claimed by Romania.In the summer of 1941, Romania joined Hitler's Axis in the invasion of the Soviet Union, recovering Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, as well as occupying the territory to the east of the Dniester it dubbed "Transnistria". Soviet partisans continued to be active in both regions. By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had reconquered all of the lost territories, reestablishing Soviet authority there.

Repressions and deportations
On 22 June 1941, during the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, 10 people were killed in Răzeni by Soviet authorities and buried in a mass graves. In July 1941 after Operation Barbarossa, a commemorative plaque was installed in Răzeni: "Aici odihnesc robii lui Dumnezeu Diomid, Niculai, Dănila, Nichita, Alexandru, Jurian, Alexandru, Ilie, doi necunoscuți. Omorâți mișelește de bolșevici comuniști. 12.VII.1941". The memorial to victims of Răzeni Massacre was opened in 2009.

The Soviet authorities targeted several socio-economic groups due to their economic situation, political views, or ties to the former regime. They were deported to or resettled in Siberia and northern Kazakhstan; some were imprisoned or executed. According to a report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, no less than 86,604 people were arrested and deported in 1940 and 1941 alone, comparable to the estimative number of 90,000 repressed put forward by Russian historians.

Immediately after the Soviet reoccupation, in 1944, a so-called "repatriation" of the Bessarabians who fled to Romania before the advancing Red Army was organized by the Soviet security forces; many were shot or deported, blamed as collaborators of Romania and Nazi Germany.

NKVD/MGB also struck at anti-Soviet groups, which were most active from 1944 to 1952. Anti-Soviet organizations such as Democratic Agrarian Party, Freedom Party, Democratic Union of Freedom, Arcașii lui Ștefan, Vasile Lupu High School Group, Vocea Basarabiei were severely reprimanded and their leaders were persecuted.

A de-kulakisation campaign was directed towards the rich Moldavian peasant families, which were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia as well. For instance, in just two days, from 6 to 7 July 1949, over 11,342 Moldavian families were deported by the order of the Minister of State Security, Iosif Mordovets under a plan named "Operation South".

Religious persecutions during the Soviet occupation targeted numerous priests. After the Soviet occupation, the religious life underwent a persecution similar to the one in Russia between the two World Wars. Religious minorities, 700 families, especially Jehovah's Witnesses, were deported to Siberia in Operation North of April 1951.

The number of the ethnic Bessarabia Germans also decreased from over 81,000 in 1930 to under 4,000 in 1959 due to voluntary wartime migration (90,000 were transferred in 1940 to German-occupied Poland) and forced removal as collaborators after the war.

Collectivisation
Collectivisation was implemented between 1949 and 1950, although earlier attempts were made since 1946. During this time, a large-scale famine occurred: some sources give a minimum of 115,000 peasants who died of famine and related diseases between December 1946 and August 1947. According to Charles King, there is no evidence that it was provoked by Soviet requisitioning of large amounts of agricultural products and directed towards the largest ethnic group living in the countryside, the Moldavians. Contributing factors were the recent war and the drought of 1946.

Khrushchev and Brezhnev
With the regime of Nikita Khrushchev replacing that of Joseph Stalin, the survivors of Gulag camps and of the deportees were gradually allowed to return to the Moldavian SSR. The political thaw ended the unchecked power of the NKVD–MGB, and the command economy gave rise to development in the areas such as education, technology and science, health care, and industry.

Between 1969 and 1971, a clandestine National Patriotic Front was established by several young intellectuals in Chișinău by Mihail Munteanu, vowing to fight for the secession of Moldavia from the Soviet Union and union with Romania.

In December 1971, following an informative note from Ion Stănescu, the President of the Council of State Security of the Romanian Socialist Republic, to Yuri Andropov, the chief of KGB, three of the leaders of the National Patriotic Front, Alexandru Usatiuc-Bulgăr, Gheorghe Ghimpu and Valeriu Graur, as well as a fourth person, Alexandru Șoltoianu, the leader of a similar clandestine movement in Northern Bukovina, were arrested and later sentenced to long prison terms.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Moldavia received substantial investment from the budget of the USSR to develop industrial, scientific facilities, as well as housing. In 1971, the Soviet Council of Ministers adopted a decision "About the measures for further development of Kishinev city" that secured more than one billion roubles of investment from the USSR budget.

Subsequent decisions directed enormous wealth and brought highly qualified specialists from all over the USSR to develop the Soviet republic. Such an allocation of USSR assets was partially influenced by the fact that Leonid Brezhnev, the effective ruler of the USSR from 1964 to 1982, was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia from 1950 to 1952. These allocations stopped in 1991 with the Belavezha Accords, when the nation became independent.

Perestroika
Although Brezhnev and other CPM first secretaries were largely successful in suppressing Moldavian nationalism, Mikhail Gorbachev's administration facilitated the revival of the movement in the region. His policies of glasnost and perestroika created conditions in which national feelings could be openly expressed and in which the Soviet republics could consider reforms independently from the central government.

The Moldavian SSR's drive towards independence from the USSR was marked by civil strife as conservative activists in the east —especially in Tiraspol—as well as communist party activists in Chișinău worked to keep the Moldavian SSR within the Soviet Union. The main success of the national movement from 1988 to 1989 was the official adoption of the Moldovan language on 31 August 1989, by the Supreme Soviet of Moldova, the declaration in the preamble of the declaration of independence of a Moldavian–Romanian linguistic unity, and the return of the language to the pre-Soviet Latin alphabet. In 1990, when it became clear that Moldavia was eventually going to secede, a group of nationalist pro-Soviet activists in Gagauzia and Transnistria proclaimed themselves as separate from the Moldavian SSR in order to remain within the USSR. The Gagauz Republic was eventually peacefully incorporated into Moldavia as the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, but relations with Transnistria soured. Its sovereignty was declared on 23 June 1990 on its territory.

Independence
On 17 March 1991, Moldova, the Baltic states, the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic boycotted the 1991 Soviet Union referendum with 98.72% in favor without any official sanction. On 23 May 1991, the Moldavian parliament changed the name of the republic to the Republic of Moldova. The Gagauz declared the Gagauz Republic on 19 August 1990. They had previously declared a Gagauz ASSR within Moldova on 12 November 1989.

Independence was quickly followed by civil war in Transnistria, where the central government in Chișinău battled with separatists, who were supported by pro-Soviet forces and later by different forces from Russia. The conflict left the breakaway regime (Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic) in control of Transnistria – a situation that persists today. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on 26 December 1991, and Moldova was officially recognized as an independent state.

Relationship with Romania
In the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, the Soviet Union and Romania reaffirmed each other's borders, recognizing Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Herza region as territory of the respective Soviet republics. Throughout the Cold War, the issue of Bessarabia remained largely dormant in Romania. In the 1950s, research on history and of Bessarabia was a banned subject in Romania, as the Romanian Communist Party tried to emphasise the links between the Romanians and Russians, the annexation being considered just a proof of Soviet Union's internationalism. Starting in the 1960s, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceaușescu began a policy of distancing from the Soviet Union, but the debate over Bessarabia was discussed only in scholarship fields such as historiography and linguistics, not at a political level.

As Soviet–Romanian relations reached an all-time low in the mid-1960s, Soviet scholars published historical papers on the "Struggle of Unification of Bessarabia with the Soviet Motherland" (Artiom Lazarev) and the "Development of the Moldovan Language" (Nicolae Corlăteanu). On the other side, the Romanian Academy published some notes by Karl Marx which talk about the "injustice" of the 1812 annexation of Bessarabia and Nicolae Ceaușescu in a 1965 speech quoted a letter by Friedrich Engels in which he criticized the Russian annexation, while in another 1966 speech, he denounced the pre-World War II calls of the Romanian Communist Party for the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina.

The issue was brought to light whenever the relationships with the Soviets were waning, but never became a serious subject of high-level negotiations in itself. On 22 June 1976, Ștefan Andrei, a member on the Permanent Bureau of the Political Executive Committee of Romania and a future Minister of Foreign Affairs, underscored that the republic harbored no territorial claims and recognized "the Moldavian Socialist Republic as an integral part of the USSR," yet that it "cannot accept the idea that Moldavians are not Romanians."

On 1 August 1976, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Elena Ceaușescu, Nicu Ceaușescu, Ștefan Andrei, and Ambassador Gheorghe Badrus were the first high-level Romanian visitors to Moldova since World War II. On 1 August, they came from Iași, and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Moldavia Ivan Bodiul, Kiril Iliashenko, and N. Merenișcev escorted them from the border until they left for Crimea at the Chișinău International Airport on 2 August. The move was widely interpreted as a sign of improved relations. During a meeting, Brezhnev insisted that Ceaușescu himself had the opportunity to see that the Moldavians existed as a separate people with a separate language during his 1976 visit. "Yes," Ceaușescu replied, "I did, but they spoke with me in Romanian."

In December 1976, Bodiul and his wife Claudia arrived for a return visit of five days at Ceaușescu's invitation. Bodiul's visit was a "first" in the history of postwar bilateral relations. At one of his meetings in Bucharest, Bodiul said that "the good relationship was initiated by Ceaușescu's visit to Soviet Moldavia, which led to the expansion of contacts and exchanges in all fields. A visit was paid from 14 to 16 June 1979, to the Moldavian SSR by a Romanian Communist Party delegation headed by Ion Iliescu, Political Executive Committee alternate member and Iași County Party Committee First Secretary.

As late as November 1989, as Russian support decreased, Ceaușescu brought up the Bessarabian question once again and denounced the Soviet invasion during the 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party.

After the fall of communism in Romania, on 5 April 1991, its president Ion Iliescu, and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed a political treaty which among other things recognized the Soviet-Romanian border. However, the Parliament of Romania refused to ratify it. Romania and Russia eventually signed and ratified a treaty in 2003, after the independence of Moldova and Ukraine.

Leadership
The Communist Party of Moldavia was a component of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Communist Party was the sole legal political organization until perestroika. It had supreme power in the land, as all state and public organizations were its subordinates.

Until the 1978 Constitution of the Moldavian SSR (15 April 1978), the republic had four cities directly subordinated to the republican government: Chișinău, Bălți, Bender, and Tiraspol. By the new constitution, the following cities were added to this category: Orhei, Rîbnița, Soroca, and Ungheni. The former four cities, and 40 raions were the first-tier administrative units of the land.

Economy
Although it was the most densely populated republic of the USSR, the Moldavian SSR was meant to be a rural country specialized in agriculture. Kyrgyzstan was the only Soviet Republic to hold a larger percentage of rural population. While holding just 0.2% of the Soviet territory, it accounted for 10% of the canned food production, 4.2% of its vegetables, 12.3% of its fruits and 8.2% of its wine production.

At the same time, most of the Moldavian industry was built in Transnistria. While accounting for roughly 15% of the population of Moldavian SSR, Transnistria was responsible for 40% of its GDP and for 90% of electricity production.

Major factories included the Rîbnița steel mill, Dubăsari and Moldavskaia power station and the factories near Tiraspol, producing refrigerators, clothing and alcohol.

Education and language
Beginning with the early 1950s, the government gradually abandoned the language standard based on the central Bessarabian speech, established as official during the Moldavian ASSR, in favour of the Romanian standard. Hence, Mihai Eminescu and Vasile Alecsandri were again allowed, and the standard written language became the same as Romanian, except that it was written with Cyrillic script.

Access to Romanian authors born outside the medieval Principality of Moldavia was restricted, as was the case with works by authors such as Eminescu, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Constantin Stere that promoted a Romanian national sentiment. Contacts with Romania were not severed and, after 1956, people were slowly allowed to visit or receive relatives in Romania. Romanian press became accessible, and cross-border Romanian TV and radio programmes could be easily received. Nevertheless, the Soviet–Romanian border along the Prut river, separating Bessarabia from Romania, was closed for the general public.

Culture
The little nationalism which existed in the Moldavian elite manifested itself in poems and articles in literary journals, before their authors were purged in campaigns against "anti-Soviet feelings" and "local nationalism" organized by Bodiul and Grossu.

The official stance of the Soviet government was that Moldavian culture was distinct from Romanian culture, but they had a more coherent policy than the previous one from the Moldavian ASSR. There were no more attempts in creating a Moldovan language that is different from Romanian, the literary Romanian written with the Cyrillic alphabet being accepted as the linguistic standard for Moldavia. The only difference was in some technical terms borrowed from Russian.

Moldavians were encouraged to adopt the Russian language, which was required for any leadership job (Russian was intended to be the Lingua Franca of interethnic communication in the Soviet Union). In the early years, political and academic positions were given to members of non-Moldavian ethnic groups (only 14% of the Moldavian SSR's political leaders were ethnic Moldavians in 1946), although this gradually changed as time went on.

Demographics
In the aftermath of World War II, many Russians and Ukrainians, along with a smaller number of other ethnic groups, migrated from the rest of the USSR to Moldavia in order to help rebuild the heavily war-damaged economy. They were mostly factory and construction workers who settled in major urban areas, as well as military personnel stationed in the region. From a socio-economic point of view, this group was quite diverse: in addition to industrial and construction workers, as well as retired officers and soldiers of the Soviet army, it also included engineers, technicians, a handful of scientists, but mostly unqualified workers.

Access of native Bessarabians to positions in administration and economy was limited, as they were considered untrustworthy. The first local to become minister in the Moldavian SSR was only in the 1960s as minister of health. The antagonism between "natives", and "newcomers" persisted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and was clear during the anti-Soviet and anti-Communist events from 1988 to 1992. The immigration affected mostly the cities of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, as well as the countryside of Budjak where the Bessarabia Germans previously were, but also the cities of Transnistria. All of these saw the proportion of ethnic Moldavians slowly drop throughout the Soviet rule.

Legacy
The widespread nostalgia for the Soviet Union influences electoral choice in the Republic of Moldova. According to a 2017 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, nostalgia for the USSR is common with 70% of Moldovans stating that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a bad thing for their country. In the region of Gagauzia, the main street of Etulia is named after Vladimir Lenin and a statue of Karl Marx is still preserved in front of the village hall.

title: Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic


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Talk:Outline of physical science

Untitled
Arrow To The Knee this page needs to be reconciled with natural science and biological science --zandperl 17:35, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)

It's not the same as physics, you know. All those subclasses shouldn't be mentioned here. They're way too high level. And certainly civil and electrical engineering shouldn't because it is applied science. What should: Physics, Chemistry (except biochemistry), Geography (except social geography), Geology (except paleontology). matter and energy. Phlebas 15:57, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Content
The information on physics copies directly from the physics' page. I am not inclined to leave it as a mere copy of that page. Do we need something on "physics" on this page? Steven McCrary 16:07, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

 * I just did the same with a few other pages. I'm just trying to fill it out. Whatever you want to do, I probably won't argue, but do you have any suggestions for filling out this page? Maurreen (talk) 16:14, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

 * Right now, I like the breakdown, just not a verbatim copy from the other pages. How would a topical outline work here?  Also, it seems we need external Internet links.  Steven McCrary 16:40, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

I moved the information around quite a bit and made several changes. Please feel free to make any suggestions or revisions? Steven McCrary 19:41, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

 * I like what you've done. I don't know enough about the subject, or have enough energy, to be much help. But a few possibilities are one or a few primary scientists, laws, definitions or developments in each field.
 * Side note, I'm going to make the capitalization more consistent. Maurreen (talk) 20:18, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
 * thank-you Steven McCrary 02:53, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
 * Perhaps a little info on the periodic table. Maurreen (talk) 20:36, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Also possibly a little on how the fields are applied, a more-concrete representation. Maurreen (talk) 20:45, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
 * I believe we should be careful with our additions. Explaination of all of these ideas can be found on other pages.  I suggest that the pages need Wikified-linked to other pages. I like the idea of prominent scientists.  But, I believe laws, definitions, and developments should be added with care or this article could repeat a great deal of information already (and more appropriately) found on other pages. Steven McCrary 02:58, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

Computer science
Hi all. I would like to have your point of view on wether computer science seen as the study of computations is a physical science. Regards, --Powo 22:13, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm of the view that computer science is, as is maths and stats etc... Although it would seem to seem that different peoples views on this differ as to the definition. Such as the editor(s) of this current version. Mathmo 13:52, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree that Computer Science (CS) is like maths, under some aspects. However, contrary to maths, it has a strong connection to the physical world! CS can be seen as the study of computations, which is the evolution over time of a physical system (a computer). It can also be seen as the study of Information, which is a concept from physics, similar to Energy. Seing CS from those points of view seems to make CS as a physical science. I personally tend to see CS as something in the intersection of physics, mathematics and engineering. Because of this, it challenges the usual boundaries decided by science philosophers (math is a not a science/physics is a science), because CS is in the middle! I would like to see this article take that into account. IMHO, many people do not understand that CS is a science. They see CS as technology (and the word CS also has this meaning, I suppose). This is clearly a misunderstanding of the deepness of the discipline. CS is more than that, which is aknowledged by saying that CS is like mathematics.However I can not agree with the decision of putting CS as mathematics, because of its very strong link to the physical world (asexplained above), and also, from the point of view of the scientific practise, CS differs a lot from mathematics since there is a lot of the empirical and experimental approach (although most of the experiments are of the In silico type, but this is not exclusive to CS: biology, physics, etc... make use of in silico experiments a lot too). Regards, Powo
 * I would disagree with User:Powo, I study both Physics and Computer Science and I would not call CS a physical science. Computer Science is no more physical than Mathematics. Theoretical Computer Science (the sort Powo was referencing two in parts) deals with not the evolution of a physical system, but with computation.... computation done on a theoretical turing machine, usually with unlimitted memory, and thus fundamentally non-physical. Also, most of the study of CS deals with abstraction that is rarely linked to physical phenomena (much like mathematics), while Physics (which is also very highly abstaract at upper levels) links its abstaraction to the physical world and physical phenomena. As for the "computer science" that deals with the "evolution" of a physical system, that is more the engineering section, which is more often referred to as 'Software Engineering' or 'Computer Engineering'. Last, on the point of study of information.... Physics and Computer Science studies information in fundamentally diffferent ways. Physics studies information from a physical prospective, while Computer Science studies it as a theoretical abstaraction. --DFRussia 11:36, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Restored removed material
The content reduction/replacement performed October 11 2006 by offered up what looks to be a sincere attempt at content improvement, so I left most of it in. However, the blanking that occurred at the same time looked inappropriate so I have copy-pasted it back to restore it. I know this plays minor havoc with the history. Worse, it is an ugly article now as a result. Someone else more involved with this article might be wise to revert back to the last October 4 version and then either 1) work the Jalaldn contribution into the structure, as I attempted or 2) post it here on the talk page for consideration or 3)delete.  -- Paleorthid 17:43, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

 * Unfortunately all of Jalaldn's "contribution" was copied from encyclopedia Britannica. I've reverted them. In fact I essentially had to revert the article back to the version of 00:06, September 6, 2006 by SineWave, and adding the only two good edits since then made by Transhumanist, on Sep 26. Paul August ☎ 22:55, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Spify up the Basic Principles and Fields sections
I was wondering if anyone was up for improving the look of the Basic Principles section, or in general of classifying the fields. I think math has a very good way of doing their description and visual representation of fields and subfields. Does anyone feel upto the tast of moving the Physical science section to the same standard with me? Also, does anyone oppose? --DFRussia 11:42, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Well I tried to spify up the section. Hopefully everyone enjoys it. I will see if I can come up with any ideas to merge basic principles, etc.... --DFRussia 05:21, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Image:Meissner effect.jpg listed for deletion
An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:Meissner effect.jpg, has been listed at Images and media for deletion. Please see the to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Papa November (talk) 15:32, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

The table with images, as cut from lead
I have removed the following section from the article. Any relevant information inside the section should be wikified and inserted in the article in the form of normal text. Feer 12:19, 11 February 2008 (UTC) Please discuss this here first before reinserting without rationale. Thanks. Feer 22:51, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I mention my reasoning in the "Spify up the Basic Principles and Fields sections" higher up on this talk page --DFRussia (talk) 06:29, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, I didn't notice that before. The example you give above (the math article) actually looks pretty nice. I guess my main objection with the image-table above is the fact that it makes the article look more like some kind of portal instead of an encyclopedia article. It's just a bit too big. But integrating the seperate images, cf. the example at math could actually be a nice idea. Just try to keep the article layout balanced. Feer  12:37, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

The "History of" section needs links!
Please add some relevant links to the history section.

Links can be found in the "History of" article for this subject, in the "History of" category for this subject, or in the corresponding navigation templates. Or you could search for topics on Google - most topics turn blue when added to Wikipedia as internal links.

The Transhumanist 00:31, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 03:21, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Outline of physical science → Physical science – The article was moved from that location because of its structure, but there's no "physical science" article now, just a redirect here. It may be better to return it there and tag it with prose, specially if outline articles may be deleted. Cambalachero (talk) 20:21, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

 * Oppose if it's an outline, it should stay as it is. Perhaps put up a request at various science wikiprojects to turn in an article version based on the outline instead. 70.24.247.61 (talk) 07:32, 8 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Oppose Outlines serve a different purpose than articles. Articles inform on a suject while outlines will provide a classification of all the links to articles about a topic. If there is no article about physical science, consider looking for the reasons (such as: is this really a specific topic deserving an article) and if there are none maybe you could create one. Offiikart Talk 16:35, 10 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Universities?
This doesn't seem an appropriate place to list universities that teach physical science. At this time, only two are listed, so this looks like marketing. Do it elsewhere. Parveson (talk) 22:46, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Quick explanation of Wikipedia outlines
"Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline". There are two types of outlines: sentence outlines (like those you made in school to plan a paper), and topic outlines (like the topical synopses that professors hand out at the beginning of a college course). Outlines on Wikipedia are primarily topic outlines that serve 2 main purposes: they provide taxonomical classification of subjects showing what topics belong to a subject and how they are related to each other (via their placement in the tree structure), and as subject-based tables of contents linked to topics in the encyclopedia. The hierarchy is maintained through the use of heading levels and indented bullets. See Outlines for a more in-depth explanation. The Transhumanist 00:08, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Physical science
Essay 49.150.101.144 (talk) 00:57, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Outline of physical science


text:
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Українська Радянська Соціалістична Республіка; Украинская Советская Социалистическая Республика), abbreviated as the Ukrainian SSR, UkSSR, and also known as Soviet Ukraine or just Ukraine,  was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1991. Under the Soviet one-party model, the Ukrainian SSR was governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union through its republican branch, the Communist Party of Ukraine.

The first iterations of the Ukrainian SSR were established during the Russian Revolution, particularly after the Bolshevik Revolution. The outbreak of the Ukrainian–Soviet War in the former Russian Empire saw the Bolsheviks defeat the independent Ukrainian People's Republic, during the conflict against which they founded the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets, which was governed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), in December 1917; it was later succeeded by the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1918. Simultaneously with the Russian Civil War, the Ukrainian War of Independence was being fought among the different Ukrainian republics founded by Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian anarchists, and Ukrainian separatists – primarily against Soviet Russia and the Ukrainian SSR, with either help or opposition from neighbouring states. In 1922, it was one of four Soviet republics (with the Russian SFSR, the Byelorussian SSR, and the Transcaucasian SFSR) that signed the Treaty on the Creation of the Soviet Union. As a Soviet quasi-state, the Ukrainian SSR became a founding member of the United Nations in 1945 alongside the Byelorussian SSR, in spite of the fact that they were also legally represented by the Soviet Union in foreign affairs. Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian SSR emerged as the present-day independent state of Ukraine, although the modified Soviet-era constitution remained in use until the adoption of the modern Ukrainian constitution in June 1996.

Throughout its 72-year history, the republic's borders changed many times, with a general trend toward acquiring lands with ethnic Ukrainian population majority, and losing lands with other ethnic majorities. A significant portion of what is now western Ukraine was gained via the Soviet-German Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, with the annexation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia in 1939, significant portions of Romania in 1940, and Carpathian Ruthenia in Czechoslovakia in 1945. From the 1919 establishment of the Ukrainian SSR until 1934, the city of Kharkov served as its capital; however, the republic's seat of government was subsequently relocated in 1934 to the city of Kiev, the historic Ukrainian capital, and remained at Kiev for the remainder of its existence.

Geographically, the Ukrainian SSR was situated in Eastern Europe, to the north of the Black Sea, and was bordered by the Soviet republics of Moldavia (since 1940), Byelorussia, and Russia, and the countries of Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The republic's border with Czechoslovakia formed the Soviet Union's westernmost border point. According to the 1989 Soviet census, the republic of Ukraine had a population of 51,706,746 (second after Russia).

Name
Its original names in 1919 were both Ukraine  and Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (Українська Соціалістична Радянська Республіка, abbreviated УСРР). After the ratification of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, full official names of all Soviet republics were changed, transposing the second (socialist) and third (sovietskaya in Russian or radianska in Ukrainian) words. In accordance, on 5 December 1936, the 8th Extraordinary Congress Soviets in Soviet Union changed the name of the republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was ratified by the 14th Extraordinary Congress of Soviets in Ukrainian SSR on 31 January 1937.

The name Ukraine (Vkraina) is a subject of debate. It is often perceived as being derived from the Slavic word "okraina", meaning "border land". It was first used to define part of the territory of Kievan Rus' (Ruthenia) in the 12th century, at which point Kiev (now Kyiv) was the capital of Rus'. The name has been used in a variety of ways since the twelfth century. For example, Zaporozhian Cossacks called their hetmanate "Ukraine".

Within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the name carried unofficial status for larger part of Kiev Voivodeship.

"The Ukraine" was once the usual form in English, despite Ukrainian not having a definite article. Since the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, this form has become less common in the English-speaking world, and style-guides warn against its use in professional writing. According to U.S. ambassador William Taylor, "The Ukraine" implies disregard for the country's sovereignty. The Ukrainian position is that the usage of The Ukraine' is incorrect both grammatically and politically."

History
After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the February Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, many people in Ukraine wished to establish an autonomous Ukrainian Republic. During a period of the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1923, many factions claiming themselves governments of the newly born republic were formed, each with supporters and opponents. The two most prominent of them were an independent government in Kiev called the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) and a Soviet Russia-aligned government in Kharkov called the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (USR). The Kiev-based UNR was internationally recognized and supported by the Central Powers following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, whereas the Kharkov-based USR was solely supported by the Soviet Russian forces, while neither the UNR nor the USR were explicitly supported by the White Russian forces that remained, although there were attempts to establish cooperation during the closing stages of the war with the former.

The conflict between the two competing governments, known as the Ukrainian–Soviet War, was part of the ongoing Russian Civil War, as well as a struggle for national independence (known as the Ukrainian War of Independence), which ended with the territory of pro-independence Ukrainian People's Republic being annexed into a new Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, western Ukraine being annexed into the Second Polish Republic, and the newly stable Ukrainian SSR becoming a founding member of the Soviet Union.

The government of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was founded on 24–25 December 1917. In its publications, it named itself either the Republic of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies or the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets. The 1917 republic was only recognised by another non-recognised country, the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. With the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty by Russia, it was ultimately defeated by mid-1918 and eventually dissolved. The last session of the government took place in the Russian city of Taganrog.

In July 1918, the former members of the government formed the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, the constituent assembly of which took place in Moscow. With the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I, the Bolsheviks resumed its hostilities towards the Ukrainian People's Republic fighting for Ukrainian independence and organised another Soviet Ukrainian government. On 10 March 1919, the Third All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets ratified the constitution of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Founding: 1917–1922
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, several factions sought to create an independent Ukrainian state, alternately cooperating and struggling against each other. Numerous more or less socialist-oriented factions participated in the formation of the Ukrainian People's Republic among which were Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Socialists-Revolutionaries and many others. The most popular faction was initially the local Socialist Revolutionary Party that composed the local government together with Federalists and Mensheviks.

Immediately after the October Revolution in Petrograd, Bolsheviks instigated the Kiev Bolshevik Uprising to support the revolution and secure Kiev. Due to a lack of adequate support from the local population and governing anti-communist Central Rada, however, the Kiev Bolshevik group split. Most moved to Kharkov and received the support of the eastern Ukrainian cities and industrial centers. Later, this move was regarded as a mistake by some of the People's Commissars (Yevgenia Bosch). They issued an ultimatum to the Central Rada on 17 December to recognise the Soviet government of which the Rada was very critical. The Bolsheviks convened a separate congress and declared the first Soviet Republic of Ukraine on 24 December 1917 claiming the Central Rada and its supporters outlaws that need to be eradicated. Warfare ensued against the Ukrainian People's Republic for the installation of the Soviet regime in the country, and with the direct support from Soviet Russia the Ukrainian National forces were practically overrun. The government of Ukraine appealed to foreign capitals, finding support in the face of the Central Powers as the others refused to recognise it. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian SFSR yielded all the captured Ukrainian territory as the Bolsheviks were forced out of Ukraine. The government of Soviet Ukraine was dissolved after its last session on 20 November 1918.

After re-taking Kharkov in February 1919, a second Soviet Ukrainian government was formed. The government enforced Russian policies that did not adhere to local needs. A group of three thousand workers were dispatched from Russia to take grain from local farms to feed Russian cities and were met with resistance. The Ukrainian language was also censured from administrative and educational use. Eventually fighting both White forces in the east and Ukrainian forces in the west, Lenin ordered the liquidation of the second Soviet Ukrainian government in August 1919.

Eventually, after the creation of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine in Moscow, a third Ukrainian Soviet government was formed on 21 December 1919 that initiated new hostilities against Ukrainian nationalists as they lost their military support from the defeated Central Powers. Eventually, the Red Army ended up controlling much of the Ukrainian territory after the Polish-Soviet Peace of Riga. On 30 December 1922, along with the Russian, Byelorussian and Transcaucasian republics, the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Interwar years: 1922–1939
During the 1920s, a policy of Ukrainization was pursued in the Ukrainian SSR, as part of the general Soviet korenization policy; this involved promoting the use and the social status of the Ukrainian language and the elevation of ethnic Ukrainians to leadership positions (see Ukrainization – early years of Soviet Ukraine for more details).

In 1932, the aggressive agricultural policies of Joseph Stalin's regime resulted in one of the largest national catastrophes in the modern history for the Ukrainian nation. A famine known as the Holodomor caused a direct loss of human life estimated between 2.6 million to 10 million. Some scholars and the World Congress of Free Ukrainians assert that this was an act of genocide. The International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–1933 Famine in Ukraine found no evidence that the famine was part of a preconceived plan to starve Ukrainians, and concluded in 1990 that the famine was caused by a combination of factors, including Soviet policies of compulsory grain requisitions, forced collectivization, dekulakization, and Russification. The General Assembly of the UN has stopped shy of recognizing the Holodomor as genocide, calling it a "great tragedy" as a compromise between tense positions of United Kingdom, United States, Russia, and Ukraine on the matter, while some nations went on to individually categorize it as genocide, including France, Germany, and the United States after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

World War II: 1939–1945
In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and occupied Galician lands inhabited by Ukrainians, Poles and Jews adding it to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region, lands inhabited by Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Bulgarians and Gagauz, adding them to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR and the newly formed Moldavian SSR. In 1945, these lands were permanently annexed, and the Transcarpathia region was added as well, by treaty with the post-war administration of Czechoslovakia. Following eastward Soviet retreat in 1941, Ufa became the wartime seat of the Soviet Ukrainian government.

Post-war years: 1945–1953
While World War II (called the Great Patriotic War by the Soviet government) did not end before May 1945, the Germans were driven out of Ukraine between February 1943 and October 1944. The first task of the Soviet authorities was to reestablish political control over the republic which had been entirely lost during the war. This was an immense task, considering the widespread human and material losses. During World War II the Soviet Union lost about 8.6 million combatants and around 18 million civilians, of these, 6.8 million were Ukrainian civilians and military personnel. Also, an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians were evacuated to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic during the war, and 2.2 million Ukrainians were sent to forced labour camps by the Germans.

The material devastation was huge; Adolf Hitler's orders to create "a zone of annihilation" in 1943, coupled with the Soviet military's scorched-earth policy in 1941, meant Ukraine lay in ruins. These two policies led to the destruction of more than 28,000 villages and 714 cities and towns. 85 percent of Kiev's city centre was destroyed, as was 70 percent of the city centre of the second-largest city in Ukraine, Kharkov. Because of this, 19 million people were left homeless after the war. The republic's industrial base, as so much else, was destroyed. The Soviet government had managed to evacuate 544 industrial enterprises between July and November 1941, but the rapid German advance led to the destruction or the partial destruction of 16,150 enterprises. 27,910 collective farms, 1,300 machine tractor stations and 872 state farms were destroyed by the Germans.

While the war brought to Ukraine an enormous physical destruction, victory also led to territorial expansion. As a victor, the Soviet Union gained new prestige and more land. The Ukrainian border was expanded to the Curzon Line. Ukraine was also expanded southwards, near the area Izmail, previously part of Romania. An agreement was signed by the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia whereby Carpathian Ruthenia was handed over to Ukraine. The territory of Ukraine expanded by 64500 sqmi and increased its population by an estimated 11 million.

After World War II, amendments to the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR were accepted, which allowed it to act as a separate subject of international law in some cases and to a certain extent, remaining a part of the Soviet Union at the same time. In particular, these amendments allowed the Ukrainian SSR to become one of the founding members of the United Nations (UN) together with the Soviet Union and the Byelorussian SSR. This was part of a deal with the United States to ensure a degree of balance in the General Assembly, which, the USSR opined, was unbalanced in favor of the Western Bloc. In its capacity as a member of the UN, the Ukrainian SSR was an elected member of the United Nations Security Council in 1948–1949 and 1984–1985.

Khrushchev and Brezhnev: 1953–1985
When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, the collective leadership of Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrentiy Beria took power and a period of de-Stalinization began. Change came as early as 1953, when officials were allowed to criticise Stalin's policy of russification. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) openly criticised Stalin's russification policies in a meeting in June 1953. On 4 June 1953, Aleksey Kirichenko succeeded Leonid Melnikov as First Secretary of the CPU; this was significant since Kyrychenko was the first ethnic Ukrainian to lead the CPU since the 1920s. The policy of de-Stalinization took two main features, that of centralisation and decentralisation from the centre. In February 1954, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) transferred Crimea to Ukraine during the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's reunification with Russia (Soviet name for the Pereiaslav Agreement). The massive festivities lasted throughout 1954, commemorating (Переяславська рада), the treaty which brought Ukraine under Russian rule three centuries before. The event was celebrated to prove the old and brotherly love between Ukrainians and Russians, and proof of the Soviet Union as a "family of nations"; it was also another way of legitimising Marxism–Leninism. On 23 June 1954, the civilian oil tanker Tuapse of the Black Sea Shipping Company based in Odessa was hijacked by a fleet of Republic of China Navy in the high sea of 19°35′N, 120°39′E, west of Balintang Channel near Philippines, whereas the 49 Ukrainian, Russian and Moldovan crew were detained by the Kuomintang regime in various terms up to 34 years in captivity with 3 deaths.

The "Thaw" – the policy of deliberate liberalisation – was characterised by four points: amnesty for some convicted of state crime during the war or the immediate post-war years; amnesties for one-third of those convicted of state crime during Stalin's rule; the establishment of the first Ukrainian mission to the United Nations in 1958; and the steady increase of Ukrainians in the rank of the CPU and government of the Ukrainian SSR. Not only were the majority of CPU Central Committee and Politburo members ethnic Ukrainians, three-quarters of the highest ranking party and state officials were ethnic Ukrainians too. The policy of partial Ukrainisation also led to a cultural thaw within Ukraine.

In October 1964, Khrushchev was deposed by a joint Central Committee and Politburo plenum and succeeded by another collective leadership, this time led by Leonid Brezhnev, born in Ukraine, as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Brezhnev's rule would be marked by social and economic stagnation, a period often referred to as the Era of Stagnation. The new regime introduced the policy of rastsvet, sblizhenie and sliianie ("flowering", "drawing together" and "merging"/"fusion"), which was the policy of uniting the different Soviet nationalities into one Soviet nationality by merging the best elements of each nationality into the new one. This policy turned out to be, in fact, the reintroduction of the russification policy. The reintroduction of this policy can be explained by Khrushchev's promise of communism in 20 years; the unification of Soviet nationalities would take place, according to Vladimir Lenin, when the Soviet Union reached the final stage of communism, also the final stage of human development. Some all-Union Soviet officials were calling for the abolition of the "pseudosovereign" Soviet republics, and the establishment of one nationality. Instead of introducing the ideologic concept of the Soviet Nation, Brezhnev at the 24th Party Congress talked about "a new historical community of people – the Soviet people", and introduced the ideological tenant of Developed socialism, which postponed communism. When Brezhnev died in 1982, his position of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who died quickly after taking power. Andropov was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who ruled for little more than a year. Chernenko was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.

Gorbachev and dissolution: 1985–1991
Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost (English: restructuring and openness) failed to reach Ukraine as early as other Soviet republics because of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a conservative communist appointed by Brezhnev and the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, who resigned from his post in 1989. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986, the russification policies, and the apparent social and economic stagnation led several Ukrainians to oppose Soviet rule. Gorbachev's policy of perestroika was also never introduced into practice, 95 percent of industry and agriculture was still owned by the Soviet state in 1990. The talk of reform, but the lack of introducing reform into practice, led to confusion which in turn evolved into opposition to the Soviet state itself. The policy of glasnost, which ended state censorship, led the Ukrainian diaspora to reconnect with their compatriots in Ukraine, the revitalisation of religious practices by destroying the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church and led to the establishment of several opposition pamphlets, journals and newspapers.

Following the failed August Coup in Moscow on 19–21 August 1991, the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine declared independence on 24 August 1991, which renamed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to Ukraine. The result of the 1991 independence referendum held on 1 December 1991 proved to be a surprise. An overwhelming majority, 92.3%, voted for independence. The referendum carried in the majority of all oblasts. Notably, the Crimea, which had originally been a territory of the RSFSR until 1954, supported the referendum by a 54 percent majority. Over 80 percent of the population of Eastern Ukraine voted for independence. Ukraine's independence was almost immediately recognized by the international community. Ukraine's new-found independence was the first time in the 20th century that Ukrainian independence had been attempted without either foreign intervention or civil war. In the 1991 Ukrainian presidential election 62 percent of Ukrainians voted for Leonid Kravchuk, who had been vested with presidential powers since the Supreme Soviet's declaration of independence. The secession of the second most powerful republic in the Soviet Union ended any realistic chance of the Soviet Union staying together even on a limited scale.

A week after Kravchuk's victory, on 8 December, he and his Russian and Belarusian counterparts signed the Belovezh Accords, which declared that the Soviet Union had effectively ceased to exist and forming the Commonwealth of Independent States as a replacement. They were joined by eight of the remaining 12 republics (all except Georgia) on 21 December in signing the Alma-Ata Protocol, which reiterated that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The Soviet Union formally dissolved on 26 December.

Politics and government
The Ukrainian SSR's system of government was based on a one-party communist system ruled by the Communist Party of Ukraine, a branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPSS). The republic was one of 15 constituent republics composing the Soviet Union from its entry into the union in 1922 until its dissolution in 1991. All of the political power and authority in the USSR was in the hands of Communist Party authorities, with little real power being concentrated in official government bodies and organs. In such a system, lower-level authorities directly reported to higher level authorities and so on, with the bulk of the power being held at the highest echelons of the Communist Party.

Originally, the legislative authority was vested in the Congress of Soviets of Ukraine, whose Central Executive Committee was for many years headed by Grigory Petrovsky. Soon after publishing a Stalinist constitution, the Congress of Soviets was transformed into the Supreme Soviet (and the Central Executive Committee into its Presidium), which consisted of 450 deputies. The Supreme Soviet had the authority to enact legislation, amend the constitution, adopt new administrative and territorial boundaries, adopt the budget, and establish political and economic development plans. In addition, parliament also had to authority to elect the republic's executive branch, the Council of Ministers as well as the power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court. Legislative sessions were short and were conducted for only a few weeks out of the year. In spite of this, the Supreme Soviet elected the Presidium, the Chairman, 3 deputy chairmen, a secretary, and couple of other government members to carry out the official functions and duties in between legislative sessions. Chairman of the Presidium was a powerful position in the republic's higher echelons of power, and could nominally be considered the equivalent of head of state, although most executive authority would be concentrated in the Communist Party's politburo and its First Secretary.

Full universal suffrage was granted for all eligible citizens aged 18 and over, excluding prisoners and those deprived of freedom. Although they could not be considered free and were of a symbolic nature, elections to the Supreme Soviet were contested every five years. Nominees from electoral districts from around the republic, typically consisting of an average of 110,000 inhabitants, were directly chosen by party authorities, providing little opportunity for political change, since all political authority was directly subordinate to the higher level above it.

With the beginning of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reforms towards the mid-late 1980s, electoral reform laws were passed in 1989, liberalising the nominating procedures and allowing multiple candidates to stand for election in a district. Accordingly, the first relatively free elections in the Ukrainian SSR were contested in March 1990. 111 deputies from the Democratic Bloc, a loose association of small pro-Ukrainian and pro-sovereignty parties and the instrumental People's Movement of Ukraine (colloquially known as Rukh in Ukrainian) were elected to the parliament. Although the Communist Party retained its majority with 331 deputies, large support for the Democratic Bloc demonstrated the people's distrust of the Communist authorities, which would eventually boil down to Ukrainian independence in 1991. Ukraine is the legal successor of the Ukrainian SSR and it stated to fulfill "those rights and duties pursuant to international agreements of Union SSR which do not contradict the Constitution of Ukraine and interests of the Republic" on 5 October 1991. After Ukrainian independence the Ukrainian SSR's parliament was changed from Supreme Soviet to its current name Verkhovna Rada, the Verkhovna Rada is still Ukraine's parliament. Ukraine also has refused to recognize exclusive Russian claims to succession of the Soviet Union and claimed such status for Ukraine as well, which was stated in Articles 7 and 8 of On Legal Succession of Ukraine, issued in 1991. Following independence, Ukraine has continued to pursue claims against the Russian Federation in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property that was owned by the Soviet Union. It also retained its seat in the United Nations, held since 1945.

Foreign relations
On the international front, the Ukrainian SSR, along with the rest of the 15 republics, had virtually no say in their own foreign affairs. However, since 1944, the Ukrainian SSR was permitted to establish bilateral relations with countries and maintain its own standing army. This clause was used to permit the republic's membership in the United Nations, alongside the Byelorussian SSR. Accordingly, representatives from the "Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" and 50 other states founded the UN on 24 October 1945. In effect, this provided the Soviet Union (a permanent Security Council member with veto powers) with another two votes in the General Assembly. The latter aspect of the 1944 clauses was never fulfilled and the republic's defense matters were managed by the Soviet Armed Forces and the Defense Ministry. Another right that was granted but never used until 1991 was the right of the Soviet republics to secede from the union, which was codified in each of the Soviet constitutions. Accordingly, Article 69 of the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR stated: "The Ukrainian SSR retains the right to willfully secede from the USSR." However, a republic's theoretical secession from the union was virtually impossible and unrealistic in many ways until after Gorbachev's perestroika reforms.

The Ukrainian SSR was a member of the UN Economic and Social Council, UNICEF, International Labour Organization, Universal Postal Union, World Health Organization, UNESCO, International Telecommunication Union, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, World Intellectual Property Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was not separately a member of the Warsaw Pact, Comecon, the World Federation of Trade Unions and the World Federation of Democratic Youth, and since 1949, the International Olympic Committee.

Administrative divisions

Legally, the Soviet Union and its fifteen union republics constituted a federal system, but the country was functionally a highly centralised state, with all major decision-making taking place in the Kremlin, the capital and seat of government of the country. The constituent republics were essentially unitary states, with lower levels of power being directly subordinate to higher ones. Throughout its 72-year existence, the administrative divisions of the Ukrainian SSR changed numerous times, often incorporating regional reorganisation and annexation on the part of Soviet authorities during World War II.

The most common administrative division was the oblast (province), of which there were 25 upon the republic's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Provinces were further subdivided into raions (districts) which numbered 490. The rest of the administrative division within the provinces consisted of cities, urban-type settlements, and villages. Cities in the Ukrainian SSR were a separate exception, which could either be subordinate to either the provincial authorities themselves or the district authorities of which they were the administrative center. Two cities, the capital Kiev, and Sevastopol (which hosted a large Soviet Navy base in Crimea), were uniquely designated "cities with special status." This meant that they were directly subordinate to the central Ukrainian SSR authorities and not the provincial authorities surrounding them.

Historical formation
However, the history of administrative divisions in the republic was not so clear cut. At the end of World War I in 1918, Ukraine was invaded by Soviet Russia as the Russian puppet government of the Ukrainian SSR and without official declaration it ignited the Ukrainian–Soviet War. Government of the Ukrainian SSR from very start was managed by the Communist Party of Ukraine that was created in Moscow and was originally formed out of the Bolshevik organisational centers in Ukraine. Occupying the eastern city of Kharkov, the Soviet forces chose it as the republic's seat of government, colloquially named in the media as "Kharkov – Pervaya Stolitsa (the first capital)" with implication to the era of Soviet regime. Kharkov was also the city where the first Soviet Ukrainian government was created in 1917 with strong support from Russian SFSR authorities. However, in 1934, the capital was moved from Kharkov to Kiev, which remains the capital of Ukraine today.

During the 1930s, there were significant numbers of ethnic minorities living within the Ukrainian SSR. National Districts were formed as separate territorial-administrative units within higher-level provincial authorities. Districts were established for the republic's three largest minority groups, which were the Jews, Russians, and Poles. Other ethnic groups, however, were allowed to petition the government for their own national autonomy. In 1924 on the territory of Ukrainian SSR was formed the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Upon the 1940 conquest of Bessarabia and Bukovina by Soviet troops the Moldavian ASSR was passed to the newly formed Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, while Budzhak and Bukovina were secured by the Ukrainian SSR. Following the creation of the Ukrainian SSR significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians found themselves living outside the Ukrainian SSR. In the 1920s the Ukrainian SSR was forced to cede several territories to Russia in Severia, Sloboda Ukraine and Azov littoral including such cities like Belgorod, Taganrog and Starodub. In the 1920s the administration of the Ukrainian SSR insisted in vain on reviewing the border between the Ukrainian Soviet Republics and the Russian Soviet Republic based on the 1926 First All-Union Census of the Soviet Union that showed that 4.5 millions of Ukrainians were living on Russian territories bordering Ukraine. A forced end to Ukrainisation in southern Russian Soviet Republic led to a massive decline of reported Ukrainians in these regions in the 1937 Soviet Census.

Upon signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union partitioned Poland and its Eastern Borderlands were secured by the Soviet buffer republics with Ukraine securing the territory of Eastern Galicia. The Soviet September Polish campaign in Soviet propaganda was portrayed as the Golden September for Ukrainians, given the unification of Ukrainian lands on both banks of Zbruch River, until then the border between the Soviet Union and the Polish communities inhabited by Ukrainian speaking families.

Before 1945
At the onset of Soviet Ukraine, having largely inherited conditions from the Tsarist Empire, one of the biggest exporters of wheat in the world, the Ukrainian economy was still centered around agriculture, with over 90% of the workforce being peasants.

In the 1920s, Soviet policy in Ukraine attached importance to developing the economy. The initial agenda, War Communism, had prescribed total communisation and appropriation per quota of food from the people by force - further economic damage and a famine claiming up to one million lives ensued. With the New Economic Policy and the partial introduction of free markets, an economic recovery followed. After the death of Lenin and the consolidation of his power, Stalin was determined to industrialisation and reversed policy again. As heavy industry and wheat exports boomed, common people in rural areas were bearing a cost. Gradually escalating measures, from raised taxes, dispossession of property, and forced deportations into Siberia culminated in extremely high grain delivery quotas. Even though there is no evidence that agricultural yield could not feed the population at the time, four million Ukrainians were starved to death while Moscow exported over a million tonnes of grain to the West, decimating the population.

Within a decade, Ukraine's industrial production had quintupled, mainly from facilities in the Donets Basin and central Ukrainian cities such as Mykolaiv.

Agriculture
In 1945, agricultural production stood at only 40 percent of the 1940 level, even though the republic's territorial expansion had "increased the amount of arable land". In contrast to the remarkable growth in the industrial sector, agriculture continued in Ukraine, as in the rest of the Soviet Union, to function as the economy's Achilles heel. Despite the human toll of collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union, especially in Ukraine, Soviet planners still believed in the effectiveness of collective farming. The old system was reestablished; the numbers of collective farms in Ukraine increased from 28 thousand in 1940 to 33 thousand in 1949, comprising 45 million hectares; the numbers of state farms barely increased, standing at 935 in 1950, comprising 12.1 million hectares. By the end of the Fourth Five-Year Plan (in 1950) and the Fifth Five-Year Plan (in 1955), agricultural output still stood far lower than the 1940 level. The slow changes in agriculture can be explained by the low productivity in collective farms, and by bad weather-conditions, which the Soviet planning system could not effectively respond to. Grain for human consumption in the post-war years decreased, this in turn led to frequent and severe food shortages.

The increase of Soviet agricultural production was tremendous, however, the Soviet-Ukrainians still experienced food shortages due to the inefficiencies of a highly centralised economy. During the peak of Soviet-Ukrainian agriculture output in the 1950s and early-to-mid-1960s, human consumption in Ukraine, and in the rest of the Soviet Union, actually experienced short intervals of decrease. There are many reasons for this inefficiency, but its origins can be traced back to the single-purchaser and -producer market system set up by Joseph Stalin. Khrushchev tried to improve the agricultural situation in the Soviet Union by expanding the total crop size – for instance, in the Ukrainian SSR alone "the amount of land planted with corn grew by 600 percent". At the height of this policy, between 1959 and 1963, one-third of Ukrainian arable land grew this crop. This policy decreased the total production of wheat and rye; Khrushchev had anticipated this, and the production of wheat and rye moved to Soviet Central Asia as part of the Virgin Lands Campaign. Khrushchev's agricultural policy failed, and in 1963 the Soviet Union had to import food from abroad. The total level of agricultural productivity in Ukraine decreased sharply during this period, but recovered in the 1970s and 1980s during Leonid Brezhnev's rule.

Industry
During the post-war years, Ukraine's industrial productivity doubled its pre-war level. In 1945 industrial output totalled only 26 percent of the 1940 level. The Soviet Union introduced the Fourth Five-Year Plan in 1946. The Fourth Five-Year Plan would prove to be a remarkable success, and can be likened to the "wonders of West German and Japanese reconstruction", but without foreign capital; the Soviet reconstruction is historically an impressive achievement. In 1950 industrial gross output had already surpassed 1940-levels. While the Soviet régime still emphasised heavy industry over light industry, the light-industry sector also grew. The increase in capital investment and the expansion of the labour force also benefited Ukraine's economic recovery. In the prewar years, 15.9 percent of the Soviet budget went to Ukraine, in 1950, during the Fourth Five-Year Plan this had increased to 19.3 percent. The workforce had increased from 1.2 million in 1945 to 2.9 million in 1955; an increase of 33.2 percent over the 1940-level. The result of this remarkable growth was that by 1955 Ukraine was producing 2.2 times more than in 1940, and the republic had become one of the leading producers of certain commodities in Europe. Ukraine was the largest per-capita producer in Europe of pig iron and sugar, and the second-largest per-capita producer of steel and of iron ore, and was the third largest per-capita producer of coal in Europe.

From 1965 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, industrial growth in Ukraine decreased, and by the 1970s it started to stagnate. Significant economic decline did not become apparent before the 1970s. During the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1951–1955), industrial development in Ukraine grew by 13.5 percent, while during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (1981–1985) industry grew by a relatively modest 3.5 percent. The double-digit growth seen in all branches of the economy in the post-war years had disappeared by the 1980s, entirely replaced by low growth-figures. An ongoing problem throughout the republic's existence was the planners' emphasis on heavy industry over consumer goods.

The urbanisation of Ukrainian society in the post-war years led to an increase in energy consumption. Between 1956 and 1972, to meet this increasing demand, the government built five water reservoirs along the Dnieper River. Aside from improving Soviet-Ukrainian water transport, the reservoirs became the sites for new power stations, and hydroelectric energy flourished in Ukraine in consequence. The natural-gas industry flourished as well, and Ukraine became the site of the first post-war production of gas in the Soviet Union; by the 1960s Ukraine's biggest gas field was producing 30 percent of the USSR's total gas production. The government was not able to meet the people's ever-increasing demand for energy consumption, but by the 1970s, the Soviet government had conceived an intensive nuclear power program. According to the Eleventh Five-Year Plan, the Soviet government would build 8 nuclear power plants in Ukraine by 1989. As a result of these efforts, Ukraine became highly diversified in energy consumption.

Religion
Many churches and synagogues were destroyed during the existence of the Ukrainian SSR.

Urbanization

Urbanisation in post-Stalin Ukraine grew quickly; in 1959 only 25 cities in Ukraine had populations over one hundred thousand, by 1979 the number had grown to 49. During the same period, the growth of cities with a population over one million increased from one to five; Kiev alone nearly doubled its population, from 1.1 million in 1959 to 2.1 million in 1979. This proved a turning point in Ukrainian society: for the first time in Ukraine's history, the majority of ethnic Ukrainians lived in urban areas; 53 percent of the ethnic Ukrainian population did so in 1979. The majority worked in the non-agricultural sector, in 1970 31 percent of Ukrainians engaged in agriculture, in contrast, 63 percent of Ukrainians were industrial workers and white-collar staff. In 1959, 37 percent of Ukrainians lived in urban areas, in 1989 the proportion had increased to 60 percent.

title: Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic


text:
David Roberts (painter)

David Roberts (24 October 1796 – 25 November 1864) was a Scottish painter. He is especially known for The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, a prolific series of detailed lithograph prints of Egypt and the Near East that he produced from sketches he made during long tours of the region (1838–1840). These and his large oil paintings of similar subjects made him a prominent Orientalist painter. He was elected as a Royal Academician in 1841.

Early life
David Roberts was born at Edinburgh in Scotland. Apprenticed for seven years to a house painter and decorator named Gavin Beugo, his fellow apprentice being David Ramsay Hay, who became a lifelong friend. During this time he studied art in the evenings. After his apprenticeship was complete, Roberts's first paid job came in the summer of 1815, when he moved to Perth to serve as foreman for the redecoration of Scone Palace. Roberts returned in the spring of 1816 and lived with his parents while looking for work.

His next job was to paint scenery for James Bannister's circus on North College Street. This was the beginning of his career as a painter and designer of stage scenery. Bannister liked Roberts's set designs and on 10 April 1816 engaged him at a salary of 25 shillings per week to travel with the circus on a tour of England. Roberts departed Edinburgh with the circus later the same month and travelled to Carlisle, Newcastle, Hull and York, returning to Edinburgh in January 1817. During his time with the circus, Roberts was called on to take several minor stage roles as a foil for the clowns' skits.

For the first few months of 1817, Roberts worked as the stage designer's assistant at the Pantheon Theatre, Edinburgh, a new joint venture between Bannister and an Italian musician named Corri. However the Pantheon was a financial failure and closed in May 1817, putting Roberts out of work. He reluctantly returned to house painting, working on the mansion house of Abercairny, near Perth, designed by Gillespie Graham. Although he was working from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. he took the opportunity to sketch in the woods around the mansion in the evening. He followed this up with a stint painting imitation wood and marble at a mansion at Condie, near Bridge of Earn, in Perthshire. At the urging of his parents, Roberts returned to Edinburgh in January 1818, where he took employment with John Jackson, a decorative painter. Working for Jackson during 1818, Roberts decorated Lord Lauderdale's Dunbar House (known later as Lauderdale House) and then the library of Craigcrook Castle for Lord Jeffrey, who had recently leased the property.

In 1818, the Pantheon Theatre reopened in Edinburgh. Initially, a company from London with their own scene painters was in residence, but after they left, Roberts was able to get work from Corri as a scene painter. While Corri offered Roberts the position on 25 July 1818, he was already committed to house-painting work for Jackson and was unable to start at the Pantheon until the winter season. As there was no separate painting room, Roberts had to paint sets directly on the stage, which was occupied by rehearsals during the day and performances in the evening. Therefore, Roberts generally began work after the evening production had finished, working through the night. Roberts's work was noticed by the stage-manager, Mr. Monro. After the Pantheon closed, Monro moved on to the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, where he arranged for Roberts to be hired as a principal scene-painter.

In 1819, Roberts became the scene painter at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh (having at this time James Ballantine as his apprentice). There Roberts met the Scottish actress Margaret McLachlan, said to be the illegitimate daughter of a Highland gypsy girl and a clan chief. They married in 1820, "for pure love". Although the marriage did not last long, it produced Roberts' only daughter, Christine, who was born in 1821.

Although he was making a living from scene painting, it was around this time that Roberts began to produce oil paintings seriously. In 1821 he became friends with the artist William Clarkson Stanfield, who joined him to paint scenery at the Theatre Royal, and Roberts developed his love of landscape painting. In 1821 the Fine Arts Institution of Edinburgh accepted three of Roberts's paintings – views of Melrose and Dryburgh abbeys – two of which sold. At Stanfield's suggestion, Roberts also sent three pictures to the 1822 Exhibition of Works by Living Artists, held in Edinburgh.

Move to London
In 1822 the Coburg Theatre, now the Old Vic in London, offered Roberts a job as a scenic designer and stage painter. He sailed from Leith with his wife and their six-month-old Christine and settled in London. After working for a while at the Coburg Theatre, Roberts moved to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane to create dioramas and panoramas with Stanfield.

A miniature by Roberts from this time shows Margaret as a delicate woman with blonde ringlets, holding the smiling three-year-old Christine. But Roberts' family life was not as idyllic as this picture suggests: Margaret had become an alcoholic, and eventually, in 1831, Roberts sent her back to Scotland to be cared for by friends. Roberts may have burned some letters from this period in shame at his wife's drinking problem, but he was unusually frank in a letter to a friend, David Ramsay Hay. Roberts and Hay had been an apprentices together, and Hay had been seeing a mistress since his own wife had started drinking. "'If you do not know our cases are almost parallel. Yours is not as bad as mine, having some consolation. The state of my nerves is such I can scarcely write. But thank God she leaves tomorrow—I hope for ever.'"

In 1824, he exhibited another view of Dryburgh Abbey at the British Institution and sent two works to the first exhibition of the newly formed Society of British Artists. In the autumn of 1824 he visited Normandy. His paintings based on this trip began to lay the foundation of his reputation; one of them, a view of Rouen Cathedral, sold for 80 guineas.

While he built his reputation as a fine artist, Roberts's stage work had also been commercially successful. Commissions from Covent Garden included the sets for the London premiere of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) in 1827, scenery for a pantomime depicting the naval victory of Navarino, and two panoramas that he executed jointly with Stanfield.

During the second part of the 1820s, and in addition to English and Scottish scenes, Roberts painted views of prominent buildings in France and the Low Countries including Amiens, Caen, Dieppe, Rouen, Antwerp, Brussels and Ghent, sometimes making several paintings of the same scene with only minor variations.

By 1829 he was working full-time as a fine artist. That year, he exhibited the Departure of the Israelites from Egypt, in which his style first became apparent. In 1831, the Society of British Artists elected him as their president.

Travel to Spain
In 1832 he traveled in Spain and Tangiers. He returned at the end of 1833 with a supply of sketches that he elaborated into attractive and popular paintings. The British Institution exhibited his Interior of Seville Cathedral in 1834, and he sold it for £300. He executed a fine series of Spanish illustrations for the Landscape Annual of 1836. Then in 1837 a selection of his Picturesque Sketches in Spain was reproduced by lithography.

In London he made the acquaintance of artists such as Edward Thomas Daniell and John Linnell, who frequented Daniel's house.

Travel to Egypt and the Holy Land

J. M. W. Turner persuaded Roberts to abandon scene painting and devote himself to becoming a full-time artist. Roberts set sail for Egypt on 31 August 1838, a few years after Owen Jones. His intent was to produce drawings that he could later use as the basis for the paintings and lithographs to sell to the public. Egypt was much in vogue at this time, and travellers, collectors and lovers of antiquities were keen to buy works inspired by the East or depicting the great monuments of ancient Egypt.

Roberts made a long tour in Egypt, Nubia, the Sinai, the Holy Land, Jordan and Lebanon. Throughout, he produced a vast collection of drawings and watercolour sketches.

Muhammad Ali Pasha received Roberts in Alexandria on 16 May 1839, shortly before his return to the UK. He later reproduced this scene, apparently from memory, in Volume 3 of Egypt & Nubia.

Return to Britain

Upon Roberts's return to Edinburgh in 1840, his fellow-artist, Robert Scott Lauder, painted his portrait. (In 1980, the National Gallery of Scotland purchased the portrait.) Scottish society fêted him. For instance, he was the guest of honour at a dinner on 19 October 1842, at which Lord Cockburn presided.

On his return to Britain, Roberts worked with lithographer Louis Haghe from 1842 to 1849 to produce the lavishly illustrated plates of The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, originally published as Sketches in the Holy Land and Syria, 1842–1849 and Egypt & Nubia series. He funded the work through advance subscriptions which he solicited directly. The scenery and monuments of Egypt and Holy Land were fashionable but had hitherto been hardly touched by British artists, and so Roberts quickly accumulated 400 subscription commitments, with Queen Victoria being subscriber No. 1. Her complete set is still in the Royal Collection. The timing of publication just before photographs of the sites became available proved fortuitous.

Later life

In 1851, and again in 1853, Roberts visited Italy, painting the Ducal Palace, Venice, bought by Lord Londesborough, the Interior of the Basilica of St Peters, Rome, Christmas Day, 1853, and Rome from the Convent of St Onofrio, presented to the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1853 he exhibited a picture painted by command of Queen Victoria, title the 'Inauguration of the Exhibition of 1851,' it depicted the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851

His last volume of illustrations, Italy, Classical, Historical and Picturesque, was published in 1859. In 1839 he was elected an associate and in 1841 a full member of the Royal Academy; and in 1858 he was presented with the freedom of the city of Edinburgh. The last years of his life were occupied with a series of views of London from the Thames. He had executed six of these, and was at work upon a picture of St Paul's Cathedral as seen from Ludgate Hill, when he died suddenly. He collapsed on Berners Street on the afternoon of 25 November 1864 and died at home that evening. The symptoms, described as apoplexy in most histories, were those of a stroke.

He was buried at West Norwood Cemetery.

Paintings

 * Departure of the Israelites (1829)
 * The Great Staircase, Stafford House (1832), UK Government Art Collection
 * Interior of Seville Cathedral (1834)
 * A View in Cairo (1840), The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle
 * The Temple at Dendera (1841)
 * The Gateway to the Great Temple at Baalbec (1841)
 * Ruins of the Great Temple at Karnak, in Upper Egypt (1845)
 * The Destruction of Jerusalem (1850)
 * The Church of the Jesuits, View on the Grand Canal, Venice (1854), Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, Connecticut
 * Edinburgh from the Calton Hill (1858)
 * The Dogana and Santa Maria, Venice (1862) Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust
 * Street in Cairo (Royal Holloway Collection, University of London)
 * Pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Royal Holloway Collection, London)

Prints

 * Picturesque Sketches in Spain (London, 1835–36)
 * The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia (London 1842–1849, originally as The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea and Arabia and Egypt and Nubia, in 2x3 volumes.) Link to Images
 * Cities of North Africa (London 1852)

Journals

 * Roberts, David, Record Book, 1829–1864, unpublished manuscript, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.
 * Roberts, David, Eastern Journal, 1838–1839, unpublished manuscript, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

title: David Roberts (painter)


text:
Second Sea Lord and Deputy Chief of Naval Staff

The Second Sea Lord and Deputy Chief of Naval Staff (formerly Second Sea Lord) is deputy to the First Sea Lord and the second highest-ranking officer to currently serve in the Royal Navy and is responsible for personnel and naval shore establishments. Originally titled Second Naval Lord in 1830, the post was restyled Second Sea Lord in 1904. They are based at Navy Command, Headquarters.

History
In 1805, for the first time, specific functions were assigned to each of the 'Naval' Lords, who were described as 'Professional' Lords, leaving to the 'Civil' Lords the routine business of signing documents. The Second Naval Lord was the second most senior Naval Lord on the Board of Admiralty and as Chief of Naval Personnel was responsible for handling all personnel matters for the Royal Navy. In 1917 the title was changed to the Second Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Personnel by an order in council dated 23 October.

The posts of Second Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief, Naval Home Command (CINCNAVHOME) were amalgamated in 1994 in the reductions of the British Armed Forces following the end of the Cold War. The original post of Commander-in-Chief, Naval Home Command had been created on 1 July 1969, as a result of the merger of the posts of Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth and Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth.

2SL is based in Portsmouth in a combined headquarters with the Fleet Commander on Whale Island. Until October 2012, he flew his flag from HMS Victory, the world's oldest commissioned warship, which is preserved in dry dock in Portsmouth. The right to use HMS Victory as a flagship came from his position as CINCNAVHOME, who in turn acquired it from the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth. Since October 2012, distinct Commander-in-Chief posts have been discontinued and full command responsibility is vested in the First Sea Lord, who now flies his flag from Victory; this change formed part of the Levene reforms which were implemented at that time.

In 2016 the post was retitled Second Sea Lord & Deputy Chief of Naval Staff and defined as "responsible for the delivery of the Naval Service’s current and future personnel, equipment and infrastructure".

Second Naval Lords, 1830–1904
Second Naval Lords include:
 * Rear Admiral George Dundas, 1830–1834
 * Vice-Admiral Sir William Parker, 1834
 * Vice-Admiral Sir John Beresford, 1835–1841
 * Vice-Admiral Sir William Parker, 1835–1841
 * Rear Admiral Sir Edward Troubridge, 1841
 * Vice-Admiral Sir William Gage, 1841–1846
 * Vice-Admiral Sir James Dundas, 1846–1847
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Prescott, 1847
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Maurice Berkeley, 1847–1852
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Houston Stewart, 1852
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Phipps Hornby, 1852–1853
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Maurice Berkeley, 1853–1854
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Dundas, 1854–1855
 * Vice-Admiral Henry Eden, 1855–1857
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Dundas, 1857
 * Vice-Admiral Henry Eden, 1857–1858
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Dundas, 1858–1859
 * Rear Admiral Frederick Pelham, 1859–1861
 * Vice Admiral Sir Charles Eden, 1861–1866
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Sydney Dacres, 1866–1868
 * Vacant, 1868–1872
 * Vice Admiral Sir John Tarleton, 1872–1874
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Hornby, 1874–1877
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur Hood 1877–1879
 * Admiral The Earl of Clanwilliam, 1879–1880
 * Admiral Lord John Hay, 1880–1883
 * Admiral Lord Alcester, 1883–1885
 * Admiral Sir Anthony Hoskins, 1885–1888
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Vesey Hamilton, 1888–1889
 * Admiral Sir Henry Fairfax, 1889–1892
 * Admiral Sir Frederick Richards, 1892–1893
 * Admiral Lord Walter Kerr, 1893–1895
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Frederick Bedford, 1895–1899
 * Admiral Lord Walter Kerr, 1899
 * Vice-Admiral Archibald Douglas, 1899–1902
 * Admiral Sir John Fisher, 1902–1903

Second Sea Lords, 1904–1917
Second Sea Lords include:
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Drury, 1903–1907
 * Admiral Sir William May, 1907–1909
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Francis Bridgeman, 1909–1911
 * Vice-Admiral Sir George Egerton, 1911
 * Vice-Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, 1911–1912
 * Vice-Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, 1912–1914
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Frederick Hamilton, 1914–1916
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Somerset Gough-Calthorpe, 1916
 * Admiral Sir Cecil Burney, 1916–1917

Second Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Personnel 1917–1995

 * Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, 1917
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Herbert Heath, 1917–1919
 * Admiral Sir Montague Browning, 1919–1920
 * Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, 1920–1924
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, 1924–1925
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Hubert Brand, 1925–1927
 * Admiral Sir Michael Hodges, 1927–1930
 * Admiral Sir Cyril Fuller, 1930–1932
 * Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, 1932–1935
 * Admiral Sir Martin Dunbar-Nasmith, 1935–1938
 * Admiral Sir Charles Little, 1938–1941
 * Admiral Sir William Whitworth, 1941–1944
 * Admiral Sir Algernon Willis, 1944–1946
 * Admiral Sir Arthur Power, 1946–1948
 * Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt, 1948–1950
 * Admiral Sir Alexander Madden, 1950–1953
 * Admiral Sir Guy Russell, 1953–1955
 * Admiral Sir Charles Lambe, 1955–1957
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Deric Holland-Martin, 1957–1959
 * Admiral Sir St John Tyrwhitt, 1959–1961
 * Admiral Sir Royston Wright, 1961–1965
 * Admiral Sir Desmond Dreyer, 1965–1967
 * Admiral Sir Peter Hill-Norton, 1967
 * Admiral Sir Frank Twiss, 1967–1970
 * Vice-Admiral Sir Andrew Lewis, 1970–1971
 * Admiral Sir Derek Empson, 1971–1974
 * Admiral Sir David Williams, 1974–1977
 * Admiral Sir Gordon Tait, 1977–1979
 * Admiral Sir Desmond Cassidi, 1979–1982
 * Admiral Sir Simon Cassels, 1982–1986
 * Admiral Sir Richard Fitch, 1986–1988
 * Admiral Sir Brian Brown, 1988–1991
 * Admiral Sir Michael Livesay, 1991–1992
 * Admiral Sir Michael Layard, 1992–1995

Second Sea Lords and Commanders-in-Chief Naval Home Command, 1995–2012
Second Sea Lords and Commanders-in-Chief include:

Second Sea Lord and Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff, 2015–present
See: Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff

Departments under the office
As of September 2020:

Current

 * Director People and Training, previously the Naval Secretary
 * Director Development, previously the Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff (Capability)
 * Office of the Assistant Chief (Policy)
 * Office of the Director of Personnel and Training & Office of the Naval Secretary
 * Director Navy Acquisition

Former
Included:
 * Admiralty Interview Board
 * Naval Careers Service
 * Naval Education Service
 * Office of the Medical Director-General (Naval)
 * Royal Navy Medical Service
 * Royal Naval Hospital
 * Office the Director Naval Nursing Service
 * Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service
 * Royal Naval Reserve
 * Royal Marines Reserve
 * Department of the Director Combined Operations Personnel
 * Department of the Director Naval Education
 * Britannia Royal Naval College
 * Royal Naval College, Dartmouth
 * Royal Naval College, Greenwich
 * Royal Naval College (Portsmouth)
 * Royal Naval War College
 * Department of the Engineer Rear Admiral Assistant
 * Department of the Paymaster Director General
 * Department of the Director General Medical Services
 * Department of the Director General Supply & Secretariat Branch
 * Department of the Director of Air Personnel
 * Department of the Paymaster Director-General
 * Department of the Director Physical Training & Sport
 * Department of the Director of Personnel Services
 * Department of the Director Welfare Conditions
 * Department of the Director of Manning
 * Department of the Director Recruiting
 * Department of the Director Service Conditions
 * Department of the Director of Training
 * Directorate General Training, (1960–1969)
 * Directorate-General Naval Manpower and Training (1972–1994)
 * Department of the Engineer-in-chief, as regards personnel
 * Medical Director-General of the Navy
 * Dental Examining Board
 * Medical Consultative Board
 * Medical Examining Board
 * Naval Intelligence Department, as regards mobilisation of the fleet
 * Naval Mobilisation Department, as regards personnel
 * Office of the Admiral Commanding, Coastguard and Reserves
 * Office of the Admiral Commanding Reserves, as regards personnel
 * Office of the Admiral Superintendent, Naval Reserves, as regards personnel
 * Office of the Adviser on Education
 * Office of the Chief of Staff, Reserves
 * Office of the Controller of the Coastguard
 * Office of the Deputy Adjutant General Royal Marines
 * Office of the Adjutant General Royal Marines
 * Office of the Chaplain of the Fleet, as regards naval schools
 * Office of the Engineer Rear Admiral for Personnel Duties
 * Royal Naval Academy
 * Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve
 * Statistics Department