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Journeys of Frodo

Journeys of Frodo: An Atlas of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings by Barbara Strachey is an atlas based on the fictional realm of Middle-earth, which traces the journeys undertaken by the characters in Tolkien's epic.

The book comprises 51 two-colour maps (a general map of Middle-earth and 50 numbered maps) at various scales, all based on the original The Lord of the Rings maps drawn by Christopher Tolkien from his father's sketches. Each map is on a right-hand page in landscape format and depicts physical features in black and contour lines in red. Routes taken by characters on roads and paths are shown in dashed black and red; routes off-road are in red only. Arrows show the direction of travel and dates are listed in red. Scales along the top and left of each map show the distance east/west (mainly east) and north/south (mainly south) from Bag End. At the bottom of each map is a scale showing miles to the inch and an indication of the lunar phase or phases visible at the dates given.

Each numbered map is accompanied by a description on the facing left-hand page, in which Strachey describes the portion of the route indicated, often justifying her topographical decisions with quotes from the book. In some cases she points out discrepancies in the topographical descriptions, occasionally for instance altering the course of a road or a river on the grounds that it would otherwise be inconsistent with Tolkien's other descriptions of the terrain.

Reception
Christopher Tolkien refers to Journeys of Frodo a number of times in The History of The Lord of the Rings, often agreeing with Strachey's conclusions, and sometimes disagreeing.

Nancy-Lou Patterson, reviewing the work in Mythlore, calls it a "delightful contribution" to the understanding of The Lord of the Rings, agreeing with Strachey's comment that when she first read the novel, she wished she had had "a complete set of maps covering the journeys of Frodo and his companions". Patterson writes that Strachey's maps "with their charming directness and laconic simplicity, come very close to the spirit of Tolkien's own line drawings, and form a genuine visual parallel to his novels".

Ian Lace, reviewing the book for MusicWeb, called the book a remarkable piece of useful Middle-earth/Hobbit scholarship. He writes that Strachey has combined information from the texts, Tolkien's maps, and clues such as the phases of the moon.

title: Journeys of Frodo


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Palmiro Togliatti

Palmiro Michele Nicola Togliatti (26 March 1893 – 21 August 1964) was an Italian politician and statesman, leader of Italy's Communist party for nearly forty years, from 1927 until his death. Born into a middle-class family, Togliatti received an education in law at the University of Turin, later served as an officer and was wounded in World War I, and became a tutor. Described as "severe in approach but extremely popular among the Communist base" and "a hero of his time, capable of courageous personal feats", his supporters gave him the nickname il Migliore ("the Best"). In 1930, Togliatti renounced Italian citizenship, and he became a citizen of the Soviet Union. Upon his death, Togliatti had a Soviet city named after him. Considered one of the founding fathers of the Italian Republic, he led Italy's Communist party from a few thousand members in 1943 to two million members in 1946.

Born in Genoa but culturally formed in Turin during the first decades of the 1900s, when the first Fiat workshops were built and the Italian labour movement began its battles, Togliatti's history is linked to that of Lingotto. He helped launch the left-wing weekly L'Ordine Nuovo in 1919, and he was the editor of Il Comunista starting in 1922. He was a founding member of the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista d'Italia, PCd'I), which was founded as the result of a split from the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI) in 1921. In 1926, the PCd'I was made illegal, alongside the other parties, by Benito Mussolini's government. Togliatti was able to avoid the destiny of many of his fellow party members who were arrested only because he was in Moscow at the time.

From 1927 until his death, Togliatti was the secretary and leader of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI), except for the period from 1934 to 1938, during which he served as representative to the Comintern, the international organisation of Communist parties, earning the il giurista del Comintern ("The Jurist of Comintern") nickname from Leon Trotsky. After the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 and the formation of the Cominform in 1947, Togliatti refused the post of secretary-general, offered to him directly by Joseph Stalin in 1951, preferring to remain at the head of the PCI, which was by now a mass-based party, the largest Communist party in western Europe. His relations to Moscow were a continuing subject of scholarly and political debate after his death.

From 1944 to 1945, Togliatti held the post of Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, and he was appointed Italian Minister of Justice from 1945 to 1946 in the governments that ruled Italy after the fall of Fascism. He was also a member of the Constituent Assembly of Italy. Togliatti inaugurated the PCI's peaceful and national road to socialism, or the "Italian Road to Socialism", the realisation of the communist project through democracy, repudiating the use of violence and applying the Italian Constitution in all its parts, a strategy that some date back to Antonio Gramsci, and that would since be the leitmotiv of the party's history; after his death, it helped to further the liberalisation among Communist parties and countries. He was the first Italian Communist to appear in television debates. Togliatti survived an assassination attempt in 1948, a car accident in 1950, and he died in 1964 during a holiday in Crimea on the Black Sea.

Early life and family
Togliatti was born in Genoa into a middle-class family, the third son of two elementary school teachers. His father Antonio was also an accountant in the public administration, while his mother Teresa Vitale was a teacher. His father's job forced the Togliattis to move frequently to different cities. Before his birth, they moved from Turin to Genoa. He was named Palmiro because he was born on Palm Sunday; Togliatti's parents were observant Roman Catholics. Togliatti had one sister, Maria Cristina, and two brothers, Enrico and Eugenio Giuseppe. Eugenio Giuseppe Togliatti became a mathematician and discovered Togliatti surfaces.

Education and military service
In 1908, Togliatti studied at the Azuni classics high school (classical lyceum) in Sassari, where he was recognised as the best student in the school. After a series of studies concluded with an average of 30, the highest vote, Togliatti graduated in November 1915 with the thesis Il regime doganale delle colonie ("The Customs Regime of the Colonies"), which was discussed with Luigi Einaudi. He also enrolled in the faculty of letters and philosophy. When his father died on 21 January 1911 of cancer, his family ended up in poverty; it was only thanks to a scholarship that Togliatti was able to graduate from the University of Turin with a degree in law in 1917. In 1914, Togliatti had entered politics by joining the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) prior to the First World War, but his studies prevented him from taking part in the party's daily life. The war and then political activity prevented him from obtaining a second degree: he dedicated himself to politics in 1923.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Togliatti declared himself in favour Italy's intervention on the side of the Entente powers, a minority view among socialists who distinguished, in the words of Battista Santhià, "between the imperialist war and the just national claims against the old imperialisms; they did not consider it right that some Italian provinces should remain under the dominion of a foreign state, moreover a reactionary one." According to Togliatti's brother Eugenio Giuseppe, Togliatti and Antonio Gramsci were "both hypercritical of the government's neutralist attitude and harshly anti-Giolittians".

The precise intellectual path of the young Togliatti is not clear. In the cultural climate of those years, the neo-idealistic and Hegelian currents were prevailing, and they ranged from the teaching of Benedetto Croce to the most exasperated expressions of nationalism and spiritualism. Togliatti would always declare that he remained a stranger to the latter; it is certain that Croce in particular, then La Voce of Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, and Gaetano Salvemini and Romain Rolland had no small part in his youthful formation. The first approach to Marxism would have occurred all through the writings of Antonio Labriola; the decisive elements that led Togliatti to Marxist socialism were his friendship with Gramsci and the concrete social reality of Turin, which saw the development of a strong and organised workers' movement.

Initially permanently discharged from military service due to physical incapacity (a severe short-sightedness), Togliatti served as a volunteer army officer during the war, and he was later wounded in action and sent home to recuperate. In 1915, he had volunteered for the Red Cross, serving in various hospitals, including at the front. Meanwhile, wartime needs led the military commands to review the enlistment criteria, so he was declared able and enlisted in 1916; he was assigned to the 54th Infantry Regiment and then moved, at his request, to the 2nd Alpini Regiment. In 1917, Togliatti was admitted to the official cadet course in Caserta; he passed it but did not obtain the appointment as an officer due to a serious pleurisy that had occurred in the meantime. He gained the rank of caporale maggiore (major corporal) in health care, and he was discharged in December 1918 at the end of a long leave.

L'Ordine Nuovo
Returning at the end of the conflict, Togliatti was a part of the group around Gramsci's L'Ordine Nuovo paper in Turin, while working as a tutor. Like the other founders of L'Ordine Nuovo, Togliatti was an admirer of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and strongly supported the immediate creation of soviets in Italy. He believed that existing factory councils of workers could be strengthened so that they could become the basis of a communist revolution. Initially, the newspaper, which was founded with union backing, focused on cultural politics. In June 1919, the month following its founding, Gramsci and Togliatti pushed out Angelo Tasca and re-focused as a revolutionary voice. The newspaper reached a circulation of 6,000 by the end of the year and its reputation was heightened by its support of the April 1920 general strike, while the PSI and the affiliated General Confederation of Labour did not support it. On 1 January 1921, the paper began to be published daily.

Like Gramsci, Togliatti took an interest in association football, which was becoming a sport with massive following, and was said to have been a supporter of Juventus, as were other notable communist and left-wing leaders. Allegedly, Togliatti used to ask Pietro Secchia every Monday morning (according to others, the interlocutor was Luigi Longo) what Juventus had done the day before; if the interlocutor did not have an answer, Togliatti was said to reply: "And you, do you expect to make the revolution without knowing the results of Juventus?" Some alleged that "What did Juventus do?" was the first question Togliatti had asked upon awakening after his assassination attempt on 14 July 1948. That same year, he had been pictured at the stadium with Gianni Agnelli.

Communist Party of Italy
Togliatti was a member of the communist faction within the PSI, which was part of the Communist International, commonly known as the Comintern. On 21 January 1921, following a split in the PSI on their 17th Congress in Livorno, he was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd'I). The PCd'I was formed by L'Ordine Nuovo group led by Gramsci and the culturalist faction led by Angelo Tasca.

In the 1921 Italian general election held on 15 May, the PSI suffered losses but remained the largest party, while the PCd'I achieved 4.6% of the votes and 15 seats. In 1923, some members of the party were arrested and put on trial for alleged conspiracy against the state. This allowed the intense activity of the Comintern to deprive the party's left-wing of authority and give control to the minority centre, which had aligned with Moscow. In 1924 and 1925, the Comintern began a campaign of Bolshevisation that forced each party to conform to the discipline and orders of Moscow.

The policy of Bolshevisation moved Gramsci to write a letter in 1926 to the Comintern in which he deplored the opposition led by Leon Trotsky but also underlined some presumed faults of Joseph Stalin. Togliatti, who was in Moscow as a representative of the party, received the letter, opened it, read it, and decided not to deliver it. This caused a difficult conflict between Gramsci and Togliatti,  one that they never completely resolved. According to the journalists Mario Pendinelli and Marcello Sorgi, Togliatti did this because he was aware that Gramsci's hegemony and war of maneuver theories contrasted with Stalin's Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy; he kept the letter along with Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and gave them to a journalist.

Fascist regime
In October 1922, Benito Mussolini, leader of the National Fascist Party (PNF), took advantage of a general strike by workers and announced his demands to the government to give the PNF political power or face a coup d'état. With no immediate response, a small number of Italian fascists began a long trek across Italy to Rome that was called the March on Rome, and told Italians that they were intending to restore law and order. Mussolini himself did not participate until the very end of the march, with Gabriele d'Annunzio being hailed as leader of the march, until it was revealed that he had been pushed out of a window and severely wounded in a failed assassination attempt. This deprived d'Annunzio of the possibility of leading the coup orchestrated by an organisation he himself had founded. Under the leadership of Mussolini, the Fascists demanded Luigi Facta's resignation as prime minister of Italy and that Mussolini be named prime minister. Although the Italian army was far better armed than the Fascist paramilitaries, the Italian government under Victor Emmanuel III faced a political crisis. The King was forced to choose which of the two rival movements in Italy would form the government: Mussolini's Fascists, or the anti-monarchist PSI. He selected the Fascists and appointed Mussolini as the new prime minister.

Initially, Togliatti minimised the dictatorial aspects of the new Fascist government. In the same year, he said: "The fascist government, which is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, will have no interest in getting rid of any of the traditional democratic prejudices." Upon taking power, attacks by the Blackshirts on communist militants increased, as did their arrests. In August 1923, Mussolini pushed through the Italian Parliament a new electoral law named after its drafter Giacomo Acerbo, the Acerbo Law, which assigned two-thirds of the seats to the list that had exceeded 25% of the votes. Togliatti wrote that "fascism gained power by dispersing the proletarians aggregates, preventing their unification on any terrain, and cause a unification around it in favour of the bourgeois political groups."

In the 1924 Italian general election, the National List of Mussolini (an alliance with liberals and conservatives) used intimidation tactics, resulting in a landslide victory and a subsequent two-thirds majority, while the CPd'I gained 3.7% of votes and 19 seats. In January 1926, Togliatti co-authored with Gramsci the thesis of the third congress of the PCd'I. Later that same year, the party was banned by the Fascist government, and Amedeo Bordiga and Gramsci were arrested and imprisoned on the island of Ustica. Togliatti was one of few leaders not to be arrested, as he was attending a meeting of the Comintern in Moscow. After Gramsci's arrest, Togliatti became the leader of the party, which moved to Paris.

In the 1930s, Togliatti was able to survive in the Soviet Union, having renounced Italian citizenship for a Soviet one, despite the Great Purge. While in Moscow, he made an analysis on fascism, including its rise in Italy, and he began to construct a strategy that was based on broad alliances of middle-class categories. His partito nuovo (English: New Party), that would come into reality in 1943, had an interclassist dimension and was open to "the demands and mental structures of the middle classes". During World War II, he broadcast messages of resistance to Italy, and he also tried to appeal to fascist rank and file in order for them to join forces with liberal and left-wing anti-fascist elements.

Exile
In 1927, Togliatti was elected as the party's general-secretary in place of Gramsci. In exile during the late 1920s and the 1930s, he organised clandestine meetings of the party at Lyon (1926) and Cologne (1931). In 1927, he took the position of secretary of the party. In 1935, under the nom de guerre, he was named member of the secretariat of the Comintern, and he was later involved in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, he was arrested in France; upon being released, he moved to the Soviet Union and remained there during World War II, broadcasting radio messages on Radio Milano-Libertà to Italy, in which he called for resistance to Nazi Germany and the Italian Social Republic. While in Moscow, he was accused by critics of not doing enough to help fellow communists and others in Fascist Italy. He was aware that the party's clandestine organisation and resistance to fascism would not have been possible without Soviet support, and it was for this reason that he flattened to Stalinist positions.

In August 1936, the Comintern published a manifesto, titled "For the Salvation of Italy and the Reconciliation of the Italian People", which was allegedly written by Togliatti. It was addressed to "the blackshirt brothers" and appealed for unity between Communists and Fascists. It read: "We Communists have made ours the Fascist programme of 1919, which is a programme of peace, liberty and defence of the interests of the workers. ... The Fascist programme of 1919 has not been realised! Let's struggle united for the realisation of this programme." In March 1941, Togliatti told the Comintern that the strength of Fascism lay not only in violence. He said: "This dictatorship has done something – not just by means of violence. It has done something even for the workers and the young. We cannot deny that the introduction of social security is a fact." Those appeals to fascists were not limited to Togliatti. Giuseppe Di Vittorio wrote a letter to a Fascist union leader. He asked him: "Between communists and fascists in good faith, are there any possibilities of working together, for the well-being of the Italian people and for the progressive march of our country?" The context for those appeals dates back to an August 1936 party meeting in Paris, where Togliatti's brother-in-law Mario Montagnana said: "We must have the courage to say that we do not intend to overthrow fascism... we want to improve fascism today because we can't do more." The aforementioned appeal to the Blackshirts was written by Ruggero Grieco, Togliatti's successor as party leader during his time at the Comintern, and was published in Lo Stato Operaio in August 1936 with the apocryphal signature of Togliatti and all the main Communist leaders. In later years, Togliatti described the manifesto as "a coglioneria".

At the same time, the party and its militants were actively involved in the resistance to Mussolini's regime through clandestine action. They were well prepared for clandestine activity because of the structure of their organisation, and the fact that they had been victims of systematic repression by the authorities; more than three quarters of the political prisoners between 1926 and 1943 were communists. Throughout the dictatorship, the party was able to maintain and feed a clandestine network, distribute propaganda leaflets and newspapers, and infiltrate fascist unions and youth organisations. In 1935, the party led a campaign against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. The party and communist partisans, among others, then went on to play a major role in the Italian resistance movement that led to the fall of the Fascist regime in Italy, and Togliatti became a revolutionary constituent and constitutionalist of the Italian Republic, of which he is considered a founding father.

On 15 May 1943, the party changed its official name to the Italian Communist Party. This change was not surprising as PCI started being used as the party's acronym around 1924–1925. This name change also reflected a change in the Comintern's role, as it increasingly became a federation of national Communist parties. This trend accelerated after Vladimir Lenin's death and its new name emphasised the party's shift from an international focus to an Italian one. At the time, it was a hotly contested issue for the two major factions of the party. On one side, the Leninist preferred the single world party as it was internationalist and strongly centralised, while on the other side the Italians wanted a party more tailored to their nation's peculiarities and more autonomy. Togliatti returned to Italy in March 1944, after 18 years of exile in Switzerland, France, Soviet Union, and Spain where, with the cover name of Alfredo, he represented the Comintern in the Garibaldi Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

Salerno Turn and national unity governments
On 2 April 1944, Togliatti returned from Moscow to Italy, and led the renamed Italian Communist Party (PCI) and other political forces to the Svolta di Salerno, variously referred to in English as the Salerno Turn, the Salerno Turning Point, and the U-turn at Salerno, the city where this took place. This was a compromise between anti-fascist parties, the monarchy of Italy, and the then prime minister Pietro Badoglio to set up a government of national unity and to postpone institutional questions. In doing so, he resolved the stall resulted from the Bari's congress back in January 1944. Togliatti also founded a political journal, Rinascita, following his return to Italy in 1944, which he edited until his death.

With the Salerno Turn, the PCI committed to supporting democracy and to abandon the armed struggle for the cause of socialism. In doing so, the U-turn had the effect to have moved the party to the right, in contrast with many demands from within; it also meant the disarmament of those members of the Italian resistance movement that had been organised by the PCI. During the resistance to fascism, the PCI became increasingly popular, as the majority of partisans were communists. The Garibaldi Brigades, promoted by the PCI, were among the more numerous partisan forces.

Starting with the second Badoglio government, the national unity government including the PCI, Togliatti held several positions in the Italian government. From April 1944 to June 1945, he was both a minister without portfolio and Deputy Prime Minister of Italy under Badoglio (April–December 1944) and Ivanoe Bonomi (December 1944–June 1945). From June 1945 to July 1946, he also served as the Italian Minister of Justice under Ferruccio Parri and Alcide De Gasperi. Adversaries not only on an ideological level, Togliatti and De Gasperi proved skilled mediators in a difficult moment for Italy. As the Italian Minister of Justice, Togliatti's pragmatism was put to the test when he approved, not without internal disapproval within the PCI, an amnesty.

The amnesty bearing Togliatti's name was controversial because, in addition to partisans, who were in less numbers compared to the fascists and their collaborators in terms of crimes, pardoned and reduced sentences for Italian fascists, excluding the most grave crimes, as well as those committed by high-ranking officials and crimes committed for material gain or carried out with excessive cruelty but did not include rape or sexual torture, which were still pardonable. The amnesty was considered necessary both for the unity of the country and for the rebuilding of the Italian nation after the war.

The result of the final draft for the amnesty law-decree was a compromise between the PCI, which wanted to keep the fascists imprisoned, and the DC, which wanted the fascists pardoned and accepted an amnesty for partisans as the compromise. In practice, the amnesty, which was supported by Allied Force Headquarters in Italy, led to an increase in prosecution of partisan crimes, while fascist crimes were treated more leniently; fascists and their collaborators benefited far more from the amnesty than imprisoned partisans, who were treated as common criminals. Later less publicised pardons and releases on parole between 1947 and 1953, when Togliatti was no longer the Italian Minister of Justice, further reduced sentences for political crimes committed during the war and turned Italy's amnesty into an amnesia.

Constituent Assembly and 1947 May crisis
At the 1946 Italian general election, which was held at the same time (2 June) as the 1946 Italian institutional referendum won by republican supporters, the PCI was the third political force behind the DC and the PSI, and obtained 19% of the votes and 104 seats in the new Constituent Assembly of Italy, where Togliatti was elected as a member. In 2015, historian Giuseppe Vacca recounted the significant role that Togliatti played in the work of the Constituent Assembly. Togliatti was the only Communist leader to participate in the foundation of a democratic republic according to the canons of a European constitutionalism. In the work of defining the republican Constitution of Italy, Togliatti collaborated with the jurist Giuseppe Dossetti.

On 24 September 1946, Togliatti gave a speech at the municipal theater of Reggio Emilia. In this speech, he argued the historical-political reasons that required the construction of a solid relationship with the middle classes. In doing so, Togliatti placed himself in many respects in the tradition of the Italian socialist movement, whose legacy he openly claimed, while at the same time he defined the originality and modernity of the new party with respect to the old reformism in the capacity to go beyond that particularist and classist system that had pushed the PSI to privilege the reasons of the labourers to the detriment of those of the sharecroppers and small owners, which helped to determine a social fracture in which fascism would have entered. According to Togliatti, the relationship with the middle classes was essential, both for the rooting of the PCI and for the realisation of that pact between producers that was at the heart of the economic policy proposal he launched in August 1946 in l'Unità with an explicit reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. This new course and its realisation were considered necessary to permanently overcome the social tensions that had crossed the country and for the success of the Salerno turning point.

In January 1947, Togliatti acknowledged De Gasperi as "the main exponent of the strongest among the popular and democratic parties on which the government will have to be based". In March 1947, in opposition to the dominant line in his own party, Togliatti voted for the inclusion of the Lateran Pacts in the Constitution of Italy,   where it became its Article 7. Togliatti said the vote in favour of his party was more due to political responsibility than personal conviction. Communist ministers were evicted during the May 1947 crisis in both Italy and France after United States involvement. The same month also saw the Portella della Ginestra massacre of communist Sicilian peasants on 1 May. As in Italy, the French Communist Party (PCF) was a major party, taking part in the three-parties alliance known as Tripartisme, and became the largest party after scoring 28.3% at the November 1946 French legislative election. As was done by the United States in Italy, Maurice Thorez, head of the PCF, was forced to quit Paul Ramadier's government along with the four other party ministers. The crisis contributed to the start of the Cold War in western Europe. Under Togliatti, the PCI became the largest Communist party in western Europe.

Popular Democratic Front and assassination attempt
In his 26 September 1947 speech at the Constituent Assembly calling for his vote of no confidence in the fourth De Gasperi government, Togliatti said: "Our goal is the creation in our country of a free and equal society, in which there is no exploitation by men of other men." In 1948, Togliatti led the PCI in the first democratic election after World War II. The 1948 Italian general election resulted in a loss to Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) Allied with the PSI in the Popular Democratic Front, the coalition achieved 31% of the votes, and the PCI returned 131 deputies to Parliament. Togliatti himself was elected to the country's Chamber of Deputies.

On 14 July 1948, at about 11:40 am, Togliatti was shot three times, being severely wounded by Antonio Pallante, a neo-fascist student, who had strong anti-communist views and was a militant of the Common Man's Front. Togliatti's life hung in the balance for days and news about his condition was uncertain, causing an acute political crisis in Italy,  with civil war and insurrection implications,  which included a general strike called by the Italian General Confederation of Labour,  as well as portraits of Togliatti being brought in during the celebration of the storming of the Bastille and a telegram from Stalin. Upon regaining consciousness, Togliatti himself was instrumental in calling for calm and a return to normalcy; from his hospital bed, he reassured his comrades and tried to pacify spirits, averting the danger of an armed insurrection. He preferred the "Italian Road to Socialism" over a violent revolution, and rejected the concept of an internationally-directed movement in favour of one that was both democratically and nationally oriented. Historian Sergio Turone described it as "the most complete and most extensive general strike ever in the history of Italy". In January 2023, it was publicly revealed that Pallante had died on 6 July 2022, aged 98, and that he never regretted the shooting.

1950s and 1960s
On 22 August 1950, a car accident caused Togliatti to crack the frontal bone and fracture a vertebra. As with the 1948 assassination attempt, the event caused an international sensation, and was followed by an investigation, which blamed the accident on "the unacceptable levity of fellow driver Aldo Zaia". At the time, no one was aware that in October 1950 he had lost consciousness and went into a coma; his doctor suspected that Togliatti had been poisoned. Togliatti was saved by brain surgery. During his period of convalescence in a Piedmontese clinic, it was reported that Togliatti had played chess with the Italian senator and fellow party member Cino Moscatelli. In December 1951, within the context of the birth of the Gladio anti-communist organisation, spy microphones were set up in Togliatti's house by the head of the Supervisory Commission, and were intended to also monitor his partner, Nilde Iotti, who was suspected of being in contact with Vatican circles.

Under Togliatti's leadership, the PCI became the second largest party in Italy and the largest non-ruling Communist party in Europe. Although permanently in the opposition at the national level during his lifetime, the party ran many municipalities and held great power at the local and regional level in certain areas. In 1953, Togliatti fought against the Scam Law, an electoral legislation passed by the DC-led majority of the time, which aimed at using first-past-the-post to augment its power. Ultimately, the law was to prove of no use for the government in the elections of that year, where the PCI won 22.6% of the vote and confirmed itself as the first party within the parliamentary opposition and the second biggest party after the DC. It was repealed in July 1954.

Togliatti was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies, and he remained a member of Parliament until his death in 1964. Despite his close relationship with the Soviet Union, Togliatti's leadership remained unscathed after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which was in most countries a cause for major conflicts within the political left. He developed a theory of unity in diversity within the Communist parties in all countries, which he outlined in a Rinascita article in December 1961, and named polycentrism.

"Italian Road to Socialism"
After the Khrushchev Thaw in the Soviet Union, Togliatti was inspired by the new set of reforms and launched the party program of the "Italian Road to Socialism". He said: "We are democrats in that we are not only anti-fascists, but socialists and communists. There is no contradiction between democracy and socialism." The new policy proposed by Togliatti was opposed to any revolutionary means of gaining power and aimed at accompanying institutional action with the extension of social and trade union struggles, and supported the concept of peaceful coexistence. During this period, the PCI purged revolutionary and extremist factions opposed to the new openly reformist line. On 15 February 1956, Il Nuovo Corriere della Sera published on the front page a correspondence by Piero Ottone on the five-hour speech with which Khrushchev the previous day explained to the 1,400 Soviet delegates and the leaders of international Communism, including Togliatti and Mauro Scoccimarro, the new strategies of communism. The main points of Khrushchev's speech were the peaceful coexistence between the blocs, the prevention of war, and the forms of transition of the various countries to socialism that, in the words of Ottone, means "the forces of socialism can assert themselves without revolutions, without civil wars, through parliamentary processes", akin to Togliatti's "Italian Way to Socialism" that was first inaugurated with the Salerno turning point and that he reiterated in his speech of response.

In the 1958 Italian general election, the number of votes for the PCI was still on the rise. In the 1963 Italian general election, the PCI gained 25.2% of the votes but again failed to reach a relative majority. Nonetheless, the 1963 election ended the Centrism party system and resulted in the first centre-left government in the history of the Italian Republic, with the PCI giving its first external support, a system of government known as the Organic centre-left. In 1961, Togliatti said: "We are a party that is on the side of those who fight in defense of their freedom." During the early 1960s, Togliatti appealed to the Catholic world. In a 1963 speech in Bergamo, titled "The Destiny of Man", he called for a common front between the religious and communists against consumerism and the commodification of life, and that this opposition must act as a bridge between them. In August 1964, Togliatti went to the Soviet Union and wrote the Yalta Memorandum. Published after his death, Togliatti's memorandum that outlined his political doctrine strengthened the trend toward liberalisation within the international Communist movement and Communist governments. Additionally, he made various criticisms of the Soviet leadership, including the perceived slowness with which it was leaving behind the Stalinist legacy. The historian Giuseppe Vacca saw the memorandum as a generalised critique of the Soviet system.

Personal life
From 1924 to 1948, Togliatti was married to fellow party member and politician Rita Montagnana. Until his death, he was in a relationship with Nilde Iotti, also a fellow party member and politician. This relationship was controversial due to the fact that he was already married and the moralistic austerity that distinguished the PCI at the time. Iotti would become the first woman in the history of the Italian Republic to hold by the end of the 1970s one of the three highest offices of the state, namely the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies. Togliatti was a supporter of women's rights, with the Noi donne feminist magazine describing him at his death as "a great supporter of women's emancipation".

Death and funeral
Togliatti died as a result of a cerebral haemorrhage, while vacationing with his companion Nilde Iotti in Yalta, then in the Soviet Union. The day before, he had been urgently hospitalised as a result of a stroke, for which he underwent surgery; he was 71. According to some of his collaborators, Togliatti was traveling to the Soviet Union to give his support to Leonid Brezhnev's election as Nikita Khrushchev's successor at the head of Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Enrico Berlinguer, his favourite pupil, was later elected as his successor to the National Secretary of the PCI position; Berlinguer's time in office saw the Historic Compromise and the moral question. The news of Togliatti's death was first given by the country's leading agency ANSA. The party's newspaper l'Unità described him as "a great son of the Italian people, a brilliant leader of international communism, a fighter who spent his whole life in a hard and tireless struggle for socialism, for democracy, for peace."

The Soviet Russian city of Stavropol-on-Volga, where Togliatti had been instrumental in establishing the AutoVAZ (Russian: Lada) automobile manufacturing plant in collaboration with Fiat, was renamed after him (in Russian: Tolyatti) in his honor in 1964, after his death; in 1991, it was renamed Tolyattigrad. One of the main town squares in the Croatian city of Rijeka (Italian: Fiume) was named after Togliatti while Croatia was part of SFR Yugoslavia, until it was renamed to Jadranski trg (Adriatic Plaza) in 1994. There is still a street in Belgrade named after him (Serbian: ulica Palmira Toljatija). Togliatti's funeral, held on 24 August 1964, was attended by a million and saw much popular participation, comparable to that of Berlinguer years later; about 500,000 people followed Togliatti's coffin making its way in Rome.

A 1972 painting by Renato Guttuso, titled I funerali di Togliatti, was made to recreate the event. The painting includes, in addition to Iotti, Brezhnev, and Berlinguer, notable global Communist movement figures and others whom Guttuso imagines being present at the funeral, such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Pablo Picasso, Pablo Neruda, Elio Vittorini, Angela Davis, Antonio Gramsci, Dolores Ibárruri, Anna Kuliscioff, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Curzio Malaparte described Togliatti as the thinking head of Italian Communism.

Legacy
The Salerno Turn anticipated the "Italian Way to Socialism" and the Eurocommunist trend. While its motives have been widely discussed and argued about by scholars, the national peculiarity of the PCI is not limited to Togliatti and is well-founded by the fact that it was a co-founder of the Italian Republic and its constitution, as well as its significant contribution to the resistance against Nazi–fascism and its mass base. The PCI under Togliatti and their attitude towards the Marshall Plan is placed within the context of the Cold War and anti-communism. After orchestrating the fall of the PCI and PSI from government, amid a crisis within the DC and fears that a left-wing coalition would take power, the United States and George Marshall had informed the Italian government that anti-communism was a pre-condition for receiving American aid, and James Clement Dunn had directly asked Alcide de Gasperi to dissolve the parliament and remove the PCI. Additionally, the United States provided support to anti-PCI groups in 1948, and reiterated that should the PCI win, the Marshall Plan and other aids could be terminated. According to one estimate, the United States spent about $10–20 million on anti-communist propaganda and other covert operations, much of it through the Economic Cooperation Administration of the Marshall Plan, and then laundered through individual banks. Fearful of a possible electoral victory for a left-wing coalition, the British and American governments also undermined their campaign for legal justice by tolerating the efforts made by Italy's top authorities to prevent any of the alleged Italian war criminals from being extradited and taken to court. For their part, the Soviets would fund the PCI until 1984, and the party relied on Soviet financial assistance more than any other Communist party supported by Moscow. United States and Soviet interference and funding led to criticism of the other and accusing each other of going too far. United States government sources said that the PCI was receiving $40–50 million per year from the Soviets when their investment in Italy was stated to be $5–6 million; declassified information showed this to be exaggerated.

Liberal and left-wing critics saw Togliatti's policy of the Salerno Turn as an example of frontism, or common front, that was orchestrated by Stalin to conform to his deals with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. In contrast to the long-time held historiography of the PCI, Elena Agarossi and Victor Zaslavsky argue in a revisionist account that Togliatti and the other leaders of the PCI were fundamentally subservient to Stalin, and did their best to promote Soviet interests. They argue that Togliatti was above all a Stalinist, and that he remained one for years after Stalin died in 1953 and the Soviet Union had repudiated much of his legacy. They argue that it was Stalin who ordered Togliatti to play a moderating role in Italian politics because the time was not yet ripe for a showdown with capitalism. Agarossi and Zaslavsky rely not only on Togliatti's papers but those of the Kremlin, especially the highly detailed reports sent in by the Soviet ambassador in Rome. Stalin forced the PCI to reject and work against the Marshall Plan, despite the loss of much support from Italian voters who wanted the American aid. First published in 1997, this view was criticised by Luciano Canfora. Canfora saw the Salerno Turn and 1944 as a rebirth of Italy's Communist party, and said that "the PCI had gradually followed a path which required it, as a historical task, to occupy the space of social democracy in the Italian political panorama." In the words of Franco Lo Piparo, Togliatti's "Italian Road to Socialism" entailed "social democracy using communist rhetoric".

In February 1992, during the electoral campaign for the imminent general election, the historian Franco Andreucci published an incomplete and manipulated version in the weekly news magazine Panorama, the excerpt of a holographic letter from Togliatti (then known as Ercoli, a Soviet citizen since 1930, member of the military commission of the executive committee of the Comintern) from the Moscow archives, in a correspondence sent from Ufa on 15 February 1943 and written in response to a letter from the PCI leader Vincenzo Bianco who asked Togliatti to intercede with the Soviet authorities to avoid death of prisoners of the Italian Army in Russia. The manipulation of some words and phrases of the text in the letter reported in the weekly was discovered only ten days later. Andreucci had corrected a photocopy that came badly and in part incomplete given to him by the historian Friedrich Firsov, dictating it via telephone to the director of Panorama from home of the journalist Francesco Bigazzi, correspondent in Moscow for the newspaper il Giorno, as a result of which he had to resign from the position of consultant held at the publishing house Il Ponte alle Grazie, which, due to the loss of credibility suffered, soon suffered a collapse in sales and was absorbed in 1993 by Edizioni Salani. The political result of the operation was partially achieved, as the attack on Togliatti, in addition to influencing the result of the 1992 Italian general election, also served to put Iotti out of the running from a possible election to the presidency of the Italian Republic.

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

title: Palmiro Togliatti


text:
Talk:Orthogonal functions

The inner product example would be better defined as:  = ... (without the subscript). This avoids ambiguity, and emphasises that f and g are functions and that e.g. f(x) is a value of f at the point x.

Inner product
As an inner product is positive definite, the integral of a product of functions will not be an inner product without restrictions on the functions. Orthogonal functions can be defined without recourse to this special method of describing orthogonal segments in a plane. Rgdboer (talk) 01:39, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

The article has been revised with bilinear form taking the place of inner product. — Rgdboer (talk) 00:20, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

title: Talk:Orthogonal functions


text:
Ailsa Craig

Ailsa Craig (Ailsae Craig; Creag Ealasaid) is an island of 99 ha in the outer Firth of Clyde, 16 km west of mainland Scotland, upon which microgranite has long been quarried to make curling stones. The now-uninhabited island comprises the remains of a magmatic pluton formed during the same period of igneous activity as magmatic rocks on the nearby Isle of Arran.

The island, colloquially known as "Paddy's Milestone", was a haven for Catholics during the Scottish Reformation in the 16th century, but is today a bird sanctuary, providing a home for huge numbers of gannets and an increasing number of puffins.

Etymology
An early reference to the rock is made by Sir Donald Monro, Archdeacon of the Isles, who referred to the rock as "Elsay" in the 16th century. The modern name of the island is an anglicisation of the Gaelic, Aillse Creag meaning "fairy rock". An alternative Gaelic name is Creag Ealasaid meaning "Elizabeth's rock". The first element, Aillse may represent Allt Shasann, "cliff of the English", mentioned in the Book of Leinster as Aldasain.

The island is sometimes known as "Paddy's Milestone", being approximately the halfway point of the sea journey from Belfast to Glasgow, a traditional route of emigration for many Irish labourers going to Scotland to seek work.

As a result of being the most conspicuous landmark in the channel between Ireland and Scotland, the island is known by a number of different names;
 * A' Chreag: "the rock"
 * Creag Alasdair: "Alasdair's rock"
 * Ealasaid a' Chuain: "Elizabeth of the ocean"
 * Alasan
 * Carraig Alasdair: "Alasdair's Rock" (used in the Madness of Sweeney, the tale of a legendary king of Ireland).

The Bass Rock is sometimes nicknamed "the Ailsa Craig of the East", although its prominence in the Firth of Forth is not as great as that of Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde.

Placenames
A number of features and places on the island have acquired names, Gaelic in most cases, such as Craigna'an (cliff of birds); Trammins (place of Elder trees); Balvar (big round cliff); Garryloo (rough hill) and Ashydoo (black hill). Some names seem self-explanatory and indeed even the 'Swine Cave' may refer to a time when the Earl of Cassilis received part of his rent in hogs from the island.

Geography and geology
The island is approximately 16 km west of Girvan; it is 4 km in circumference and rises to a height of 340 m. The island is part of the administrative district of South Ayrshire, in the ancient parish of Dailly.

Geologically, Ailsa Craig comprises the remains of a Palaeogene pluton. Its prominence is due to the microgranite's hardness, making it more resistant to erosion than the surrounding Permian and Triassic sedimentary rocks into which it was intruded. The microgranite is itself intruded by a series of olivine dolerite dykes. Ailsa Craig, along with neighbouring Arran, is part of the North Atlantic Igneous Province, a widespread system of magmatic rocks formed during the initial stages of the opening of the North Atlantic Ocean. Boulders of distinctive Ailsa Craig microgranite known as erratics were transported by glaciers as far afield as County Donegal and Pembrokeshire.

The microgranite's unusual composition and crystalline texture make it particularly hard and resistant to impact, making this rock a favoured material for the manufacture of curling stones. The "blue hone" variety is now used for the lower part of the stone which contacts the ice (the running band) while the "common green" variety is used to make the body of the stone (including the striking band). A third variety, "red hone", is similar to blue hone but has now been exhausted.

Facilities
The only surviving buildings on the island are the lighthouse on its east coast facing the Scottish mainland, a ruined towerhouse built by Clan Hamilton to protect the area from Philip II of Spain in the 16th century, and the old quarry manager's house that is used by the RSPB.

The island has a fresh-water spring but no electricity, gas, sewage or telephone connections.

The chief well on the island lies above 'the Loups', and this was used by the Northern Lighthouse Board which built a cistern there and piped the water to the lighthouse complex. The 'Horse Well' was located behind the gasworks; the 'Castle Well' stands above Ailsa Castle, and finally the Garry Loch sits higher up and once supplied water to the tenant's cottage.

Fishermen seem to have used the island for centuries, first being noted in 1549 and it is recorded that they even at one time slept beneath sails stretched over hollows on the beach.

A row of fishermen's cottages was under construction in the 1840s. However, the main developer died, and the project was abandoned, with the area used instead as a walled kitchen garden until the gasworks was built.

Owners
The island seems to have been a part of the Barony of Knockgarron that lay in the Parish of Dailly and the then holder, Duncan of Turnberry, Earl of Carrick established the abbey of Crossraguel and endowed it with the island of Ailsa Craig to "provide for their table". The barony passed through several hands until it became the property of the third Earl of Cassilis in 1548.

Apart from 2 ha sold to the Northern Lighthouse Board in 1883, since the 16th century the island has belonged to the Earls of Cassilis. In 1831, Archibald Kennedy, 12th Earl of Cassilis, was created the first Marquess of Ailsa, taking the title from Ailsa Craig.

In May 2011, it was announced that the island was for sale by Charles Kennedy, 8th Marquess of Ailsa, with an asking price of £2,500,000, but as of March 2013 it was unsold and the price was "offers over £1,500,000". It was reported in December 2013 that an unnamed environmental trust had placed a formal bid, and in April 2014 the National Trust for Scotland was reported to be considering a bid. As of 2020, the island was still owned by David Kennedy, 9th Marquess of Ailsa and was leased by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds until 2050.

Four cottages, a shed, a railway, a winch house, the main pier, and an area of adjacent land are now in the ownership of the Scottish Indian businessman Bobby Sandhu. Mr Sandhu purchased this registered title buildings and land for £85,000 from the Argyll Group plc. Mr Sandhu stated he wished to build a five-star hotel on the land (Title: AYR24617). However, the planning system apparently prevented this development.

History
In 1590 the shipping of the Clyde was disrupted by pirates who were said to be Highlanders, quha lyis about Ailsay.

Margaret Girvan ran a tearoom in a wooden building that stood next to the tacksman's cottage, famed for its pristine white table cloths and fresh scones. Girvan kept goats in stone-built goat rees or pens on the good grazing near Garry Loch. The feral billy goats were wont to interfere with these nanny goats and this was another reason for their demise.

An annual hunt of the solan geese or gannets took place in the days of Robert Burns as the flesh was considered a delicacy. Robert Burns's maternal uncle Samuel Burns was involved in the solan goose trade.

Ailsa Castle
The 12 m high ruins of a 3-storey castle that stands on the eastern side of the island was built in the late 1500s by the Hamilton Family to protect the island from King Philip II of Spain. The island was used as a prison during the 18th and 19th centuries. The castle has two vaulted storeys and an oven is located in a cellar with evidence of a spiral stairway that once ran to the top of the tower. Three cinquefoils arranged in a 'V' shape are carved on the tower and indicate that the Hamiltons were linked with the structure. There are indications of an adjoining building that ran to the north.

Spanish invasion
Ailsa Craig was a haven for Roman Catholics during the Scottish Reformation. In about 1587 the prominent Catholic, Lord Maxwell, landed on Ailsa while attempting to escape his pursuers and finding a fishing boat he attempted to reach Crossraguel Abbey, but was captured. In 1597 another Catholic supporter, Hugh Barclay of Ladyland, took possession of Ailsa Craig which he was intent on using as a place of safety for Catholics to practise their faith, for provisioning and stopping off point for a Spanish invasion which would re-establish the Catholic faith in Scotland and a storehouse for provisioning the Catholic Earl of Tyrone in Ireland.

Hugh was however discovered by The Rev. Andrew Knox, a Protestant minister (who later became both Lord Bishop of the Isles and Lord Bishop of Raphoe). Barclay thereafter deliberately drowned himself in the sea or did so accidentally whilst trying to escape. Another version states that Andrew Knox lay in wait for Hugh with nineteen others and ambushed him at the shingle beach with the result that he attempted to defend himself until he was forced back into the sea and drowned.

Smuggling
Beneath the Main Craig at the southern end of the island and 40 ft (12m) above sea level is a cave named after the supposed smuggler MacNall. When the cave was being cleared of guano many years ago, two stone coffins were found, both containing human bones. The Rev. Roderick Lawson (1831–1907) thought that one of the interments might be MacNall himself, but no details of this individual have yet come to light. Ailsa Craig would have been an ideal place for the temporary hiding of contraband goods.

Chapels
The island had two chapels and Thomas Pennant who visited Ailsa Craig in 1772 recorded that the ruins of a small chapel were located near the landing place and that another chapel (which he did not visit) was located on the summit of the island and was probably used by seamen to pray for safe voyages and returns. Lawson sees this second chapel as being a myth. When the lighthouse was being constructed, four stone coffins were found that may well have been associated with the first mentioned chapel, two at the tenant's house and two at the gasholder site. The monks of Crossraguel Abbey once held the island and "places of prayer" are therefore to be expected especially with a garrisoned castle nearby; it is to be noted that even the diminutive Lady Isle off Troon once had a chapel. The chapel was first mentioned, along with the castle, in 1580 by Sir James Balfour.

Lighthouse, foghorns and gas works
The Lighthouse was built between 1883 and 1886 by Thomas Stevenson; it is owned by the Northern Lighthouse Board.

The lighthouse was automated in 1990 and converted to solar electric power in 2001; the island has been uninhabited since automation in 1990. Ailsa Craig and its lighthouse feature extensively in Peter Hill's book Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper.

Two substantial foghorns with concrete housings were built in 1866, one at the north end of the island near the Swine Cave reached by 'the Loups' path and the other at East Trammins on the south end. Both were powered by compressed air that was piped from the lighthouse, where a gas-powered compressor was housed until 1911 when oil-powered engines were installed. One of the compressed air pipelines can still be seen within 'the Loups' path that was constructed above it. The compressed air cylinders that held the required store of air are still prominent features, especially at the Trammins foghorn. Both foghorns were decommissioned in 1966 and a Tyfon fog signal was used until 1987 when improvements in ship navigation made it also redundant.

The gasworks are still a prominent feature on the island and the cable-powered tramway was partly built to haul wagons full of coal up to it from the North Port. Two gasholders held the coal gas that powered both the compressed air pump and the lighthouse light, however in 1911 the light was converted to incandescent lighting which was powered by electricity. The gas works became redundant at this time. Lawson records that oil was used to produce the gas for the lighthouse light.

Railways
Ailsa Craig had two quite separate rail transport systems, one dated from 1886 and supplied coal, oil fuel and provisions to the lighthouse and gas works via the North Port and later the New Jetty and the other transported road stone from the quarries at Kennedy's Nags via the stone crusher to the Quarry Pier. The Northern Lighthouse Board's tramway had a section worked via a powered cableway that hauled wagons up from the North Port and later from the new jetty.

This well-built tram line is largely intact and has a gauge of three feet with junction/points at the gas works and a further set of points that led to a siding that ran down parallel to the gable end of the gas works to presumably collect the coal ash for disposal. The main line runs on down to the lighthouse and its ancillary buildings, taking a right-angled bend to run parallel to the southern end of the lighthouse buildings block. This section of the line was worked by hand and at least two wagons remain at the site together with a set of spare wheels at the gas works.

The mineral line was built by the Ailsa Craig Granite Company Ltd. in 1909 and ran from the quarry at Kennedy's Nags via the stone crusher near the south foghorn to the Quarry Pier. This crudely constructed narrow gauge line was mainly horse drawn, although wagons were also moved by hand or hauled up inclines by winding engines. The mineral railway at the quarry end had a least one siding and a mobile steam crane loaded the larger granite blocks into the wagons that were transported to the stone crusher at the Trammins near the south foghorn, smaller stones being loaded and even moved by hand.

Wagons or bogies were winched up to the substantial stone crusher and gravity was used to deliver the different grades of road stone to the waggons below that were then hauled by horses to the Quarry Pier via a line that ran in front of the lighthouse buildings and took a tight right-angled bend to run up the substantial stone-built incline to the storage area in preparation for delivery via sea to the mainland. Kerb stones and stone railway sleepers for sections of the Scotch gauge horse-drawn railway from Ardrossan to Doura were also produced. Photographs taken in the late 19th century show the horse-drawn wagons passing in front of the lighthouse and portray the substantial railway incline and storage area. At times the production outstripped the storage capacity and a photograph shows at least three piles of different grades of road stone stockpiled in front of the lighthouse enclosure. The track at the crusher had a siding that ran to the crusher and a set of points that led to the Quarry Pier main line.

The Ailsa Craig Granite Company was never a financially sound business and effectively closed in 1928. The course of the mineral line is still evident near the quarries as a linear embankment that ends below Kennedy's Nag. Various artefacts of the quarry enterprise remain, including concrete blocks at Kennedy's Nag and steel and concrete remnants of the stone crusher near the south foghorn.

Curling stones
From the mid-nineteenth century the island has been quarried for its rare type of micro-granite with riebeckite (known as "Ailsite"), which is used to make stones for the sport of curling. , 60–70% of all curling stones in use were made from granite from the island and it is one of only two sources for all stones in the sport, the other being the Trefor Granite Quarry in Wales.

Ailsa Craig produced two types of granite for curling, Blue Hone and Ailsa Craig Common Green. Blue Hone, which is unique to Ailsa Craig, has very low water absorption, which prevents the action of repeatedly freezing water from eroding the stone. Ailsa Craig Common Green is a lesser quality granite than Blue Hone. In the past, most curling stones were made from Blue Hone but the quarry is restricted by environmental conditions that exclude blasting.

Kays of Scotland has been making curling stones since 1851 and has the exclusive rights to the Ailsa Craig granite, granted by the Marquess of Ailsa. A "harvest" of Ailsa Craig granite by Kays took place in 2013, after a hiatus of 11 years; 2,000 tonnes were harvested, sufficient to fill anticipated orders until at least 2020. A subsequent harvest was held in the winter of 2020.

Natural history
Sea eagles or erne nested at the Bare Stack until 1881 when the tenant shot the last specimen, which is preserved at Culzean Castle.

Pennant and others have noted that the only trees growing on the island are elders (Sambucus nigra) or bourtrees in the Scots dialect, found as a grove known as The Bourtrees at the Trammins on the southern end of the island. This visitor also rather quaintly mentions that he was surprised to find three species of "reptiles" by which he meant molluscs, namely a naked black slug, the garden snail Cornu aspersum and one of the common striped snails of the genus Cepaea. He speculated that they had accidentally been brought over from the mainland secreted within vegetables.

Slowworms (Anguis fragilis) are found on the island, although they suffered greatly when badgers and raccoons were introduced by Lord Ailsa. The badgers did not survive long, but the racoons bred for a number of years.

The mammal fauna included rabbits, and at one time goats, whilst pigs were bred here as food for the inhabitants. The billy goats were shot for sport in the 19th century and no longer survive; only a mounted head of one remains at the McKechnie Institute in Girvan. The rabbits and goats may have been originally introduced to supply food for the fishermen and were mentioned by Pennant in 1772 and by the Rev Abercummie in 1688, who called them by the old name of coneys.

The island is now a bird sanctuary, leased by the RSPB until 2050. Huge numbers of gannets nest here.

Rats were probably introduced via shipwrecks; supposedly, a coal boat that sank offshore was the first culprit and caused great harm to the nesting bird populations, with the puffins proving vulnerable to the extent of extinction as breeding birds. After a long campaign using pioneering techniques, the rats were eradicated in 1991, and now puffins are once again raising young on the island with many other benefits accruing to both the fauna and the flora.

In a small glen above Ailsa Castle, a small freshwater body known as the Garry Loch is located at an altitude of 247 m, with a depth of at least 17 feet.

In popular culture

 * In chapter 15 of Herman Melville's novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), Ailsa Craig is portrayed as an omen.
 * John Keats, during his walk from London to Scotland, composed To Ailsa Rock (as the island was known then) following seeing the island.
 * British singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey's debut album, First Mind features a song entitled Ailsa Craig.

Accidents
Lawson in the 1890s records that a young lady once fell over the cliff near Craig Na'an; however, her Victorian style garments caught the wind like a parachute and she escaped with her life and some broken bones that soon knitted back together. A visitor in a group from Stranraer was not so lucky and fell to his death on his way down from the summit.

A shocking death was that of a young boy from Girvan who was sitting amongst loose rocks, pulling out stones and throwing them into the sea when a very large boulder started to move and crushed him. The stone was too heavy to shift and help from the mainland was required to extract the body of the unfortunate victim. In 1887 a ten-year-old boy died whilst collecting eggs at the West Craigs.

title: Ailsa Craig


text:
Talk:Stalin's speech of 19 August 1939

Old talk
The very existence of this speech has not been proven and still being debated by historians.

And no pages link to here Wetman 19:11, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

 * I hope you'll agree that the above doesn't preclude the existence of the article: describing either a fact or a hoax of historical importance. Mikkalai 19:19, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

A POV removed:

 * The apparent mistake in Stalin's reasoning was the fact that WW2 followed the pattern of blitzkrieg rather the positional war of WW1. The result of this error and Soviet decision to support Germany was the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Besides, it is not directly revevant to the article. The goal is to describe the fact, not to judge it. Not to say that Stalin (allegedly) spoke not about the length of the war per se, but about the time to properly "consume" the seized territories by Germany.Mikkalai 19:19, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It could be helpful if people know that it was Russian historian T.S.Bushuyeva who found the text among secret files of USSR Special Archive and published it in Russian journal Novy Mir (No. 12, 1994). -Whiskey 23:04, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately she didn't. Mikkalai 05:30, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

 * Thanks. Whiskey 08:27, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

 * The archive files location: Centre for the Preservation of Collections of Historical Documents, former Soviet Special Archives; fund 7, list 1, file 12239. (In Russian: Центр хранения историко-документальных коллекций, бывший Особый архив СССР, ф. 7, оп. 1, д. 1223) From the link added in the article. Constanz 15:34, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Not authentic document, see curentg article. `'юзырь:mikka 04:42, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Moved sentence from article
About Stalin's interview in Pravda. "Some Kremlinologists would interpret this as Stalin's implicit acceptance of the essential content of the speech. "

I can't find any such quotation there; I only find Nordling's own interpretation (which is, IMHO, rather far-fetched, to say the least, and pretty vague, too). Nordling is not a Kremlinologist (whatever that "science" is worth, anyway).--91.148.159.4 14:31, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Page refactor
Following discussion, I've redrafted the page. Hopefully this has done the following:

 * 1) Dealt with the problem of the "allegedly", by explaining up front the actual debate over the papers
 * 2) Adding useful sections for the article
 * 3) Fixing mild non-neutral wording that here and there suggested a for/against viewpoint.
 * 4) Renaming to make clear its an "alleged speech" not an "alleged Stalin" :)

I haven't removed any text or changed any actual substantive material. I have rewritten the intro, but the main body is pretty much unchanged except for moving around and mild wording and style stuff. FT2 (Talk 11:49, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Typo
" (The archive files location: Centre for the Preservation of Collections of Historical Documents, former Soviet Special Archives; fund 7, list 1, file 12239, in Russian: Центр хранения историко-документальных коллекций, бывший Особый архив СССР, ф. 7, оп. 1, д. 1223)."

Needs fixing -- was it 12239 or 1223? FT2 (Talk 11:51, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

recent renaming
The document is called "Stalin speech". "Alleged" is an opinion, not part of the name of the document, even it is forgery. `'Míkka 21:58, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Which document do you mean? There is a number of documents containing various versions of this speech, none of them has such a title. "Alleged" is not an opinion. There are only two opposite opinions: 1. the speech was real; 2. it is a forgery. "Alleged" means some of historians hold the first opinion, and others hold the second. This distribution is a real fact, not an opinion. And this is the only neutral name, which don't prefer neither 1 st nor 2nd opinion. --Stopar 09:22, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I'd have to agree with Mikka on that one. Whether true or not, the topic of this article is Stalin's speech. I believe the title is not the place to discuss whether something was true or not. Otherwise we'd have to move, say, the article on Saint Nicholas to Alleged Saint Nicholas or the article on Polish invasion of Russia to Alleged Polish invasion of Russia.  // Halibutt 09:38, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Authenticity
This article states: "In 1994, Russian publicist T. S. Bushuyeva published an archival reference of the speech in an article printed in the Novy Mir magazine (#12, 1994), based on what she claimed was recent findings in Soviet Special Archives of a text that according to her was supposedly recorded by a Comintern member present at the meeting. (The archive files location: Centre for the Preservation of Collections of Historical Documents, former Soviet Special Archives; fund 7, list 1, file 1223, in Russian: Центр хранения историко-документальных коллекций, бывший Особый архив СССР, ф. 7, оп. 1, д. 1223)."

It also states: "Whether this speech was ever given by Stalin is still the subject of dispute by historians and no proof is as yet unanimously accepted. According to Viktor Suvorov's book M-Day, Soviet historians laid special emphasis on proving that no Politburo meeting took place on August 19, 1939. Nevertheless, Suvorov states in his book that Russian military historian Dmitri Volkogonov has found evidence that a meeting really took place on that day.

Historical documents demonstrating the non-existence of the speech are also met with scepticism, in view of a similar vigorous denial of the Secret Protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Carl Nordling (an amateur historian known for his Holocaust denial) has pointed out some counter-theses to Sluch' disapproval of the existence of such speech."

I believe we should not focus on what Surovov or Nordling have to say about the subject, they are just lifting on the bandwagon. I believe we should focus on Bushuyeva and Volkonogov. If they state they found evidence then we should take them serious and ask for that evidence. Until now we don't have that evidence on Wikipedia (as we also don't have it on Wikipedia on many other subjects considered to be common knowledge) and that is what should be mentioned in this article as primary information for the viewer to be considered.

 * I agree. I have checked this Russian source, and surprisingly, it tells nothing about Bushueva and nothing about this secret speech of Stalin, although it does discusses the MR pact and related questions. If I am mistaken here, please correct.Biophys (talk) 03:54, 9 May 2008 (UTC) O'K, I found it. Source seems to be rather unreliable.Biophys (talk) 04:03, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

 * It seems that Politburo meeting and Stalin's speech during this day indeed took place (per several sources including Volkogonov and archive findings by Bushueva). However, it remains unproven what exactly Stalin said in his speech, since there is no original, and the existing text was based on "Comintern sources" first published in France. Sergei Slutch argues that text was probably a forgery (although his arguments do not look convincing to me), whereas many others (who he cites in his article) believe the text was real. A typical controversy. The article by Slutch is probably O'K and can be used. Biophys (talk) 04:49, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

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Nordling
Hey (especally mr Altennman)

I agree that wikipedia shouldnt actually promote little deniers like Nordling, his work was very important to the historiography of the debate, he is used two times in references. I think the article should mention hid credentials and how whack he was or change the references which can be a rabbithole, especially his site which has the worse, pro-irving, holocaust denying takes. ShatziWiki (talk) 15:34, 5 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The issue is not that he is a denier per se, the issue is that as such, he cannot be considered as a reliable source, not to say he is not a professional historian. - Altenmann >talk 21:39, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Stalin's speech of 19 August 1939