Academic literature on the topic 'Russian program music'

The article analyzes the results of Russia's largest scientific and practical event dedicated to music education: the seventh session of the Scientific Council on the problems of the history of music education, held in Vologda on April 23-26, 2019. The program of the session included the international scientific conference “Preparing of a music teacher: Historical Experience, Problems, Prospects”, the Russian Scientific Seminar and the All-Russian Symposium. The results of the session, which brought together more than 70 leading researchers in the history of music education in Russia and the near abroad, are summarized in key areas. A retrospective analysis of the activities of music and pedagogical faculties of pedagogical universities, operating in the country since 1959 and practically eliminated at present, is considered as the leading theme. The results in other areas of the session are also generalized: the development of the history of music education as a field of historical, pedagogical and musicological knowledge; history of vocational and school music education. Crisis phenomena in music-pedagogical education are marked.

The concept of the research is based on the idea of a high educational mission of universities in the Russian Diaspora, using the example of the Pridnestrovian State University named after T. G. Shevchenko, which is the bearer of the spiritual values of Russian culture, including Russian musical classics. The article highlights the problem of preserving the cultural identity of students of foreign Russian-speaking universities in the post-Soviet space in the context of educational science. The authors consider the historical origins of music education in the Russian Diaspora and analyze the typical features of educational activities that are closely related to the traditions of Russian culture and the cultural and typological foundations of Russian musical art as a phenomenon of the centuries-old Orthodox civilization. The article substantiates the relevance of the formation of the cultural environment of foreign Russian-language universities by means of musical enlightenment, analyzes the maintenance of Russian students’ identity based on the development of musical and educational projects tested on the basis of Pridnestrovian State University named after T. G. Shevchenko, shows the importance of including classical heritage of Russian music in the training program for music students. The authors proceed from the idea of creating a pedagogical system of musical and educational work in an overseas Russian-language university, operating according to the educational standards of the Russian Federation. The article describes the levels of gradual professional training of music students for musical education activities that can ensure the effective development of multi-ethnic student contingent of cultural typological dominants of Russian music and Russian culture; a complex of special methods is presented that initiates the motivation of future music teachers to various forms of enlightenment, activating their intellectual and creative resources, promoting the mastering of the technology of organizing and implementing musical educational projects.

The article is devoted to the problem of creating a positive image of Russia in Japan and a positive educational impact on students that is the result of their active participation in various activities aimed at achieving this goal. The conclusions of the article are underpinned by the results of three-week seminar «Russian language and Russian culture» that has been held at SPbGIK for Japanese students from Meiji Gakuin University and Jochi Daigaku (Sophia University) for 15 years already, as well as meetings of SPbGIK students with students at Nihon University, Japan. The program of the seminar in addition to the lessons of the Russian language and sightseeing tours around St. Petersburg and its suburban municipalities included lectures on Russian culture, history and music. The Japanese and Russian students visited the house of the station superintendent in the village of Vyra, Veliky Novgorod and the museum of ancient wooden architecture in the village of Vitoslavlitsy, participated together with folklore groups in old Russian folk games, round dances, etc. The value of this work is multifaceted. On the one hand, because of the immersion in Russian culture, communication with students and teachers of SPbGIK the Japanese students acknowledged to have created an objective and a more complete positive image of Russia. On the other hand, the Russian young people involved in this work deepened their sense of responsibility for the image of Russia, growing aware of the need to make a personal contribution to its creation, understanding that those impressions about Russia that the Japanese take home depend on everyone. It is necessary to search for new forms of work in this direction, to attract the youth to it, to accumulate, to generalize and exchange experience.

The article is devoted to the 65th birthday and 40th anniversary of the creative work of the composer, Honoured Artist of Russia, Laureate of Moscow Prize, Professor Victor Stepanovich Ulyanich. To celebrate this event, a concert was held at the Concert Hall of the Gnesins Russian Academy of Music on November 27, 2021. The concert program included works of a wide genre and stylistic range. In the first part there were compositions for various instrumental ensembles with the harp — the instrument the composer preferred throughout his life. Two symphonies were performed in the second part: the concert symphony for clarinet, harp and chamber orchestra "Bells of the Soul", previously presented on the CD with music by Victor Ulyanich, and the pastoral symphony "Sounds of Wind, Rain and Rainbow" for 12 flutes, harp and percussion quartet, from 2021, which was performed for the first time.

The article deals with the problems of training the composition by S. V. Rachmaninov by Chinese pianist students. It is shown that these problems are due to an insufficient level of knowledge about the traditional spiritual content of Russian culture, that are the fundamental basis of the composer’s music, the characteristics and key themes of his work, and the focus of Chinese pedagogy on the technological side of learning. According to the author, an important step on the path of Chinese students to understanding and professional interpretation of Rachmaninov’s music can be the training of the composer’s music. The features of the refraction of the program of the phenomenon in piano compositions by S. V. Rachmaninov are considered. It was concluded that study of program could be an important impetus in the work on identifying the “invisible subtext” of the composer’s non-programmed piano opuses. Approaches to teaching Chinese students based on identifying the concept of non- programmed Rachmaninov’s piano music are proposed. The characteristics of pedagogy are characterized depending on the orientation towards the disclosure of programmed, non-programmed and conceptual in the compositions.

The article is devoted to the piano works of Nikolay Savelyevich Berestov, one of the most famous composers of Yakutia, Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation and Yakutia, whose compositional heritage is performed outside of Yakutia and Russia. He is the author of numerous works in different genres of vocal and instrumental music, innovatively implementing in his compositions the traditions of national folklore. The article reveals characteristic features of the composer's style — the interaction of intonation vocabulary of national folklore and European writing technique, the adherence to the program, the consistent definition of technical and figurative- emotional tasks of plots and dramaturgy. The most striking works from various cycles — pieces, fugues as well as the "Northern Landscapes" triptych — are examined in more detail.

AbstractThis article examines language politics in Ukraine through the analysis of interactional dynamics on a televised music-centered talk show. The episode analyzed here, which aired in the summer of 2002, provides an example of the non-accommodating bilingualism that had become widespread in both the media and everyday practice. The Russian language clearly dominated, but the continuous presence of Ukrainian language asserted the distinct Ukrainianness of the program in various ways.

Thereunder is a publication the program of the discipline of “Musical Informatics” devoted to the theory and methodology of teaching student musicians with strong visual impairments. The methodological and content-rich components of study of this discipline in the federal state-run professional educational institution “Kursk Music Residential College for the Blind” of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Russian Federation are presented. The author of the article describes the special conditions for realizing the adapted program of the discipline of “Musical Informatics,” the thematic plan of the discipline, the methodological recommendations for teachers who implement the educational process within the walls of the college, the hardware-software, educational methodological and informational support for the realization of the educational process in specialized institutions the activities of which are directed at education, upbringing, rehabilitation and social adaptation of visually impaired invalids.

This work researches the issues of instruction of the specialist sound designer in the sphere of work with sound who is endowed with present-day competence. Sound design is examined as a special type of artistic activity and as an educational direction in Russian higher education. Creation of sound by means of digital design already possesses its own history, theory and sphere of practice in the domain of education. The authors illuminate the new profile of the Master’s program “Information Technologies in Music and Sound Design” available at the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia. The quality of the process of education must provide the necessity of instruction of high-level specialists on demand. Sonar design requires specific skills and complex attainments from the specialist. Offered for discussion are the professional competencies which are necessary for the sound designer to master as a specialist capable of applying the attained knowledge in various present-day spheres of professional activity. Characterization is provided for the complex of required disciplines of the examined educational program within the frameworks of the educational program within the frameworks of instruction of “Informational Systems and Technologies.” The experience of work of the tutorial methodological laboratory “Musical Computer Technologies” of the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia in this field are disclosed. The prospects of the development of the new educational direction are determined.

Postmodern methodology, which influenced the development of the human sciences of the XXI century, teaches researchers to freely use any concepts and definitions outside of the original semantic context. The author of the article, opposing this practice, defends the traditional methodological foundations of the national pedagogy of music education, identifying the problem of ambiguity and inconsistency of understanding the category of spirituality in modern music and pedagogical research. Identification of the original meanings and clarification of the categorical specifics of spirituality is impossible outside of theological sources that capture the “mechanisms” of centuries-old experience of spiritual knowledge of the world and man. Recognizing the spirituality as the highest reality of human existence, it is suggested that in the pedagogy of music education this category is the basis for a dialogue of scientific and religious knowledge. Scientific interpretation of the category of spirituality in musical art and education is impossible without the correct “translation” of theological pedagogical attitudes into the language of music and musical creativity. Historical and cultural analysis of spirituality as a “super-understanding” of the existence of music is revealed using a comparison of religious meanings with the real sound “analogs”. The appeal to the Russian musical heritage allowed us to identify significant trends between “spiritual” and “artistic”. The first trend is the dominance of spirituality in temple music. It is confirmed by the birth of the artistic Canon of Orthodox temple singing, which emphasizes the semantic depth and grace of prayer texts. The article highlights the norms of the embodiment of spirituality in music, born in the bowels of the theory of its “inspired” origin, as well as the time cycle of the revival of the spiritual dominant in the phenomenon of the “Orthodox musical Renaissance”. Another trend is related to the development of spirituality in secular musical genres. The article notes the ambiguity of the contact between “spiritual” and “artistic” in secular music, the semantic diversity in the implementation of spirituality by Russian composers from its Evangelical understanding to mystical “author’s” interpretations. The transformation of the content components of spirituality into morality in the public consciousness of Russia and their further interaction contributed to the formation of the now widespread, but clearly insufficiently researched concepts of “spiritual and moral education” and “spiritual and moral culture”. In the content of modern music and pedagogical education, the moral component outside of its spiritual context is taken into account to a greater extent. All the above points to the need to develop a new master’s degree program that takes into account the following interrelated factors: the centuries-old experience of embodying spirituality in the musical art, the secular nature of the training of future music teachers.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the rapid growth of musical culture in Russia. This resulted in a large repertoire of piano music — ranging from miniatures to virtuosic etudes and sonatas. Growing out of the nineteenth century romantic tradition, and highly influenced by the social conditions of the time, Russian composers developed a distinctive style which closely reflected their culture, personalities and ideologies. There are several approaches to studying performance practice. One is to study the interpretations of other pianists. While this does have many advantages, it has not been adopted in this paper as it has one flaw: it still fails to capture the distinctive language of these composers. Rather, the paper will study the social and musical influences on the composers, and, more importantly, their philosophies about pianism and the purpose of music. This will be related to interpretative issues in the works. The repertoire has been divided into four areas. The paper commences with a study of the miniature, which is valuable in finding the ‘essence’ of a composer’s musical language expressed on a small scale. Here, the ‘elementary’ considerations in performance practice will be studied. The second chapter discusses etudes. This is useful in gaining an insight into composers’ conception of technique, and how this relates to performance practice. The third chapter deals with music that has extra-musical themes. This provides opportunity for a more detailed cultural and biographical study of the composers. To represent the large-scale repertoire of Russian composers, the sonata will be studied. Here, a detailed analysis of the composers’ musical language and its relationship to expression will be discussed.
Masters Thesis

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the rapid growth of musical culture in Russia. This resulted in a large repertoire of piano music — ranging from miniatures to virtuosic etudes and sonatas. Growing out of the nineteenth century romantic tradition, and highly influenced by the social conditions of the time, Russian composers developed a distinctive style which closely reflected their culture, personalities and ideologies. There are several approaches to studying performance practice. One is to study the interpretations of other pianists. While this does have many advantages, it has not been adopted in this paper as it has one flaw: it still fails to capture the distinctive language of these composers. Rather, the paper will study the social and musical influences on the composers, and, more importantly, their philosophies about pianism and the purpose of music. This will be related to interpretative issues in the works. The repertoire has been divided into four areas. The paper commences with a study of the miniature, which is valuable in finding the ‘essence’ of a composer’s musical language expressed on a small scale. Here, the ‘elementary’ considerations in performance practice will be studied. The second chapter discusses etudes. This is useful in gaining an insight into composers’ conception of technique, and how this relates to performance practice. The third chapter deals with music that has extra-musical themes. This provides opportunity for a more detailed cultural and biographical study of the composers. To represent the large-scale repertoire of Russian composers, the sonata will be studied. Here, a detailed analysis of the composers’ musical language and its relationship to expression will be discussed.
Masters Thesis

After a year of trading colorful barbs with the American president and significant achievements in North Korea’s decades-long nuclear and missile development programs, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared mission accomplished in November 2017. Though Kim's pronouncement appears premature, North Korea is on the verge of being able to strike the United States with nuclear weapons. South Korea has long been in the North Korean crosshairs but worries whether the United States would defend it if North Korea holds the American homeland at risk. The largely ceremonial summit between US president Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, and the unpredictability of both parties, has not quelled these concerns and leaves more questions than answers for the two sides' negotiators to work out. The Korean Peninsula’s security situation is an intractable conflict, raising the question, “How did we get here?” In this book, former North Korea lead foreign service officer at the US embassy in Seoul Patrick McEachern unpacks the contentious and tangled relationship between the Koreas in an approachable question-and-answer format. While North Korea is famous for its militarism and nuclear program, South Korea is best known for its economic miracle, familiar to consumers as the producer of Samsung smartphones, Hyundai cars, and even K-pop music and K-beauty. Why have the two Koreas developed politically and economically in such radically different ways? What are the origins of a divided Korean Peninsula? Who rules the two Koreas? How have three generations of the authoritarian Kim dictatorship shaped North Korea? What is the history of North-South relations? Why does the North Korean government develop nuclear weapons? How do powers such as Japan, China, and Russia fit into the mix? What is it like to live in North and South Korea? This book tackles these broad topics and many more to explain what everyone needs to know about South and North Korea.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

Various platforms can be used for webinars in online programs; such as WizIQ. This online service allows the user to conduct webinars with audio-visual material, presentations, etc. Listeners of the online programs can hear presenter's voice, see a presentation, listen to music, and take an active part in the chat. However, there are great difficulties associated with the ongoing course content- an abundance of unstructured information, inaccuracy of information, a growing number of public resources, an ever-changing world and a changing labor market have led to the emergence of a new kind of activity - curating content. This chapter describes the authors' suggestions of optimizing online learning course content using an automated curator in the sliding mode. The given system has been successfully used by Professor Vardan Mkrttchian in five different Russian Universities, teaching online for its 10 academic disciplines.

The development of cultural ties and cooperation between Russia and China in the field of education correlates with the current strategy of internationalization of Russian universities. Many Russian universities today tend to develop partnerships with Chinese universities. In particular, the number of Chinese students studying in Russian universities constantly increases; academic exchange programs are successfully implemented, the number of scientific contacts between representatives of universities of the two countries grows. The implementation of such cooperation is accompanied by problems of social and cultural interaction in the field of education of Russian and Chinese students. The general purpose of the study was to identify the axiological component in the interaction of Russian and Chinese students in the space of the Russian university. Chinese students who study in Yekaterinburg universities (390 people), Russian students who study/live with Chinese (500 people), 10 Chinese experts, 10 Russian experts in the field of education in Russia and China were interviewed. The results suggest that the Russian students find the values of hedonistic nature – love and pleasure – to be more important than the Chinese ones, while the Chinese students consider study and personal security to be most important (and this is determined by the goals of coming to Russia and the conditions of staying in the territory of a foreign country). Nevertheless, it cannot be said that the values of students from the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China differ radically and may interfere with the productive socio-cultural interaction between them. Besides, the great importance of such values as world peace and love of country for Chinese students can be the basis for attracting them to participate in the activities of patriotic and cultural student associations that already exist in the Ural universities. The practical significance of the results obtained is that the identified problems of socio-cultural interaction between Chinese and Russian students make it possible to develop technologies for optimizing the socio-cultural interaction of foreign students in Russian universities, which is especially important in the initial stages of their education in Russia. Among the recommendations for optimizing the process of entering Chinese students into Russian universities (in addition to Russian language classes) are joint Russian-Chinese leisure and holiday events, joint social student associations (volunteering, tourism, music, etc.), excursion programs aimed at acquaintance with the culture of the host country, the joint interaction of Russian and Chinese students in social networks and messenger apps.