~* WoRLd Is aLL aBoUt DrEaMs *~

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The next weekend is a great holiday for the people who live in Kiev. I have a great pleasure to tell you that I’m one of these lucky guys. So, on May 26-27 the Day of Kiev will be celebrated. I love holidays like this and I already found some info about the program. Usually, as you know, such holidays organized on Maydan Nezalezhnosti, but this year will be different, according to the political situation in the country. The concerts are going to be on Besarabka (Besarabskaya Square) instead of Maydan Nezalezhnosti. It is planned to set up a stage, where the Meer of Kiev will first of all greet the citizens and then communicate with them. Later the concert will be held on the same stage on Besarabka. Many singers and bands are going to participate. Vladimir Grishko and Natalia Bychiinskaya are among the participators. By the way, I heard that the program of the concert is ready, but probably it will have some changes. That’s why it is not told yet to the people. There is also several other events, which were planned to be organized on Maydan Nezalezhnosti, but these will be held in another place as well. On the Day of Kiev there is a festival planned as well. It will include the festival of kites, Roller-Marathon and different concerts in such places as Besarabka, Evropeyskaya Ploshad (European Square) and Pevcheskoe Pole. The festival will be ended with the great series of fireworks in the evening of May 27. I think this holiday will be great!!! I’m for sure will go on the concert and check it out myself with my friends. I think it will be lots of fun ))) 

   I LOVE TEDDY BEARS!!!

This blog is like the continuation of the previous one. I decided to write about the train crash again, as the case has some news. Many people were involved in it, so everybody wanted to find out why it had happened. Finally, some conclusions were promulgated. The Public Prosecutor’s Office announced that this event was not a terroristic sabotage, but a mistake of the railway personnel. The crash happened, because workers, who were supposed to repair the crossing place on the railroad, did the renewal not professionally, in a hurry. The repair was of a poor quality. As a result the accident had happened. The investigation continues, but for its interest the names of suspected are not told. Our President, Victor Ushenko, said that according to these events, the present Minster of Transport System has to leave his post. The Minister, in his turn, doesn’t want to agree. I will keep up with this situation, which influences politics and the whole country.

I like to travel and usually I use trains or busses. Lately, I used trains the most as the 50% off discount for students works pretty good for me. Last week my sis’ went to our hometown, I mean Kirovohrad, for the May weekends and I stayed, because I’d found a job. But later on this week, I was thinking to join my family. I was very lucky as there were no tickets any more for the
Kiev Express “Kiev-Dnepropetrovsk”, which I usually use. Wanna know what happened…? Last Wednesday, this express train crashed near
Kiev. Can you imagine how lucky I was not to go home by this train on May 3? From the news on TV I heard that three people were injured after a train was derailed near
Kiev. That late Wednesday could be the first case of sabotage on the railway in the former
Soviet Union over the past decade. The investigation is going on. The Minister of Transport System of
Ukraine gave a talk on TV. He said that the train was going to Kiev from Dnipropetrovsk crashed near Rosava station near
Kiev after unknown persons had apparently tampered with the safety equipment at the railway crossing. It is horrible! I could be in this train returning from Kirovohrad to
Kiev. It’s a pity, but I think that actually they won’t find the suspects. The reason why it is actually happened is that there is no security equipment in the railway crossing places. The other thing is there won’t be any of these provided in the closest future, as the budget of
Ukraine has no money for such changes in the railway. All of this is so sad, but it is a true reality… Our world is a cruel one. So, we better watch out!

I decided to use the Proquest database, as I searched the Ebscohost so many times that I didn’t expect to find something new. Proquest is easy n use and very similar to Ebsco. The most important thing is your keywords. Yeah-h-h! I succeeded! I got four sources more. I found two articles, one book and one review of the book. Actually, I didn’t use the last one, I mean the review. One of the articles seemed rather unusual to me, as the author was anonymous. The article is called “History by Numbers: The Costs of World War II.” It is a very interesting and exciting article, as it consists not only from text, but also includes bar charts, graphs and pictures. The article provides the comparison info about human losses worldwide. You can see the comparison between
Untied
States and Soviet Union; Germany and Japan; United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain; Germany, Japan, U.S. and
Great Britain. Anyways, this data just another proof that the
Soviet Union had the most human losses during WWII.The other article is “How Many Died?” The author is an American journalist Steven Shabad, who cooperated with Russian reporter Boris Sokolov. Steven Shabad investigated the question already mentioned in the name of the article. So, how many died? And by the way, why nobody knew? It was already 1995. He found out with the help of his Russian colleague that this info was hidden and manipulated after the war ended by Soviet government. The articles from the beginning of the book Battles on the Eastern Front; the Soviet-German War, 1941-1945 explains the possibility to have only certain number of armed forces on each side: German & Soviet. Also, the authors support the idea that the human losses of the Soviet army were higher that the German ones on the front-lines.According to this data, my research paper became more valuable and persuasive. For myself, I made a conclusion that Proquest is a good thing J It helped me a lot and I’m glad I came to the Embassy last Friday.

As you know, we visited Kristina in the American Embassy last Friday. It was kind of funny. The Embassy is a very nice building with good security. The security staff is rather serious and acts just like in the airport. They checked everybody’s clothes and bags, including my. It was a funny situation, when they saw on the screen a bottle of water in my bag. I was asked to take it out, open it and smell or better drink from it… Can you imagine?! Huh-hhh! My classmates laughed and smiled around. When we get to the library, it was nice. The library was provided with several databases, such as Ebscohost & Proquest, which we could use for our research as well. Everybody got their rough drafts back. Most of people have one similar comment: “Not enough Ebsco sources.” We were looking for additional articles and it was rather successful!   

My rough draft was kind of half-done, as I had only three and a half pages and with missing conclusion. I still think I did a pretty good job, as I can explain why it wasn’t run to the end. I just sent so many articles to myself that I had to spend lots of time looking through them and deciding whether it is worth using each or not. Finally, I picked only two sources from the Ebscohost. I know that it was not enough. I also had rather good Russian articles from Voenno-Medicinskie Zhyrnalu (Military-Medical Magazines). I got those from Parliamentary library, in Podol department, as they store there many old newspapers and magazines like in archive. Those articles provided me with needed data on statistics of human losses during WWII. I like that this semester, firstly, we give Kristina the rough draft and only later in couple weeks the final variant of the research paper. I was happy to get comments on my research paper, as I can improve it now!    

During my research, I visited British Council several times. I spent there some time, looking for appropriate information related to my topic. I found out that some articles, which looked to me rather helpful firstly, were not very suitable later on. That was the reason to return to the British Council again and again… I used two sources from the Ebscohost database in the rough draft of my research paper. One of them is an article “The Aftermath of the Fascist Air Attacks on Military Ambulance Trains and Mobile Units” recalls the events of WWII. It puts us into the picture of railway bombings, including the medical trains. The article summarizes the statistics of dead and wounded soldiers carried in trains at that time. The author includes the data of human losses, resulted by German bombing of Soviet railway. The article gives real numbers of soldiers killed in the bombings of sanitary and hospital trains. The other source is a book The House Build on the Send: The Conflicts of German Policy in
Russia: 1939-1945 of German author Reitlinger. The Ebscohost database had some pages from his book, which I found very useful. The author talks about death statistics during WWII and what kind of deaths should be taken in account. He reminds us about the German collaboration groups and camps, which organized repressions for the Soviet people who were in German captivity. Reitlinger shows some numbers, according to his own research, on prisoners who were killed, died themselves, escaped or were finally freed in 1944. The author touches many influential factors of German policy during WWII, but I used only data related to my theme.   

Yeah!!! We did it! Good job, guys! I think, we did a pretty good presentation. Personally, I think I spoke better this time than last semester. It was so nice that many outstanding people visited our presentation. It was really nice to understand that History Matters caught an interest of American Ambassador and his wife. I was happy to see old ladies, the stories of their lives were told. Of course, it’s a pity that Anna wasn’t there, but I’m sure other widows recognized her in my slide show. The Photo Contest was great! Even, I’ve got only a certificate of participation, with no place, I was really happy! I think we need to do it the next year again! I appreciated the comments made on the Landscape Category pictures. It was really interesting to hear the comments from the professional.I think the audience was more interested in our presentations this time. The audience was different – there were people who were interested and no Dragomanov students, who didn’t care much the last semester.  I think, people liked it and we touched their hearts with our stories!