Politburo

Politburo (pronounced pol-it-byoor-oh or poh-lit-byoor-oh)

(1) The executive committee and chief policymaking body of a Communist Party (often in lowercase).  In the English-speaking world, sometimes erroneously written as politbureau or in hyphenated form.

(2) A casual term for a senior policymaking body in a political organisation, generally consisting of members who either are appointed by the party in control of the organisation or who attain membership through their personal political affiliations (sometimes derogatory).

1917: From the Russian Политбюро́ (Politbjuró) as shortening of полити́ческое бюро́ (politícheskoe byuró) (political bureau).  As a general principle, a politburo, in general, is the chief committee of a communist party and often exercises executive authority. The German form is Politisches Büro abbreviated as Politbüro and, like the Spanish Politburó, is directly loaned from Russian.  Chinese uses a calque (政治局; Zhèngzhìjú in pinyin), from which the Vietnamese (Bộ Chính trị), and Korean (정치국, 政治局 Jeongchiguk) terms derive.

1917 and after

The first politburo was Russian, created in 1917 by the Bolsheviks, the initial membership of seven including Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky and Stalin.  Although the USSR’s Politburo was notionally the highest policy-making government authority, it was usually subservient to the office of General Secretary of the Communist Party, especially during Comrade Stalin’s (1878–1953; leader of the Soviet Union 1922-1953) time.  In an example of the re-branding which happened often in the USSR, it was known as the Presidium between 1952 and 1966.  Many communist nations adopted the model during the twentieth century but politburos exist now only in the five remaining communist countries, China, the DPRK (North Korea), Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba.  Those five long outlasted the Russian original which was dissolved in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Old white men: the Twenty-sixth Politburo (1981–1986) of the USSR (1981 press release).

The last four leaders of the USSR (Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982), Yuri Andropov (1982-1984), Konstantin Chernenko (1984-1985) and Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991) all appear here.

Nomenclature

Nomenclature (pronounced noh-muhn-kley-cher, noh-men-kluh-cher, noh-muhn-kley-choor or noh-men-kluh-choor

(1) A set or system of names or terms, the terminology used in a particular science, art, activity etc, by an individual, community or institution.

(2) The names or terms comprising a set or system.

1600-1610: From the sixteenth century French nomenclature, from the Latin nōmenclātūra (a calling by name, list of names), from nomenclator (namer), the construct being nōmen (name), from the primitive Indo-European root no-men- (name) + calator (caller, crier), from calāre (call out), from the primitive Indo-European root kele- (to shout); a doublet of nomenklatura.  In many cases, the words classification, codification, glossary, locution, phraseology, taxonomy & terminology will be synonymous and interchangeable.  The related forms include nomenclatural, nomenclatorial & nomenclative, nomenclaturally, nomenclator, nomenclatory (and the equivalent systems using exclusively numbers: numericlature.  The noun plural is nomenclatures.

In Ancient Rome a nomenclator was (1) the title of a steward whose job was to announce visitors and (2) a prompter who helped a politician seeking election recall names and pet causes of his constituents.  The meaning "systematic list or catalogue of names" is attested from the 1630s; that of "system of naming" dating from the 1660s while the modern sense of "the whole vocabulary or terminology of an art or a science" is from 1789.  In English, circa 1600, it also had the meaning “a name” but, being a complicated way of saying something simple, this quickly went extinct.

In the Soviet Union, nomenklatura was the "list of influential posts in government and industry to be filled by Communist Party appointees".  The origin of this predated the formal creation of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; (Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, СССР the Russian abbreviation in Cyrillic, transliterated as SSSR in Latin script)) and was emblematic of the centralization of authority and decision making the party organization imposed almost immediately on the state.  It was too indicative of the way the dictatorial structure of the party, mapped onto the mechanism of the state would, disguised sometimes as a collective model, to almost the end distinguish the USSR from many of the non-communist models of authoritarian rule which flourished during the twentieth century, their corporatist nature often misunderstood because of the way the label “dictatorship” was applied.

Formalized during 1919-1920, the party’s system of control was created in the months after the revolution, the Politburo (a creation of the party’s Central Committee which, technically, exercised only the authority delegated by the committee) dealt with all matters of significance and thus reserved the key decisions exclusively for their remit, the routine and procedural matters handled either by the Orgburo (essentially the body which enacted the Politburo’s edicts and coordinated the regional organizations and thus best understood as a kind of party chancellery) or the famously bureaucratic Secretariat.  It was in the Secretariat (where the paperwork from the higher bodies tended to end up) that the need for a reliably indexed filing system to conquer the developing administrative chaos quickly became apparent and nomenklatura was part of the system.  Accordingly created was the Учраспред (Uchraspred), (the Department of Files & Assignments) which, operating rather as gangsters would run as HR department, handled the registration of party members and their subsequent allocation to positions below the higher-level appointments, which remained in the gift of the Politburo or Orgburo.

Comrade Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986; early Bolshevik, Soviet foreign minister 1939-1949 & 1953-1956), Edward R Stettinius Jr (1900–1949; US secretary of state 1944-1945 and ambassador to the UN 1945-1946 (“Stettinius the younger”, his father having been assistant secretary of war 1918-1921)) & Anthony Eden (1897–1977; thrice UK foreign secretary and prime-minister-1955-1957) at the foundation conference of the United Nations, San Francisco, 1945.

Predictably, the structure provided much scope for patronage, nepotism and factionalism but, handling annually thousands of movements, it nevertheless demanded efficient administration, something lacking until in 1921, Vyacheslav Molotov, just elevated to the Central Committee and Orgburo, was put in charge of the Secretariat.  Studious, serious (of the many photographs which exist, in few is he smiling) and with a mind which if not as quick as his colleagues was certainly thorough, he excelled in the role and though the more intellectually illustrious were inclined to decry his “needless and shameful bureaucratism", they couldn’t not be in awe of his capacity to spend long hours sitting at his desk, creating order our of what was a post-revolutionary mess, comrade Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 1870–1924 and known by his alias Lenin; revolutionary, political theorist and founding head of government (Soviet Russia 1917-1924 and the Soviet Union 1922-1924) dubbing him “stone ass” (often misquoted as “iron ass”), a moniker later used (behind his back) by the negotiators from the West with whom he sat through many meetings and conferences during his long tenure as Soviet foreign minister, his intransigence legendary even by diplomatic standards.  Other ambassadors dubbed him "comrade nyet"; nyet a Russian word meaning a particularly blunt "No!".  "Stone ass" was most productive during those long sessions at his desk, producing endless streams of paper which fed a burgeoning bureaucracy; Lenin also dubbed him "comrade filing cabinet".        

Stone ass: comrade Molotov sitting at his desk.

The English nomenclature was a borrowing in the 1600s of the sixteenth century French which was from the Latin nōmenclātūra (assignment of names to things, mentioning things by name, a list of names).  Almost immediately, the word was picked up by many branches of science (most notably in botany or zoology) where it gained the definitive senses of “a systematic assignment of names” and later in the same century, “the technical terms within a science”.  The noun nomenklatura existed in Russian since the early nineteenth century but it was particular and well-publicized use by the Soviet communists which made it known in the West.  Understanding its implications, the Kremlinologists in the 1950s adopted nomenklatura when discussing bureaucracies and administrative structures in both the USSR and other communist states.

Memo: Team Douglas Productions, 29 July 2004.

Also of interest to students of nomenclature is the process by which the names of people can become objects applied variously.  As Napoleon, Churchill and Hitler live on as Napoleonic, Churchillian and Hitlerite, on the internet is a body of the Lohanic.  Universally, that’s pronounced lo-han-ick but Lindsay Lohan has mentioned in interviews that being a surname of Irish origin, it’s “correctly” low-en, a form she adopted early in 2022 with her first posting on TikTok where it rhymed with “Coen” (used usually for the surname “Cohen” which is of Hebrew origin and unrelated to Celtic influence).  For a generation brought up on lo-han it must have been a syllable too far because it didn’t catch on and by early 2023, she was back to lo-han with the hard “h”.  Curiously, while etymologists seem to agree that historically lo-en was likely the form most heard in Ireland, the popular genealogy sites all indicate the modern practice is to use lo-han so hopefully that’s the last word.  However, the brief flirtation with phonetic h-lessness did have a precedent:  When Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) was being filmed in 2004, the production company circulated a memo to the crew informing all that Lohan was pronounced “Lo-en like Coen” with a silent “h”.

Proxemics

Proxemics (pronounced prok-see-miks)

(1) In sociology and psychology, the study of the spatial requirements of humans and animals and the effects of population density on behavior, communication, and social interaction.

(2) In linguistics, the study of the symbolic and communicative role in a culture of spatial arrangements and variations in distance, as in how far apart individuals engaged in conversation stand depending on the degree of intimacy between them.

1963: A portmanteau word, the blend mixed by US anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward Twitchell Hall (1914–2009) for an academic paper published in 1963 (which built on ideas in his book The Silent Language (1959)), the construct being prox(imity) + -emics.  Proximity was a compound word, the construct being proxim(ate) +‎ -ity, from the Middle French proximité from the Latin proximitās & proximitāt-  from proximus (from the primitive Indo-European prokwismmos, from prokwe (from whence prope)).  The novel –emics was an extracted borrowing from the word phonemics (the study of phonemes or distinct units of sound in a language; phonology).  Proxemics is a noun, proxemical & proxemic are adjectives and proxemically is an adverb.  Proxemics (the study of the effects of the physical distance between people in different cultures and societies) is one of those words which appears to be a plural but is a singular form.  For those learing English it may seem strange proxemic is an adjective and proxemics a noun singular.

Empirical research

Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behavior, communication, and social interaction.  It’s one of a number of disciplines in the study of non-verbal communication, including semiotics (sign language), haptics (touch), kinesics (body language), vocalics (para-language), and chronemics (structure of time).  Analogous with the way animals use urine and physical posturing to define their territory, the idea is that humans use personal space and concrete objects to establish theirs.

The theory suggests there are four types of distances people keep: intimate (up to 18 inches (.5m)), personal (18 inches to 4 feet (.5-1.2M)), social (4 to 10 feet (1.2-3m)), and public (over 10 feet (3m+)) although those are the distances chosen deliberately by individuals; forced closeness such as experienced on public transport are not part of proxemics.  The theory exists within the discipline of behaviorism and is thus observational rather than being derived from explicit instruction which is why personal distance and physical contact varies by culture, the physical distance between communicators indicating also the nature of their relationship.  Beyond relationships, proxemics attempted to explain other cultural and anthropological phenomena, such as the organization of built environments and living spaces, furniture, walls, streets and fences all being arranged in ways that delineate territory, whether for living, working or meeting others; territories historically existing to provide comfort for inhabitants and induce anxiety in intruders.

Practicing pre-pandemic proxemics: The septuple of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo's Standing Committee at the Eighteenth Congress of the CCP, Beijing, China, November 2012.

Note the social distancing, an indication of early planning for the COVID-19 pandemic.  The unfortunate fellow (second from left) who spoiled the photograph by wearing the wrong color tie, was expelled from the party and transferred to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) as deputy assistant sanitation inspector.  Still, it does indicate how good things can be if things are not troubled by decadent Western concepts such as the imposition of DEI (diversity, equity & inclusion) legislation.  In some matters, Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021 and since 2025) has learned much from the CCP.    

Practicing pandemic proxemics: Lindsay Lohan in Dubai, April 2020, group photograph of a nonuple, expressing thanks to Dubai Police Force for their help during the difficult time.

Stack

Stack (pronounced stak)

(1) A more or less orderly pile or heap.

(2) A set of shelves for books or other materials ranged compactly one above the other, as in a library.

(3) As smoke-stack, a number of chimneys or flues grouped together (and used originally to describe an especially tall structure).

(4) A vertical duct for conveying warm air from a leader to a register on an upper story of a building.

(5) A vertical waste pipe or vent pipe serving a number of floors.

(6) In informal use, a great quantity or number.

(7) In radio, an antenna consisting of a number of components connected in a substantially vertical series.

(8) In computing, a linear list arranged so that the last item stored is the first item retrieved and an area in a memory for temporary storage

(9) In military jargon, a conical, free-standing group of three rifles placed on their butts and hooked together with stacking swivels.

(10) In air traffic control, as air stack or stack-up, groups of airplanes flying nearly circular patterns at various altitudes over an airport where crowded runways, a low cloud ceiling, or other temporary conditions prevent immediate landings.

(11) In historic English measure for coal and wood, equal to 106 cubic feet (3m³).

(12) In geology, a column of rock isolated from a shore by the action of waves.

(13) In poker and some other games, the quantity of chips held by a player at a given point in a gambling game.

(14) To arrange or select unfairly in order to force a desired result, especially to load (a jury, committee, etc.) with members having a biased viewpoint.

(15) In Australian slang, to crash (typically a bike, skateboard etc).

(16) In recreational drugs as "stacked pill", a dose (most associated with MDMA) with an external coating in several (stacked) colors.

1250–1300: From the Middle English stak (pile, heap or group of things) from a Scandinavian source akin to the Old Norse stakkr (haystack), thought to be from the Proto-Germanic stakkoz & stakon- (a stake), from the primitive Indo-European stog-, a variant of steg (pole; stick (source of the English "stake")), the source also of the Old Church Slavonic stogu (heap), the Russian stog (haystack) and the Lithuanian stokas (pillar).  It was cognate with the Danish stak and the Swedish stack (heap, stack).

Noted stackers, same cause; different effect: Liz Truss & Xi Jinping with their predecessors.

Especially in politics, the idea of loading the membership of some body (a committee, a branch meeting etc) so that votes may be controlled is an ancient (if not noble) practice but it wasn't described as "stacking" until the early twentieth century.  In some jurisdictions, the practice of "branch stacking" (paying for people to enroll in a political party, many of whom may not be aware of their involvement) has been made unlawful but the technique seems still widespread.  Recent examples at the more exalted level of executive government include Liz Truss (b 1975; UK prime-minister for a few weeks in 2022) who stacked her infamously brief administration exclusively with her supporters regardless of their talent and Xi Jinping (b 1953; paramount leader of the People's Republic of China since 2012) who, when re-structuring the seven member Standing Committee of the Politburo after securing a third term in office, ensured no dissenting voices were likely to be heard.  This worked out not well for Ms Truss; Mr Xi expects better things. 

Stacked: Lindsay Lohan photographed in a pleasing aspect.

Stack in the sense of Australian slang (often as "stacked it") means "to crash" in some way, typically from a skateboard, scooter or bike and (to clarify things) the word was memorably used by #metoo campaigner Grace Tame to explain an injury sustained just after she'd upset the ruling Liberal party.  In the sub-culture of recreational drugs, "stacked pills" are those with a layered color scheme suggesting some interesting variation of ingredients (although all the evidence suggests the finish is purely decorative); among the MDMA crowd "stacked disco biscuits" were said to be a 1990s favorite.  As applied to the (noun) shelves in libraries upon which books are (verb) stacked, use dates from 1879 and as a description of the chimneys of factories, locomotives etc it came into use in the mid-1820s.  The use in computing (the best known of which is probably the IP (Internet Protocol) stack)) dates from 1960 when the word was use to describe software consisting two or more components, the loading of which is dependent on an earlier part, hence the idea of layers which stack upon each-other.  As a modifier it was used to describe the haystack in the mid-fifteenth century and in industrial architecture the smoke-stack (a very tall factory chimney) dates from the mid 1820s (although the structures pre-date the use).  The use of smoke-stack was later picked up by naval architects and was applied also to steam locomotives although these exhausts weren't disproportionately tall.  The verb stack emerged in early fourteenth century agriculture in the sense of "to pile up the grain into a stack" and was thus directly from the noun.  Perhaps surprisingly, the adjectival use of stacked appears undocumented until 1796 when it was used as a past participle to describe the clusters of hay assembled at harvest but etymologists suspect it had long been in oral use.  The adjectival use of stacked to suggest a woman who is pleasingly (even perhaps slightly disproportionately) curvaceous dates from 1942.

Of DeSoto's triple stack

1957 DeSoto Adventurer Convertible.

DeSoto's signature triple stacked taillights were a footnote in Detroit's macropterous era of the late 1950s, the style making possible the distinctive vertical arrangement.  Chevrolet would for years make triple taillights a trademark of their more expensive lines (although, apart from the odd special built for the show circuit, they resisted the temptation to add a third to the Corvette (the additional rear apertures on the abortive 1963 Corvette Grand Sport (GS) were for air extraction)) but they appeared always in a less memorable horizontal array.  DeSoto's motif was Chrysler's most successful use of the fins but it wasn't enough to save the brand  which was crowded out of the mid-priced market, not only by competition from General Motors (GM) and Ford but also by intra-corporate cannibalization, squeezed from below by Dodge and from above by Chrysler's new Newport line.  Demand for DeSotos collapsed and that so many were built in 1960 was simply to use up the large inventory of the few parts still exclusive to the brand.  The last of the line, heavily discounted, were not sold until well into 1961.

More sharing of stuff than before: 1960 DeSoto Fireflite four-door hardtop (left) and 1960 Chrysler New Yorker four-door hardtop (right).

By 1959 the writing was on the wall for the once popular DeSoto and the 1960 range would prove its swansong, the last of the breed barely modified Chryslers and the only real hint of the past was the taillight's triple frets.  On the DeSoto the ridges were a modest attempt to retain brand identity but in optics such things have a purpose and are known as “Fresnel lenses” or “Fresnel ribs”, the name from French civil engineer Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827), remembered for his research into optics which led eventually to the near-unanimous acceptance of the nature of light being a wave (he was half-right but light was later proved to possess a wave-particle duality).  His more enduring Fresnel lens used the catadioptric (reflective/refractive) principle and what the “stepped” design did was extend the reach of lighthouse beams, doubtlessly saving the lives of many seafarers.  Fresnel’s invention was a refinement of the dioptric (refractive) stepped lens, a concept first published by the French cosmologist and mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) and Fresnel’s enhancements better distributed and directed the light, improving visibility from longer distances and a greater range of angles.

By 1960 (left) the DeSoto's taillights were a shadow of the way the triple-stack motif had been defined in 1959 (right): This juxtaposition is DeSoto Red Tail Lights in Black and White by Paul Ward.  Many designers probably will prefer the later interpretation but there's a charm to the triple stack.

Open stack exhausts

The exhaust systems of most internal combustion engines are designed to allow as efficient an operation as possible over a broad range of engine speeds while performing as quietly as is required.  Unlike engines used on the road, those designed for competition aren’t as compromised by the need for a wide powerband and quiet operation so open stack exhausts, optimized for flow and the reduction of back-pressure, are attractive.

Stacked: BRM P57 in its original configuration.

During the 1950s, despite engine capacity having being reduced from 4.5 (275 cubic inch) to 2.5 (153 cubic inch) litres, speeds in Formula One were increasing so the sport’s governing body (then the  Commission Sportive Internationale (CSI)), a crew almost as dopey about such things as the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) are now), reacted by imposing a further reduction to 1.5 litres (92 cubic inch).  The 1.5 litre formula ran between 1961 and 1965 but came under increasing criticism as being unworthy of Formula One status in an age when big-engined machinery in other categories was attracting such interest.  The rules did however compel designers and engineers to conjure up some exquisite voiturettes.  BRM’s jewel-like 1.5 litre V8 was the first since the one-off Mercedes-Benz W165 built for the 1939 Tripoli Grand Prix and proved successful, winning the 1962 drivers’ and constructors’ championships.  To extract the maximum from the tiny V8, BRM initially ran them with eight, slightly angled, open-stack exhaust headers which were effective but, because of the limits of the metallurgy of the era they were prone to working loose so, with only the slightest sacrifice in top-end power, during 1962 an orthodox horizontal system was fabricated as a replacement.

Stacked: Graham Hill, 14^th BRDC (British Racing Drivers Club) International Trophy, Silverstone, 12 May 1962.

BRM's chassis for the 1.5 litre formula was actually ready before the new (P56) V8 so in 1961 it was fitted with the widely-used four cylinder Coventry Climax unit which proved uncompetitive against the various configurations of the V6 used in the Ferrari 156 F1 (the "sharknose").  Confusingly, in its debut season, BRM labelled the car the P48/P57 while in 1962 the official name was P578; subsequently just about everybody called the thing the P57 and although lacking the charisma of the earlier and later sixteen cylinder cars it was the factory's most successful engine/chassis combination and wasn't replaced until 1964, one private team even (without success) campaigning the P57 into 1965.

Destacked: Graham Hill, 1962 South African Grand Prix, East London, 29 December 1962.  While the more tightly regulated forms of circuit racing (mostly) restricted the use of open-stack exhausts, in more permissive places (notably the wildly modified "Sports Racing Closed" and "Allcomer" competitions in Australia and New Zealand) the protuberant pipes lasted longer.

Leftover

Leftover (pronounced left-oh-ver)

(1) Usually as leftovers; food remaining uneaten at the end of a meal, especially when saved for later use.

(2) Anything left or remaining from a larger amount; remainder.

(3) A casual (and disparaging) term used in the People's Republic of China to describe women still un-married after the age of twenty-six. 

1878: A compound word left + over; the construct being a noun use of verb phrase left over.  The meaning is always in the sense of left (“remaining, abandoned”) + over (“excess”).  Left is from the Middle English left, luft, leoft, lift & lyft, from the Old English left & lyft (air, atmosphere) from the Proto-Germanic luft with which may be compared the compared the Scots left (left), the North Frisian lefts, left & leefts (left), the West Frisian lofts (left), the dialectal Dutch loof (weak, worthless), and the Low German lucht (left).  Over is from the Middle English over from the Old English ofer from the Proto-Germanic uber (over), from the primitive Indo-European upér, a comparative form of upo; akin to the Dutch over, the German ober & über, the Danish over, the Norwegian over, the Swedish över, the Icelandic yfir, the Faroese yvir, the Gothic ufar, the Latin super, the Ancient Greek ὑπέρ (hupér), the Albanian upri (group of peasants) and the Sanskrit उपरि (upári).  The hyphenated left-over (remaining, not used up) is from 1890 as a noun meaning "something left over" is from 1891.  The sense of (the almost always plural) leftovers “excess food after a meal" (especially if re-served later) dates from 1878.  In this sense, Old English had metelaf.

Leftover women

Sheng nu (剩女; shèngnǚ), most often translated as "leftover women" is a phrase (usually considered derogatory), which describes Chinese women who remain unmarried by their late twenties.  First promulgated by the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) as a promotion of government programmes, it’s been used in other countries but remains most associated with People's Republic of China (PRC).  As a demographic phenomenon, it was once unexpected because the conjunction of the PRC's one-child policy and the disproportionate abortion of female foetuses had led to a distortion in the historic gender balance.  Births in China since the one-child policy was introduced in 1979 have averaged 120 males for every 100 females compared to a global ratio of 103:107.

A bride with four suspected leftovers.

The term appears to have entered common-use in 2005-2006 and seems first to have appeared in the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan.  Unlike most of Cosmopolitan’s editorial content, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took it seriously and instructed the ACWF (a kind of cross between the CWA (Country Women’s Association) and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) to publish articles stigmatizing women still unwed by their late twenties.  Borrowing from Maoist tradition (if not theory), the ACWF provided a useful analysis of the problem, concluding that while “pretty girls” didn’t need much education to find a rich partner, “average or ugly” ones who seek higher degrees thinking it will “increase their competitiveness” in the marriage market are delusional; all that happens is they become old “…like yellowed pearls."  The rhetorical flourishes aside, they had a point.  As the numbers of highly educated women rose, the numbers of potential husbands they found acceptable did not.  What the distorted gender balance created by the one-child policy and the selective-sex abortion preferences had produced was an increasingly educated and middle-class female minority not impressed by a less schooled and more rural male majority. 

Geographic distribution of leftover women, People’s Republic of China.

“Leftover women” seemed the choice in print but on the internet, the punchier 3S or 3SW (Single, Seventies (referring to the then prominent 1970s birth cohort) and Stuck) was also used instead of sheng nu.  There is an equivalent term for men, guang gun (bare branches (ie men who do not marry and thus do not add branches to the family tree)); shengnan (leftover men) does exist but is rare.

CCP demographers had expressed concerns about the social and economic implications of the one-child policy as early as the 1990s.  In the new century, the policy was first selectively relaxed, then revised to permit additional children for those selected by the CCP as desirable breeders and, on 31 May 2021, at a meeting of the of the CCP Politburo, the three-child policy (三孩政策) was announced.  The session, chaired by Xi Jinping (b 1953; CCP general secretary 2012- & PRC president 2013-), followed the release of the findings of the seventh national population census which showed the number of births in mainland China in 2020, at twelve million, would be the lowest since 1960, an indication of the demographic trend causing the ageing of the population.  The Xinhua state news agency then announced the three child policy would be accompanied by supportive measures to “maintain China's advantage in human resources” but surveys suggested the section of the population the CCP would like to see produce three children per household were generally unwilling to have even two, the reason overwhelmingly the high cost of living in Chinese cities.  The announcement on 26 July 2021 permitting Chinese couples to have any number of children was thus greeted by most with restrained enthusiasm.

Leftover no longer: Lindsay Lohan's engagement ring.  Ms Lohan announced her engagement in 2021, marring the following year.  In 2023, a post confirmed reports of her pregnancy. 

The problem of re-production is not restricted to the PRC, the birth rate in South Korea now down to around .8 per woman while a rate around 2.1 is necessary if the population is to be sustained.  What exacerbates the problem in the PRC is the simple lack of women of child-bearing age, caused by the distorted male/female live-birth rates in the decades following the imposition of the one-child policy and any vague hope the long stretches of lock-downs may have encouraged procreation were not realized.  Despite that disappointment, the CCP wasn't discouraged and embarked on a new propaganda campaign making it clear to young women that having babies was part of their patriotic duty to the motherland: pregnancy was now compulsory.  In the West, the decline in the birth rate has for some time been thought a problem, largely because of the impending acceleration in the distortion between those of working age (paying into the system) and those not generating income (extracting from the system).  Of late however, influenced by the un-anticipated rapidity in the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, theorists are re-visiting the models and pondering the implications.

Gulag

Gulag (pronounced goo-lahg)

(1) The system of forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union (with initial capital).

(2) Individually, a Soviet forced-labor camp (usually with initial capital).

(3) By association, any prison or detention camp, especially one used for political prisoners (usually not with initial capital).

(4) Figuratively, any place regarded as undesirable or one perceived as being a “punishment-post” (not with initial capital).

(5) Figuratively, any system used to silence dissent (not with initial capital).

1930-1931: From the Russian ГУЛА́Г (GULÁG, GULag or Gulág), the acronym (Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj) translated usually as “Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps” but also, inter alia, “Chief Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”, “Main Directorate for Places of Detention”, “Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps” etc.).  The noun plural was Gulags.

An example of the way in which a bland acronym (like the 1933 Gestapo (an abbreviated form of the German Geheime Staatspolizei (the construct being Ge(heime) Sta(ats)po(lizei), literally “secret state police”) can become a byword for something awful, although technically, the acronym GULag (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj (Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps)) didn’t come into use until 1930, the origin of what quickly would evolve into a vast, nation-wide network of concentration camps lies in the legal device created almost immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917.  This was the concept of the “class enemy”, a logical crime to gazette under Marxist-Leninist theory and one that could be applied literally to anybody, regardless of their conduct; it was essentially the same idea as the crime of “unspecified offences” which appears in the judicial sentences of some authoritarian states.  Russia, as many of the Bolsheviks knew from personal experience, had a long tradition of “internal exile” and the new regime extended this concept, creating concentration camps for class enemies where convicts were required to perform useful manual labor (forestry, mining, quarrying etc).

The early camps, authorized by decree in April 1919, were the prisoner of war (POW) facilities which had become redundant after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) which concluded hostilities between Russia and the Central Powers although the first model camp was in the White Sea region, in what were once the Orthodox Church's monastery buildings on the Solovetsky Islands and the first prisoners were anti-Bolsheviks, mostly left-wing intellectuals and members of the White Army.  The Cheka, the Russian secret police (the first in the alphabet soup of the names adopted (Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB, NKVD, SMERSH, MGB, (most famously) KGB & FSB), was allocated the role of administration.  Reflecting the love secret police everywhere have for mysterious acronyms, the Cheka created SLON (Northern Camps of Special Significance) as an administrative template for the Solovetsky Islands which, briefly, was the only camp complex in the Soviet state.  The number of concentration (usually described as “correctional labor”) camps grew sufficiently during the 1920s to outgrow the bureaucratic structures initially formed by the Cheka and in 1930 the GULag was created as a separate division of the secret police which worked in conjunction with the Soviet Ministry of the Interior overseeing the use of the physical labor of prisoners.  Although the camps were sometimes used for those guilty of “normal” criminal offences, the great majority of inmates were political prisoners who were sometimes genuine political dissidents but could be there for entirely arbitrary reasons or even as victims of personal vendettas.  In these aspects there are parallels with the Nazi's concentration camps which also worked as systems of coercion, punishment & repression although the GULag never had a programme industrially to exterminate an entire race.  There was another striking similarity in the camp architecture of the two dictatorships which were nominally ideological opponents.  The German equivalent of the GULag, the Konzentrationlager is remembered for the words Arbeit macht frei (work makes you free) rendered in wrought iron above the gates of Auschwitz I; the inscription через труд (through labor (ie get back home through working)) was the message at the prisoners' entrance to the Magaden camp in Siberia.      

What is sometime neglected in the history of the GULag (and other systems of concentration camps) is that while it is well-understood as part of a system of repression, there were genuine attempts to locate the camps in places where the labor extracted from the inmates could be applied to the maximum benefit for the state, something of great significance because in 1929 comrade Stalin (1878–1953; Soviet leader 1922–1953) announced a programme of rapid industrialization and the first of a succession of five-year plans. In support of this, the Politburo abolished any distinction between political and other crimes and intruded a unified network of camps to replace the hitherto dual prison system.  From this point, accelerating from the mid-1930s, archipelagos of camps were built (substantially by the prisoners) close to sites of huge economic projects such as a canal from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea, gold mining in Kolyma and lines of communications such as the Baikal-Amur Mainline.

The GULag’s second great growth spurt happened during Stalin’s “Great Terror” in 1936-1938 when the upper echelons of the Communist Party, the armed forces, the civil service and even the GULag management were subject to purges and while there were many executions, most were sent to the camps which, never designed for such numbers, were unable to handle the mass influx and the already high death rate increased sometimes threefold.  During comrade Stalin's great purges, the (whispered) joke was that the Russian population consisted of (1) those in the gulag, (2) those just released and (3) those about to go back.  On a somewhat smaller scale, rapid inflows also happened in the early years of World War II because of the need to imprison those deported from territory just occupied by the Soviet Union (Eastern Poland, the Baltics, Bessarabia) but this pressure on capacity was more than off-set by the sudden release of many prisoners to meet the needs of the Red Army which had suffered massive losses in the Nazi invasion.  Needing troops, all was suddenly forgiven and it wouldn’t be until 1945 that the numbers in the camps began again to trend upwards, reflecting the waves of arrests among the ranks of the Red Army, former German POWs and ethnic minorities, including Soviet Jews.  The Cold War also fed the GULag.  In 1948-1949, Stalin launched the construction of new megalomaniacal projects, including the Volga-Don Canal, new power stations, dams, and communications, among them the Dead Road and a tunnel and railway to Sakhalin Island, both of which, despite a horrific death-toll, proved impossible to build and were cancelled when Stalin died in 1953.

After Stalin’s death, an amnesty was announced for many of those serving sentences for criminal offences and almost all of those deemed to have committed “minor offences” were released although political prisoners remained imprisoned and it wasn’t until “the thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971; Soviet leader 1953-1964) that widespread releases were ordered after almost four million political crime cases were reviewed and in 1957, as one of a number of reforms, the GULag was abolished and most of the camps shut down.  Khrushchev himself announced that the Soviet economy would no longer based on the slave labor of prisoners which, as a piece of economic analysis was true but while the numbers of political prisoners fell, they did not disappear although they tended now to be only imprisoned for genuine opposition to the regime, dispatched most frequently to labor camps in Mordovia or in camps clustered around the Urals. The conditions remained grim but the death rates were tiny compared to those suffered in Stalin’s time but what also disguised the extent of post-Stalinist repression was than many dissidents were technically not imprisoned but instead declared insane and incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, many of which closely resembled prisons.  There, the “insane” were often subject to cruel & unusual “medical” procedures.

The number of people who passed through the GULag can never exactly be known but, using archival material which became accessible after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, historians have estimated between 15-18 million were imprisoned and the death-toll may have been almost 10%, the overwhelming majority of whom were from Russia or the constituent republics of the USSR but others were foreigners, mostly Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians & Frenchmen.  The network of camps dotted around the USSR consisted of almost 500 administrative centres, each running as few as dozens or as many as hundreds of individual camps, historians having documented just under 30,000.  In the West the term GULag became widely known only after the publication in 1973 Russian of novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's (1918–2008) three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, described by the author as "An Experiment in Literary Investigation" which he wrote between 1958-1968, using documentary sources including legal papers, interviews, diaries, statements and his personal experience as a GULag prisoner.

Map of the GULag camp distribution, Plain Talk magazine, 1950.

However, both the system of slavery and the word “GULag” had, during comrade Stalin’s time, been publicized in the West, remarkably accurate maps published in 1950 in the US in Plain Talk (A US anti-communist monthly magazine, 1946–1950) magazine but, despite it being the high Cold War, the revelations didn’t resonate in public consciousness as they would a generation later when Solzhenitsyn released The Gulag Archipelago.