CULTURE

Invitation to the exhibition

Chokpak, the Sacred Wind

Aigul MYRZATAI

ALMATY, March 2

(THE GLOBE)

The exhibition Chokpak, Sacred Wind is being held in the ARK gallery located in the hyper-market Ramstore. The exhibition presents works by Shymkent artists Damira Sychova and Roman Potehin.

Chokpak means the sacred wind that blows in Shymkent with a mystical rhyme (1, 3, 5, 7 days and nights), that charms the modern town with power of the Nature. Trivial details fall back before its power and the world of permanent Beauty remains.

Damira Sychova, an architect by her education, harmonically combines constructive logic and compositional pureness of spacial structures with lofty beauty of unpretentious things and situations.

Rationalism and laconicism of an architect combines with the creative suddenness help her to reach this perfection.

It is noteworthy that the main heroes of her paintings are common women, cats and cows. The painter considers them in the light of the nature that is symbolized by Central Asian pumpkins, trees and flows. Trivial truths that trustfully look from the painter�s pictures are fanned by heat of deserts and foothills of Shymkent. In these uninhabited places Damira tries to console her pain, escaping to memories of her childhood and to find the meaning of life. The heritage of oasis and caravan roads, of the past and of the present, the Orient mentality and peaceful bliss are combines with European speculativeness of colored constructions and forms.

A number of graphical paintings by Roman Potehin are made with the help of classic devices and techniques (pencil and coal). The painter focuses his attention in the man�s inside world and tries to express the beauty of his soul.

With this exhibition the ARK gallery continues the project Provinces-Metropolis started in the last season with the exposition of painters from Karaganda. They demonstrated to the Almaty audience that talent does not depend on geography. Hence, the art has no provinces, but only talents and hacks.

50 years ago Fuchs Convicted of Revealing Atomic Secrets

ALMATY, March 1 (THE GLOBE)

In London, Klaus Fuchs, the German-born physicist who helped build the first two U.S. atomic bombs, is convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. As a student in prewar Germany, Fuchs joined the Communist Party, but in 1934 was forced to flee after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler seized power. Settling in Britain, he became a brilliant young scientist, and after World War II broke out, was granted security clearance despite his Communist past. In 1943, he was sent with other British scientists to the United States to join the top secret U.S. atomic program. Eventually stationed at atomic development headquarters in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Fuchs became an important scientist in the program. However, soon after his arrival, he made contact with a Soviet spy and offered precise information about the program, including a blueprint of the �Fat Man� atomic bomb later dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, and everything that the Los Alamos scientists knew about the hypothesized hydrogen bomb. After the war, Fuchs returned to England, where he continued his atomic work and Soviet espionage until December 21, 1949, when a British intelligence officer informed the physicist that he was suspected of having given classified nuclear weapons information to the U.S.S.R. The discovery of Fuch�s espionage came four months after the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first atomic bomb. Fuchs pleaded guilty and, on March 1, 1950, after a two-hour trial, was convicted. Despite calls for his execution, by British law he could only be sentenced to fourteen years as he had committed the espionage before the U.S.S.R. was designated an official British enemy. After nine years, he was released from prison and immediately left Britain for Communist East Germany, where he resumed his scientific career. The revelation of Fuchs�s espionage was a major factor leading to U.S. President Harry S. Truman�s approval of massive funding for the development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon theorized to be dozens of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

History of the second Millennium

February 28 1922 After forty years of occupation, Great Britain formally approves Egyptian independence; although the Suez Canal and the defense of Egypt remain in British hands.

February 29 1792 Gioacchino Rossini, operatic composer, creator of The Barber of Seville, was born.

March 1 1950 In London, Klaus Fuchs, the German-born physicist who helped build the first two U.S. atomic bombs, is convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

March 1 1922 Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was born.

March 2 1946 Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist leader, is elected the first president of the short-lived Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

March 3 1918 Bolshevik Russia signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, abandoning the Allied war effort and ceding vast amounts of former Russian territory to Germany and Austria-Hungary.

March 3 1831 George Pullman, inventor of the railroad sleeping car, was born.

March 3 1847 Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, founder of Bell Telephone Company, was born.

March 5 1953 In Moscow, Joseph Stalin, who became the leader of the Soviet Union after Vladimir Lenin�s death in 1924, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-three.