The choice of name for the capital of present-day Lithuania — Wilno, Vilna, Vilne, Wilda, Vilnia or now Vilnius — shows who you are, or were. In the 20th century alone, it has been occupied or claimed by Germany, Russia, Poland and the Soviet Union, with only brief periods of Lithuanian autonomy.
Vilne, in Yiddish, was home to one of Judaism's greatest rabbis, a saintly brainbox known as the Gaon (Genius) who gave his first sermon aged seven and kick-started the great Jewish intellectual revival in the 18th century. "Vilna is not simply a city, it is an idea," said a speaker at a Yiddish conference in 1930. It was the virtual capital of what some call Yiddishland, a borderless realm of east European Jewish life and letters in the inter-war era. At times, the majority of the city's population was Jewish. Their murder and the deportation of many Poles by Stalin meant that the city lost 90 per cent of its population during the second world war. Present-day inhabitants of Vilnius may find much they did not know in Laimonas Briedis's subtle and evocative book about their city's history.
Poles mourn the loss of Wilno, one of their country's great cultural and literary centres. Poland's two great poets studied there: Adam Mickiewicz nearly two centuries ago, and in the pre-war years Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel prizewinner. Yet both men saw their Lithuanian and Polish identities as complementary, not clashing.
For Russians, Vilna had harsher echoes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky stayed there briefly, detesting the subversive pro-Polish sentiment of what was the third-largest city in the tsarist empire. Earlier it was centre stage in Napoleon's disastrous invasion of 1812. Mr Briedis neatly sums up the city's appearance in Tolstoy's "War and Peace". "A crossing through Vilna was like a passage of honour: to the east...lay Russia — a familiar land offering spiritual comfort and self-respect; to the west — Europe — a foreign territory prompting national self-doubt and embarrassment."
In any of the dozen possible renderings of the city's name, its roots evoke mystery. Wilda, its old German label, comes from the word wild. In Lithuanian come hints of the words for devil (velnias), the departed (velionis) and ghost (vele). That ambiguity is fitting. In its 700-odd years of recorded history, the city has been both capital city and provincial backwater. Outsiders have been struck by its filthy streets and shameless women, and also by its glorious architecture and heights of scholarship. Pilgrims flock to the Gates of Dawn, its most holy Catholic shrine. It has been the epitome of tolerance and a crucible of the Holocaust.
Russia is planning to build a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves.
This is causing widespread alarm among environmentalists, reports The Guardian. prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year.
An agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February.
The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, Russia's largest oil firm.
The building of the nuclear power stations would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas.
The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years.
In addition, designers are known to have developed submarine nuclear-powered drilling rigs that could allow eight wells to be drilled at a time.
Bellona, a leading Scandinavian environmental watchdog group, yesterday condemned the idea of using nuclear power to open the Arctic to oil, gas and mineral production, terming it as a highly risky proposition.
Environmentalists also fear that if additional radioactive waste is produced, it will be dumped into the sea.
Russia has a long record of polluting the Arctic with radioactive waste.
Countries including Britain have had to offer Russia billions of dollars to decommission more than 160 nuclear submarines, but at least 12 nuclear reactors have been dumped, along with more than 5,000 containers of solid and liquid nuclear waste, on the northern coast and on the island of Novaya Zemlya.
The US Geological Survey believes the Arctic holds up to 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves, leading some experts to call the region the next Saudi Arabia.
The technological exploitation of the region is next to impossible due to sea ice, strong winds and temperatures that can dip to below -50C.
Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the US have all claimed large areas of the Arctic in the past five years. But many countries bordering the Arctic see climate change as the chance to exploit areas that were once inaccessible and to open trade routes between the Pacific and Atlantic.