Posted on 10/20/2005 6:18:16 AM PDT by Pokey78
Reader Jack Fulmer sent me the following item, which appeared a century ago — 13 September 1905 — in the Paris edition of the New York Herald:
Holy War WagedPlus ça change, eh? Last week Islamists killed a big bunch of people in Nalchik, the capital of the hitherto more-or-less safe-ish Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. True, in our more sensitive age the Herald Tribune’s current owners, the New York Times, would never dream of headlining such a report ‘Holy War Waged’, though the Muslim insurgents are fighting for a pan-Caucasian Islamic republic from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
St. Petersburg: The districts of Zangezur and Jebrail are swarming with Tartar bands under the leadership of chiefs, and in some cases accompanied by Tartar police officials. Green banners are carried and a ‘Holy War’ is being proclaimed. All Armenians, without distinction of sex or age are being massacred. Many thousand Tartar horsemen have crossed the Perso-Russian frontier and joined the insurgents. Horrible scenes attended the destruction of the village of Minkind. Three hundred Armenians were massacred and mutilated. The children were thrown to the dogs and the few survivors were forced to embrace Islamism.
And in the long run it’s hard to see why they won’t get it, the only question being whether it’s still worth getting. Moscow has reduced Grozny to rubble, yet is further than ever from solving its Chechen problem. Moreover, the sheer blundering thuggery of the Russian approach has no merits other than affording Moscow some short-term sadistic pleasure as it exacerbates the situation. The allegedly seething ‘Arab street’, which the West’s media doom-mongers have been predicting for four years will rise up in fury against the Anglo-American infidels, remains as seething as a cul-de-sac in Pinner on a Wednesday afternoon. But the Russian Federation’s Muslim street is real, and on the boil.
Remember the months before 9/11? The new US President had his first meeting with the Russian President. ‘I looked the man in the eye and found him very straightforward and trustworthy,’ George W. Bush said after two hours with Vladimir Putin. ‘I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ I’m all for speaking softly and carrying a big stick, but that’s way too soft; it’s candlelight-dinner-with-the-glow-reflecting-in-the-wine-glass-just-before-you-ask-her-to-dance-to-‘Moonlight-Becomes-You’ soft. Even at the time, many of us felt like yelling at Bush: Get a grip on yourself, man! Lay off the homoerotic stuff about soulmates! This is a KGB apparatchik you’re making eyes at.
But Putin was broadly supportive — or at least not actively non-supportive — on Afghanistan (a very particular case) and Nato expansion (a fait accompli), and some experts started calling Vlad the most Westernised Russian strongman since Peter the Great and cooing about a Russo-American alliance that would be one of the cornerstones of the post-Cold War world.
It’s not like that today. From China to Central Asia to Ukraine, from its covert efforts to maintain Saddam in power to its more or less unashamed patronage of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Moscow has been at odds with Washington over every key geopolitical issue, and a few non-key ones, too, culminating in Putin’s tirade to Bush that America was flooding Russia with sub-standard chicken drumsticks and keeping the best ones for herself. It was a poultry complaint but indicative of a retreat into old-school Kremlin paranoia. Putin was sending America’s chickens home to roost. I wonder if Bush took a second look into the soulful depths of Vladimir’s eyes and decided he wasn’t quite so finger-lickin’ good after all.
Russia’s export of ideology was the decisive factor in the history of the last century. It seems to me entirely possible that the implosion of Russia could be the decisive factor in this new century. As Iran’s nuke programme suggests, in many of the geopolitical challenges to America there’s usually a Russian component somewhere in the background.
In fairness to Putin, even if he was ‘very straightforward and trustworthy’, he’s in a wretched position. Think of the feet of clay of Western European politicians unwilling to show leadership on the Continent’s moribund economy and deathbed demography. Russia has all the EU’s problems to the nth degree, and then some. ‘Post-imperial decline’ is manageable; a nation of psychotic lemmings isn’t. As I’ve noted before in this space, Russia is literally dying. From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, it will be down to below 130 million by 2015 and thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century, a third of what it was at the fall of the Soviet Union. It needn’t decline at a consistent rate, of course. But I’d say it’s more likely to be even lower than 50 million than it is to be over 100 million. The longer Russia goes without arresting the death spiral, the harder it is to pull out of it, and when it comes to the future most Russian women are voting with their foetus: 70 per cent of pregnancies are aborted.
A smaller population needn’t necessarily be a problem, and especially not for a state with too much of the citizenry on the payroll. But Russia is facing simultaneously a massive ongoing drain of wealth out of the system. Whether or not Dominic Midgley was correct the other day in his assertion that the émigré oligarchs prefer London to America, I cannot say. But I notice my own peripheral backwater of Montreal has also filled up with Russkies whose impressive riches have been acquired recently and swiftly. It doesn’t help the grim demographic scenario if your economic base is also being systematically eaten away.
Add to that the unprecedented strains on a ramshackle public health system. Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world. From virtually no official Aids cases at the time Putin took office, in the last five years more Russians have tested positive than in the previous 20 for America. The virus is said to have infected at least 1 per cent of the population, the figure the World Health Organisation considers the tipping point for a sub-Saharan-sized epidemic. So at a time when Russian men already have a life expectancy in the mid-50s — lower than in Bangladesh — they’re about to see Aids cut them down from the other end, killing young men and women of childbearing age, and with them any hope of societal regeneration. By 2010, Aids will be killing between a quarter and three-quarters of a million Russians every year. It will become a nation of babushkas, unable to muster enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy or enough young families to secure its future. True, there are regions that are exceptions to these malign trends, parts of Russia that have healthy fertility rates and low HIV infection. Can you guess which regions they are? They start with a ‘Mu-’ and end with a ‘-slim’.
So the world’s largest country is dying and the only question is how violent its death throes are. Yesterday’s Russia was characterised by Churchill as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Today’s has come unwrapped: it’s a crisis in a disaster inside a catastrophe. Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has Aids, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia’s got the lot: an African-level Aids crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet. Of course, the nuclear materials are all in ‘secure’ facilities — more secure, one hopes, than the secure public buildings in Nalchik that the Islamists took over with such ease last week.
Russia is the bleakest example on the planet of how we worry about all the wrong things. For 40 years the environmentalists have warned us that the jig was up: there are too many people (see Paul Ehrlich’s comic masterpiece of 1970 The Population Bomb) and too few resources — as the Club of Rome warned in its 1972 landmark study The Limits To Growth, the world will run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993. Instead, poor old Russia is awash with resources but fatally short of Russians — and, in the end, warm bodies are the one indispensable resource.
What would you do if you were Putin? What have you got to keep your rotting corpse of a country as some kind of player? You’ve got nuclear know-how — which a lot of ayatollahs and dictators are interested in. You’ve got an empty resource-rich eastern hinterland — which the Chinese are going to wind up with one way or the other. That was the logic, incidentally, behind the sale of Alaska: in the 1850s, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich, the brother of Alexander II, argued that the Russian empire couldn’t hold its North American territory and that one day either Britain or the United States would simply take it, so why not sell it to them first? The same argument applies today to the 2,000 miles of the Russo–Chinese border. Given that even alcoholic Slavs with a life expectancy of 56 will live to see Vladivostok return to its old name of Haishenwei, Moscow might as well flog it to Beijing instead of just having it snaffled out from under.
That’s the danger for America — that most of what Russia has to trade is likely to be damaging to US interests. In its death throes, it could bequeath the world several new Muslim nations, a nuclear Middle East and a stronger China. In theory, America could do a belated follow-up to the Alaska deal and put in a bid for Siberia. But Russia’s calculation is that sooner or later we’ll be back in a bipolar world and that, in almost any scenario, there’s more advantage in being part of the non-American pole. A Sino–Russian strategic partnership has a certain logic to it, and so, in a darker way, does a Russo–Muslim alliance of convenience. In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact crumbling before his eyes, poor old Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block, the Ayatollah Khomeini: ‘I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,’ wrote the pioneer Islamist nutcase. ‘I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.’
In an odd way, that’s what happened everywhere but the Kremlin. As communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Afghanistan and Indonesia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay which would have been ‘Marxist fantasists’ a generation or two back are now Islamists: it’s the ideology du jour. Even the otherwise perplexing enthusiasm of the western Left for the jihad’s misogynist homophobe theocrats is best understood as a latterday variation on the Hitler/Stalin pact. And, despite Gorbachev turning down the offer, it will be Russia’s fate to have large chunks of its turf annexed by the Islamic world.
We are witnessing a remarkable event: the death of a great nation not through war or devastation but through its inability to rouse itself from its own suicidal tendencies. The ‘ideological vacuum’ was mostly filled with a nihilist fatalism. Churchill got it wrong: Russia is a vacuum wrapped in a nullity inside an abyss.
Of cause you are right i like polish cinematograph as well. & there is no two opinions about Lem & Senkevich. But i mean in comparison with russian contribution & the point is that i don't wanna humble our polish neighbours but want to make them realize that Russia is a country with greate european culture which was formed by talanted people (by the way, some of them had polish roots) & deny this true is kind of ignorance.
P.S What a New Year holiday witout Andrey Myagkov & Barbara Brylska...
But if I see that someone questions the heritage and moral responsibility of soviet AND russian crimes by comparing them to little sins of Poles (yes little sins!) my blood starts to boil.===
Little sins? It is from YOUR perspectives they are little.
BTW I wouldn't recall noone sins if not your compatriot Vox_PL hysteria here. I know that "none is without some little sin". SO I try "not to judge hence not to be judged".
But if someone accuses whole nation of russains for soviet deeds I found it wrong.
LOL, so you think that we wanted to be surrounden by hostile powers from west, east, south and north? HAHA, plain stupid. Natually you can't provide any source for your claim whatsoever, cause it don't exist!
Unfortunatelly for you, you can convince nobody except those already convinced - fellow apologists and those who suffer on "polish complex".
Compare death tolls from both sides. And you get what I mean.
Compare the policy towards language and traditions of those poor oppressed nations. Compare the resistance. Compare the terror. Period.
from YOUR perspectives
And from your perspective, Soviet and Russian ones are justified because there was that bloody Poland and Russian angels saved poor oppressed nations like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belorussia, (you also tried with Finnland).
Of cource Ribentrop-Molotov was a reaction to mass graves of poor Czechs in Zaolzie. Yes we got what we deserved.
Yes we sent people to Sybiria, killed people in the forrests, earlier banned national languages and traditions. Earlier we created Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to opress the poor Lithuenians and just out of coincidence our King was Lithuanian. LOL man who you are trying to convince?
The excuse given by every conquering nation, including the Germans. Maybe one day you'll understand that.
January–November 1648. In this period a series of brilliant Cossack victories aroused the whole Ukrainian people and won wide support for Bohdan Khmelnytsky. What was strictly a Cossack rebellion became transformed into a mass movement against the Polish nobility.
On 21 January 1648 Khmelnytsky led a small unit of registered Cossacks and Zaporozhian Cossacks in an attack on the Polish garrison on Bazavluk Lake (on the Dnieper River) and overpowered it. This freed the Zaporozhian Sich from Polish control and won the Zaporozhian Cossacks over to Khmelnytsky's side. He was elected hetman. The subsequent months were spent in preparations for a larger rebellion. Proclamations were sent out urging the Cossacks, peasants, and burghers to rise against the nobility. Khmelnytsky concluded an important treaty with Turkey and the Crimean khan Islam-Girei III, obtaining the aid of a 40,000-strong Tatar army under Tuhai-Bei's leadership.
The Polish government sent an army of 30,000 men in April 1648 to suppress the uprising in Ukraine. The Polish commanders expected little opposition and made a serious tactical blunder by dividing their forces. About 10,000 rebels surrounded the Polish advance guard of 6,000 men, led by S. Potocki, Hetman Mikołaj Potocki's son, at Zhovti Vody and destroyed it on 16 May 1648 (see Battle of Zhovti Vody). Khmelnytsky and the Tatar army met the main Polish force, commanded by Grand Hetman Mikołaj Potocki and Field Hetman Marcin Kalinowski, near Korsun and routed it on 26 May 1648 (see Battle of Korsun). The two Polish commanders were captured by the Tatars.
After these victories fighting between Cossack-peasant detachments and Polish troops flared up throughout Ukraine. In the summer of 1648 the detachment of Colonel Maksym Kryvonis engaged in several bloody battles with the Polish nobility's force, led by Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki. During this fighting the population suffered terrible losses. The Polish troops systematically killed all Cossacks and peasants, including women, children, and the old people who fell into their hands, while the rebels treated the nobles, Catholic clergy, and Jews, many of whom took the side of the Polish nobles, in a similar fashion.
At the end of the summer the Polish government sent another well-equipped army of 32,000 Poles and 8,000 German mercenaries against the Cossacks. The army's command, consisting of A. Koniecpolski, M. Ostroróg, and Prince Władysław-Dominik Zasławski, was weak and inexperienced. Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, who wanted to be the commander in chief of the Polish forces, did not have adequate communications with the advancing Polish army. Confident of victory, the Polish commanders let Bohdan Khmelnytsky assume a very convenient position near Pyliavtsi. During the battle that took place there on 23 September 1648 (see Battle of Pyliavtsi), the rebels, numbering about 80,000, completely crushed the Polish army. Khmelnytsky's army of about 100,000 men marched into Western Ukraine and in early November besieged Lviv. Several Cossack detachments advanced west into territories settled mostly by Poles or Belarusians, and anti-noble and anti-Polish revolts also broke out there. At the request of the Ukrainian burghers Khmelnytsky lifted the siege of Lviv and besieged Zamość, where the remnants of Wiśniowiecki's army had sought refuge. With the election in November of a new Polish king—Jan II Casimir Vasa, whose candidacy was supported by Khmelnytsky—the Ukrainian army returned to the Dnieper region and on 2 January 1649 triumphantly entered Kyiv.
April–August 1649. Bohdan Khmelnytsky decided to separate completely Ukraine from Poland, but although he continued to triumph on the battlefield, he could not overpower the enemy. Mobilizing all the forces of the Polish Commonwealth, Jan II Casimir Vasa began the offensive against Khmelnytsky in April 1649. The main Polish force under the command of the king himself departed from Volhynia, while the Lithuanian army, commanded by the Lithuanian hetman, Prince J. Radziwiłł, marched on Kyiv. On 10 July Khmelnytsky and Islam-Girei III surrounded a part of the king's forces in Zbarazh. When Jan II Casimir Vasa with his army of 25,000 men went to the aid of the besieged troops, Khmelnytsky led a surprise attack on 15 August and encircled the king at Zboriv (see Battle of Zboriv). In the meantime, during June and July, the Lithuanian army almost reached Kyiv, but the Cossack-peasant raids in the rear forced the Lithuanians to retreat. A decisive and final victory over the Poles appeared to be within Khmelnytsky's grasp. But at this critical moment Islam-Girei III, who was bribed by the Poles and disturbed by the rapid growth of the Ukrainian forces, withdrew his troops, which forced Khmelnytsky to negotiate with the Poles. On 28 August 1649 Khmelnytsky concluded the Treaty of Zboriv with the Polish delegation headed by Jerzy Ossoliński. The treaty did not really satisfy either side.
August 1650–September 1651. International factors began to play a more important role in the Ukrainian-Polish conflict. The Cossacks experienced their first defeats and were forced to retreat from the positions they had won previously.
In the summer of 1650 both sides tried to isolate each other by diplomatic means. Polish diplomats warned Moscow about the Cossack threat and succeeded in gaining the support of Vasile Lupu, the hospodar of Moldavia. Bohdan Khmelnytsky strengthened his ties with the Crimean Tatars and the Ottoman Porte. To undermine Polish influence in Moldavia, Khmelnytsky sent a large Cossack-Tatar army there in August 1650 and forced Vasile Lupu to sign a treaty and to promise to give his daughter Roksana Lupu in marriage to Khmelnytsky's son Tymish Khmelnytsky.
While the Cossacks were busy in Moldavia, a Polish army of 50,000 men attacked the Bratslav region on 20 February 1651. A major battle took place in June near the town of Berestechko in Volhynia (see Battle of Berestechko). The Polish army, which included about 20,000 German mercenaries who were veterans of the Thirty Years' War, faced the Ukrainian-Tatar forces. The Cossacks were betrayed once again by the Tatars and were defeated. On 10 July they retreated under difficult conditions to Bila Tserkva. At the beginning of August the Lithuanian army occupied and ravaged Kyiv. In spite of these setbacks Bohdan Khmelnytsky mobilized a force of 50,000 men and on 24–25 September 1651 engaged the enemy in battle near Bila Tserkva. The fighting was fierce but inconclusive. Drained of strength, both sides began negotiations, which led to a treaty unfavorable to Khmelnytsky—the Treaty of Bila Tserkva—on 28 September.
Soon after the signing of the treaty Polish troops and nobles began to return to Ukraine and to restore the former order. Part of the population of Right-Bank Ukraine, threatened by the return of their former oppressors, began to abandon its villages and migrated east to Left-Bank Ukraine and Slobidska Ukraine.
Spring 1652–winter 1653. Although the Cossacks scored several victories against the Poles, signs of fatigue and discouragement appeared, and Bohdan Khmelnytsky began to rely increasingly on foreign help. In 1651–2 he strengthened his ties with the Tatars and the Porte. He focused his attention on Moldavia, hoping that Tymish Khmelnytsky's marriage with Roksana Lupu would solidify the alliance of Ukraine with Moldavia and indirectly with Turkey and the Crimean Khanate. In the spring of 1652 Khmelnytsky sent Tymish with a large Cossack-Tatar army to Moldavia. On 2 June the army encountered a Polish force of 30,000 men at Batih (see Battle of Batih), and Khmelnytsky, who came to his son's aid, scored a brilliant victory. In August 1652 Tymish married Roksana, but in the spring of 1653 the Moldavian boyars, supported by Wallachia and Transylvania, revolted against Vasile Lupu and the Cossacks, and Tymish died defending Suceava (see Battle of Suceava). His death on 15 September 1653 put an end to Khmelnytsky's Moldavian orientation.
In the meantime war again broke out in Ukraine. A large Polish army of 80,000 men invaded Podilia and was encircled at Zhvanets by the combined forces of the Cossacks and Tatars at the beginning of December 1653. At a critical moment the Tatars once again concluded an agreement with the Poles, forcing Bohdan Khmelnytsky to make peace with the Poles on 5 December on the basis of the conditions of the Treaty of Zboriv of 1649. This latest act of Tatar treachery convinced Khmelnytsky to change his foreign policy.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky had maintained diplomatic relations with Muscovy almost from the beginning of the rebellion, but Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich refused to support the uprising, for this would lead to war with Poland. The Polish defeats and the danger of Khmelnytsky's acceptance of the Porte's suzerainty, however, persuaded Moscow to resume negotiations with the hetman in 1653. These negotiations culminated in the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654, according to which Ukraine recognized the protectorate of the Russian tsar while maintaining its complete autonomy and received Russian military and political aid against Poland.
Summer 1654–autumn 1655. In this period the united Ukrainian and Muscovite forces took the offensive against Poland and scored significant victories. Major battles took place in Right-Bank Ukraine, Belarus, and Western Ukraine. In the summer of 1654 the Muscovite army and 20,000 Cossacks, led by Ivan Zolotarenko, invaded Belarus and captured Smolensk. Continuing the campaign in 1655, they took Vilnius in July. During the Belarusian campaigns a tension arose between the allies over the question of which side should control the captured territories—the Zaporozhian Host or Moscow. In the meantime the Poles invaded the Bratslav region in the fall of 1654 and on 20 January 1655 laid siege to Uman. Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Russian commander, Vasilii Sheremetev, led a joint army of 70,000 men against the enemy and fought a hard but inconclusive battle near Okhmativ on 29 January 1655 (see Battle of Okhmativ). In the spring the Ukrainian-Muscovite forces invaded Western Ukraine, and by the end of September they besieged Lviv. In October, however, when Poland's new allies, the Tatars, arrived with reinforcements, the Cossacks and Russians retreated east.
Autumn 1656–summer 1657. Bohdan Khmelnytsky became increasingly disappointed with the Russians, and he began to look for other allies against Poland. In the summer of 1655 the Swedish king, Charles X Gustav, took advantage of Poland's war with the Cossacks and Russians to seize the northern part of Poland and Lithuania. Moscow became perturbed at the growth of Swedish power. Hence, on 24 October 1656 it signed the Vilnius Peace Treaty with Poland and then jointly with Poland declared war on Sweden.
The Ukrainian government, whose representatives were excluded from the negotiations, was very indignant over the peace treaty. Hence, in October 1656, in spite of Russian protests, Bohdan Khmelnytsky entered into a broad coalition with Sweden, Transylvania, Brandenburg, Moldavia, and Wallachia. The coalition had as its purpose the partition of Poland. In joining the coalition, the hetman was interested mainly in capturing the Western Ukrainian territories and uniting them with Ukraine.
The interests of the coalition members diverged, however. Furthermore, Poland obtained diplomatic and military support from Austria, Muscovy, and the Crimea. In spite of this a Ukrainian-Transylvanian army of 30,000 Hungarians and 20,000 Cossacks under the command of Prince György II Rákóczi and Colonel Antin Zhdanovych invaded Poland in January 1657 and occupied Galicia and a large part of Poland, including Cracow and Warsaw. But the oppression of the local population by the Hungarians and the intrigues hatched by Muscovite agents among the Cossacks diminished the army's fighting capacity. Rákóczi was forced to retreat eastward before the Polish offensive. Towards the end of July 1657 he was encircled by the Poles and Tatars at Medzhybizh and was forced to sign the Treaty of Chornyi Ostriv on 22 July. Zhdanovych tried to hold the anti-Polish front but did not succeed. This catastrophe hastened the death of Khmelnytsky, which occurred on 6 August 1657. This marked the end of the Cossack-Polish War.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kubala, L. Szkice historyczne, 6 vols (Lviv 1881–1922)
Petrovs'kyi, M. Vyzvol'na viina ukraïns'koho narodu proty hnitu shliakhets'koï Pol'shchi i pryiednannia Ukraïny do Rosiï (1648–1654) (Kyiv 1940)
Hrushevs'kyi, M. Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy, 8-9 (New York 1954–8)
Kryp'iakevych, I. Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi (Kyiv 1954)
Tys-Krokhmaliuk, Iu. Boï Khmel'nyts'koho (Munich 1954)
Golobutskii, V. Diplomaticheskaia istoriia Osvoboditel'noi voiny ukrainskogo naroda 1648–1654 gg. (Kyiv 1962)
Hrushevsky, M. History of Ukraine-Rus’, vol 8 (Edmonton–Toronto 2002)
O. Subtelny
Does it change a fact that in the times discussed those country were opressed by SU and not freed? DO you think that posting such things can change one's opinion about SU and terrible mass murderers?
Again, you're making another straw man. I have never excused soviet autrocities and any accusation by you or even hinting at that is a bold faced lie.
I posted the article because you guys love to go back in history and damn the Russians for the past thousand years and then relink that into the Soviets. Well, seems that you are not those angels that so many of the Poles here like to present. Invading your neighbors is just as much your history as everyone elses.
Trying to indicate your opponent in a debate is doing something he's not, such as your continous accusations that I excuse the communists is a leftist, under handed and desperate tactic and in the end it will back fire in your face.
So don't even try going down that route, because it will get ugly fast.
High Russian culture actually. I was born and bred in Moscow, but unlike you just happened not to be a chauvinistic caveman of patently Soviet type.
You are not one of them... and hey, kitchen is still waiting for you!
?!
How about the Empire of Chukotka? Or Makhno's Anarchist Republic of Guljai-Pole?
During the time of disturbances any rural district centre could claim independence and take on some loud and tasteless name...
It's good that you still read "free encyclopedia", you do need to get rid of your historical ignorance, but may be it's time to try to think for yourself and stop accepting anything you find on-line at it's face value.
No I don't. But he could be a Martian as well, for what it matters!
Was Disraeli a British politician?
Was Nicolas' II wife the last Russian Czarina or a Dane (or Prussian, or whatever)?
Shandor Petefi is a classic of the Hungarian poetry, what does it matter that he was a Croat by birth?
Was Fonvizin a German or a Russian? Was Pushkin an Abyssinian and Lermontov a Scott?
I stated it clearly before, and this is a common wisdom: the ethnicity and party allegiance of the public figures don't matter - they belong to the nation they're working for (or, as in the case of Dzerzhinsky, they believe they're were working for).
Right, that's why not knowing history you accuse others of lieing and propoganda....sure, not a caveman my arse.
A bigger man would say: well, I was wrong, guess there was a war and I learned something, sorry for attacking your knowledge.
To which I'd respond: no problem.
But that's asking to much, so paddle your way around all you like. But the facts stand: you made an arse of yourself, I schooled you now you're squirming. G'day mate.
Hello? SU == Soviet Union. You do understand that the Soviet Union existed between 1918 and 1991, right? The wars of the 1600s did not involve a philosophy that wasn't to be born for another 200 years. Nor did the wars Poland fought with Lithuania, Belaruss and Ukraine because of the Soviets. Nor was Polish persecution of Orthodox Christians in western Ukraine or western Belaruss because of the SU nor was Poland siding with Hilter in 1937-38 because of the SU.
The SU was evil, period. But those were sins of greed from your own hearts and had nothing to do with the SU.
DO you think that posting such things can change one's opinion about SU and terrible mass murderers?
The only one bringing that up is
You are not one of them... and hey, kitchen is still waiting for you!
High Russian culture my arse. A low bred Myzik and nothing more.
They also belong to the Cause they're working for and the Soviet cause was an anti-nationalist, internationalist cause that killed 20 million RUSSIANS and 16 million other Soviets. Ever heard of the People's Republic of Bavaria? Or will you try and accuse me of making that one up to and get spanked again?
Vanjusha, I've already asked your most politely to cut the crap, but that stuff is obviously too abundant in your brain system, and it overwhelms you. Please receive my condolences then...
You either don't understand the fundamental difference between the illegal over-stayer and American citizen, or don't recognize main principles of belonging to the great American nation. But methinks that to serve your political agenda you're just making yourself a bigger buffoon than you really are .
Is Condi a, say, Angolan, or American?
Is Rudy Juliani American or Italian?
Is Collin Powell American or Jamaican?
Exactly in the same way all those you "don't recognize" for Russians are, and Soviets they're too.
You either don't understand the fundamental difference between the illegal over-stayer and American citizen, or don't recognize main principles of belonging to the great American nation. ==
I understand it. But you don't understand that your definition "live in country and speak language" is too broad which brings in american nation each illegal who sneaked into country and learned english.
Or it make polish composer Shopin a french and for example jb6 here a german.
And which is most funniest it make all arab citizens of Israel as jews!!
Tell it to israelites here that they have to embrace all arabs citizens of Isreael since accroding to you they are fellow jews:)). I appoximately know what they will tell you back:)).
And you of cause trully new zealander?:))
SO for you each neophite who came in to coutry and learn language belongs to flag nation. It is very crazy liberal idea which bring only problems.
Is Condi a, say, Angolan, or American?
Is Rudy Juliani American or Italian?
Is Collin Powell American or Jamaican?
Exactly in the same way all those you "don't recognize" for Russians are, and Soviets they're too.==
Condi, Rudi, Collin they are american since they are american citizens. But ethnically they are angolan, italian, jamaikian or so.
BTW these days you may get american citizenry and still couldn't speak english. So again you definition of ethnicity like "leave in country, speak language" doesn't work in America.
Same way russianry is NOT citizenship but ethnicity. In Russian Empire later and Russian Federation today you can be "Rossyanin" means citizen of Empire but noways it cann't make you a russian.
SO again Stalin, Beria, Molotov was soviet citizens of georgian and jewish ethnicity. Nothing to do with russian ethnicity.
SO who is REAL buffon here we all see it clearly now. Your crazy liberal ideas doubtly will be supported here.
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