About a year ago, I was conversing with a demographics student at the Higher School of Economics who wants to work at Rosstat after his graduation.
One of the things we discussed stuck out in my mind: “Wouldn’t it be great if there was an Albion’s Seed for Russia?”
That is, an exhaustive ethnographic survey of the various Russias in the spirit of Hackett Fischer’s classic, but informed by modern population genetics.
At this point in time, I have neither the time, nor frankly the expertise, to embark on such a project. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, a fine-grained map must surely be worth even more, and I conveniently have many of them lying around on my hard drive.
So consider this a preliminary sketch of what such a book might look like.
Though one can detect many obvious patterns, I am going to forego commentary so that my readers could look at the data through fresh eyes. Maybe there’ll be some novel observations.
Population
Source: mikhed.ru
Map of Russia adjusted for population.
Source: ?
Map of Russia’s population density.
Source: ?
Prevalence of the Russian language in the Russian Empire as of the 1897 Census.
Source: N. Avdeev
Percentage Russians as of the 2010 Census.
Population Genetics
Source: Balanovsky, Oleg et. al – Two Sources of the Russian Patrilineal Heritage in Their Eurasian Context (2006)
MDS Plot of the Y Chromosomal Variation, Grouping Regional Subpopulations and Averaged Ethnical Populations of Europe
Source: генофонд.рф.
Map of genetic distances from Northern Russians (based on Y-chromosome haplogroups)
Health & Crime
Source: M. Ukolova
Male life expectancy in Russia in 2011.
Source: N. Avdeev
Murder rate in Russia in 2011. (Note: Link contains maps for 2005-2015 period).
Source: temur25 (based on Trezvaya Rossiya data)
Index of alcoholization in Russian regions.
Source: Republic.ru (based on the Atlas of Justice)
Most commonly confiscated drugs in 2014: Brown = amphetamines; Light purple = heroin; Purple = desomorphine; Light green = cannabinoids; Light orange = Opium poppies; Orange = opiates; Dark green = synthetic cannabinoids; Light gray = no data; Dark gray = Other.
Literacy and Human Capital
Source: gramoty.ru
Quantity of birchbark documents found in medieval Russian towns.
Source: ?
Historical map of Russian Empire literacy rates as of the 1897 Census.
Source: Anatoly Karlin
PISA-adjusted IQ of Russian regions according to PISA 2009 and PISA 2015. See full article [in Russian] at Sputnik & Pogrom.
Politics
Source: @welections
Russian Constituent Assembly election, 1917: Brown = Social Revolutionaries; Red = Bolsheviks; Green = Regional SR’s; Yellow = Local parties.
Source: parol6342190
Russian Constituent Assembly election, 1917: Bolshevik share of the vote (total: 22.5%).
Source: Alexander Kireev
“The Red Belt”: Russian Presidential elections of 1996, First round: Blue = Yeltsin; Red = Zyuganov (communists).
Source: Alexander Kireev
Russian Duma elections of 2011, assessment of degree of electoral fraud.
Source: Alexander Kireev
Russian Duma elections of 2011, estimate of ruling party United Russia’s “real” result.
Source: Alexander Kireev
“The Red Belt” survives: Russian Presidential elections of 2012, relative performance of: Red = Zyuganov (communists) vs. Blue = Prokhorov (liberals).
Source: Alexander Kireev
Russian Duma elections of 2016, relative performance of: Red = KPRF (communists) vs. Blue = LDPR (nationalists).
Civil Society
Source: FOM
Percentage of Russians in 2011 saying a government official had requested or expected a bribe from them in the past one or two years.
Source: RIA
Percentage of overdue bank loans in Russian regions as of Jan 1, 2017.
Source: markswebb.ru
Percentage of card money withdrawals that accrues to cash withdrawals.
Society & Culture
Source: Alexander Kireev
Share of unregistered marriages in Russia as per the 2010 Census.
Source: Klüsener, Sebastian – 2015 – Spatial variation in non-marital fertility across Europe in the 20th-21st centuries
Non-marital fertility ratio in 1910.
Source: Alexander Kireev
Share of individual houses in rural areas with a banya/sauna (vs. a bath/shower) as per the 2010 Census.
Source: Alexander Kireev
Share of Russians with knowledge of the English language as per the 2010 Census.
Muscovy Company was Albion seed in Russia.
Exotic Samara.
Military bases seem to attract English speakers!
@Anatoly Karlin: You might be interested in this 1998 article about Russian and U.S. geography:
http://digitalcommons.spu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=works
R1a and R1b have an interesting geographic dichotomy.
Some say that the overwhelming preponderance of R1b in the West can only be explained by selective forces – perhaps something like self-domestication. It seems to in a way be true of male domesticated horses.
Anyway, if that is the case, I hope that R1a is different and less pozzed by nature.
This is probably been pointed out before but you know who Anatoly looks like? He always reminded me of somebody but I could never figure out who.
Assad. They could seriously be brothers. In fact, Anatoly actually looks more middle eastern than Assad.
Anatoly, are you related to Assad?
I can explain the red’est areas on the political maps:
Jews once live’d there.
but now, they’re mostly in Israhell,
New York,
Las Vegas,
Hollywood,
Miami Beach, and
Broward County.
Thrilled to see Crimea included in Russia on the first map — but they forgot Kaliningrad!
It’s interesting that Poles, Ukrainians and half of (non-northern) Russians could be one nation, and the genetic differences within would be less that within German nations (or within current Russian nation, as composed from two different groups, which could be somewhat provocatively called Slavic and non-Slavic subpopulations).
I hope you get the chance to work on the book; but make sure to get some assistance from people like Razib.
Off topic: some time, you ought to visit the towns of the Golden Ring, and give us your observations.
This would be a cool book to write, but I have neither the time nor necessary expertise. Maybe three decades later. 🙂
I have visited most of the Golden Ring towns, if 15 years ago. That said, visiting again and comparing now and then would be an interesting project.
What immediately caught my eye is the misinterpretation of the birchbark documents distribution like Literacy and Human Capital. It’s a known fact that the high number of the birchbark documents in the Novgorod area is due to the geological conditions conducive to birchbark preservation. These numbers as such cannot be easily interpreted as a measure of regional literacy.
Northern Russians can’t be called non-Slavic. Uniparental markers provide little undersranding of their ancestry composition. Autosomal data clears it up. See S.Kozlov’s article in Russian “Russian North population genepool structure”. Most “Northern Russians” are half-Slavic half-Finnic, People in Vologda and Vyatka are 3/4 Slavic, Perm is the only center where Finnic component reaches 2/3. There is literally a handful of pure russified Finnics in a few tiny locations like Mezen and Pinega. Russian North-West proper either has very subtle 5% admix – in Novgorod, or is purely Balto-Slavic – in Pskov.
Well yes, I know that; but if you look at the genetic data, you will also see that while other Russian cluster very closely with Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, SLovaks (so they make one big happy Slavic family), the northern Russians are far away. In fact, I think it’s possible that genetic distance between Moscow and Warsaw is smaller thatn between Moscow and some northern Russian city.
Here is a data calculated by someone else (here: https://www.eupedia.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-32372.html), based on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4558026/figure/pone.0135820.g002/
Genetic distance between Poles and:
0) Poles – 0,0000
1) Belarusians – 0,0000
2) Ukrainians – 0,0002
3) South Russians – 0,0004
4) Czechs – 0,0005
5) Slovaks – 0,0006
6) Central Russians – 0,0010
7) Lithuanians, Latvians – 0,0011
9) Croatians – 0,0013
10) Slovenes – 0,0015
11) Bosnians – 0,0017
12) Serbians – 0,0023
13) Bulgarians – 0,0030
14) Macedonians – 0,0031
15) Montenegrins – 0,0043
16) North Russians – 0,0087
“all populations from Archangelsk province are included in the vast “northern” cluster, along with Vologda Russians, Baltic speakers (Latvians and Lithuanians), Finnic speakers (Komi, Finns, Estonians, pooled group of Karels, Vepsa and Izhors) and Germanic speaking Swedes. Note, that North Russians are more genetically similar to geographically distant Baltic populations rather than to Finnic speakers: the similarity with Baltic populations was revealed for each North Russian population, while degree of similarity with Finnic speakers and set of similar Finnic populations do vary. The genetic similarity among linguistically heterogeneous but geographically united (from Baltic to Pechora) populations might indicate the Paleo-European gene pool persisting in this area, which preceded the split of the Balto-Slavic and Finnic linguistic branches. The mitochondrial DNA data (reflecting the maternal lineages) demonstrates the similarity of the Russian North to the widest set of populations from northern half of Europe. Norwegians and Germans appear to be the most genetically similar to the Russian North.”
Balanovska E.V., Pezhemsky D.V., Romanov A.G., Baranova E.E., Romashkina M.V., Agdzhoyan A.T., Balagansky A.G., Evseeva I.V., Villems R., Balanovsky O.P. The Northern Russian gene pool: Slavs? Finns? Paleo-Europeans?
http://denispezhemsky.ru/file/andpicture-store-1/DEFAULT/com.arttechnics.andpicture.store.core.FileEntry/fileData/8962
I wonder what Hungarian values would be. In Cavalli-Sforza (based on early 1990s results with small samples) Hungarians were closest to Poles* (also quite close to Ukrainians, and to a smaller extent Czechs, Austrians, more our northern and eastern neighbors than the southern ones), I wonder if that held up.
I’d expect Slovaks to be pretty close.
*There must be a genetic basis for the “Polak, Węgier — dwa bratanki” idea.
Not easily, no, but this argument has always seemed strange to me. Why out of all the cities of medieval Russia was Novgorod the only one conductive to birchbark preservation, while zero of the southern cities weren’t to even the minimal degrees seen in other cities?
just give everyone a dna test already and distribute people in a way that promotes human flourishing and discovery.
or, better yet, let people choose where to live BUT associate every locale with a main haplogroup (or whatever the “correct” level of analysis is) and a list of haplogroups sorted in descending order of “compatibility” to that AND THEN physically remove (resettle or incentivize in some other way, such as by a poll tax if you’re from an “incompatible” haplogroup) the top 5%, say, of the most “incompatible” people whose mere presence is holding everyone back (like that babboon experiment in which the most nastiest babboons succumbed to TBC (which in monkeys is acute instead of chronic) from human garbage (because you have to be nasty to go to the dump and fight over garbage) and social conditions in the troupe improved radically.)
Because the average (non hbd) person knows what a haplogroup is or cares.
Urban Russians forget what a Steppe Confederacy is,
So also
This map
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DepIPOFWkAEb-g5.jpg
How it maps with today?
Offtopic – what do you guys make sense of this article by the financial journalist Justin Fox?
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-01/falling-birth-rates-poised-to-boost-certain-economies
If you’re talking about this map,
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/map-genetics-northern-russians.jpg
then no, this isn’t accurate, as this map isn’t actually a map of “genetic distances”. What the person drawing this has done is to take one genetic marker, the Y-chromosome haplogroup (every male has one and only one), taken the frequency of various haplogroups in a population and calculated a score that compares which populations have similar frequencies. You can easily have a striking difference between Y DNA haplogroup frequencies between two populations that are genetically close and you can easily have similar Y DNA frequencies in two very genetically distant populations.
For an example of the latter, if this map extended to northern India, you would see patches where some Indian ethnic groups have Y DNA profiles almost identical to Poles and the map would color Poles as a closer match to Indian Brahmins than to Germans – by Y DNA frequencies they are a closer match but Poles and Germans are certainly closer to each other.
For an example of the former, if you have a population that has absorbed a part of another with different Y chromosomes, a map of this kind will show a radical genetic boundary even if the absorbed population was small and the new hybrid population is still close to the original. This is what’s actually happening here with “North Russians” compared to most other Slavs – northern Russians are still mostly R1a like most Slavs but they have the striking difference of the presence of some N1c (of the subtype that’s common in Finno-Ugric speakers so there’s a good candidate for the source of this admixture).
The reason Balts and Estonians show up as the same color as north Russians is that they’re populations heavy in both R1a and N1c which may or may not imply that they’re Finno-Ugric + Balto-Slavic admixtures. There is actually no big genetic distance gap between Lithuanians and Poles but there is a striking difference that Lithuanians have some N1c while Poles have almost none. However, curiously, the Lithuanian N1c is not the same subtype that’s common in Finno-Ugrians and north Russians so if the maker of the map used more resolution in his classification he’d find another totally different grouping with Lithuanians and Latvians as one group while Estonians would still look like north Russians.
The reason a sharp boundary between Russians and Finns shows up is that Finns almost entirely lack the Y DNA marker R1a so Finns do not have significant Balto-Slavic admixture on the male lines. This is another example of a “sharp but not deep” genetic boundary – Finns are genetically close to northern Russians and Estonians but there is one striking difference in that Finns lack R1a.
In any case, looking at mere Y haplogroups is nothing now that admixture modeling that can look whole blocks of genome is coming out. It’s like trying to figure out what Jupiter is by your naked eye when Galileo has already done observations with a telescope.
noone will be asking;)
I don’t know. Like I said, it doesn’t have to be haplogroups. It could be something like the Big 5. Also, now that I think of it, it doesn’t have to be a single grouping/cohort/whatever but an “optimal” ratio of groupings (N% of 25%-neurotics, K% of 3/4ths-extroverts etc) per locality.
Luckily we can discard this study without even bothering to debunk since we now have far better methods than various cooked up measures of genetic distance (which prove absolutely nothing about ancestry) like admixture analysis. For example, here is a study that models Balto-Slavic populations as admixtures of ancient groups:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135820
Specifically, look at this graph for proportions:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=large&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135820.g003
What you can see here is that their categories of northern and central Russians have a significant Far Eastern (ie Mongoloid) component (the yellow bars) that most closely matches today’s Eastern Siberians like Yakuts and Evenkis. It also matches Finno-Ugric ethnic groups like Finns, Mordvins, Komis, Udmurts etc so they’re a very possible source.
However, it cannot come from Balts for the simple reason that Balts don’t have this significant Mongoloid ancestry.
It also does not come from Tatars, Mongols or any other recent steppe invader. These groups do have the yellow component but they also have another, orange, Mongoloid component that closely matches Han Chinese. The lack of this component in north Russians is evidence that there’s basically no Mongol or Tatar ancestry in northern Russians.
Back before anyone even knew about genetics, linguists already figured out that the extinct Finno-Ugric languages spoken in the zone between the Baltic Sea and the Volga that left enough traces to be classified were most closely related to either Finnish/Estonian or Mordvin. From linguistics we would expect only the comparison to Finns, Estonians and Mordvins to match north Russians and the linguistically more distant Komis, Udmurts to be potentially very different and that’s exactly what we see.
So, to recap, we have an exotic, non-European component in Russians, most heavily in the north, which already throws out of the window any idea that north Russians differ from south Russians because of Baltic admixture – this component cannot come from Balts who don’t even have it. This is the only significant difference in ancestry components between north and south Russians. The only potential source that matches it is Finno-Ugric, though of course it’s also possible that there was some unknown population in the north that was absorbed by Finno-Ugric speakers and Russians.
Of course, ancestry admixture models like this have a lot of assumptions built into them and this is likely to get much more accurate, but the result of the non-European component in Finns, Mordvins and north Russians is just not going to go away. When Finns and Russians share a bunch of genes with Yakuts and not even neighboring Europeans the result is far too striking and obvious.
There is a whole industry of Finnish articles in Finnish trying to deny this Mongoloid component in Finns (not to mention any connection to Russians). The reason they’re not published in English is because they’d get trashed under international scrutiny but there’s an audience here that desperately wants to hear that they don’t have Mongoloid genes or gene links to Russia. I suspect something similar is going on with results published only in Russian…
So if you were a foreigner who wanted to move to Russia, and was willing to learn the language, where would be the best place to live ?
Between Moscow and the Bylorussian border ?
Better to just restore your ancient sib tribal system
Instead of discussing genes, the “esteemed geneticists” here should better concentrate on psychological, mental or cultural traits of different Slavic nations.
I think they will discover that actually there are very little differences regardless of the geographic location or religious denomination of a particular Slavic nation.
In this sense, the only ones who seem to me significantly different from the Slavic stereotypes are Checszs and Slovenes, who seem rather industrious, well organized, rather lees “emotional and irrational” then the others. The rest are pretty much the same to me.
Let me list just a few “bad” psychological traits: melancholic, irrational, undisciplined, unruly, reckless, prone to melodramatic, bizarre and irrational outbursts, arrogant to their kin while curiously feeling servile and inferior to foreigners, especially the ones located to the West.
I mean, I do not see any difference between the public suicide of that unfortunate Croat general accused of war crimes and the most recent “Babchenko” case – both seem typically Slavic: melodramatic, bizarre and totally irrational.
Of course, there must be “good Slavic” traits in abundance, too, otherwise there would not have been almost 300 millions of them.
Just my 2 cents.
It would be interesting to map various nations cultural distance from Russia. What is Russia’s “natural” sphere of influence, and where is it strongest and weakest?
Slavic and Orthodox nations:
Other Orthodox nations:
Other Balto-Slavic nations:
= member of CSTO and/or EEU
Even though Kazakhstan has a large (but shrinking) Russian minority, I wouldn’t include it on the list because it’s a Turkic Muslim nation. Samuel Huntington might have classified Kazakhstan as a “cleft country,” transitioning from Russia’s to Turkey’s cultural and political sphere of influence.
Twelve of the 20 nations in Russia’s sphere are members of NATO or the EU, i.e. part of the Western alliance. Only two of the 20 nations are members of Russia’s competing military and economic blocs (CSTO and the EEU).
And Russia’s chances of expanding its alliances into this sphere are blocked by territorial disputes with Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. The best it can do is block these three nations from joining NATO, but at the cost of turning what should be natural allies into permanent enemies.
This Western blockage forces Russia to seek allies among culturally alien nations in Central Asia and beyond. The long term results of this policy will likely be continued hostility from the West, a rapidly Islamizing population of the RF due to open borders with Central Asia, and a loss of geopolitical status from superpower to tributary state of China.
Meanwhile Poland has created its own alliance in Eastern Europe, the Three Seas Initiative. The TSI is not just an economic bloc, but increasingly an ideological one: nationalist rather than globalist, and traditionalist rather than pozzed. So in what should be Russia’s natural sphere of influence, in terms of culture, politics, economics, security and ideology, Poland is clearly drinking Russia’s milkshake.
What to do? Now that Putin has been reelected to yet another term, we can expect 6 more years of stasis in relations with the West. Putin has simply burned too many bridges with too many nations to be welcomed back into the European fold.
By 2024 NATO and the EU will probably have expanded into the rest of the Western Balkans, and possibly even into Russia’s #1 remaining satrapy, Belarus. Russia, meanwhile, will try to cajole dipshit states like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan into its Eurasian system of alliances. And China will use Russia’s self-imposed isolation to force it into China’s sphere of influence.
In the short term I don’t see any way out of this jam for Russia (assassinate Putin?), though I suppose for Eurasianists like Dugin and the Saker this scenario is a feature, not a bug. But for actual Russian nationalists, the loss of the entire Slavic and Orthodox world, the creeping Islamization of Russia, and Russian subordination to China can only be considered a world-historic disaster.
In another news today, the chocolate previously only available in 72%, has now been released in 78% and 85% edition (the latter percentage, it was noted, exceeding the last election result)…
https://i.imgur.com/1QEq49q.jpg
https://euroradio.fm/sites/default/files/styles/default_image_paragraph/public/paragraphs/image/prezident85.png?itok=s8MWCYTa&c=b846495def3cff81c4f433d79faecf66
https://www.sb.by/upload/iblock/523/5235dac9f36394cdbd3d88298b2ae0e3.jpg
It made sense why they originally had 72% as a compromise.
Everyone -prefers milk chocolate, but it’s not like he could accept releasing 30%, or even 45% bars.
On the other hand, when raise it now to the numbers which are closer to the last election result – 78%, 85%, etc,… you risk associating yourself with a bitter after-taste.
Bangladesh has made progress on a lot of fronts. Following a NGO campaign there, the use of latrines there has reached 99% of the population, compared to 60% in India and deaths from diarrhoea have dropped hugely.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/23/bangladesh-took-global-killer-worlds-diarrhoeal-disease-hospital/
14% of the country lives in extreme poverty compared to 40% in 1991. Having a stable government that does not get involved in stupid wars has paid off for them.
https://qz.com/964114/the-happiest-economic-story-in-the-world-right-now/
significant component – definitely no
“As for the second major migration associated with the Mongol conquest of the medieval Russian principalities, its genetic traces is impossible to detect. This conclusion is mutually confirmed by the analysis of mtDNA and Y-chromosomes, and the data of anthropology. For example, the total frequency of Eastern-Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups in Russian populations of less than 2%: the same frequency is typical for the Western European Nations. For the Y-chromosome typical “Mongolian” marker is haplogroup C (the medium was believed to be Genghis Khan, – this haplogroup is most common among Mongols and related peoples). However, for the Russian population this haplogroup almost completely absent (frequency below 1%, i.e., from the formal standpoint of genetic polymorphism on this basis, the Russian population can be considered fully “genetically European”).”
E. V. Balanovskaya And O. P. Balanovsky. Russian gene pool of the Russian plain. M., 2007. P. 296
The same according to anthropology:
“Thus, the Russian population of Eastern Europe in the anthropological indicators or coincide with the average Western European , or deviate from them, remaining within the limits of variability of the Western European groups…”.
Bunak, V. V., the Origin and ethnic history of the Russian people according to anthropological data. M., 1965
And that is the eternally amusing part: not what ‘we are’, but what we detest and don’t want to be even linked with. This dynamic is present in most eastern European societies, e.g. in Poland it has metastised into absurd levels. Other groups come in occasionally, to be ‘Roma-linked’ or even just a Romanian in Hungary has its own industry. And than there are ‘Albanians’, enough said.
Given the infinite re-combinations and a deep historical timeframe (10-40k ago), a lot of it is very unscientific. It is also odd that the people most obsessed with the ‘we are Vikings, Kelts, or whatever‘ industry usually also share the Western-Atlantic multi-cultural ideology, at least in theory.
The bizarre nature of loving Nigerian or Eritrean re-population of Europe and fanatically denying any link to the Mongols, or the ‘damn’ Russians, doesn’t seem to bother them. Finns have Siberian-Uralic link (and origin), whether that means being ‘polluted’ by the Tatar-Russian plague I will leave to others…And if they were, what exactly could they do about it?
That’s still less deranged than many Hungarian ultranationalist ideas.
By the way liberals often spread the theory that the Hungarian tribes included the Khazars. You guessed it: we wuz Jews n sheet.
Nothing against population genetics, but Albion’s Seed is a masterpiece of cultural history, and more countries should have books written the same way.
Was Arrow Cross into Turanism? By the end of WWII, Himmler was clearly moving away from Hitler’s Nordicism to a sort of proto “Asians are the real master race” ideology.
Why are European nationalists so obsessed with India and the Far East?
Uhm, isn’t that true? The 10 arrows were 7 Magyar tribes and 3 Khazar ones, right?
I know that Hungarian Jews in the interwar years were big on trying to prove that they were actually Khazars and not Israelites so that they were just as Hungarian as the Magyars. It appears that their attempt to convince the Magyars of as much was not very successful.
I read an interesting paper a few years ago that said not only were Ashkenazic Jews not descended from the Khazars, but the Khazars never actually converted to Judaism at all. I remember it being very convincing but I haven’t read it in a while.
I have seen some of the ‘Magyars are related to Sumerians‘ arguments, and there is a minor linguistic link (very minor, and probably derivative). I have an interest in Sumerians, the linguistic evidence points to a layer of Sumerian-Elamite-Indus Valley bronze-age culture that invented a lot of our civilisation and originated many terms that we no longer understand. Their current descendants are among Dravidian languages and some in the Caucasus mountains. Linking Magyars to that is obviously a stretch. What’s wrong with being basically a Uralic Ugro-Finnish group?
Genetically I would argue that an under-appreciated rule of thumb is that people who have lived around each other are usually most related to each other, especially on their mother side. Migrations happened, but they tend to be over-stated.
Only a small elite group among Khazars accepted Judaism, and it is unclear how real it was and how long it lasted. I think when we look back at those centuries we miss how marginal all the later talk of ‘mono-theistic’ religion was to most people. It was just an idea, a story, a ritual.
“Not easily, no, but this argument has always seemed strange to me. Why out of all the cities of medieval Russia was Novgorod the only one conductive to birchbark preservation, while zero of the southern cities weren’t to even the minimal degrees seen in other cities?”
Might it have something to do with Novgorod’s history with Hansa? Might contact with the Baltic/wider Europe have some influence on its importance or ability to store such documentation?
By 2024, the EU may cease to exist even nominally.
Sumerian Hungarian linguistic links are totally, absolutely, 100% refuted and not supported by any known facts.
https://www.nyest.hu/hirek/sumer-magyar-ket-jobarat
(Sorry, you need a web translate service.)
What’s wrong with being basically a Uralic Ugro-Finnish group?
I guess it’s not romantic enough. I cannot claim to be able to follow the thought processes of these people. (Some of them are not even nationalistic at all!)
I think the basic psychology is that there are no obviously similar languages in Europe or anywhere else, but people want to belong. If we cannot have close relatives in the present, we might invent a glorious past for ourselves, which then we wouldn’t have to share with anyone. See, though we don’t have relatives like Russians have Ukrainians, at least we don’t have to quarrel with them over which of us did Rus belong to: we can have Sumerians all for ourselves.
The idea is obviously to convince Hungarian ultranationalists (there are a few strains where it’s accepted, by the way) that Hungarian Jews (the vast majority of whom arrived in the last few centuries, mostly in the half century before the First World War) are just as ethnically Hungarian as anyone else.
They were not very typical of the Hungarian far right in the 1930s. They were more like nationalistic Bolsheviks, wanted to nationalize much of the economy, and provide social services for the masses. They also wanted to get rid of Jews, but simply by facilitating their emigration to Palestine. Their leader, Szálasi, even opposed their deportation to Auschwitz (it’s unclear how much he knew of their eventual fate there), because in his opinion they should’ve instead been doing forced labor for Hungary. But Szálasi was not a very good thinker. He even wrote articles and books, but even his subordinates told him that his writing was unclear and difficult to understand, so either he should refrain from writing or try to articulate more clearly what he thinks.
Most of the Hungarian far right was deeply hostile to the Arrow Cross movement (they chose the name after the swastika or “hooked cross” was banned by the government, and they circumvented it by starting to use the “arrow cross” instead), because they saw them as wolves in sheep’s clothes or communists in nationalist clothes. Though they did have some intelligentsia support, which evaporated after 1942.
Anyway, I think they didn’t write much about Turanism, but probably mostly accepted is, as it was quite mainstream then.
You’re correct, but liberals (not only Jews) still occasionally bring up this line of argument. It’s unclear to me how sincere they are. Obviously, even if their were Jews (Khazar converts) among the Hungarians, they must’ve converted to Christianity in the following centuries. The Hungarian Jews who are now in Hungary mostly arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries, some of them already in the 18th century, very few earlier. (The earlier arrivals often left or were killed during the Turkish wars, because I think most of them lived in the Ottoman areas, and the vast majority of the population there was killed by the wars, especially the War of Liberation, when pestilence and famine accompanied the armies, and much of the area was devastated at least twice. City dwellers, especially merchants etc. were especially targeted by soldiers because of their supposed wealth, and they succumbed to epidemics more easily, too. The Jews were often pogromed on top of that, just to make sure.)
not only were Ashkenazic Jews not descended from the Khazars, but the Khazars never actually converted to Judaism at all
Anyway, you largely answered why I consider the argument just idiotic.
There are a few words that seem to originate in ancient Sumerian whose roots were inherited by Magyar (and Greek, Slavic) language. E.g. ‘Poseidon’ in Greek looks like a straight derivation from ‘sailing God’. Most likely scenario is culture dispersion via trade. What makes it interesting is that southern, Indian Ocean and Mesopotamia, influence reached north to Ural region, Russia, Ukraine with trade 4-5,000 years ago.
Magyar misfortune is that their influence has always been constrained by the difficulty – and otherness – of their language. It is simply not easy to shift native populations to Magyar culture, so the attempt eventually failed in most of the Carpathian basin. And that has left all of us with a choppy, slightly dysfunctional present. I give you one example (often cited in Slovakia): Lajos Kossuth came from a remote valley in the north and his family mostly spoke Slovak. When Kossuth in 1848 became the leader of the Hungarian national movement, his uncles and cousins spoke to him in Slovak. Magyar language was too difficult for most of them, although they had little difficulty with German, Czech or even Latin. That is an under-appreciated factor in the collapse of Austria-Hungary.
To embrace Turanism is strange. If any single factor undermined Magyar development and consolidation, it had to be the 200-year plus Ottoman wars and occupation. As long as Magyar national movement was allied with the Ottomans, it was doomed to fail. I have never understood the appeal, although there are links between Magyars and Turks if one goes far enough back (as there are with Slavs, Scyths, Iranians,…). But genetically, Magyars are almost identical to the surrounding nations – whatever mixing we all underwent in the past was fairly evenly spread. I feel at home when I visit Budapest, but the language…oh, boy…so we communicate mostly in English (that has lately started to happen with Poles too, and that is just weird).
Interested on your thoughts of the relationship of the Volga-Uralics (Chuvash, Mari, Udmurt, etc) to the Russians. At least in the case of the Chuvash they seem to be pretty fully culturally Russian to my Western eyes, even if obviously genetically admixed with Siberians (this plays out interestingly as it tends to lend itself to a white people with in many cases noticeable asiatic features, particularly eye and facial shape). This is particularly true I think in the cities where Russian is the default language as opposed to the countryside where chuvash (and presumably the others in their territories) is spoken more frequently.
On Friday, the Order of “Parental Glory” award ceremony. (Included in the award are not only parents who have many children, but also those who adopt).
that guy looks way too skinny to be Russian. Russians are supposed to be burly and intimidating.
in Novgorod the y birchbark preserved thanks to local characteristics of the soil (high humidity).
In addition, an important role is played by the preservation of Novgorod archaeological layer XI-XIII centuries. In other cities, after numerous reconstructions of different centuries, this layer is often destroyed.
In the southern cities, most likely the birch bark was not used (due to the lack of birches)
“to be burly and intimidating”.
It’s the skinny guys that can put you in an early grave
I also took my education on the land of Rus from Street Fighter.
http://www.fightersgeneration.com/characters/zangief.html
Incidentally, though, every single Russian I know in real life as a friend is the tall and skinny archetype. One is quite into working out and has bulked up a bit, but still is working with the body of an ectomorph which means he’s not going to be “bear-like” no matter how much he tries(short of steriods).
I rather thought I saw a bit of Salman Rushdie, from certain angles
Not sure if you are trying to include in this nonsense.
Sometimes you realize why it makes sense to focus on Victory Day, Sputnik 1, Gagarin.
Historical quiz:
Who has won the Second World War, the first satellite in space, the first man to leave the surface of the planet earth?
Hint- it was not Czechs or Slovenes, it was not even the America or the British, or the Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Swedes. Even the Nigerians did not manage it.
And I didn’t even have to mention about building the Pyramids…. 🙂
Might it have something to do with Novgorod’s history with Hansa? Might contact with the Baltic/wider Europe have some influence on its importance or ability to store such documentation?
The Novgorod’s birchbark documents revealed rather a lack of external influence. Vernacular language the documents are written in doesn’t indicate traces of foreign impact. That’s one of the reasons that undermine the popular beliefs about Norsemen’s role in the ancient Russia.
This last would be France, I think:
Though they did have a tether.