As some of you are aware, last week I was traveling in Saint-Petersburg.
I went upon the invitation of a local politics club, but decided I stay several days to explore the city. I haven’t been to SPB since 2002, so this doubled as an opportunity to see how the northern capital has changed in the past 15 years.
City Observations
As with the rest of Russia, the city itself has certainly changed for the better in all the usual respects. More cars, and far newer ones. Roofs appeared much cleaner and shinier from the top of St. Isaac’s Cathedral than in 2002. As in the rest of Russia, virtually everyone who wants Internet access has it (SPB actually has slightly higher Internet penetration than Moscow, for some reason).
That said, whereas I distinctly remember liking Saint-Petersburg more than in the early 2000s, this is no longer the case.
(1) Moscow is and technologically advanced, e.g. it has free WiFi in the metro for several years now, which SPB and other backwards cities like London and San Francisco have yet to adopt.
(2) I greatly prefer acontinental climate to a cold maritime one.
(3) There is a reason Slavophiles have traditionally viewed Moscow as Russia’s “true” capital. The architecture is more authentically Russian. It also tends to be more human-scale. Central Saint-Petersburg is a place of wide imperial avenues, and the grand pomposity of the buildings and palaces, though initially impressive, gets monotonous after a while (in this respect it is actually reminescent of Washington DC).
This is of course a simplification – there are plenty of oppressive open spaces in Moscow too, and SPB has its fair share of quaint courtyards and interesting corners – but as an architectural ensemble Moscow definitely wins out.
(4) The Moscow metro is far more developed, so distances between stations are shorter. This makes Moscow more walkable, especially since SPB is also intersected by a massive river. Finally, although SPB’s bridges are a nice tourist magnet, they can be a pain in the ass for locals who can be cut off from their homes if they don’t leave the bar in time (not helped by the SPB metro closing one hour earlier than the Moscow metro).
(5) Whereas in 2002 Saint-Petersburgers – at least in my limited, one-week tourist experience – were more civil than Muscovites, Muscovites have improved greatly since then, and there is now no longer any difference.
One easy way to test civility is how frequently drivers make way for pedestrians on zebra crossings. 15 years ago in Moscow, it was perhaps 10%, and 25% in SPB. Nowadays I’d estimate it’s about 75% in Moscow, about the same as in the US. In SPB, however, it might be closer to 50%. Still, these are all extremely approximate figures, especially for SPB where I only spent 6 days.
I noticed that many Saint-Petersburgers seem to have a sort of inferiority complex, a lingering resentment towards Moscow at being deprived of their capital. Unfortunately, they have a point. I don’t like it and I think the hyper-centralization that accounts for this is very bad for the country, but the fact of the matter is that least 50% of everything interesting and significant taking place in Russia happens in Moscow.
Moscow is the undisputed political (executive, legislative), economic, and scientific center of Russia.
SPB has some modest share of influence in the political-legislative and cultural sphere (though probably not near as much as Moscow), but otherwise, it is ultimately just the largest gorod-millionnik.
That said, as one person I talked to optimistically pointed out, SPB does have a “marginalistic charm” to it, and she continued, “all the most interesting and disruptive phenomena come from the margins.” If there’s one thing that SPB suffers no shortage of relative to Moscow, it is hipsters.
Politics
I was invited to Saint-Petersburg was to give a lecture to a local right-wing politics club about “HBD and its Role in the Alt Right.”
There is a loosely affiliated network of such clubs through Russia in Moscow, SPB, and the bigger cities. (Vincent Law, whom I had the pleasure of meeting, wrote about the SPB chapter here).
This invitation was perfectly congruent with my wider meta-goal of redpilling Russian nationalists on HBD/IQ-realism, so of course I accepted.
My talk itself covered the basics of HBD/IQ:
- The largely separate evolution of the world’s three great races since they split ~50,000 years ago.
- The validity of psychometrics
- The importance of psychometrics, esp. wrt life outcomes and national differences in GDP per capita and other development metrics
- The direction of causality – exceptions (Communist legacy; oil windfalls) prove the rule!
- Why should this be the case?
- FLynn effect: Will immigrant performance converge?
- Would HBD-informed prescriptions apply to Russia? (e.g. immigration policy, positive eugenics, genetic augmentation of IQ)
I was very impressed by the quality of the responses and questions. Many people were familiar with the material, and asked pointed and relevant questions, such as the technical details of how national IQs are calculated, the extent to which emotional intelligence is important, and why US Jews cleverer than Israelis.
Clearly young Russian nationalists are informed, intelligent, and intellectually curious, having avoided the ideological skeletons of the boomer nationalist mindset in Russia (e.g. Eurasianism, “geopolitics,” Heidegger, extreme Orthodoxy, and various other obscurantisms). This is incredibly encouraging for the future.
Many interesting and spirited discussions about the Alt Right, Milo, Karelian nationalism, censorship, and many other weird and esoteric topics followed.
The politics club is only one element in SPB’s nationalist ecosystem, which even extends to having their “own” bars with discounts for nationalists. I would shill them but I don’t know if they’d appreciate the publicity.
The city also hosts the Black Hundreds publishing group, which specializes in republishing Tsarist-era classics as well as modern nationalists authors. I bought two books from each category.
The first was a 1916 edition of Valentin Kulchitsky’s The Code of Honor of the Russian Officer (widely distributed to Russian officers during WW1 because the accelerated wartime training schedule meant that many of them didn’t have time to fully absorb the culture of the General Staff).
The second was Vitaly Fedorov’s (“Africa”) Notes of a Terrorist (in the good sense of the word) – possibly the best war novel from the Donbass to date (an English translation is available on Amazon).
A third major nationalist organization in SPB is the Russian Imperial Movement.
Its nationalism is explicitly based on religion, not ethnicity – you don’t have to be an ethnic Russian to join, but you do have to be an Orthodox Christian. However, they are also considerably more hardcore than the others, having been directly involved in the events in Donbass through their Imperial Legion batallion.
Tourism
When not delving deeper into extremism and padding my files at Langley and Lubyanka I did the usual touristy stuff.
Transport/Hotels
I traveled to SPB via the Sapsan high speed train, which at 250kph takes about 3.5 hours to get there from Moscow.
$75 normal ticket, $100 business class. The latter has far better conditions, and includes a meal, so it’s worth considering.
Alternatively, you can take the overnight train for $25 or $40 (platskart and kupe, respectively), depending on your desired privacy level.
I stayed at the Katyusha hotel. It’s right next to the Neva River – right past the arch in the photo to the right – and about 200m from the Hermitage. One night there costs a mere $50.
This really brings home the point why PPP-adjustments to GDP per capita are absolutely relevant when gauging living standards. Russian wages might be far lower than in Western Europe, but so are the prices.
Food
In addition to the standard Western fast food chains, such as McDonald’s/KFC, Russia now has many of its own indigenous equivalents. Being a tourist in SPB, unlike in Moscow, I took the opportunity to explore some of them. Teremok is a national chain that features very traditional Russian fare such as common soups (borscht, obroshka, ukha, solyanka, etc.), pelmeni, pancakes, cutlets with buckwheat for prices similar to a MacDonald’s. Even better, though, was the SPB-specific Brynza chain, though it is marginally pricier (right: Cod Leningrad style).
I last had Indian food half a year ago and really wanted to try my favorite national cuisine again. Fortunately, Saint-Petersburg has an excellent Indian restaurant right in the city center called Tandoor. It compares well even with Indian restaurants in London and the Bay Area. A business lunch of yellow daal, spicy vegetables, and butter chicken costs $10. So do most curries (e.g. the vindaloo on the right). The masala chai is also very good. It is run by Russians, though the cooks are Indians.
Note that traditionally Russia traditionally hasn’t had anything spicier than, I dunno… paprika? So you have to order your Indian food very/extremely spicy to get it moderately spicy by British/American standards.
Museums
Finally visited the Kunstkamera. It is by and large a standard ethnographic museum, the most interesting part of the exhibit being the original Petrine collection.
I was very impressed with the Central Naval Museum. It hosts a series of huge halls with thousands of naval paintings, ship models, figureheads, guns, munitions, uniforms, and other naval objects, all exhaustively documented and woven into a comprehensive history of the rise and fall of Russian naval power. Unfortunately, there are few English translations.
Visited the Yusupov Palace. TIL they were Christianized Tatars, descended from one 15th century Khan Yusuf.
Petropavlovsk Fortress includes the cathedral where the Russian Tsars since Peter the Great are buried, including Nicholas II and his family, who were interred there in the 1990s. The Russian Orthodox Church objected to burying a person who abdicated the throne inside the main cathedral, so they repose in an adjoining room to the main hall which can be considered a separate chapel.
There are several other separate museums.
One is the prison with its 69 rooms that held revolutionaries. The tour group leader made a point of how horrific conditions were, though in my experience, that’s part and parcel for historical prison tours everywhere. But to the casual eye the rooms sure look spacious even by the standards of modern US prisons, to say nothing of typical jail conditions a century ago. And the sentences tended to be remarkably lenient considering prisoners were often involved in assassination plots, terrorism, etc., which in many other states would have warranted the death penalty. It was surely much more humane than Guantanamo.
There was a museum of the history of SPB from the early native inhabitants who lived there in their log cabins. One room was famous for having been the scene of the sentencing of the Decembrists, of whom five were put to death. This was cited as an example of Tsarist cruelty and caprice in Soviet history textbooks, but come on… this was ultimately a violent mutiny against the sovereign. The vast majority of the plotters were exiled to Siberia for some period of time, or even pardoned. Even many West European countries at the time would have been far less lenient.
One building that used to host a secret rocketry R&D facility in the early USSR is now a space museum. One thing I was struck by was how many people both interested in and technically capable of developing modern rocket technologies there were in the late Russian Empire (starting with Tsiolkovsky, the concept’s father). It seems inevitable to me that there would have been a strong Russian missile and space program regardless of whether the USSR had appeared or not.
I visited the Hermitage. I have been there before, but it is so vast you need to spend a few days to properly see all of it anyway. My favorite room there in the original palace section was Nicholas II’s library. Most of the Winter Palace was for all intents and purposes a “museum,” even when it was still the living quarters of the imperial family (the status signalling problem really reached absurd proportions in the Russian Empire, as in ancien regime France). The library looks like a place where you could actually sit down and get some work or reading done over a glass of red wine.
Popov’s Central Museum of Communications is one of the oldest science and technology museums in the world. Amongst other exhibits, it hosts Alexander Popov’s original radio set. He actually made his revolutionary discoveries slightly earlier than Guglielmo Marconi, but the Italian became known as the inventor of radio in the West because of his greater interest in and success at commercializing it.
I also passed by the Chubais Museum of the Implementation of Democracy in Modern Russia (what a mouthful, even in Russian). As Lazy Glossophiliac commented, “Should have been housed in a 90s-style kiosk store with lots of gaudy advertising all over it.” You had to make an appointment to enter the museum, which I suppose says something about its popularity.
I couldn’t be bothered, having better things to do with my time, such as drinking with the people who will one day kick those squatters out of such a fine building and open a Museum of Autocracy in its stead.
Does Piter have Moo-Moo (Mu-Mu) cafes, or is it only a Moscow thing?
I think it’s a Moscow only chain but I’m not the best person to ask since I haven’t even been to one yet.
What do the Black Hundreds think of the future of democracy in Russia?
“The largely separate evolution of the world’s three great races since they split ~50,000 years ago.”
Isn’t that a bit of an over-simplification? There are huge population groups (e.g. pretty much the entire Indian subcontinent) that don’t fit in that scheme. Also it makes things sound more stable and constant than they apparently were (e.g. it seems modern Europeans are the result of a fusion of several different groups that happened only 4000-10 000 years ago).
I have somewhat nationalist inclinations myself, but I think one should be careful about making grand statements with neat distinctions.
… It’s a simplification to be sure, but it’s the simplification from which consequent exploration must start.
I mean – this is virtually a paraphrase of one of the first paragraphs from the introduction to A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade:
Yes, but Wade is a journalist, not a trained scientist, so his authority is limited. Anyway, my point isn’t that genetics, IQ, ethnicity etc. don’t matter (I certainly believe they do)…but I think one has to be careful how one presents such views. Overly sweeping claims make it easier for one’s opponents to claim that this is all just outdated, racist pseudo-science.
Indians, from untouchable to Jat, are heavily descended from iranian neolithic farmers, who were closely related to the caucasian and anatolian neolithic farmers, with a minority of australoid ancestry. Negritos, Papuans, and Australian Aboriginals are the 4th race
Is it really “a minority”? I thought at least in Southern India it’s more like 50/50. In any case Indians as a major population of mixed origins don’t fit neatly in a “three great races” model.
The main strands of Russian nationalist (as defined here) thinking on this are:
(1) Summon a zemsky sobor, “whose electors will choose the dynasty and Emperor, or opt for another form of governance.” (step 12 in this program)
This was how the Romanovs came to power in 1613 following the Time of Troubles.
(a) Who? At any rate, probably not a Romanov. Little to no support for any of their living descendants.
(b) What form – (i) a Constitutional monarchy, (ii) a strong executive monarch in tandem with an independent Duma, or (iii) a hard autocrat like Nicholas I?
In practice, there are few supporters of (i). If you’re a monarchist in the first place, chances are you don’t want to pussyfoot about it.
There are supporters of (iii), but they are a decided minority.
Most monarchist nationalists are supporters of (ii), and broadly want to carry on from where Russia left off in February 1917.
I would estimate 20-30% of Russian nationalists are monarchists but I haven’t inquired widely on this issue let alone done polls.
(2) That said, it’s safe to say that a majority of Russian nationalists are uninterested in monarchy.
Funnily enough, they are considerably more supportive of democracy than the Alt Right in the West.
This might be on account of two factors.
(a) Grass being greener on the other side of the fence (so Russian nationalists want to copy Western methods, seeing failure in Putinism; while Western NRx and Alt Right want to adopt more autocrat methods, observing the failures of democracy in their countries).
(b) Their belief (and this is tied in with the above) that the Russian people will make better choices than what they see as the bureaucratic-kleptocratic class that governs Russia today.
The Western Alt Right, seeing the 11th Parisian arrondissement that contains the Bataclan theater voting 90%+ for Macron, might have rather less faith in the ability of its own people to make sane political decisions.
Overall I’d estimate 25% monarchy – 60% democracy – 15% Führerprinzip but I might be pretty wrong on these numbers.
If the Duma is independent, doesn’t (ii) equal (i)?
Edit:
Under (1)(b), of course.
Well, sure, but I had one hour to present my ideas, and I wanted to focus on the IQ and economics.
The fine details of human evolution are very important, of course, but I don’t think they are extremely relevant to Russia policy today. 🙂
(1) (i) = UK today
(1) (ii) = Russia 1913 (Wilhelmine Germany, perhaps Qatar & UAE today, etc).
A lot more people seem comfortable in English in SPB than in Moscow. Not just business people but service staff. This may explain internet use. OTOH I have also seen more people ostentatiously dressing in clothing styles to reflect 19th C Russia. And then there are the shops selling peasant smocks for dressing up for Radnovery weekends. Much more of this in my SPB than my materialist Moscow.
I will defend SPB. As an occassional (less so now) resident in one of the bigger provincial agglomerations, SPB is still more than a million city, not just culturally. It is the port with the accompanying businesses. Firms with facilities in Novorossisyk as well still chose SPB for their HQ. It has national institutions. In, say, applied physics, it might claim the edge on Moscow. (looking with an engineer’s eye). It’s not quite Amsterdam, although far bigger but it will take comparison.
Next time find the bar called Hemingway’s behind the National Library. Best House, Dubstep, Trance and dancing girls in SPB. Not the drunken orgies of 90’s Moscow legend but a good night out.
You are right about Indian food. I know the Chef at Paprika in Domodedovo airport. The name tells you everything. Sometimes Russians ask for real Indian spices. They invariably return it complaining there has been a mistake. Russian style food is excellent but spicy it ain’t. Better to explore Caucasian and Central Asian cuisine, although the “lamb” can be a bit tough.
The train is better than planes for Moscow – SPB. No travelling out to an airport and checking in. Pulokovo at SPB is traffic choked miles from the centre with no metro or train. The buses are rough, tough and slow and the metro interchange when you get there is a tough haul with heavy bags. The train turns up in the centre with no modal change. Assume the taxi driver is asking for 6 times the actual fare from the station to the hotel. If you are fit enough to carry bags, take the metro.
Moscow is and technologically advanced, e.g. it has free WiFi in the metro for several years now, which SPB and other backwards cities like London and San Francisco have yet to adopt.
There’s no phone or Internet service of any kind in the tunnels of the NY subway. I think there’s WiFi in the stations, but I’ve never tried it.
Democracy and free speech are a proven, 100% certain road to liberalism. Monarchy and dictatorship are imperfect, but I think they have a better track record.
Modern China has a very interesting system. I think the leadership changes every 10 years. Very impressive. They have no history of this at all, and yet it’s been working fine for several decades. I wonder how long it will last. A leader may come along in the future who’ll refuse to retire after 10 years, maybe try to rule from backstage afterwards.
Chinese succession system was developed to prevent Soviet style experience sitting at the top until one drops dead without leaving successor in place. Succession was major issue for Roman empire and I am confident it was major reason behind what happened both after Stalin and then Brezhnev death. Now I wonder who succeeds Putin. So, it is major issue that should not be left to chance or dermocracy pardon my French.
His name is Jian Zemin. His faction was since purged, though, by Xi Jinping. Hopefully future leaders will withdraw fully to private life after public life, as the system appears to be trying to encourage.
In practice, I think China has roughly returned to the eternal bureaucracy with aristocratic(“princelings”) and meritocratic(gaokao) elements.
One in three is not bad. In total numbers, it sounds like there’s quite a bit of appeal to monarchy, then. I wonder if any of it has appeared in fiction or art?
SPB, at 60°N, lies as far north as southern Alaska.
For most people living that close to the Arctic Circle
would fall in the category of an acquired taste. If you
follow the 60°N parallel around the globe, you can see
at once that it’s extremely underpopulated – e.g., Scandi-
navia, N. Canada or Siberia – and for very good reasons.
How many people can tolerate living with so much
darkness in winter without succumbing to SAD? At least
many Scandinavians can escape to Spain or Greece in the
depths of winter. I suppose Russians can do something similar.
Crimea? Sochi?
A very, very, very unusual sight. In St. Petersburg, the old town is preserved entirely, a single ensemble. Old Moscow destroyed, and instead there is a mishmash of styles, without any ensemble
How do you assess the contribution to culture?
Here (the first that I found online) a list of winners of the award “Aelita” for achievements in science fiction:
2010 — Andrei Lazarchuk for contribution to fiction (St. Petersburg)
2009 — Vladimir Vasiliev for contribution to fiction (-)
2008 — Sviatoslav Loginov for his contribution to the fantasy (Saint Petersburg)
2007 — was not awarded
2006 — Alexander Gromov for his contribution in fiction (Moscow)
2005 — Maria Semenova for her contributions to the fiction (St. Petersburg)
2004 — Vasily Golovachev for contribution to fiction (Moscow)
2003 — Vladimir Savchenko for his contribution in fiction (-)
2002 — Yevgeny Lukin for contribution to fiction (-)
2001 Marina and Sergey Dyachenko for contribution to fiction (-)
2000 — Vadim Shefner for his contribution to the fantasy (Saint Petersburg)
1999 — Sergei Lukyanenko for her contributions to the fiction (Moscow)
1998 — Eugene Kulakowski as the pioneer of a space fighter in Soviet fiction (-)
1997 — Kir Bulychev for his contribution in fiction (Moscow)
As far as I can tell, approximately the same situation is in respect of awards in other fields (theater, music, movies, etc.)
I will add that St. Petersburg has one huge advantage – near to the city are huge forest with rivers and lakes, and long sandy beaches on the coast of Finnish Gulf. For example Kurortny district of St. Petersburg
http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/6717/21959172.5/0_b874e_17d2d057_orig.jpg.
Some of the places where I walk near my home http://s019.radikal.ru/i619/1706/06/6c3cfa27a4e8.jpg, http://savepic.ru/14303616.jpg
okroshka, you surely meant (sorry for nitpiking)
formerly in winter residents of St. Petersburg go for a week in Egypt or Turkey. Those who are richer – in Thailand or UAE
Good stuff.
Quibbling on Popov: I we look at 1895, Popov used the coherer-based radio noise receiver for lightning detection, not for comms (my russian is not good, but this seems to be the thing in the photo: it’s not a “radio set” — it dings when lightning creates radio noise.).
Use of radio noise for communication started in 1896 (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stepanovich_Popov and http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/nu_lectures/lecture6/coherers/coherer.html ). That year, the idea was independently invented: In the same year, the British naval officer Henry B. Jackson had managed to use the coherer for short-distance inter-ship signalling. He was the Navy’s torpedo expert though, so got called to shore by the Admiralty to interview a guy that was a bit of a hustler and was selling stuff that didn’t necessarily fully work: Marconi.
A relevant passage from “Information at Sea – Shipboard Command and Control in the U.S. Navy from Mobile Bay to Okinawa” by Timothy S. Wolters:
Just came across a Moo-Moo Burger joint around Sennaya Square, this morning – is that what you’re looking for?
Thanks, Mr. Karlin, for your restaurant suggestions.
I’m in StP for the next five weeks, attending the “Stars of the White Nights” festival.
I think it is the second most beautiful ciry in Europe, just behind Prague.
I’m now on the lookout for Теремок &/or Брынз.
Only among the Paniya (https://www.google.com/search?q=paniya&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJiN2AmsXUAhUDLyYKHUthAPEQ_AUIBigB&biw=800&bih=382#imgrc=q9_Uu5x_LGbOfM:), does Onge like ancestry even reach 41.5%. Even then, they look nothing like the Onge or Abbos, perhaps because massive divergence had occurred for tens of thousands of years between geographically isolated hunter gathers.
An analogous situation is found in Europe, where WHG is very low due to neolithic incorporation and then subsequent genocide by R1. The highest WHG ancestry is in the high Balts, about 30 in lats and 35 in estonians.
Ok, but the population of the subcontinent before the coming of the Indo-Aryans didn’t just consist of hunter-gatherers? I mean there was agriculture, towns etc. (iirc the Aryans’ myths describe how they conquered the towns and fortresses of the natives), so much higher population density than had been the case for European hunter-gatherers.
I’ll readily admit to being an amateur about those issues though.
How is that “mere”? The hourly rate in Russia for the majority is from $2 to $4. This means one night is from 12 to 25 working hours or in other words roughly 2 or 3 days of work.
Considering the average hourly rate in the USA is $22, the rough formula to know how much something would cost for an American is to convert RUR to USD and then multiply by 5 or 6. So your (their) $50 is like $250-$300 per night in the USA. How are such prices widespread in the US or Western Europe? I believe not much; you surely can find a hotel for a smaller sum.
When you’re speaking about wages and prices in Russia you remind me one of those 1%-ers or 10%-ers who brag about how life is great and everything is cheap and affordable. I understand you were spoiled by CA and sincerely believe that $2000/month is a minimum or mediocre wage, but, please, come down to earth sometimes. People here work their guts out for even $300/month, and $50 is not “mere”.
Fwiw, I think average hourly wage suggested for the US is distorted by very high salaries.
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/confusion-over-median-hourly-wages-5527
Median hourly wages are quite a bit lower, probably below $16 an hour. At any rate, your point about the differences in wage structure is well made.
Still, $50 isn’t much to me. Seems like a nice place to visit.
If you are the Unz Review MOD…I presume 1) you are well aware that someone is using my handle in the comments section…and 2)by virtue of textual fingerprints…Commenter Cornivus is highly likely the culprit who is using my handle and advocating political assasination with my appropriated handle…..YOU WILL TAKE CORRECTIVE ACTION TO CLEAN THIS UP…right?
AK: No, I’m not the “Unz Review MOD,” I am mod only on my own blog.
Commenter Corvinus has been egging on Unz Commenters for months to engage in open political violence….for the life of me…I do not understand why Corvinus has not been banned months ago…
The only and unique War for Blair Mountain…modally speaking….
There should be an under-the-hood-hashing collision between I…the real War for Blair Mountain….and the fake War for Blair Mountain(Corvinus) who is advocating political assasination…
Above comment intended for Anatoly…
For anyone interested and able to read in Russian, “Notes of a Terrorist (in the good sense of the word)” can be found in the original at http://flibusta.website/b/447298/read
It is quite entertaining so far.
No the hunter gatherers were swamped pretty thoroughly from Afghanistan to the Eastern jungle
Baltics, northern Scandinavia Finland were very hard to farm and hard for pastoral Aryans so migration was less. Finland has highest ANE(ancient nortbern Eurasian) heritage corresponding with light hair, though, but less of the Caucasian component so there might have been different migrations.
Aryans were also probably more closely related to WHG too, than farmers to australoids
Well, Jiang contributed to stability both by relinquishing power and by continuing to exercise it behind the scenes. Deng had done the same, and no doubt Xi will do the same. The solidity of CCP structures means these things cannot get out of hand. Mexico under the PRI was less predictable, and Russia unfortunately also lacks certainty around succession issues.
[ belief (and this is tied in with the above) that the Russian people will make better choices than what they see as the bureaucratic-kleptocratic class that governs Russia today.]
That insane belief in itself is sufficient evidence that democracy must never be allowed in Russia.
reminds me … the Finnish word for slave, “orja”, pronounced approx “oryah” comes “From an Indo-Iranian word for Aryan (compare Slav → slave); cognate to Estonian ori, Erzya уре (ure) and Udmurt вар (var).”
says Wikidictionary
So I guess the ancient Finns kept those darkie Aryans as slaves.
You’re right, this is a really good read, thanks for posting. Though I feel like I should buy the book to, you know, support the cause. On the other hand, I’d be happy to read for free any well written accounts from the other side, provided they’re in either Russian or English. Any links, AP?
The same with Russia or anywhere else. But this does not compormise the average if we know what it signifies and how to understand and use it. The rule of thumb is the average is 140% of the median, or another way the median is 70% of the average. Another point of view: the median divides the upper half and the lower half; the average divides the lower 70% and the upper 30%. So you may interpret the average as the ceiling for the majority – most get less.
161.4=22.4 or 220.7=15.4. You see the formula works quite well.
No doubt. I believe in some part the hotel prices in Moscow and SPB are influenced by foreign tourists, so the hotels try to get as much as they can.
Zemsky sobor as well as the American electoral college are outdated concepts from the distant past when, due limited communications, people could not vote directly, especially (in the case of zemsky sobor) when the society was divided by estates (so each estate sent their own delegates and had different power in the decision making). Today we do not need any delegates or electors. People can and should vote directly.
From some point of view the Russian people have already made their choice several times: they choose Putin as an ad hoc monarch. I doubt if Putin had a son, the people would like him, though in Azerbaijan it has worked (and in Syria until some time).
Overall, monarchy needs its proper base – a real aristocracy – which Russia (and most countries to be fair) lacks. Monarchy today, where it still exists, is largely the legacy regime.
Well, when people say they dislike liberalism I always want to ask: don’t you enjoy it? Would you prefer living in Saudi Arabia?
For monarchy maybe yes, since it was the default regime for most of human history and we have little to compare (Ancient Greece and Rome?). Still the monarchies with even aristocrat democracy seem to have been better. For dictatorship in the modern period – are you kidding?
Do you like your life being controlled by some old corrupt senile bureaucrats or their no less corrupt and cunning children? I suppose you must like all the initiatives from the senile Sovoks in the Duma (like internet only with passports or no VPN).
There is a Gödelian self-contradicting statement in there somewhere, but I just can’t put my fingers on it.
autosomally uralic pops are even darker than yamna- they were yellowish- examine Nenets, Khanty, Yakuts, or Nganasan.
They were also closely related to ANE- thats why Finns, Udmurts, etc all have high levels of ANE along with oriental like features
If only Russia had tried democracy twice, under widely different conditions, so there was some independent basis for deciding whether it was a good thing for the country or not!
Finns and Udmurts do not have oriental like features, except in the eyes of those primed to see them before looking.
To clarify- Finns, Mordvins, Mari, Udmurts all are clearly white. But are you saying they have “zero” oriental like features, especially compared to Europeans to the West?
Zero is a big word. Not many things in human life are zero.
No, it has not even tried. Living as “collective Mizulina and Yarovaya” tells you to live is not a very good perspective. You may like it, I don’t and millions of Russians agree with me; and, if I remember you right, you choose to live under democracy in the West and not in Saudi Arabia or North Korea.
No, I am talking about chain which is a greatly updated re-make of Soviet “stolovkas”. Thank you for responding, though. It seems like Moo-Moo is Moscow-only chain.
My “revealed preference” would be to live in an much more autocratic Singapore, but unfortunately, I can’t afford it. So I would say that there are excellent examples of highly functional autocracies.
The notion of exit at present is a bit silly, mobility isn’t really as easy as it is suggested and is trending downward.
[No, it has not even tried.]
Uncontroversially false. It was tried in 1917 and from 1991-1998.
[millions of Russians agree with me]
Many millions fewer than agree with me.
Basic bitch tirades against chinovniki have been the lazy option throughout Russian history. Normally they merely provide a low form of entertainment, but in an evil hour they can do a whole lot of harm.
In the politics club audience, what percentage of the audience was women to men?
Really? How strange – so this “Moo-Moo” Burger place that I came across, yet again, today, on my way back from visiting Kronstadt, exists only in my imagination???
Sadovaya St., 42, St. Petersburg, Russia
Just for historical perspective:
The Russian liberal-conservative tradition (which Russian nationalists tend to respect) is supportive of broad freedoms in general, but only in step – especially those related to democracy – with the degree to which Russians have adapted the maturity and “legal consciousness” (Ilyin) to uphold those freedoms and not to abuse them. As one quote from it goes: “Thank God for the prisons and bayonets, which protect us from the people’s fury!”
Sounds elitist… but 1917 pretty much proved them right. So did 1991-1998, really.
So there is a certain logic to the gradualistic approach, no matter how infuriating it might be to have to suffer the likes of Yarovaya/Mizulina/Pekhtin/etc in the interim.
About 85% men/15% women.
They were also almost all in their 20s or at most 30s.
btw – the last thing I’m looking for in StP is a Hamburger. The first thing I’m looking for is pickled stuff – pickled tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, pickled squash – omg – it doesn’t get any closer to heaven than this – and so cheap!
I never said anything like this nor even implied. I had to go to look for it and as it turned out it is this:
https://www.cafemumu.ru/
You, meanwhile, talk about a specific burger bar on Sadovaya which is not a chain but stand alone restaurant.
https://www.restorating.ru/spb/catalogue/moo-moo/
Now, get this–it ended with me researching the whole thing by myself, LOL! We often (when in Moscow) eat at Moo-Moo chain–inexpensive and delicious. Because next year I need to get to Piter I though I’d ask about Moo-Moo stolovkas there.
“Afrikaner’s” autobiography from the Donbass rebellion is really great, you should advertise it a lot more. It’s great as a war story, full of amazingly weird anecdotes, has lots of insights into the Russia-Donbass relationship. Really fun to read in its mangled English translation, which seems to be done by Fedorov himself.
Fedorov’s prose is hilarious and reminds me a lot of Edward Limonov’s ranting manifestos, he’s the same broken English and sense for absurdist humor. The battlefield descriptions and freakish gallery of characters are absolute gold, and also the fact that Fedorov seems to think the foreign readers are a bunch of idiots. (Describing the Volga in detail, as the “Missisippi river of Russia”)
Also interesting that “Afrikaner” really loathes Putin’s Russia for not doing enough, even blames it for undermining and crippling the Donbass rebellion at the critical stage. Putin seems to be disliked by nationalist Russians in general and the Donbass separatists in particular, which is quite the revelation to your usual Western reader.
There seems to be a cultural division here, at least going by Fedorov’s rants…as a reader, you do get the sense that Novorossiya thinks of itself as a distinct frontier area with its own warrior culture, different from Russia proper, almost the same way the Scots-Irish settlers were the frontline shocktroops of Anglo-Saxondom and thought the English softies couldn’t build the empire without them. Fascinating stuff.
Read it now!
Nenetses, Khantys and Yakuts have very little in common with each other genetically. At most one of them could be a close descendant of original Uralic-speaking people since they’re not close relatives of each other and don’t descend from one common ancestor population. (Besides, Yakuts are Turkic…) But there’s no particular reason to think that any of them are “autosomatically Uralic” and it’s curious that random internet people somehow know what true original Uralic genes are when specialists can’t even agree on whether proto-Uralic speakers were Caucasoid, Mongoloid or something in between.
You also posted nonsense about Indo-Europeans earlier:
Let’s see what the studies are saying about those pastoral invaders.
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v522/n7555/full/nature14317.html
Figure 3 is a quick summary of their model and the relevant part here is the green bar (Yamnaya) which represents a component that once flooded Europe in a mass migration of pastoral people from the Pontic steppe (while the orange bar is estimated ancestry from the farmer migrations and the blue the hunter-gatherers):
https://www.nature.com/article-assets/npg/nature/journal/v522/n7555/images/nature14317-f3.jpg
So, the demographic replacement by pastoral invaders was the highest in… Scandinavia and the Baltic region. Northern Europeans in general have higher proportions of the steppe pastoralist component than southern Europeans. Why do you make these claims about genetic studies in an authoritative tone when much of the stuff you claim is the exact opposite of what the studies have been saying so far?
Anatoly,
Although it is still a year away, the Confederations Cup kicked off yesterday. What are your thoughts on hosting the World Cup? Will it bring any additional benefits to Russia (i.e. infrastructure improvements, etc.)? What is the average Russian’s thoughts on it?
the 90’s were engineered, though. I mean the chernukha, cynicism, “this country” etc. The 90’s are not an authentic expression of what Russians as a nation are like.
слова из песни не выкинешь, as they say.
OT:
Macron’s party has won an absolute majority in France’s parliamentary elections. Horrible, this year has been a disaster politically so far.
France is over. She was for some time. People deserve government they choose, France made a choice.
You’ll be able to say the same thing about Germany in September. And yes, in the end people get what they deserve for their stupidity and cowardice. But it’s still deeply depressing.
hey – sorry for the confusion.
I mean, what are the chances that there would be a moo-moo burger place in StP, and a moo-moo café chain in Moscow, with no connection between them, and that I would just happen to walk past the former a few short minutes before seeing your post about the latter…
It’s eerie, I tell you. Eerie.
Many millions of Frenchmen did not choose Macron, and globalism, and extinction. They do not deserve the fate that is in store for them.
Agree and I am aware of that and my heart is with REAL French, Germans, Spaniards (if there any left) etc. But if one can blame Macron’s Presidency on quirky political system in France, his party’s overwhelming success is a completely different story. Those millions of French we are talking about are, sadly, still a minority.
You know, if experience of Marten’s family (pure Germans, not a word in Russian), let alone of many Russian Germans coming back home, to Russia, and, even before that, in Catherine The Great times are any indication–large numbers of Germans in Russia are nothing new. Fact is, I do expect the stream of Western Europeans, real refugees, to Russia only increase. Many are already settling in Hungary and Czechia.
Can I get this in print somewhere as opposed to Kindle?
In southern India the “median” person probably is more like 30-40% “Caucasian” and 60-70% “australoid”.
Tamil Brahmins (which is mostly my racial heritage, though with a bit of Anglo descent) are ‘whiter’ than the average in the south, but even they/we are like 50:50.
Race is unquestionably a real and interesting phenomena- different ethnic groups have genetically diverged through geographic separation and have quite varied aesthetic, physical, physiological and behavioural traits. That being said, any realistic way to capture human genetic diversity needs to have a lot more than three divisions. Nicholas Wade is as you say, not a scientist, and doesn’t know what he is talking about.
Iranians and Danes shouldn’t be considered part of the same racial group, neither should Nilotic Kenyans and Bantu-speaking Cameroonians, and neither should Malays and Chinese. And then of course south Indians / Andamanese, Australian Aborigines, the Khoisan, etc.. don’t fit into any of the above groups.
That’s what I thought, thank you for confirming it. Yes, I think a “three races” model (which can be really dumb sometimes…apparently there still are people who think all subsaharan Africans, Australian Aborigines and Austronesian “Negritoes” all belong to some sort of “black race”) just doesn’t capture the complexity of population diversity. And by now that must be obvious to many laymen as well (e.g. people from West and East Africa often look physically distinct in a clearly discernible way)…so I think one should be careful with such over-generalizations (though tbh if one talks about those issues one probably can’t really avoid charges of “racism”).
German Reader: is the German media reacting at all to the Democrats pathetic loss in the GA-06 special election?
So it’s… not really nationalism.
Russia is weird.
I don’t consume much German media anymore, and tbh I hadn’t heard myself of that election in Georgia. But apparently it is covered in the important newspapers at least, e.g. here two articles from the “conservative” FAZ and WELT respectively:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/trumps-praesidentschaft/nachwahl-in-georgia-republikaner-bestehen-stimmungstest-15070101.html
https://www.welt.de/newsticker/news1/article165774272/Republikaner-gewinnen-Nachwahlen-in-zwei-US-Bundesstaaten.html
I don’t think it will be mentioned much on TV (but then I don’t watch that anyway).
OT:
Ukraine leader says Trump voiced strong support for Kiev during talks
I wonder where this is going.
You mean this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_6th_congressional_district_special_election,_2017
1/ Why shall election in district with 700k people get worldwide attention?
2/ 48.1% vs 51.9% is not “pathetic”, this is very good result in formerly solid Republican district.
(66% vs 33% in 2014, 61% vs 38% in 2016)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_6th_congressional_district#2016
This is normal state of affairs in Eastern Europe and Balkans. To be Polish or Croatian, you have to be Catholic. To be Serb, Romanian or Greek, you have to be Orthodox. Any actual belief, knowledge, religious practice or following the commandments is not necessary. It is fine to be Christian who never went to church in his life, as long as never went to the right church.
i.e., the way it should be, in the 21st century. It’s the Westerners (specifically Protestants) who are uptight.
I could not but feel great satisfaction that I was arrived in a country governed by Christians; for though the Muscovites do, in my opinion, but just deserve the name of Christians, yet such they pretend to be, and are very devout in their way. It would certainly occur to any reflecting man who travels the world as I have done, what a blessing it is to be brought into the world where the name of God and a Redeemer is known, adored, and worshipped; and not where the people, given up to strong delusions, worship the devil, and prostrate themselves to monsters, elements, horrid-shaped animals, and monstrous images. Not a town or city we passed through but had their pagodas, their idols, and their temples, and ignorant people worshipping even the works of their own hands. Now we came where, at least, a face of the Christian worship appeared; where the knee was bowed to Jesus: and whether ignorantly or not, yet the Christian religion was owned, and the name of the true God was called upon and adored; and it made my soul rejoice to see it. I saluted the brave Scots merchant with my first acknowledgment of this; and taking him by the hand, I said to him, “Blessed be God, we are once again amongst Christians.” He smiled, and answered, “Do not rejoice too soon, countryman; these Muscovites are but an odd sort of Christians; and but for the name of it you may see very little of the substance for some months further of our journey.”—“Well,” says I, “but still it is better than paganism, and worshipping of devils.”—“Why, I will tell you,” says he; “except the Russian soldiers in the garrisons, and a few of the inhabitants of the cities upon the road, all the rest of this country, for above a thousand miles farther, is inhabited by the worst and most ignorant of pagans.” And so, indeed, we found it.
–Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719
PS the last sentence is about indigenes (hence “garrisons”)
PPS note the multiple use of “ignorant”, so beloved of SJWs. Plus ça change…
Moderate Racists Condemn Finsbury Park Attack
lol, wanted to watch it, not available in my country.
What a wonderful civilization we’ve got in the modern west…truly the pinnacle of freedom and open discourse.
I think at least 80 or 90% of the joke is the idea itself, using Muslim apologies for white supremacism. So – though it’s worth watching once – I won’t watch it again. But from memory I can give you a short summary:
It’s intolerant and unfair to accuse white supremacism or racism in general for those attacks, because I, as a white supremacist, feel so, or at least say so, which means that it definitely is so. The majority of racists are decent law-abiding citizens who would never even think of committing such attacks (or even if they would think about it, they wouldn’t have the courage to actually commit them). Yes, of course, our holy texts in the Daily Stormer speak of “massacring all nonwhites”, but it’s not to be taken literally, because there are other verses in the same text commending peacefulness towards our fellow citizens, so actually massacring nonwhites is basically un-racist. Yes, those other verses are talking about an ethnically cleansed white homeland, but only intolerant people make a big fuss about it, for any normal person they clearly mean that racism is a movement of peace.
Also, while we white supremacists are very peaceful people, the more you talk against all of us or against white supremacy in general, the more some of us will kill nonwhites, so just don’t do that. Instead, you should just affirm how much you like white supremacy. We need more tolerance (of us, racists), and asking how tolerant we are is just intolerant, so don’t ask that.
that’s funny but it’s blatantly plagiarized from Anglin. And his was funnier too.
Anatoly seems to be saying that even extreme right wing Russian nationalists are willing to accept non-ethnic Russians provided that they are Orthodox. I can’t imagine there being a parallel to that in Poland or Greece.
Are you not American? This was a huge deal.
The Democrats need to win 24 seats to take control of the House in 2018. The Republicans hold 23 seats in districts where Hillary beat Trump. In GA-06, Trump only beat Hillary by 1.5 points. Basically GA-06 is exactly the kind of district that the Dems need to win to take back the House.
They had a good candidate, unlimited money, insane levels of enthusiasm and full party support and not only could they not flip the seat, they actually underperformed Hillary’s margin by 2.3%. This bodes horribly for the Dems in 2018 and is the first evidence we have that Trump is probably the favorite to win again in 2020.
Yes, that’s what I sort of expected…the left’s double standard in this regard certainly is a deserving target for satire and mockery. Their reactions to terror attacks by Muslim extremists and by white right-wing extremists are so obviously contradictory…but then that is true for most of their confused thinking.
Anyway, kind of bothers me that I can’t watch this (at least unless I do some manipulation of IP adresses which I don’t really have experience in)…more and more foreign Twitter accounts are also simply blocked in Germany (German right-wingers get theirs deleted)…and of course the Social Democrats, with the connivance of the Christian Democrats, want to push through major “anti-hate speech” legislation before the elections. But yeah, the same people in favour of that then tell us how horribly authoritarian it is in Poland or Hungary…ridiculous.
This is very practical stance in country like Russia. Remember, all of Russia was burned during the revolution and civil war, and half of Russia was burned again in WW2. How many Russians can prove their “pure blood” descent with birth certificates of their ancestors and other authentic documents?
(leaving aside the absurdity of Russian monarchists demanding “pure Russian blood”, while the Romanovs are 100% pure Germans)
Every holiday and every circus show must some day end. Permanent election campaign American style is even sillier than Trotskyite permantent revolution.
I haven’t heard Anglin’s version, do you per chance have a link?
https://www.dailystormer.com/after-white-on-black-murder-in-nyc-its-time-to-rally-around-white-supremacists/
Thanks!
I don’t know why you think it’s so surprising.
People with a strong Orthodox-Christian identity view the community they belong to as that of the Orthodox world. It’s not even a big deal since racial and denominational borders tend to heavily overlap. It’s not exactly like there are many Orthodox Uzbeks burning with the desire to recreate the Russian Empire.
There’s good family records from the late 19th century to today, though with a gap c.1918-1930 (i.e. the period after the Church stopped systemically collecting birth/death/marriage data, and the Soviet authorities had yet to take up the slack).
If your ancestors c. 1910 were purely from the Russian heartlands, then chances are you’re “pure” Russian, since there was little mobility or cross-cultural (outside the aristocracy) marriages before then.
Slightly off topic,
http://www.intellinews.com/macro-adviser-russia-s-asian-pivot-starts-to-pay-off-123788/?source=russia
if Russia is really serious about its pivot eastward, why doesn’t it move its capital east? to Vladivostok for example. Seems like russia is trying to lure Asian investments from China and Japan, but how does it make sense for Asian investors to put money in russia while all of the major cities are located on the other side of the continent?
Honestly it makes sense on the long run to do so since the West has repeatidly demonstrate its willingness to use its economic upper hand aggressively and also since the economic center of gravity is moving further east with every passing day anyway.
Seems like an investment that should have been made rather than Sochi olympics or the FIFA World Cup.
I doubt these “national church” nationalists do not care about which people (and ethnicities) apply for their cause for the sake of the “universal Orthodox faith”.
They must believe those “religious” people applying (considering the case they are not ethnic russians) are also well-off, educated and willing to assimilate in their culture and fight for the cause 100%, since it’s odd how someone who’s not russian suddenly decides to identify with Russian Orthodoxy and russian culture.
It’s different from open borders advocates who would believe flooding their countries with all kind of diversity is the right thing to do, thinking they have the ability and the guts to convert them to the neo-liberal/globalism ideology and make them forget their core culture and religion.
It’s no different from your average ethnic nationalist, although a bit more “liberal” to accept “anyone” as long as it isn’t anyone.
An ethnic group is essentially a widened conception of an extended family, a belief in a shared set of bloodlines. If you look at some 50 % Serb and 50 % Croat town in the Balkans, the odds are that a random Serb and another random Serb will find a common ancestor somewhere in the family tree but a random Croat and a random Serb won’t – Serbs and Croats may be essentially the same if you look at some measure of genetic distance but since religion has been a big barrier to intermarriage their bloodlines over the traceable generations are rather separate sets.
Practical barriers like language and geography end up creating separate ethnic groups because they make intermarriage hard and thus create separated sets of bloodlines. Religion can create that even when there’s no linguistic or geographic separation.
(Of course, Christianity originally did the opposite of separation of bloodlines in Europe as it erased clannish kinship structures by discouraging cousin marriage and encouraging intermarriage. But Christianity split to many factions and they ended up encouraging intermarriage within their particular version of Christianity but not so much between sects.)
Can you speak of the current impression(s) of SPB people in regards to Solzhenitsyn? Do locals still read him?
As our esteemed host said, you are agonizing about nonexistant problem. This Russian monarchist party we are talking about is tiny group with no power and no influence, there are no membership perks and benefits. The people who are joining are doing it from genuine belief. To reject someone who wants to join because of Polish great-grandma or Chukchi great-grandpa would be height of stupidity.
Look at the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party – it was open to all and welcomed in its ranks nobles, bourgeoisie and kulaks. After the revolution, it could afford to be more picky.
That’s a bad misreading of the results. There was another House special election the same day in South Carolina, where the Democrat candidate significantly outperformed Hillary, and actually came closer to winning than the Dems did in GA-06. The lesson from both races is that because Trump has utterly failed to govern as the populist he pretended to be during the campaign, his map-scrambling effect has diminished, and consequently the GOP is now doing better with suburban white voters than it did in 2016 (hence the larger margin in GA-06), but worse with working class white voters (hence the smaller margin in SC-05).
Also, the GOP hasn’t passed its extremely unpopular healthcare bill yet.
OT, but I’m a week into my Ukraine trip and it’s embarrasing that I took some of the pro-Russian stuff about Ukraine as seriously as I did. For example – Lviv’s garbage problem that some pro-Russians have been gleefully mentioning is not at all visible in the city center (meaning, from downtown to the airport; massive piles are gathering somewhere way on the outskirts where few peopl ego). There are bags out around midnight but they are removed early in the morning. Manhattan has far more trash around, than does central Lviv. Rumors are that Poroshenko wants Lviv’s mayor, who has his own presidential ambitions, to look bad. Lviv at this point has reached Krakow-level development, it’s just a normal Western city, albeit cheaper. Few signs of war – one occasionally sees uniformed soldiers and by the opera house there is a booth to donate for ATO veterans, but nothing more. Quite a few hipsters who peacefully coexist with the occasional person openly sporting a neo-Nazi tattoo. Much of the Banderism is tongue-in-cheek, in polls Svoboda is down to the single-digits, the Lviv mayor’s business-friendly moderate Samopomich Party dominates. Zero ethnic diversity in this large, busy and well-developed city.
Civilization solidly extends at least 15 miles out of the city at this point; one sees subdivisions and such and new ones being built, and beyond them some well-developed 1st-world resort-type facilities similar to those one sees outside Moscow. There are a lot of new, lavish Greek Catholic churches everywhere (somewhat analogous to the Orthodox ones sprouting around Moscow). Lviv is no Dubai but the construction and expansion is noticeable.
30 miles out, however, and you’re back to the 90s. Roads full of potholes, people getting around on bicycles or walking between villages. Lots of livestock grazing around the sides of the roads. Villages are still very neat and clean, with little fences and gardens. In atmosphere it’s more anachronistically Amish-like than third world-like. Random shrines with Mary or Jesus. In Ternopil oblast, the middle of nowhere, I gave a ride to some 30 year old villager; he crossed himself whenever we drove past a church (the Russian psychologist Pavlov did the same, 100 years ago – this tradition has been retained in rural Galicia). He said he made about $7 a day as a laborer in a town, with this he supported his wife and children and didn’t have enough money to get a passport made in order to cross the border and work in Poland, so he was stuck.
No industries though. Parasitic part of Ukraine as it always was. You can apply for permanent residence. Cows tenders wanted and night shift garbage removers.
7 months of chaos and turmoil in a situation of the continuing war is not a democratic experience.
A decade of looting and lying by the former Soviet nomenklatura is not a democratic experience.
Overall Russia has known no proper democratic experience for a bare minimum of 50 years, or mere 2 generations, that type of an experience that many countries like the UK or USA have enjoyed for more than a century. The Russian people simply do not know what is real democracy is. They have never felt that. What they call a democracy is not democracy, what they call liberalism is not liberalism. This confusion actually has led many to think that Russians are against democracy and freedom, “nation of slaves”, etc. nonsense. Actually when you repeat that anti-Russian nonsense you’re just playing in the one team with Russophobes.
I think we need Levada or something like that here. If we were asking Russians of the basic points of democracy and liberalism without mentioning the discredited names of these ideologies, we may get a very different picture than that the apologists of totalitarianism and autocracy try to present. Granted, no such apologists would prefer to live under their beloved regime, if given a choice. E.g., you do not live under it (you’ve been shy about where are you from, so let me suggest you in the USA and not in North Korea).
It is just the same with nationalism. When you say “nationalism”, Russian are strongly against; when you ask them things like “Russia for Russians” or “deport immigrants” they suddenly agree.
An example. When an exception proves the rule. Actually we must take into consideration other things about Singapore than its political regime. Like its size, the unique geographical position, its previous history of the English rule, its current position within the global economical and financial framework, etc. These all in fact really make a great difference or rather change pretty everything.
When in the West any racial theories were condemned forever, meanwhile in the USSR physical anthropologists devised elaborate racial classifications with dozens of races, with macro-groups and sub-groups.
http://web-local.rudn.ru/web-local/uem/ido/antrop/5.html#5.4.6
Actually the Soviet civil register (ZAGS) was created in 1918, so you have more chances to track your ancestors with Soviet documents than with some church registers which may have been destroyed. And what is important, in the Soviet documents they registered the ethnic group.
Look at climate maps (particulary the av. temp. in winter) and you may have an idea why.
https://geographyofrussia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/159_1-1024×645.jpg
You do not expect Russians to flock to the areas with -30C…-40C in winter, do you?
I thought it is more a hot-topic in the Ukrainian media than in the Russian one. At least all the information I read about this was from Ukrainian sources. “Pro-Russians”, whomever you may refer them to, are likely just expressing Schadenfreude and not creating the actual hype.
What did you expect, shell holes and ruins? It is not Lviv which is being bombed by the brave Ukrainian Army.
The percentage of votes for “Svoboda” is not an indicator of nationalism. There are no or few non-nationalist parties in Ukraine, every party is practically nationalist (even the “Opposition Bloc”). “Moderate” in the Ukrainian realities means they are not agitating outright for killing Kikes and Moskals.
So actual experiments with democracy must be ruled out of evidence because they didn’t work out well, but fantasies about how good imaginary democracy would be are the most valuable kind of evidence. This sort of stuff is beyond parody.
Based on what one of my relatives with an interest in tracking our family history told me, it’s much easier to do for the 1890-1917 period than for the 1918-25/30 period.
ZAGS existed but coverage seems to have been pretty bad, especially during the Civil War period for understandable reasons, and for a few years afterwards.
I agree with that.
Korrespondent.net (the main Ukrainian resource I follow) has an update about Lvov’s garbage problem about twice a week.
Sure thing I was not talking about moving the Russian population to Siberia. I was talking about cities along the eastern coastline where the climate is tolerable to some extent ( not much worse than Petersburg )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladivostok#Climate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg#Climate
I would say having big cities ( with maritime access) closer to major Asian countries is the only option that russia could possibly have to diversify its economy away from western influence. ( what other option do you think it has? )
So what are you expecting them to be now, in this context? Thankful for Russian irredentism? Say Russia wouldn’t have nukes and would be just a run-of-the-mill larger banana republic and the US and Ukraine woud support separatism in the Caucasus or in other regions (like Tuva). Wouldn’t you justify the entire political spectrum in Russia turning nationaist?
Have you been living in a cave the last thirty years?
That literally means people must move there. But they won’t if not for a good reason like much MUCH better living standards that they may ignore the weather. But the living standards are unlikely to improve while there is small population there. A circle.
No, it’s exactly as twice as colder: the av. Jan temp. -5.5 vs. -12; just 100 km inland and you got -15; in Khabarovsk you get -20. Nobody wants to live in such a climate if not for a good reason. Even in Edmonton, Canada you get only -11.
When some people think that Siberia/Far East is underpopulated and Russian must take some drastic measures to change this, I only have one question to ask: why are they not suggesting to Canadians to move to places such as Newfoundland (just mere -8)? Yet Canadians prefer to be squeezed in the farthest southern corner of Ontario, as well as Americans prefer living on the Coasts and not in sunny Montana or the Dakotas. Russians must be stupid to do the other way, eh? Or are Russians simply frost-resistant?
By the way, it was not Putin or D. Kiselev or other vatniks who said that the situation was so extreme that all the children of Lviv must leave Lviv for some time: it was the mayor of Lviv himself.
You do not understand. It has nothing to do with the Crimea or Donbas. It is just another justification for their innate hatred against Russians. The entire Ukrainian nationalism is built upon (self-)denial and rejecting of Russia and all things Russian (hence the famous formula “Ukraine is not Russia”, or in other words “anti-Russia”) and hatred against Russians (and to a lesser extend against Poles and Jews, but since WWII they are not relevant any more).
The only problem is those were not actual experiments with democracy. On the contrary, it is your wild imagination which allows you to call 1917 a “democratic experiment”. Or the 1990s. But the way, what made you write “1991-1998”? What happened in 1998? And for your information Russia is living under democracy, at least in theory and legally, the law has not changed since 1991 (nor 1998).
Do you consider the democratic system in your country imaginary? I bet you do not. So you say it can only work in your country but not in Russia. Russia must only enjoy totalitarianism and an “iron fist”. Again this just proves you are a Russophobe who thinks Russians are innate slaves who cannot rule themselves but need a master.
By that broad (and not necessarily incorrect) definition of nationalism every major party in Russia is a nationalist party, every American party is a nationalist party, etc. So what, then? I was discussing extreme, fascistic nationalism.
How myopic, but typical.
So what should they do? Declare themselves as Russians and unite with Russia? Deny anything that happened between 1648 and 1991 and even 2014? Forget about Valuev’s decrees just because of some chauvinists believe?
Of course, looking from the other side of the planet with binoculars what is going on here is very, eh… hyperopic. Murrican arrogance is unmatched, it borders on idiocy.
God forbid. Before 2014 many people might have been under such illusions (I was one), but now you must be a real Russophobe thinking that 20m-40m Khokhol imbeciles have anything to do with Russians or that letting 20m-40m of genetically degenerative human material in will not worsen the Russian good genetic. No, now they must not declare, they must prove, must beg before Russians that they are not that bad and of any worth. Otherwise only visas and the wall! Khokhols must be proud of themselves, for on the Russian hierarchy of sympathies Khokhols have fallen below the level of Tajiks and Uzbeks.
But wait, that exactly what the Khokhol separatists have done!
Let us feel sorry for the Khokhol separatists. I only regret that the tsars and the people like Valuev were too soft on the Khokhol separatists. If only they knew what was really going on in their southern provinces and how it would have ended up, they would exterminate every one of the Khokhol separatists, not to mention censuring and destroying Ukrainian books.
I’ve promised myself not to write anything substantial to you, but alright, I’ve just remembered one recent news.
Let us forget for a moment about Lviv. In Kiev its city council has approved a change of the name of an avenue from Vatutin to Shukhevych. Ukrainians may argue that Bandera was really a nice guy, but there is no doubt that Shukhevych was an officer in the SS; even if we imagine that on such a post he dindu nuffing, this fact of his biography (among many others) says much. Nobody could imagine that, for example, the city council of Paris would glorify some Vichyist who served in the SS. Yet 69 Kievite deputies (out of 120) voted for Shukhevych, thus practically declaring they are Nazi sympathizers. No deputy voted against. The other absentee lesser half of the council simply did not care. And Kiev is not even considered the capital of Ukrainian nationalism. This says something about the political climate of the whole country. Yes, it is only a symbolic movement, but symbols mean a lot in politics.