Rosa Luxemburg in her 1918 book on the Russian Revolution:
Ukrainian nationalism in Russia was something quite different from, let us say, Czechish, Polish or Finnish nationalism in that the former was a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition, since the Ukraine never formed a nation or government, was without any national culture, except for the reactionary-romantic poems of Shevschenko. It is exactly as if, one fine day, the people living in the Wasserkante should want to found a new Low-German (Plattdeutsche) nation and government! And this ridiculous pose of a few university professors and students was inflated into a political force by Lenin and his comrades through their doctrinaire agitation concerning the “right of self-determination including etc.”
It is actually rather remarkable how much her critiques echoes that of Russian conservative opponents of the Bolsheviks (even if from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum):
The Bolsheviks are in part responsible for the fact that the military defeat was transformed into the collapse and breakdown of Russia. Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves have, to a great extent, sharpened the objective difficulties of this situation by a slogan which they placed in the foreground of their policies: the so-called right of self-determination of peoples, or – something which was really implicit in this slogan – the disintegration of Russia… One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades struck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. While they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short, for the whole apparatus of the basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the “right of self-determination” inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled.
Incidentally, Lenin himself had extensively critiqued Luxemburg on the nationalities question.
Just goes to further show that Ukrainian nationalists should be laying wreaths on the statues of the man who did more than any other to found their state instead of so ungratefully toppling them.
Almost a century later, Rosa’s words on Ukraine still sound true
(((Ukrainian nationalists))).
Leaving aside the role of (((Victoria Nuland))), daughter of (((Sherwin B. Nuland))) (born (((Shepsel Ber Nudelman)))) and wife of (((Robert Kagan))), in creating this situation in the fictional, made-up “nation” which takes its name from the ukraine, there’s this fascinating article published two years ago in algemeiner titled “Ukraine: Batallion Backed by Jewish Billionaire Sent to Fight Pro-Russian Militias.”
It seems there are only a few places where (((certain people))) support nationalism, and (((Our Greatest Ally))) and the “ukraine” are two of them.
And here it is, the actual picture that’s worth a thousand words on this topic:
http://cdn11.img22.ria.ru/images/102610/10/1026101087.jpg
If Rosa Luxemburg were alive today she’d be a “senior fellow” at some American funded think tank and be making up stories about Putin and Trump. People like her don’t believe any nations are real – apart from one – and so her views on Ukraine are of no value. It is interesting though to learn she and Lenin differed on the best way to destroy what was the Russian Empire. The moral of the story is to avoid ever having to depend on the goodwill, honesty or kindness of people like Luxemburg or Lenin.
I am so frigging sick of those echo brackets, even though I’ve used them myself. I’m starting to find the people trolling these Jewish-American media narcissists as annoying as their “victims”.
No special “insight” of Rosa Luxemburg, it just shows that Luxemburg simply repeated information from some Russians who didn’t know much about Ukraine. Not coincidentally, modern Russians who know little about Ukraine think the same thing. And some Westerners who know little about Russia or Ukraine but who read Russians who know little about Ukraine also think the same thing. It’s a chain of ignorance.
Lenin had lived in Austria-Hungary and somewhat paradoxically appreciated and adopted the conservative Austrian approach to the nationalities question.
More silliness. Lenin recognized the state that preceded him, which had been based on the pre-revolutionary governates with Little Russian/Ukrainian majorities and where pro-Ukrainian parties had won elections prior to Bolshevik rule. Interestingly the current de facto borders in Ukraine’s southwest closely match those of Brest-Litovsk:
http://www.conflicts.rem33.com/images/Ukraine/1918_ukr.jpg
Lenin had lived in Austria-Hungary and somewhat paradoxically appreciated and adopted the conservative Austrian approach to the nationalities question.
No, that was not his motivation. The early Bolsheviks’ motivation was divide and rule. Same as Vicky’s today.
Division preceded Bolshevik rule. You seem to think the Bolsheviks broke up a unitary Russian Empire, rather than invade a state that had already been recognized by a dozen or so countries. Ukraine had been in turmoil and retaining for Ukrainians some form of culturally friendly pseudo-state was helpful in mollifying them while solidifying the security structures and party control within the new acquisition. Previous overt centralizing attempts had ended in revolt and retreat.
USSR’s early nationality policy was bit like that of Austria-Hungary.
You seem to think the Bolsheviks broke up a unitary Russian Empire, rather than invade a state that had already been recognized by a dozen or so countries.
Without looking it up I’m going to guess that Germany, another party that was interested in divide and rule with regard to Russia at that particular moment, was one of those countries. And that Germany’s allies in WWI were some of the others.
@Anatoly Karlin: Please look up the data for the “Little Russian” population in the 1897 Imperial Russian Census.
Also, though, it is worth noting that Imperial Russian politician Pyotr Durnovo was aware as early as February 1914 that “Little Russian separatism” can reach quite unexpected proportions (in favorable circumstances) if Russia will annex Galicia. In this regard, Durnovo appears to have been spot-on!
Here is a map which shows the percentage of people who spoke the “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) language in the Russian Empire back in 1897:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Ukrainian_in_Russian_Empire_1897.png
@Glossy: Who exactly is Vicky? Completely serious question, for the record.
Also, though, I would like to point out that the Bolsheviks’ separate classifications of (Great) Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians appears to be based on Imperial Russia’s separate classifications of Great Russians, “Little Russians,” and “White Russians.”
Indeed, if Russia genuinely wanted to turn Ukrainians into Russians, then it could have tried abandoning the concept of a triune Russian nation and instead tried to create a new, single, “melting-pot” Russian identity for (Great) Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians (and began this process early enough, obviously). After all, you certainly don’t hear people refer to a triune Italian or Polish or Bulgarian nation, now do you?
The official results of that census, which can be seen online, list Great, Little and White as three subsets of the Russian language. Imagine the US government asking census responders what kind of English they spoke – northern, southern or Black. It’s never going to happen, but it wouldn’t be a stupid question. The data would be meaningful.
@AP: “Interestingly the current de facto borders in Ukraine’s southwest closely match those of Brest-Litovsk:”
Yes, which in turn shows that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk wasn’t as bad for Russia as many people believed and still believe.
@Glossy: Don’t you mean “meaningless”?
Also, for your scenario, I would change the “Black” part to “Midwestern” since the U.S. Census Bureau (and Americans in general) consider Black and White to be different races. Now, if the U.S. Census would have asked White Americans to choose between Northern English, Southern English, and Midwestern English (or, better yet, to choose between Northern White, Southern White, and Midwestern White racial/ethnic identities; after all, as far as I know, there was a difference in ethnic identities between Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians), then the crucial question (in regards to this) would probably be this: Why exactly were separate racial/ethnic identities created for Northern Whites, Southern White, and Midwestern Whites? Was this done on a whim by the U.S. Census Bureau and/or by the U.S. government or was this done due to the fact that such separate identities have already existed for centuries?
The Byzantines already made a distinction between Little and Great Russias in the middle ages. Tsar Alexey, Peter the Great’s father, called himself the Tsar of Great, Little and White Russias in the 17th century. It’s an old division, like the division of Germany, France and Italy, especially Italy, into northern and southern parts.
I think that the idea that Great and Little are not two subsets of Russia but separate nations was first put forward sometime in the mid-19th century by a small group of Little Russian intellectuals. I don’t think that the bulk of the Little Russian population was aware of this idea until the early Bolshevik period. The early Bolsheviks picked up this idea and ran with it for their own reasons. They put the entire power of the state behind this idea, the educational system included. That’s really where modern Ukraine comes from.
Vicky is Victoria Nuland.
Also, another important question might be this: Why exactly did Pyotr Durnovo believe as early as February 1914 that “Little Russian separatism” might reach quite unexpected proportions in Ukraine if Russia were to annex Galicia? After all, surely a surviving Tsarist Russia wouldn’t have been very receptive to “Little Russian separatism”; thus, in Durnovo’s view, what exactly would have been so appealing about “Little Russian separatism” that was allegedly only promoted by a few intellectuals?
The Russian census of 1897 had no questions about ethnic identity. This English wiki lists all the questions that were asked:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire_Census
One of the questions was about language. But the results, which I’ve seen, list Great, Little and White as three subsets of the Russian language.
The revolutionaries’ nationalities policy (essentially divide and rule) was worked out a long time before the revolution. This was a part of their wish list. Any thorough discussion of the dangers of revolution would have had to touch on the danger of this part of their wish list being put into action.
“The Byzantines already made a distinction between Little and Great Russias in the middle ages. Tsar Alexey, Peter the Great’s father, called himself the Tsar of Great, Little and White Russias in the 17th century. It’s an old division, like the division of Germany, France and Italy, especially Italy, into northern and southern parts.”
There is one crucial distinction, though–as far as I know, none of these other countries had separate census categories for the various subgroups of their languages. For instance, as far as I know, there were no separate census categories for Low German, Middle German, and High German.
“I think that the idea that Great and Little are not two subsets of Russia but separate nations was first put forward sometime in the mid-19th century by a small group of Little Russian intellectuals. I don’t think that the bulk of the Little Russian population was aware of this idea until the early Bolshevik period. The early Bolsheviks picked up this idea and ran with it for their own reasons. They put the entire power of the state behind this idea, the educational system included. That’s really where modern Ukraine comes from.”
Why exactly did Pyotr Durnovo believe (in February 1914–in his famous memorandum to Russian Tsar Nicholas II) that the Ukrainian (“Little Russian”) population in the Russian Empire could become extremely attracted to “Little Russian separatism” in the event that Russia will annex Galicia from Austria-Hungary, though? After all, Durnovo was presumably thinking of a surviving Imperial Russia when he made this prediction.
You seem to think this memorandum was some kind of holy writ, rather than a grab bag of everything that could possibly go wrong. Some things it warned about did happen, more or less. Others didn’t and never could have.
My understanding was that most of the old Russian principalities had their own separate identities, usually the result of the Varangian/Slav synthesis superimposed over whatever Slav/Finno-Ugric/Turkic/Baltic people had been there. After the Mongol Invasions, most of these were wiped out, save for the northern states descended from the Ilmenians (Novgorod, the Pomors, etc), the western states under Lithuania descended from the original Slavs (Polotsk, Smolensk, Galicia-Volhynia) and the eastern states descended from Finno-Ugrians (Muscovy, Tver, Vladimir-Suzhdal etc). Under Ivan III, Vasili III, and Ivan IV, the eastern states were merged together, and the northern identities were forcibly assimilated and extinguished.
However, the western states didn’t always remain in Moscow’s orbit, and so kept the remains of their old identities, hence modern Belarus and Ukraine. The Poles and Austrians converted the old Galicia-Volhynia to Catholicism, giving the proto-Ukrainians a sense of separateness from the Great Russians. Additionally, the Great Russians were farmers from north of the forest line, while the people in Galicia-Volhynia were more pastoral: the Cossacks. Naturally differences in lifestyle, faith, and history created separate identities.
After the defeat of the last of the Turkic nomads the rest of the Pontic Steppe was able to be settled by a mix of Germans, Jews, and Slavs. Of the Slavs, there was a mix of the Orthodox Russians with heavy Finno-Ugric and Germanic ancestry who came to be the easterners loyal to Moscow; and the Cossacks and true Slavs from Galicia-Volhynia who became the Ukrainians. Under the Tsars the mix was gradually digested into proper Great Russian form, but then Lenin happened.
Is that a fair summary?
@Glossy: “Vicky is Victoria Nuland.”
OK.
Also, though, I think that you are overestimating the impact and role of the U.S. in the Maidan Revolution of 2014. After all, as far as I know, it was Ukrainians themselves that launched the protests against Yanukovych; indeed, as far as I know, the U.S. merely supported these Ukrainians.
“The revolutionaries’ nationalities policy (essentially divide and rule) was worked out a long time before the revolution. This was a part of their wish list. Any thorough discussion of the dangers of revolution would have had to touch on the danger of this part of their wish list being put into action.”
Would Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia have been considered revolutionaries, though? After all, if Tsarist Russia would have somehow survived and would have won World War I, then Ukrainian nationalists from Galicia would have been the ones who would have been promoting Ukrainization (from below–rather than from above like the Bolsheviks did in real life).
Indeed, if you want a German analogy to this, then perhaps this hypothetical scenario can work:
For whatever reason, Austria (or Austria-Hungary) begins promoting a separate Upper German national identity in its German-majority parts in the early 19th century. World War I is completely butterflied away in this scenario (though Germany is still unified by Prussia in the 1860s and 1870s in this scenario). When Austria-Hungary implodes sometime between the 1920s and 1950s in this scenario, Germany annexes rump, German-majority Austria (against the wishes of its inhabitants–who consider themselves to be Upper Germans).
In this scenario, would there have been a high chance that Upper German separatism would have (eventually) become extremely popular among the people of southern Germany (such as among the people of Bavaria)–to the point that it could have eventually posed a threat to the unity of Germany?
If the answer to the question above is Yes, then I am tempted to agree with you that Russians and Ukrainians (outside of Galicia, that is) could have been considered to be one people as late as 1914.
However, at this point in time (in 2016), this exercise appears to be purely academic considering that a separate, unique Ukrainian national identity has already developed (and crystallized and solidified) by now. Personally, though, as an Israeli-American of Jewish, Russian, and Belorussian descent, I certainly don’t shed any tears about this. After all, having separate Russian and Ukrainian states doesn’t appear to be much different from having separate Czech and Slovak states, having separate Bulgarian and Macedonian states, having separate Kazakh and Kyrgyz states, having separate Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian states, having separate Spanish and Portuguese states, et cetera. 🙂
A bizarre alternate history involving an ideology of your own invention is supposed to prove a far-fetched speculation in your beloved Durnovo memorandum is correct? You have an interesting idea of argument.
[a separate, unique Ukrainian national identity has already developed (and crystallized and solidified) by now]
No it has not, outside the former Dual Monarchy territory.
@5371: Fair enough, I suppose. However, it is worth noting that I certainly haven’t heard any Imperial Russian officials complain about the risk of, say, support for Siberian separatism reaching quite unexpected proportions. Likewise, I certainly haven’t heard of any Bolsheviks advocating in favor of the creation of a separate, say, Siberian SSR.
In addition to this, didn’t Ukrainians already demand autonomy from Russia in early or mid-1917?
Also, though, I certainly acknowledge that Russia probably could have successfully eventually Russified most or all Ukrainians if it would have conquered and annexed Galicia in 1812, if it would have implemented universal standardized education in Russia (in its real life 1991 borders), Ukraine, and Belarus afterwards, and if the Bolshevik Revolution would have been completely butterflied away. However, I also don’t see why exactly having separate Russian and Ukrainian states right now is any worse than having separate Czech and Slovak states, having separate Bulgarian and Macedonian states, having separate Kazakh and Kyrgyz states, having separate Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian states, having separate Spanish and Portuguese states, et cetera right now.
Finally, in response to @Anatoly Karlin, even if I agreed with you that the Bolsheviks did most of the work in developing a separate Ukrainian national identity, this certainly doesn’t mean that Ukrainian nationalists can’t or shouldn’t hate the Bolsheviks for conquering Ukraine in 1919 (and thus eliminating Ukraine’s independence for the next several decades), for the famine(s) that the Bolsheviks caused in Ukraine, and for eliminating capitalism in Ukraine (until the post-1991 time period, that is).
@5371: “[a separate, unique Ukrainian national identity has already developed (and crystallized and solidified) by now]”
“Right now” means 2016—not 1914 or 1917. Indeed, do you honestly think that most Ukrainians don’t conquer themselves to be a separate people from Russians in 2016? If so, then I would certainly love to see your evidence in favor of this!
“A bizarre alternate history involving an ideology of your own invention is supposed to prove a far-fetched speculation in your beloved Durnovo memorandum is correct? You have an interesting idea of argument.”
Well, I was trying to find a good analogy for this.
@5371: Indeed, I even wrote “in 2016” in that specific sentence of mine:
“However, at this point in time (in 2016), this exercise appears to be purely academic considering that a separate, unique Ukrainian national identity has already developed (and crystallized and solidified) by now.”
Thus, I certainly don’t know why exactly you think that I was talking about 1914 or even 1917 in that specific sentence of mine.
Also, though, I think that you are overestimating the impact and role of the U.S. in the Maidan Revolution of 2014. After all, as far as I know, it was Ukrainians themselves that launched the protests against Yanukovych; indeed, as far as I know, the U.S. merely supported these Ukrainians.
Vicky was caught on tape picking the Ukraine’s future prime minister. Some days before the 2014 coup an audio tape was released (almost certainly by the Russian government) in which Vicky told Jeffrey Pyett, the US ambassador in the Ukraine, that one Ukrainian opposition figure (Klitschko) was not ready for government, but that another opposition figure (Yatsenyuk) should be in government. Surprise, surprise, a few days later, when the coup finally happened, Yatsenyuk, the guy Vicky wanted, became prime minister.
But that wasn’t actually the most surprising thing. I used the words “surprise, surprise” too early. The next part is probably the most inept PR step I’ve ever seen from a major country.
Instead of denying the tape’s authenticity the US State Department chose to scold Putin for wiretapping Vicky’s conversations. It also said that she apologized to EU officials for saying “F*** the EU” on that tape. By doing this they admitted that the tape was real.
@5371: Also, two additional things:
@AP: “and where pro-Ukrainian parties had won elections prior to Bolshevik rule.”
Can you please provide a source for this part? After all, I am certainly extremely interested and curious about this. 🙂
@Glossy: “Vicky was caught on tape picking the Ukraine’s future prime minister.”
Yes, she certainly was. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the U.S. was responsible for the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. Rather, it simply means that the U.S. considered Ukraine important enough to advise its politicians about who exactly the next Prime Minister of Ukraine should be. Indeed, if you want another example of this, then I think that Bill Clinton’s support of Ehud Barak in the 1999 Israeli Prime Ministerial election might work for this.
Indeed, there certainly is a difference between actually organizing a revolution and offering a suggestion as to who exactly the new Prime Minister of a country should be.
Indeed, while I haven’t seen any evidence that the U.S. and its Western allies actually organized the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, I certainly do have to admit that this Revolution appears to have worked quite wonderfully for the U.S. and its Western allies. 🙂 After all, as a result of this revolution and subsequent events, Russia stripped Ukraine of its most pro-Russian parts. In turn, this demographic change along with the belief of many Ukrainians that Russia is an aggressor has likely ensured that Ukraine will have a pro-Western government for decades to come, if not even longer than that. 🙂
Now, do I support everything that the current Ukrainian government does? Hell No! Indeed, perhaps the U.S. and the West should give some tough love to the current Ukrainian government in regards to things such as corruption and media restrictions. However, I am certainly pleased to see Ukraine firmly establish and anchor itself in the Western orbit. 🙂
This wasn’t the first or the tenth color revolution. Actually, it wasn’t even the first one in the Ukraine. If you think that these conveyer-belt look-alike events aren’t organized by the US government and NGOs that are allied with it, then you either aren’t paying attention or are on board with their goals and methods.
Three things:
Wasn’t the first Ukrainian Color Revolution successful as a result of a Ukrainian Supreme Court ruling?
Are you claiming that the original 2004 Ukrainian elections weren’t rigged?
If you’ve got evidence that the U.S. government actually played the decisive role in the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, then I would certainly love to see it. 🙂 Seriously; after all, I would certainly applaud the U.S. government for doing this if this is indeed the case. 🙂 Indeed, why exactly shouldn’t I (an Israeli-American with Western views) support color revolutions which result in countries firmly establishing and anchoring themselves in the Western orbit for decades to come, if not longer? 🙂 Completely serious question, for the record.
I knew perfectly well you were talking about 2016. Outside the former Hapsburg territory, svidomitism is a matter of conformism only, a mile wide and an inch deep. It would disappear at the first sight of a Russian tank.
Special prize for sancta simplicitas for anyone who thinks there are any honest elections or court decisions in the Ukraine.
I’m actually Jewish too. You’re proving one of my old points. There’s little enthusiasm for the Ukrainian idea among Ukrainians. When I argue against the Maidan, in English or in Russian, 90% of the time I’m arguing against fellow Jews. Most of the world’s Jews have never heard of the Maidan, but most of the people who feel passionately about it are Jews, not Ukrainians.
They all think that neoconnery is good for the Jews. It’s not. It’s bad for everybody. It’s old Trotskyism. Color revolutions are worldwide revolution.
And of course it’s anti-Western. All of the main pro-Western leaders in the modern West – Trump, Marine Le Pen, that Austrian guy who just narrowly lost the presidency – are pro-Putin. He is the main backer of pro-Western forces in the West.
Basically, neoconnery is original, i.e. early, Communism, under another name. Vicky supports the Ukrainian project for the same reasons that Lenin and Trotsky did. The similarity of the language (“revolution”) is not a coincidence. Trust me, that’s not good for the Jews. Or for anybody else.
Oh, and by the way, to pull off this “revolution” of hers Vicky used the help of actual Nazis. Guys with old German runes on their sleeves, many with shaved heads, some with swastikas. And then she gave some of their leaders government posts as a reward. Trust me, I’ve looked into this in detail: there’s nothing in it that’s good for the Jews.
Exactly. Personally, I’d prefer ‘socialism in one country’.
Even the name of Ukraine is a dead giveaway that it was never meant to be an independent country. Ukraine means “Borderland”. Borderland of what? Borderland of Russia of course. It can not be a borderland of itself. There was another “Borderland” that received completely different treatment from the west.
This one was called “Krajina” – notice the resemblance? It means exactly the same in Serbian language – borderland. Krajina was a Serb enclave in Croatia and they never became an independent state supported by the west on account of the Serbs generally being uncooperative with the west’s agendas. If the Ukrainians sat down and really thought about it, the best choice for them is to return to being a borderland of what the once were.
@5371: “I knew perfectly well you were talking about 2016. Outside the former Hapsburg territory, svidomitism is a matter of conformism only, a mile wide and an inch deep. It would disappear at the first sight of a Russian tank.”
While this appears to be true for the late 1940s (based on data in regards to post-World War II anti-Soviet insurgencies in Ukraine), I am skeptical that this is still true today. After all, a large part of the Maidan protests in 2013-2014 occurred in Kiev. Indeed, without such large-scale protests in Kiev, I doubt that Yanukovych would have been overthrown.
“Special prize for sancta simplicitas for anyone who thinks there are any honest elections or court decisions in the Ukraine.”
That’s my point, though–what exactly is wrong with Ukrainians protesting against a rigged election?
@Glossy: “I’m actually Jewish too. You’re proving one of my old points. There’s little enthusiasm for the Ukrainian idea among Ukrainians. When I argue against the Maidan, in English or in Russian, 90% of the time I’m arguing against fellow Jews. Most of the world’s Jews have never heard of the Maidan, but most of the people who feel passionately about it are Jews, not Ukrainians.”
What percentage of the Maidan protesters in 2013-2014 were Jewish? Completely serious question, for the record. After all, they are the ones who made the Maidan Revolution possible in the first place!
“They all think that neoconnery is good for the Jews. It’s not. It’s bad for everybody. It’s old Trotskyism. Color revolutions are worldwide revolution.”
Look–I’m certainly not fond of everything that the neocons advocate. However, I certainly don’t think that it’s fair to compare neocons to Bolsheviks–after all, neocons advocate in favor of democracy and greater Western influence (including using military force to achieve this) while Trotskyists appear to have advocated in favor of the creation of extremely brutal Soviet-like Communist governments worldwide. Indeed, my own family, ancestors, and relatives spent 75 years being stuck in that Communist hellhole known as the Soviet Union and let me say that it would have certainly been much better if Russia (and Ukraine, and Belarus, and Kazakhstan, et cetera) would have completely avoided these 75 years of economic backwardness and brutality.
“And of course it’s anti-Western. All of the main pro-Western leaders in the modern West – Trump, Marine Le Pen, that Austrian guy who just narrowly lost the presidency – are pro-Putin. He is the main backer of pro-Western forces in the West.”
Being nationalists doesn’t necessarily mean being pro-Western, though.
@Glossy: “Basically, neoconnery is original, i.e. early, Communism, under another name. Vicky supports the Ukrainian project for the same reasons that Lenin and Trotsky did. The similarity of the language (“revolution”) is not a coincidence. Trust me, that’s not good for the Jews. Or for anybody else.”
So, did early Communists such as Lenin and Trotsky support things such as democracy and capitalism (for the long-run–not as a temporary measure such as the New Economic Policy appears to have been)?
Indeed, unless there is some information that I don’t know about, I myself appear to be extremely offended by your comparison of early Bolsheviks (who appear to have had no problem using chemical weapons to crush the 1921 Tambov Rebellion or to kill 90% of the Russian population in order to make their revolution succeed) with neocons. 🙁
Also, Yes, I am certainly well-aware of the fact that post-Maidan Ukraine is unfortunately an economic shithole (not that Ukraine’s economy between 1991 and 2013 was anything to boast about, though!). 🙁 Indeed, having the West give some tough love to Ukraine might very well be a good idea. 🙂
“Oh, and by the way, to pull off this “revolution” of hers Vicky used the help of actual Nazis. Guys with old German runes on their sleeves, many with shaved heads, some with swastikas.”
Was it Vicky who actually requested the help of these Nazis, though?
“And then she gave some of their leaders government posts as a reward.”
You mean Oleg Tyagnibok?
“Trust me, I’ve looked into this in detail: there’s nothing in it that’s good for the Jews.”
What about the appointment of a Jew (Volodymyr Groysman) as Ukraine’s new Prime Minister in 2016, though?
@Seamus Padraig: “Exactly. Personally, I’d prefer ‘socialism in one country’.”
How exactly are you defining “socialism” here, though?
@Cyrano: “Even the name of Ukraine is a dead giveaway that it was never meant to be an independent country. Ukraine means “Borderland”. Borderland of what? Borderland of Russia of course. It can not be a borderland of itself. There was another “Borderland” that received completely different treatment from the west.
This one was called “Krajina” – notice the resemblance? It means exactly the same in Serbian language – borderland. Krajina was a Serb enclave in Croatia and they never became an independent state supported by the west on account of the Serbs generally being uncooperative with the west’s agendas. If the Ukrainians sat down and really thought about it, the best choice for them is to return to being a borderland of what the once were.”
So, should Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan likewise become one state? What about Spain and Portugal? Denmark, Norway, and Sweden? Bulgaria and Macedonia? Germany, Austria, and most or all of Switzerland? Romania and most or all of Moldova? Czechia and Slovakia? Thailand and Laos? Canada and the U.S.? Australia and New Zealand?
Indeed, why exactly is Russian-Ukrainian separation any less acceptable than, say, Kazakh and Kyrgyz separation, Spanish and Portuguese separation, Thai and Lao separation, Czech and Slovak separation, Bulgarian and Macedonian separation, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish separation, German, Austrian, and Swizz separation, Romanian and Moldovan separation, Canadian and American separation? Et cetera …
: If Ukrainians actually loved Russia that much in 2013-2014 (to the point of actually wanting to live under Russian rule), then wouldn’t the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine have been much more successful than they actually were in real life? After all, in real life, the pro-Russian separatists didn’t even manage to fully conquer and to retain control of Kharkiv (a city that voted for Yanukovych in 2010, and probably by a very large margin, to boot)!
: “Division preceded Bolshevik rule. You seem to think the Bolsheviks broke up a unitary Russian Empire, rather than invade a state that had already been recognized by a dozen or so countries. Ukraine had been in turmoil and retaining for Ukrainians some form of culturally friendly pseudo-state was helpful in mollifying them while solidifying the security structures and party control within the new acquisition. Previous overt centralizing attempts had ended in revolt and retreat.
USSR’s early nationality policy was bit like that of Austria-Hungary.”
Yes, I think that you are correct in regards to this. Indeed, as far as I know, the Bolsheviks gave nominal autonomy and, in some cases, a nominal right of secession to various non-(Great) Russian peoples in the territory of the former Russian Empire as a(n essentially symbolic, at least from the Bolsheviks’ perspective) concession to these peoples in order to make these peoples more likely to support Bolshevik/Communist rule and worldwide Communist revolution (which Bolsheviks appear to have believed would make ethnic distinctions utterly meaningless, with social class replacing ethnicity as the main dividing factor in society). After all, there certainly is a reason that Communists appear to have adopted this slogan: “Workers of the World, Unite!”
What percentage of the Maidan protesters in 2013-2014 were Jewish?
I don’t know. The people whom the Maidan brought to power were mostly Jewish. Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk, Groysman.
After all, they are the ones who made the Maidan Revolution possible in the first place!
No, the coup was a professional operation with guns, snipers, logistics. The civilians on the square were used as extras.
after all, neocons advocate in favor of democracy
Everyone says he advocates for democracy. The original Bolsheviks said that especially loudly.
Trotskyists appear to have advocated in favor of the creation of extremely brutal Soviet-like Communist governments worldwide
The Kiev junta is a brutal dictatorship. It jails people for whispering about separatism to their neighbors. All the anti-junta journalists have been killed or exiled. They’re looting the country and jailing those who criticize them.
And the neocons ARE descended from Trotskyists intellectually, and in many cases physically. Their movement goes back to original Communism and it has retained its goals and methods – violent oberthrow of power (revolution), violent represseion of dissent, looting.
I don’t know how old you are, but the late Communism that I grew up with is the opposite of what they want. They’ve retained the goals and methods of original Soviet Communism of the 1917- 1935 period, which was the most brutal period. There are several kinds of Communism, some of them completely opposed to each other.
I’ll explain why the neocons say they’re anti-Communist. Trotsky lost a power struggle to Stalin and went into exile in 1927, and most of his allies who remained in the USSR, the Old Bolsheviks, were killed by 1938. After that the USSR turned in a different direction, so the Trotskyist movement opposed to it. Trotsky’s formulation was that Stalin betrayed the revolution.
This movement persevered in exile, and since it was opposed to the USSR for decades, it eventually started calling itself anti-Communist, even though they were the original Communists. It’s only mildly confusing. The world at large associated the Communist label with the USSR, so people who were opposed to the USSR were, in a sense, anti-Communist.
Labels can often be misleading. Mao’s China called itself Communist and modern China where the iPad on which I’m typing this was made also calls itself Communist, but they’re clearly very different things.
As I said before, the neocons’ methods and goals are Old Bolshevik goals. This worldwide revolution that they want is of the same kind that the early Communists dreamed of, starting in the 19th century.
and worldwide Communist revolution (which Bolsheviks appear to have believed would make ethnic distinctions utterly meaningless
Yes, the neocons still promote that stuff. That’s why they’re opposed to nationalist, anti-immigrant movements in Europe, that’s what makes them anti-Western. Because Westerners are, at bottom, a group of related ethnicities. Their gradual replacement with other peoples makes the West less Western. This replacement is literally anti-Western. The people who fight it are pro-Western. And to fight it they have to beleive that ancient ethnic distinctions are indeed very meaningful.
Keep in mind that Glossy is an enthusiastic Stalinist.
You misunderstand the nature of Little Russian. It was its own standardized language, complete with textbooks ready to be used in schools, with a formulated grammar and vocabulary based on the speech used in Ukraine, and not simply as a subset of another language (was Great Russian seen as merely a subset of a language too?). This is the language whose use was limited on orders of the Russian Tsar here:
http://cdn.topwar.ru/uploads/images/2015/692/mequ164.jpg
And whose use was measured on the Russian census.
This language, originally standardized as Little Russian, was renamed Ukrainian when the Russian government, that had originally supported the Little Russian movement, turned against it in pursuit of rigid centralization and the Little Russians in response turned more definitively against Russia.
Evidence of Yatsenyuk being Jewish was mostly limited to him “looking” Jewish. Yatseniuk is a practicing Greek Catholic.
Groysman is, of course, Jewish.
This bizarre characterization of post-Maidan Ukraine as some sort of North Korea-like dystopia can only be believed by people who have never been to Ukraine and who don’t know anybody who has, but who take the word of anti-Ukrainian activists very seriously.
Must be why an easy majority of ethnic Ukrainians always voted for Ukrainophile parties. Ukraine had earlier been evenly divided because of Crimea and other ethnic Russian areas.
Neocons are allied with Poles, who are far more nationalist and anti-immigrant than Western Europeans.
was Great Russian seen as merely a subset of a language too?
I should be doing other things instead of arguing now, but yes, I think that’s what that old Britannica article that I showed you implied. I think that’s what the official summary of the 1897 results that I’ve seen online implied too. Three subsets of Russian.
I’m a language nerd, this is actually what my nickname here refers to. Linguists don’t waste much effort defining the difference between a language and a dialect. This is seen as useless and silly from a scientific point of view. There’s an old joke that everyone who’s interested in language has heard that “defines” language as a dialect with an army and a navy. Any way to distinguish languages from dialects would have to be arbitrary. Mutual intelligibility doesn’t work well as a test because speakers of a language that’s situated between two related languages can sometimes understand both, while speakers of the langauges flanking that middle language may not understand each other. You get a messy situation. Also, you have to define what mutual intelligibility is and any such definition (95% understanding, 90%, 80%) would be arbitrary.
So the people who study languages professionally just don’t bother with that question. The real-life, non-scientific understanding of what’s a language and what’s a dialect is always arrived at by political means. There used to be a language called Serbo-Chroatian, but now you hear about Serbian, Chroatian and Bosnian a lot more.
When early Bolsheviks came to power, the government in charge redefined Ukrainian from a dialect to a language. And Britannica, and I’m sure thousands of other publications, followed that lead.
Evidence of Yatsenyuk being Jewish was mostly limited to him “looking” Jewish.
Which you yourself admitted is true, and which IS true.
Here are the election results:
https://books.google.com/books?id=F_QMCypjpXwC&pg=PA40&dq=elections+ukraine+1917&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiI2t_vnrzMAhXhA5oKHXYMB-8Q6AEILjAD#v=onepage&q=elections%20ukraine%201917&f=false
Kharkiv and Kherson (which included Odessa) showed exaggerated totals because Ukrainian SRs and Russian SRs combined their lists in those specific provinces.
That he looks Jewish? Sure. Does that mean anything? Probably not. It’s not like looking African.
Neocons are allied with Poles, who are far more nationalist and anti-immigrant than Western Europeans.
But this is purely a marriage of convenience. They only need Poles against Russians. I’m not a regular reader of the Weekly Standard, etc., but I would guess that they don’t like the recent turn towards conservatism in Poland. It wouldn’t be in character for them to like that.
He did. Unless the entire revolutionary Bolshevik Central Committee consisted of Nazi sympathizers like Stalin claimed.
When America was ruled by neocons there was no Cheka nor millions murdered. I don’t recall collectivization being on the agenda. Have we missed something? This sounds like your description of Kiev’s government as a “brutal dictatorship.”
You seem to be describing Putin’s alliance with Europe’s Far Right.
Yes, I agree that it’s obvious that Stalin betrayed the revolution. I just think that the revolution was a hellish thing. The neocons say that they agree that it was hellish, but they always try to recreate it, and sometimes succeed at that.
Little Russian was described as a language, many decades prior to Bolshevik rule. As was Great Russian. Bolsheviks didn’t redefine Great Russian as a language rather than a dialect either.
Describing the Little Russian and Great Russian languages as types of Russian languages was analogous to describing standardized Spanish and Italian as types of Roman languages, had there been a Roman Empire ruling both Italy and Spain and running a census there. Both were languages, neither were dialects, while also having common origin.
In his 1305 treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante divided the Romance linguistic space into three languages: the si language (Italy and Iberia), the oc language (southern France) and the oil language (northern France).
The spoken versions of the main Chinese dialects are as distant from each other as the Romance languages are from each other. The Chinese government calls them dialects because it wants peace and unity. Western reference works tend to call them languages because Western governments would like to stir up separatism in China, and Western media is less independent from its governments than it likes to claim. The scientific approach is to say “linguistics does not concern itself with that question”.
In many ways China is similar to what the West would have been if the Roman Empire didn’t break up. So yes, your hypothetical was kind of realized somewhere. The results are in. The Empire calls its many unintelligible speech varieties dialects, not languages. Why? Because it’s afraid of separarism. And how can one blame it?
Actually the neocons are deadset against Orban, the most “nativist” Intermarium leader (even though he remains ultimately loyal to Atlancism on all the key geopolitical issues), and even some of the neocons have soured on Poland with the coming to power of the fanatically pro-NATO but regretfully ethnically conscious new conservative government.
So according to you (western) linguists consider Mandarin and Cantonese (at least as different from each other as Spanish is from Italian) to be separate languages because they are part of the Western governments’ plot to break up China?
It looks more like Chinese authorities playing with science for political purposes than western linguists doing so.
They are opposed to Orban because Orban is friendly towards Russia.
This tells us that neocons aren’t opposed to the West, they are simply opposed to Russia. Thus, generally positive attitude towards nationalistic anti-Russians but opposition to nationalistic pro-Russians. Russia rather than nationalism seems to be the main factor here.
Both Chinese and Western authorities are playing with science for political purposes on this issue, but the purposes aren’t equal in value. In China the purpose is peace. In the West the purpose is war.
Of course they are opposed to the West. I read with my own eyes Max Boot blaming the recent Brussels terrorist attack on Europe’s failure to integrate Muslims. And that’s generally in line with their attitudes.
[I am skeptical that this is still true today.]
It’s true. They’d go down like a five-dollar whore.
[what exactly is wrong with Ukrainians protesting against a rigged election?]
When your only problem with a rigged election is that you didn’t get to rig it in your own favour like last time, you’re not a principled democrat but a contemptible clown.
[Indeed, my own family, ancestors, and relatives spent 75 years being stuck in that Communist hellhole known as the Soviet Union]
It wasn’t a hellhole when your own relatives were no longer in the driver’s seat there.
As AK just told you, they hate the PS government in Poland although it’s more anti-Russian even than any other Polish party. Why? Because they suspect it doesn’t have holy thoughts about Jews, homos,”refugees” etc.
Everyone here has seen the billboards asking for denunciations and the Farcebook posts from females who ratted out their taxi drivers, etc., so you’re out of luck. You need an audience where no-one understands Russian.
He doesn’t have an an alliance with Europe’s far right…..and you are obviously a mentally disturbed, non-factual troll
Another cretinous comment
There are far more words separate to each culture in French,Italian and Spanish then there are in Ukrainian /Russian. They have separated from each other over centuries far more than Russian and ukrainian languages have.
Then there is the embarassing fact for Banderastan that most ukrainians (including several of the nationalist types) choose to speak Russian ahead of Ukrainian.
“many decades” before is quite irrelvant in the context on centuries on deciding on what is the clear case to anyone who speaks or reads Ukrainian that it is a dialect of Russian
The “state” that had preceded him had existed only months beforehand and without significant amounts of territory that Ukraine now has…..it is totally disengenous….as befits an insecure lunatic troll ….to make out that Lenin wasn’t a key factor in the modern Ukrainian state…..far more than any actual Ukrainian.
And modern Russians actually know a lot more about Ukraine than these destructive, parasite,USAID funded, Galician types.
Timothy Snyder has called Yatsenyuk jewish. There are several other people claiming the same thing. Several atheistic “jews” are criticised by people who are annoyed at what they perceive as jewish dominance…..so again…. it is utterly pathetically disengenous to say that because he isn’t religiously jewish, that there is no jewish element at all.
There is nothing “bizarre” about the characterization of the failed,bandit-state that is Ukraine.
What is bizarre is believed by people who in Canada/US who have never been to Ukraine but “Love” it so much as to see it’s economy destroyed by it’s idiotic policy towards the rebels and Russia & love celebrating their cowardly UPA lunatic grandfathers.
Ukraine has killed 9000 civilians, maimed several thousand more, arrested even more thousands, forced over one million to flee to Russia, killed several politicians and journalists ( with no killers actually being found),banned Russian channels from broadcasting and plenty of other activity. The argument that because some idiot in Lvov can hold a birthday party of go for a jog in the park then there “must be no serious problem” is cretinism…as expected from insecure Ukro-Nazi trolls with some failed state to “sell”
The only thing that defintes the basket-case that is modern day Ukraine isn’t pseudo-languages like Ukrainian (who most of their elite,army and civilians prefer not to speak) but anti-Russianism. This is amplified by the fact that there are almost no Ukrainian heroes who arent also Russian heroes. This is the case for Banderastan but also, most importantly, for the west … as shown in their coverage and policies. The average westerner knows probably the same or less about Ukraine, now then they did in January 2014. There was no such case for Georgia which everyone recognises as a culturally distinct state from Russia that Ukraine is certainly not.
Russians were never offering Russian rule over Kharkov so that is an utterly stupid comment. Kharkov is though a heavily pro-Russian city
It is quite stupid and unrealistic to expect an unorganized militia to organise so much and this fast within 2 months of a very fluid situation to be able to have control over 3 oblasts with a population totaling 10 million. People sympathising and people actually fighting are two distinct things…..otherwise every American who didn’t fight in the Iraq war would, by your definition have been for it. It was sensible to keep it to Lugansk and Donetsk…and close to a miracle that the rebels have administrive control over the majority population of those oblasts
AK wrote: “some of the neocons have soured on Poland” which is not the same a neocons collectively “hating” the Polish government.
Neocons seem to be mostly a type of Israeli nationalist who conflated Israeli and American interests and power. They supported the destruction of a potential modern rival in Iraq, the destruction of next-door Syria, and oppose Russia (which, I suppose, they consider to be Iraq to America’s Israel). They aren’t at the forefront of the gay rights’ movement or the pro-refugee movement. Here’s Krauthammer on refugees:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427236/krauthammers-take-let-women-children-and-refugees-over-50-nr-staff
Merkel he isn’t.
Found the tweet I was talking about:
https://mobile.twitter.com/maxboot/status/712199317541363712
This was on the day of and in response to these attacks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Brussels_bombings
Actually, that state was basically the Ukrainian SSR minus Crimea and the parts of Donbas currently controlled by rebels and Russians. Donetsk (then called Yuzivka) was on the border then, as it is now:
http://www.conflicts.rem33.com/images/Ukraine/1918_ukr.jpg
The last two years have seen Ukraine return to its Brest-Litovsk borders.
Nonsense. As we see here, fairly often.
Then there is the embarassing fact for Banderastan that most ukrainians (including several of the nationalist types) choose to speak Russian ahead of Ukrainian.
One amazing piece of data about this:
http://www.pewresearch.org/files/2016/01/FT_16.01.13_wikipedia_bubble.png
The Russian Wikipedia got 12 billion pageviews in 2015, while the Ukrainian Wikipedia got 0.7 billion. This implies that Ukrainian is being used by about 17 times fewer people than Russian. The Wikipedia says that Russian has about 260 million native + non-native speakers. Sounds plausible to me. If we divide 260 by 17.14 we get less than 15 million for Ukrainian.
You are a treasure-trove of Russian myths about Ukraine.
Not really.
Here is a map of lexical differences between European languages:
https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/
Ukrainian and Polish have 70% of words in common. Ukrainian and Russian have 62% of words in common. Italian and Spanish have 82% of words in common.
And even more Irish nationalists (indeed, the vast majority of them) speak English rather than Gaelic. So?
I suppose an neo-Roman Empire Italian nationalist wanting to own the entire Mediterranean would claim Spanish is a dialect of Italian. Or a Spanish nationalist with designs on the entire Iberian peninsula would claim that Portuguese a dialect of Spanish. That doesn’t make the claim realistic.
You would probably characterize America at the height of the Red Scare a brutal and repressive dictatorship, too.
Americans weren’t killing journalists,politicians, have political parties with a 2 million votes ( that is minusing the Crimean factor) 2 years before wiped out ….and kill thousands of civilians during the height of the red scare, so once more it is an idiotic comment.
Nor did they have a GDP per capita compareable with Moldova which they then “added” to by alienating ties with their main trading partner
They admitted their treachery, do not doubt the judgment of the committee tovarisch! https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/law/1936/moscow-trials/22/evening.htm
America wasn’t at war with the USSR.
You seem to be too stupid to be a Russian. Let me guess (and I may be wrong) – a not-too-bright American who thinks he’s well-informed after reading a lot of Russia Insider?
ha ha ha! You basically confirm my point by using the Irish example example you complete fool. The Irish dont use their language as a tool of Anglophobia or nationhood.
You can link whatever bullsh*t you want to, it doesn’t change facts. French and Spanish have far more culturally specific different terms to Italian then the Ukrainians do to Russian. I dont know what idiotic, Soros sponsored criteria they used for judging this nonsense but from highlighting nouns and phrases it is obvious what is the truth. Even the french influence on the russian aristrocracy and into the general russian language in terms of structure and polite/impolite forms is …surprise ..surprise….close to identical of the Ukrainian forms! Then there is the swearing
The Roman Italian empire wasnt responsible for the founding of most towns in modern day Spain,France, nor some of the dominant industries or cultural facilities of those towns/cities now, nor the ethnic composition in those towns, nor have (until recently) a shared military tech industry and healthy arms trade with these areas. I dont know if there were millions of spanish/french inhabitants who worked in the original roman part or millions of intermarriages. Again it is another cretinous, misleading comparison.
Like all trolls you want to inflate /lie a few months in 1918 and the basketcase that is Ukraine 1991-now and superimpose it over a thousand years of history and commonsense
Projection is obviously a key componant of troll lunatics with obvious problems, such as yourself.
You were the one who brought in the Red Scare ,you cretin. I would add to your drivel that I dont read Russian Insider…which going on the example from a fellow poster……likely has more Ukrainian readers than the Kiev Post and Ukraine Today, put together. I did for a while though watch in on a lot of garbage from TsN, Ecpreso TV and also from Schuster’s programme.
That is both incredible and at the same time, not surprising!
It would not surprise me if on Youtube, unofficial channel recordings of Russian political talkshows are getting a much larger amount of viewers from Ukrainians ,than Ukrainian talkshows themselves.
I agree with Cagey Beast. I know plenty of Orthodox or Greek Catholic Ukrainians who certainly “feel” Ukrainian. That’s enough for nationhood imo, a common “fiction”. Now whether or not Ukraine is better off as an Anglo-Zionist plaything, as a member in a union with Russia (think Bavaria or former DDR), or as a Putin vassel (as it was before) is another question. I’m a guy who’d like to see Tsargrad liberated, so you can imagine where I stand.
You are talking nonsense if you think Ukraine ever was a “Putin vassel”. Some elements of the relationship under Yanukovich were even worse than with Yushchenko. Then also the “vassal” couldn’t even recognise some of the disputed states such as South Ossetia and numerous economic disagreements.
Ukraine has existed as a state for 25 years, of course some people feel Ukrainian, just like the Confederate side still felt American, but Ukraine is not a stable country politically for a long time preceeding the events after February 2014, nor has it had a secure national identity…and I know plenty who view Russians and Ukrainians as one of the same people
Speaking of projection, when you wrote, ” non-factual troll” you were clearly describing yourself.
Facts are clear and linked to: the Ukrainian has fewer words in common with Russian than Spanish does with Italian. Ukrainian has more words in common with Polish than it does with Russian.
The fact that non-factual troll gerad claims otherwise doesn’t change that.
Let’s repeat:
Ukrainian and Polish, 7o% of words in common. Ukrainian and Russian, 62% of words in common. Spanish and Italian, 82% of words in common. Let that sink in.
Now, for someone unlike you who actually is familiar with the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian languages, this is not at all surprising. Even rather basic speech – yes/no – Polish tak/nie, Ukrainian tak/ni, Russian da/nyet, for example.
Thanks for confirming your ignorance.
You really think the t-v distinction comes from French?
Ukrainian word for mister (Pan) is the same as in Polish.
You mean like June in Russian/French Yun/Juin and Ukrainian/Polish Cherven/Czerwecz?
Moscow founded Kiev? Amazing.
If you mean Odessa, then you must also think that Helsinki, found in 1550 by Gustav I, ought to be Swedish.
Let’s enlighten the ignorant.
Kiev and central-eastern Ukraine (Poltava) joined Lithuania and then Poland, starting in 1360. It left in c. 1660. So 300 years as part of the West, during which time the Ukrainian language developed. Of course, after Pereyaslav it did not simply become a part of Russia. it remained autonomous for another 100 years, as the Hetmanate. Hetmanate’s languages (used in the famous Orthodox Academy, and in the military) were Polish and Latin, it’s laws retained from Poland-Lithuania. So about 400 years of Polish/Western/non-Russian culture. This territory was absorbed fully in c. 1770 (there was still a lot of Polish culture later, of course – the last ethnic Polish mayor of Kiev served in the 1880s). In c. 1920 it became the Ukrainian SSR, with use of Ukrainian language etc. Since Russians whine about Lenin creating Ukraine they shouldn’t count the Ukrainian SSR as being simply a part of Russia. So about 140 years as an integral part of Russia, another 70 years as a culturally pseudo-autonomous place ruled from Moscow by an internationalist regime, and now 25 years of independence.
Now, the Right Bank/Center-West (everything west of the Dnipro River including most of Kiev oblast but not Kiev City, until Galicia). Joined Lithuanian in 1360, stayed in Poland until 1793. So 430 years of Lithuanian and Polish rule. Part of the Ukrainian SSR (see above) in 1920. So 127 years of direct Russian rule, followed by 70 years as a Ukrainian entity ruled from Moscow by an internationalist regime and now 25 years of independence.
Volhynia is like the Right Bank, but it had 20 years of Polish rule, 1920-1940, missing the brunt of Stalinism.
Galicia – joined Poland in c. 1350. Joined Austria in 1790, then part of Poland again from 1920, ruled from Moscow for the first time in 1939. Part of independent Ukraine for the last 25 years.
So-called “New Russia” was settled in the late 18th – 19th century mostly by Ukrainians from the Right Bank and from central Ukraine, moving south, with some Russians (about 20% of the population) mixed in. Part of Ukrainian SSR, then of independent Ukraine.
To keep score –
Right Bank/Center East: 420 years in the West; 130 years Russian; 70 years Soviet Ukrainian; 25 years independent Ukrainian.
Volhynia: 440 years in the West; 130 years Russian; 50 years Soviet Ukrainian; 25 years independent Ukrainian
Galicia: 590 years in the West; 50 years Soviet Ukrainian; 25 years independent Ukrainian.
Southern/Eastern Ukraine: 130 years Russian; 70 years Soviet Ukrainian; 25 years independent Ukrainian.
So much for your “over a thousand years of history”mythology.
If you want to bring in old Rus, it was a loose trade-focused entity ruled by Scandinavians while it was a united state, and then broke up into warring principalities.
Clever but not realistic. Ukrainian wikipedia has half the articles of Russian wikipedia, so Ukrainians, most of whom are also conversant in Russian, will simply use Russian wiki (the fact that there are probably at least 6 times more Russian than Ukrainian speakers may explain more Russian articles). Ukrainians are also more rural fewer are online than are Russians – according to google, 61% of Russians and only 42% of Ukrainians have internet. So more Russian wikipedia views may be explained by Russians being online more, not simply Ukrainians not using the Ukrainian language.
Adjusting for these factors, you’ll get about 20-22 million Ukrainian speakers.
Your methodology, strictly applied without considering other factors, can lead to silly conclusions. For example, Persian wiki got .9 million views, or 13.3 times fewer views than Russian. So, according to your methods, there must be actually be only 19.5 million Persian speakers. Wiki claims 110 millions.
It’s not surprising to see that the idiot gerad believed you, though.
You are aware that the svidomy Ukrainians spend the last 20 years or so trying to purge Ukrainian of words it has in common with Russian? Not that this in unique for Ukrainian, Germany had several attempts of purging it from French influences etc.
Ukrainian itself is an arbitrary selection of one (out of several) Malorussian dialects (which likely were already distinct from each other a milennia or so ago), and unsurprisingly happened to be the dialect spoken in western Ukraine.
Dialects spoken in rural Eastern Ukraine are considerably closer to Russian then to Polish, and well, but Surchuk is arbitrarily not called Ukrainian.
The big disadvantadge of non Maidan is that non-Maidan allowed the Nationalists fuckwits like Viatrovych to define what “Ukrainian” means.
Also, lol at Yanukovich being a “Russian vasall”. He was pursuing the standard “multi vector” foreign policy that Kuchma and Kravchuk had as well. His rejection of the EU DCFTA was completely rational and defensible on economic grounds, even from a patriotic ukrainian western integrationist pov. (DCFTA basically ensures that Ukraine will never actually join the EU because they have already given the EU beurocracy everything it wants, while receiving basically nothing in return. DCFTA also kills any Russian option Ukraine could use to put some kind of pressure on the EU. Brussel has no interest in actually giving Ukraine a say, or giving them access to EU subvention throughs etc.). Maidan is far more slavishly pro Western then Yanukovich was pro Russian, and frankly the Vishivatniks dont deserve to be called patriots or even nationalists.
You must mean Russian words newly added in the last decades. Purging Ukrainian of such words is akin to purging Russian of English words that have entered it post 90s. The standardized Ukrainian language never included them so the lexical similarity research doesn’t reflect recent purges.
All standardized national languages are an arbitrary selection of dialects. Russian is based on the speech near Moscow, German on the speech near Hanover, etc.
Standardized Ukrainian is not based on a western Ukrainian dialect but on the speech from Poltava, deemed the purest Ukrainian region at the time the language was standardized in the mid 19th century. The guys who standardized Ukrainian were mostly from central and eastern Ukraine. Galicia contributed legal and technical terms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language#Literature_and_the_Ukrainian_literary_language
The Galician dialect is rare now due to mass schooling in standard Ukrainian in Galicia (it is ironic that Lviv basically speaks the Poltava dialect now, while Poltava itself has a lot of surzhik). One sees the Galician dialect in villages, particularly among old people, and in the diaspora – though diaspora Ukrainian Saturday schools teach standard Ukrainian. Galician somewhat resembles Carpatho-Rusyn.
Than Galician, sure. Than standard Ukrainian? Not much closer.
The naked capitalism that the neocons want to impose on the world is the same as world communism?
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? AP, do you actually think for one moment that Bulgarian is closer (or anywhere near as close, for that matter) to Russian as Belarusian or even Ukrainian? Believe me, Belarusian especially is waaaaay close to Russian, especially if you look at the regional dialects thereof, as opposed to the highly artificial literary languages. And both Belarusian and Ukrainian are obviously closer to Russian than Bulgarian is. I mean, do you even know Ukrainian or Russian? Because when you post something like that, it suggests quite strongly that you don’t know any of these languages. I know Russian and I understand Ukrainian and Belarusian. Despite some superficial similarities to Russian in terms of lexicon, Bulgarian is obviously more distant from it than are the other two.
As for the difference between Ukrainian and Russian, Ukrainian is definitely more distant from Russian than Belarusian is. At the same time though, practically any “unique” Ukrainian word (that isn’t an obvious recent borrowing) has a close analogue, if not an exact match, in some historical Russian regional dialect, which didn’t become part of the current literary language. And I don’t mean the dialects of the border region either, but rather dialects from much farther away. So the difference and distance should be seen in this context.
On the whole, the difference between Russians and Ukrainians is comparable to the historical difference between Occitans and northern French (or “French proper”) – or the Venetians and the Tuscans, or the northern and southern Germans. Occitan and French are different languages, not different dialects of the same language. And yet France is one country. Ukrainians typically say that since they have their own language, that this means that they are a separate “nation” and should therefore have their own separate state. However, most of the large countries of western Europe are “composite states”, comprised of several “language-nations”. This includes France, the UK, Italy, Spain, and Germany.
As someone who has actually lived in Ukraine for a number of years, I don’t share Anatoly’s enthusiasm for the “triune Russian nation”. I don’t think it’s realistic, and frankly, I’m not that fond of ethnic Ukrainians to support any large scale allocation of Russian resources to try to achieve this. At the same time, I think that this concept could have been very realistic if the history of the last 150 years (especially the last 100) had been a little different. Frankly, the Bolsheviks made huge mistakes. They easily could have assimilated at least a very large part of east Ukraine – and especially Belarus – but they chose not to. Instead, they chose to dabble in “national autonomies”. The rest, as they say, is history.
Woah what a self-assured progressive bitch.
Also a closet colonialist.
2 years after she wrote this Ukraine would be nicely devasted by Trotsky’s hordes (being still in ruins after the WWI european imperial mutual suicide pact). But hey, it doesn’t exist, really, so it doesn’t matter.
That woman would be right at home on Hillary’s side to visit “girl power” on random areas of the globe.
I’m not familiar with Bulgarian. The chart is for lexical difference, not grammar or pronunciation. Literary Russian had a large number of Church Slavonic inserted into it. Church Slavonic was based on the speech in what is now Slavic Macedonia. This might explain the linguists’ conclusions. Of course Ukrainian being an East Slavic language has grammar and pronunciation more like Russian.
I speak both, and understand Polish.
That is your opinion, but the reality is that Ukraine was ruled for centuries by Poland and had a Polish-speaking aristocracy (not just Poles – Polish was the language of upper class Ukrainians) . The situation was analogous to what happened in England after the Norman conquest. As a result, just as English took in a lot of French words, Ukrainian took in many Polish words. So many, that Ukraine’s vocabulary now has more words in common with Polish than it does with Russian.* Some fun examples – Ukrainian watermelon is kavun, as in Polish, while a Ukrainian pumpkin is a harbuz, as in Polish. A Russian watermelon is an arbuz and a Russian pumpkin is a tikva. A lot of basic words in Ukrainian are Polish – “dad” is Tato (vs. Russian Papa), Ukrainian “yes” is tak (vs. Russian da – also found in Bulgarian), etc.
The analogy of southern vs. northern German or southern vs. northern France would apply towards, say, Carpathian speech vs. standard Ukrainian. But not Russian vs. Ukrainian.
It would be analogous if a part of Germany were ruled by Sweden for 400 years, such that the local language had more Swedish than German words (in addition to the regional grammar differences one would expect otherwise), the people felt more Scandinavian than central European, and they “betrayed” Germany whenever there was a conflict with the North.
This probably would have been the only way to keep Ukraine with Russia voluntarily. Little Russian activists were very patriotic Rus-ians, though not Great Russians. They probably would have played the role of Scots as loyal co-creators of the British Empire. Artificially forcing the Little Russians people to become Great Russians led to a predictable backlash. Names (Little Russian, Ukrainian) are rather arbitrary labels but local speech, history, customs are real. Ideologies that veer too far from those, fail. The Little Russian and Ukrainian ideas reflected southwestern Rus reality. The idea of Ukrainians being Russians (that is, Great Russians rather than Rus) like Bavarians being Germans did not.
That train left the station even 100 years ago. Bolsheviks reacted to events, and did not create them. Probably the critical period was 200 years ago – after the Napoleonic wars Russia should have taken Galicia rather than Warsaw. Then Ukraine would have been more like Belarus.
You might find this interesting, regarding Russian and Bulgarian (author describes Church Slavonic as Old Bulgarian):
http://lyudmilantonov.blogspot.com/2011/03/bulgarian-language-and-other-slavic.html
Ukrainians are also more rural fewer are online than are Russians – according to google, 61% of Russians and only 42% of Ukrainians have internet. So more Russian wikipedia views may be explained by Russians being online more, not simply Ukrainians not using the Ukrainian language.
Excuses, excuses. And such poor ones. The number of Russian speakers that I used is 260 million. You know what that includes as well as I do. It includes Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan – places that are even more backward than Galicia. Places whose Internet penetration rates must be lower than those of any part of the Ukraine.
As I stated in my earlier comment, 260 million is the Wikipedia’s number of native + non-native Russian speakers. Most of the population of Central Asia and Transcaucasia are non-native Russian speakers. Some of these places are really struggling. I know the junta is trying to pull the Ukraine down to Tajikistan’s level, but it’s not there yet, and won’t be for quite a few years even at the current rate of societal decline. So no, the wider Russosphere (i.e. most of the FSU) that makes up that 260 million number isn’t likely to have a much lower Internet penetration rate than the Ukraine.
Yes, I took that into account. Didn’t you run the numbers before making your claims?
Uzbekistan’s internet penetration of 38% isn’t much lower than that of Ukraine. I’ll bet Uzbekistan’s Russians and Russian-speaking Uzbeks are more wired than the country’s average. Kazakhstan’s (54%) and Azerbaijan’s (58.7%) internet penetration totals are higher than Ukraine’s. As is Belarus’ 54%. Turkmenistan’s and Kyrgyztan is lower (10% and 24%, respectively) but they only have about 5-6 million people each so they don’t matter much (moreover, most of those countries’ populations are included as Russian-speaking – and I suspect the urban Russians in those republics are more wired than the general population). You can also add the Russians living abroad such as yourself, whose % are extremely high.
So while Ukraine has only 2/3 of Russia’s internet penetration, it probably has about 3/4 of the Russian-speaking world’s internet penetration. Making the appropriate adjustment yields an estimate of 20 million. Factor in in rural under-representation within Ukraine an its probably about another 1- 2 million Ukrainian speakers.
You are full of failure glossy. It’s your pattern when it comes to Ukraine. Your otherwise decent intellect breaks down – a sign.
That would be most of Russia, also. We’ve already gone over this. Galicia achieved literacy a generation before did most of Russia. Lviv university beats most Russian universities, including MGU, in programming.
But other regions in Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine, such as Zakarpattiya or Volhynia, probably have much lower internet penetration than Ukraine in general, which would further skew the results.
Wait. You mean there is some uberMensch that is manipulating the Jews as well?
You see, this is what I’m talking about. Historically, the forms tato/tata/tatka were used in the Russian north, quite independently of any Ukrainian or Polish influence, I assure you. And the forms tyatya and tyat’ka were common all over Russia – north, center, and south – and are still part of the Russian literary language.
Um, Occitan and French are different languages. As are the languages of Italy. So the analogy would definitely apply. “Carpathian speech” is a regional folk dialect of Ukrainian – it’s not a different language. Again, modern France is a conglomerate of several “language-nations” (Ukrainians claim “language = nation”), melded together and effectively assimilated by “northern France” (i.e. France proper). Same king of thing in Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain.
This talk about “artificially forcing the Little Russians people to become Great Russians” is really just self-serving POV on your part – it’s not objective fact. Hell, what exactly was done to the Little Russians that wasn’t done to the Scots? The Scottish and Irish languages were completely obliterated! Stick a fork in em, they’re done! Finished! What was done to the Little Russians that wasn’t done by France to the long-suffering “Occitan nation” with it’s beautiful embroidered towels and shirts? You think the Occitan language just magically disappeared by itself? No, France forcibly assimilated them. These claims that Ukrainians as such were “oppressed” (beyond European norms) by the Russian empire are COMPLETE BULLSHIT. What Russia did to the Little Russians was standard European practice of the time as part of the creation of a unified, centralized state. That’s not the narrative you were brought up hearing, is it?
You talk about the “Little Russian activists” as if the success of their cause was a foregone conclusion. I’m telling you that it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. If you want to get a sense of how common people in central Ukraine felt about being part of Russia back in the day, I suggest you read Babiy Yar by Anatoly Kuznetsov. It gives a pretty good illustration. Kuznetsov talks about his Ukrainian grandfather and grandmother, and how they lived before the Revolution and after, in the early Soviet decades. Essentially, they viewed Russia as their country, they were not any kind of separatist threat, they were not demanding any kind of autonomy, they were not interested in fighting for their daughter (Kuznetsov’s mother) to be taught in the Ukrainian language. To put it another way, they were ripe for assimilation. This is just one example, there are many others.
hahaha again!!
The t-v does come from the french influence you idiot. Where the french got it from is an irrelevance . Blowing smoke by quoting a few obvious words of Polish origin does nothing to support your “argument”….then again, you most likely think the average Ukrainian lives close to the standard of the average person in Singapore
There is no proof whatsoever that bullsh*t study is correct. Quoting some random crap done by some nobody doesn’t do anything. Russian is a strong influence on Ukrainian, not Polish. Most words in Ukrainian that could develop into a “tug of war” between Poland and Russia , in common usage tend to fall heavily on the russian language side. And again….there is the swearing.
Like all sewer-dwelling trolls you make up that I implied Kiev ( good you trolls at least know how to spell it) was founded by Moscow…….I was of course referring to at least 25 cities in Ukraine off the top of my head that I know were founded during the russian empire/SU time……and of which the dominant industries, architecture to this day in these towns emphasise this influence…..as I already mentioned but a cretin seeks to ignore.
That is not including those cities that were founded as settlements much earlier but then developed by the empire/SU into cities….most settlements don’t become cities…and most cities don’t “de-city-ise”…so I could easily include them too. The era of the industrialisation which created these cities, most modern urbanisation & agricultural land patterns in Europe was brought to “Ukraine” not by “Ukrainians” but Russians and russian money in strong business co-operation with the west.
Do you want to claim that the “polish influence” created the KGB?
Your bullsh*t interpretation of history over the centuries , is just that. Lies over 981 and deliberate misinterpretations of the Polish/Lithuanian and Russian history in the areas where Ukraine now exists….a waste of time.
The funniest aspect is that your lies are dumb enough you still manage to support the view that Ukraine has never been a proper country/state over the centuries with its own united culture………the cretinism and cannibilism you dimwitted trolls employ..the “cut off your nose to spite your face”……is strikingly similiar to the self-defeating tactics used by most pitiful Russian liberasts
The embarassing fact is that Lenin and Stalin are the real founding fathers of Ukraine
…and also look at the names most Ukrainians give their children
The Slavic languages are like that. For example, the Ukrainian languages, northern Russian dialects, and Croatian dialects transformed -ye and -i (lis, forest). Does this suggest Russian influence on Croatia?
Words such as Tato, Pan (any Russian similarity there?) and the many others I described are far more likely to have been caused by Poland, which ruled Ukraine for centuries, whose language was the language of Ukraine’s upper class for centuries, and whose people settled and intermarried with Ukrainians for centuries, than from northern Russia. Do you disagree?
.
I was mistaken here. Northern vs. Southern German are indeed analogous to Carpathian Ukrainian vs. standard Ukrainian. But not northern French vs. Occitan. Lexical distance between Provencal and French is similar to the lexical distance between Russian and Ukrainian (Provincal is about as different from French as is Portuguese). The Italian languages, on the other hand, are much closer to each other in terms of lexical distance than are Ukrainian and Russian. Indeed, Spanish and Italian (as well as Spanish and Portuguese) are closer to each other in terms of shared vocabulary than Ukrainian and Russian.
This wasn’t the case in Germany, as the speech of Bavarian is a dialect rather than a language. Scotland retained its own non-English identity in Britain, despite losing its Gaelic language. Scots were not forced to become Englishmen. Spain is not as unified as you might hope. France is the clear exception. Its liberal and harshly centralizing project succeeded. Have you reflected on why France succeeded and Russia failed? Perhaps because of the type of civilizational differences described by Huntington. Polish influence on Ukraine over all those centuries probably went beyond mere vocabulary.
Elimination of the Hetmanate with its local laws and customs was an objective fact. Persecution of Little Russian activists and legal limitations placed on the Little Russian language was an objective fact, despite Little Russian activists’ loyalty to the Rus idea.
Did the British government pursue policies of legally limiting Gaelic and/or Scots? Were Scottish laws and customs made identical to English ones? Was the local Church in Scotland made the same as the English one? Did Britain pursue centralization such that Scottish cities were reduced to provincial outposts and there was a brain drain to London?
This process seems to have been voluntary and not British government policy. Indeed, Gaelic largely disappeared in Scotland centuries prior to British rule, by 1400:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic#The_Eclipse_of_Gaelic_in_Scotland
I don’t know much about Occitan. Were Occitan publications banned? Were Occitan teachers arrested and exiled?
I didn’t claim that. Ukrainians were certainly better treated in the Russian Empire than the Irish were by the British. But they did not enjoy the position in the Russian Empire as the Scots did in the British Empire. They were somewhere in between. But this is a discussion on another topic.
I had an even better source: one of my (now deceased) grandparents grew up in a central Ukrainian village, 2 hours drive from Kiev’s outskirts. He was four when the Revolution happen but heard about life before, from his parents. You are correct that these people were not pro-Ukrainian activists. On the other hand they weren’t pro-Russian either. They did speak Ukrainian rather than Russian, and found Ukrainian language schools to be more convenient because it is easier to learn in one’s own language than in a foreign language. Like most people, they just wanted to make a living. Do think Russian peasants were nationalistic 120 years ago? If so, there would have been more resistance to Bolshevism. Then after NEP the “Russians” (Russian speaking Jews, Russians and Ukrainian communists from the city) came, stole the land in order to collectivize it, and took people away to execute them. In Ukraine, Bolshevism had more of an ethnic component than in Russia.
Scots maintained their own church and local legal system, even after losing their parliament (and being given a quota of seats in the British parliament). When Sweden and Norway were united from 1814 to 1905, each maintained its own parliament and laws. Austria-Hungary was a dual monarchy and within Austria there were regional parliaments with schools etc. in local languages run by local elites. Even within Russia, Finland had its own Grand Duchy with its own legislative assembly.
While what Russia did to Little Russians was not unique it was absolutely not “standard practice” either.
Non-factual troll gerad wrote another post with almost no facts.
Those were just specific examples that illustrated the reality of less lexical distance between Polish and Ukrainian than between Russian and Ukrainian..
Let’s repeat, because you are a bit slow to understand:
Ukrainian and Polish, 7o% of words in common. Ukrainian and Russian, 62% of words in common. Spanish and Italian, 82% of words in common.
Here’s a nice picture hopefully even you can understand:
http://topway.in.ua/top-way-en/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Lexical-Distance-between-Slavic-languages-2.png
Ukrainian is closer to Belarusian, Polish and Slovak than it is to Russian in terms of vocabulary. Czech and Russian are equal.
Academic linguists are not nobodies when it comes to language.
Do you have a source contradicting what I provided? Didn’t think so. You are, after all, merely a nonfactual troll.
You are demonstrably ignorant and not very intelligent; your desperate and empty assertions without any references or links are meaningless.
Your specialty? Are you a 14 year old boy?
Because southern Ukraine was conquered during the time of the Russian Empire the new cities and towns there were founded during the Russian Empire. Does this surprise you? However the lands were mostly settled by Ukrainian moving south (about 70% or so, with about 20% being Russians and the rest Jews, Serbs, Germans, etc.). Other than Odessa the mostly Russian towns and cities were rather small. When they later grew as a result of local villagers moving in, they became ethnic Ukrainian and ceased being ethnic Russian. So for example when Dnipropetrovsk had only 159,000 people in 1923 it was only 18% Ukrainian. In 2001 73% of its over 1 million people were ethnic Ukrainians.
Look, nonfactual troll gerad with low IQ “thinks” an interpretation of history is bullsh*t. How cute. Would you like a cookie?
No need to invent circuitous ways to estimate this. Here is Gallup poll from 2008 that shows that 83% of Ukrainians prefer to speak Russian in their day-to-day life.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/109228/russian-language-enjoying-boost-postsoviet-states.aspx
(see second chart)
In other words, outside the former Austro-Hungarian territory it’s close to 100%.
#NotANation
errrr….the fact that there are half the amount of vikipedia articles in Ukrainian -which is a very high number- discredits your trolling argument…again. Kazakh,Uzbek,Armenian etc wont have even 25% of the numbers of articles in their languages as in Russian. So the opportunity is there for Ukrainians to use the Ukrainian version, but hardly anybody can be bothered. Penetration rate is separate from actual use of the internet, even having a computer…nevermind actually using wikipedia. The use of Russian wikipedia is certainly disproportionately centred around Russia…and Ukraine..and Belarus….not the 70 million other residents of the former USSR. Either way you look at it, to any person with a brain, the ratio of 17:1 of Russian to Ukrainian wikipedia is embarassingly too high by at least double the factor ….and suggests that most Ukrainians use Russian wikipedia…..and in schools much prefer the old Russian textbooks.
Notice that about 11 ukrainian persons and 2 dogs read the Polish Wikipedia in “70%” “Polish” Ukrainian. Thats what happens what nutjob , 24 hour trolls like yourself come up with a nonsensical position- and then spend all day trying to come up with an “argument” from dubious sources to support it….you inevitably end up contradicting yourself.
The most popular comedies and drama watched in Ukraine are done in…Russian. The most popular poiltical talk show in Ukraine is done in…Russian. Apart from all the UPA idiot chants most Ukrainians in the blogosphere do so in….wait for it….. Russian. …and these scumbags in power are terrified of allowing Russian to be used as one of 2 state languages, as it should be. Pitiful.
The Gallup poll was contradicted by a much larger study involving 10,000s of participants, using the same method, showing about 42% preference for Ukrainian.
If Gallup were correct, this would indicate that close to 0% of people in Ukraine outside of Western Ukraine prefer the Ukrainian language. Anyone who has been to central Ukraine would know that this is sheer fantasy. Even urban Kiev is no less than 10% Ukrainian-speaking, go out into the villages or rayon centers and it’s much higher.
The reality is that beyond the 1939 borders Ukraine is around 25%-30% Ukrainian speaking, primarily in rural areas but also central oblast centers like Vynnytsia.
Thanks for confirming that you believe nonsense. Close to 100% Russian-speaking beyond the 1939 borders.
Look, nonfactual troll gerad tries to say something. And fails.
Here’s the link to the massive study involving 10,000s of interviews:
http://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/articles_HVE/16_linguaethnical.pdf
Basically, according to the census, 67.5% of Ukrainians claimed Ukrainian to be their native language (85% of ethnic Ukrainians, 15% of ethnic Russians).
However, when the surveyers asked what language they found easier to complete the interview, it was 41% Ukrainian and 44% Russian, and about 15% truly indifferent.
This number roughly matches the corrected totals for glossy’s wikipedia methodology. It is also common sense: about 95% of Ukraine’s western population is Ukrainian-speaking, and about 1/4 to 1/3 of the rest of Ukraine is Ukrainian-speaking.
I understand OJ’s investigation showed definitively that he was not the killer.
errr….last time I looked, 90% was quite close to 100% you laughably deflecting cretin
hahahahaha!!
On a serious note…..OJ’s own investigation would still have more integrity and effort than the Kiev regimes “attempts” over the Maidan killings, Odessa,the politicians killed, disgusting war crimes and murder of Buzina
Yet more attention-seeking idiocy and lies of a freak. It is a completely disinegenuous and nonsensical comparison to make between England and Scotland….with Russia and Ukraine. For a start, Scotland and England inhabit the same small island, the Scottish and English Royal families intermarried,elite Universities in Scotland like Saint Andrews for several centuries have had English elites go there.
There are several important northern English cities along the way, but the distances between London and Edinburgh or Glasgow is 600km. Kharkov and Kiev distances to Moscow are much greater than that…..and obviously more with Ekaterinburg and the central control that was in Saint Petersburg .
The “Scottish” church was allowed because it wasn’t Catholicism and thus answerable to Rome you idiot, therefore it represented no political threat to the Anglican church, but complemented it and shared many similarities. Having your Catholic queen like Mary have her head cut off also tends to concentrate the mind you idiot. The reformation ( and Scotland was a predominantly catholic country for centuries) was extremely violent in England.
Scottish law was rooted in…..English laws you cretin….so yet again more disinformation.
Again , to anybody with a brain, w when one factors in distances, external military threats and wealth going around……The Tsar and Soviets to the Ukrainians were far better than the English with the Scots,nevermind the English nasty actions with the Irish. Educated scots have been travelling down to England for centuries you dimwit…..and moaning about their lack of investment in comparion to England.
Russian Empire successfully united over 150 different ethnicities….what cretin can say that “failed” and France “succeeded” considering Frances problems over the years?
There is a lot of other garbage there as well, but I won’t bother
The SNR in the comments is quite low.
Who said 90%? More like 30% or so Ukrainian-speaking east of the 1939 border.
More excuses and empty noise from the fact-free internet troll gerad.
Look, someone who believes that about 0% of Ukraine’s population east of the 1939 border speaks Ukrainian has another useless opinion about something involving Ukraine.
First of all, northern Russian dialects typically do not replace -ye with -i, but that’s beside the point. Do you actually think that I meant to suggest northern Russian influence on Ukraine with regard to “tato”? Like, how the hell do you get that? No, the thing is that Ukrainians like to play up their supposed uniqueness (and difference from Russians) in everything – but if you scratch the surface just a little bit, their whole construction comes falling down. You emphasize Polish influence a lot, but most Ukrainians don’t do that. Instead, they like to act like all their shit is straight from “Kievan Rus”, or developed internally without any foreign influence.
What exactly are you basing this on? Because if it’s that link you posted earlier, then I suggest you be a little more skeptical of this K. Tyshchenko character. I would like to see a professional “audit” of his book. Because it just doesn’t jibe with observable reality. From my own experience, for example, there is simply no way that Bulgarian is closer (lexically or in any other way) to Russian than Belarusian is. Frankly, it’s an insult to my intelligence to suggest otherwise. Practically every single “unique” Belarusian word has analogues in the wider Russian language, i.e. the regional dialects. The number of truly unique words is literally paltry. In reality, it’s basically just artificial novoyaz like “адукацыя” (education) – which has nothing to do with the historical language of the people.
I don’t want to argue with you about the relative closeness of this language to that language. The point is that they are different languages, not different dialects of the same language. Venetian and Neapolitan are different languages. The mutual intelligibility between High and Low German is so low that they are in effect different languages, even if they are both called “German”.
Can you say “grasping for straws”? Once again, in none of the major western European countries were there any real national autonomies. All of them pursued centralization and assimilation projects with regard to the national elements. And none of them would have tolerated any separatist movements within their borders under the guise of “trying to protect local dialects and customs”, or any other such nonsense. If you want to talk about legal limitations on Gaelic or Scots, then you should ask “well, was there a separatist movement, supported by hostile forces outside of Britain, that attempted to use language as a mobilizing instrument?”
Regarding Scottish laws and customs being made the same as English ones – do you think for one moment that were meaningfully any different? Or that they would have been allowed to be? I mean, on what planet? Regarding “customs”, Ukrainians were subjected to linguistic Russification, but other than that, their customs were not changed and they were not forced to become ethnic Russians culturally. No one went into Ukrainian villages forcing Ukrainians to wear Russian clothes, eat Russian foods, perform Russian cultural rituals or anything like that.
Regarding cities being “reduced to provincial outposts” – what cities are you talking about? The population of all the major old cities grew massively under the Russian empire and numerous new cities were founded. Are you even serious when you ask “was there a brain drain to London”? Of course there was. What’s next, “did English people tell mean jokes about the Scots”? Yes, they did.
If he was four at the time of the Revolution, then he grew up in the early Soviet Union and didn’t know pre-revolutionary Russia. Kuznetsov’s grandfather was a grown man at the time of the Revolution. He had developed an attachment to that country. And anyway, I’m not saying that all Ukrainians went to sleep at night dreaming about the triumph of Russification. However, I am saying that much of the population was ripe for assimilation – and that the Bolsheviks fucked it up.
In this case, it didn’t. Tato is in all likely the product of Polish not Russian influence and similarity.
Are you a linguist? Have you catalogued the Russian, Belarussian and Bulgarian vocabularies? Personal anecdotes are nice when it comes to illustrating objective facts but they shouldn’t be used to contradict them.
BTW I posted info from a Bulgarian website that also confirms the closeness of Russian and Bulgarian with respect to vocabulary.
Both Ukrainian and Russian nationalists share an unrealistic attachment to Rus and are invested in the mythology that Rus was “their” nation, when it was neither Ukrainian nor Russian. As a non-nationalist I don’t have such hangups.
His work is generally and widely accepted by other linguists:
http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/3006/is-there-a-list-of-mutually-intelligible-languages
This is also true of Russian with respect to other languages, and Ukrainian. So?
Sure, but the degree to which Russians did this to Little Russians, while not unique and not the “worst”, was beyond the norm. The numerous peoples of Austria-Hungary, Scotland, Finland enjoyed more cultural and political autonomy than did Little Russians/Ukrainians.
Ever heard of the Jacobite rebellion? The backlash by the British government still provided for greater local autonomy than Little Russians had. There were all sorts of separatist movements in Austria, yet there was more local autonomy.
Little Russian “separatism” was uneven (many if not most Little Russian activists were strong Rus nationalists) and much milder prior to the Russian government’s suppression of the Little Russian movement, than post.
Depends on what you think is meaningful. Are laws in Germany meaningfully different from those in France? Does that mean it is irrelevant that Germans make their own laws, and French their own also? From wiki:
“The Act of Union 1707 merged the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England to form the new Kingdom of Great Britain. Article 19 of the Act confirmed the continuing authority of the College of Justice, Court of Session and Court of Justiciary in Scotland.[30] Article 3, however, merged the Estates of Scotland with the Parliament of England to form the Parliament of Great Britain, with its seat in the Palace of Westminster, London. Under the terms of the Act of Union, Scotland retained its own systems of law, education and Church (Church of Scotland, Presbyterian polity), separately from the rest of the country.”
The point is that Scotland enjoyed far more autonomy than did Little Russia/Ukraine. As did Finland, Czechia, Galicia, Croatia, Hungry, etc. etc.
Linguistic Russification was not some minor detail. You can add the subordination of the local Church to Moscow in 1686 (Scots enjoyed their own Church) – although for about a century this process involved resulted in the Ukrainianization of the Russian Church. But after that it was the opposite. So language and religion. These are a bit more substantial areas than the ability to wear embroidered shirts, wouldn’t you agree?
This is relative. Kiev went from being a major intellectual center of the Orthodox world when it was part of Poland-Lithuanian and the autonomous Hetmanate to being a mere Russian provincial outpost. Population growth of European cities was universal so the fact that Kiev had more people under Russia doesn’t mean so much.
As part of Britain, Edinburgh was a major intellectual center:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Enlightenment
After the loss of autonomy, Ukrainians such as Gogol, the composers Berezovsky and Bortiansky (according to Russian wiki, founders of classical Russian choral compositions), etc. migrated to St. Petersburg. Ukraine, unlike Scotland, became a backwater.
They were so ripe for assimilation that in 1917, prior to the Bolshevik takeover, they overwhelmingly voted for Ukrainian rather than Russian political parties:
https://books.google.com/books?id=F_QMCypjpXwC&pg=PA40&dq=elections+ukraine+1917&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiI2t_vnrzMAhXhA5oKHXYMB-8Q6AEILjAD#v=onepage&q=elections%20ukraine%201917&f=false
80.5% in Poltava, 79% in Podillia (Vynnytsia), 77% in Kiev, 71% Volhynia, 49.7% Chernihiv (which includes parts of Bryansk oblast in modern Russia, so higher % in ethnic Ukrainian parts of course), etc. The figure for Kharkiv isn’t valid because Ukrainian and Russian parties were mixed.
During the Russian Civil War, there were no major armed local pro-Russian movements in ethnic Ukrainian territories of the former Russian Empire (Kharkiv City and Donbas had Soviet governments, but these microregions were settled by mostly ethnic Russians). The local Ukrainians fought for dozens of different nationalist or anarchist warlords (Petliura and Makhno being the most important ones; others include Nykyfor Hryhoriv and Danylo Zeleny). Whites had no appeal, and Reds only had limited appeal when they pandered to local Ukrainian concerns. This tells us that Bolshevik compromise with Ukrainian cultural activists was driven by local conditions, not the other way around, and that the idea of Ukraimians being “created” by Bolsheviks is a stupid Russian nationalist myth.
You emphasize Polish influence a lot, but most Ukrainians don’t do that.
I think I remember AP talking about a Polish grandfather of his. He can correct me if I misremembered that.
As I’ve said before, there isn’t much enthusiasm for the Ukrainian idea among Ukrainians. When I criticize the Maidan on Twitter, 90% of the people who jump in to argue with me are my fellow Jews. Here, in this comment section, we instead seem to have a person who to some extent identifies with Poland supporting the Maidan.
In a certain sense, there is no Ukraine. There’s anti-Russia instead. If you dislike Russia for whatever reason, being pro-Ukrainian is a proxy for that. But there’s no independent actor on the world stage called the Ukraine and the people living in that country aren’t very enthusiastic about Ukrainian identity.
And what does that really show? Real identity tends to have deep roots. Like all real identities, the Russian, Polish and Jewish ones are very old. It’s not that the Ukraine has any deficit of history. It has lots and lots of history. But not as the Ukraine.
People say that Belgium isn’t a real country, even though it’s existed since the early 19th century. Well, that’s not long enough. The Flemish and French identities are much older and stronger.
Dmitriev, you are obviously a refined and intllectual man.
Your posts share remarkable similarity to my view, not just to Russia/Ukraine but also to these imbecilic and clueless misrepresentations of the Scottish/British relationship….. and are comprehensive rebuttals of this troll cretin’s attention-whoring nonsense.
Indeed, Gaelic largely disappeared in Scotland centuries prior to British rule, by 1400
Scottish Gaelic never disappeared. There are still a few thousand people speaking it. At the time of the existence of the independent Scottish kingdom Scottish, a Germanic language related to English, was more important than Gaelic. The modern Scottish accent in English is seriously diluted Scottish.
But they did not enjoy the position in the Russian Empire as the Scots did in the British Empire.
This is especially disingenuous since everyone thought of Khruschev and Brezhenv as Ukrainians. And Gorbachev is from Stavropol, which was settled by Ukrainians. He has a Ukrainian accent and has talked about his ties to the Ukraine.
Forget the empire, Ukrainians led the USSR within living memory.
From my own experience, for example, there is simply no way that Bulgarian is closer (lexically or in any other way) to Russian than Belarusian is.
Bulgarian (well, and its very close relative Macedonian) is the only Slavic language that lost a lot of the Indo-European inflexional grammar and began to use articles.
Did Britain pursue centralization such that Scottish cities were reduced to provincial outposts and there was a brain drain to London?
Absolutely.
This is relative. Kiev went from being a major intellectual center of the Orthodox world when it was part of Poland-Lithuanian and the autonomous Hetmanate to being a mere Russian provincial outpost.
I don’t think that’s true at all. It was burned down by Mongols in 1240, spent many centuries afterwards as a small, unimportant town, and then became important again during the 19th century.
and n0t just with Scottish cities…plenty of northern England and welsh cities too.
I wrote “largely disappeared.”
You are being disingenuous, as neither Brezhnev nor Khrushchev were Ukrainians. Some ignorant people thinking they were Ukrainians did not make them Ukrainians. Gorbachev wasn’t Ukrainian either, although he had some Ukrainian ancestors.
There has already been a black American president, but never a Ukrainian ruler of Russia or the USSR.
Oops.
“Scotland was already one of the most urbanised societies in Europe by 1800.[222] The industrial belt ran across the country from southwest to northeast; by 1900 the four industrialised counties of Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire, and Ayrshire contained 44 per cent of the population.[223] Glasgow became one of the largest cities in the world, and known as “the Second City of the Empire” after London.[224] Shipbuilding on Clydeside (the river Clyde through Glasgow and other points) began when the first small yards were opened in 1712 at the Scott family’s shipyard at Greenock. After 1860 the Clydeside shipyards specialised in steamships made of iron (after 1870, made of steel), which rapidly replaced the wooden sailing vessels of both the merchant fleets and the battle fleets of the world. It became the world’s pre-eminent shipbuilding centre. Clydebuilt became an industry benchmark of quality, and the river’s shipyards were given contracts for warships”
And then this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Enlightenment#Major_intellectual_areas
Poor Dmitriev.
“…never a Ukrainian ruler of Russia or the USSR.”
Chernenko wasn’t Ukrainian?
No Polish grandfather. Great-grandparents spoke mostly Polish, but they weren’t Poles.
That must be why most Ukrainians have been voting for Ukrainophile parties over the years.
I suspect most Ukrainians avoid generally anti-Ukrainian environments.
Any proof, other than your twitter experience?
If this fantasy were true Donbas project would have been more successful. Or Ukraine would have been more like Belarus, a country where people really aren’t especially enthusiastic about their national identity.
Gorbachev’s mother was Ukrainian. His wife was a Siberian Ukrainian.
Funny, but between Khrushchev and Gorbachev every single Soviet leader (save Andropov) was either an Ukrainian from Russia or a Russian from Ukraine. If such distinctions even make sense.
Again, Kiev went from being a major intellectual center of the Orthodox world when it was part of Poland-Lithuanian and the autonomous Hetmanate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_University_of_Kyiv-Mohyla_Academy#Kyiv-Mohyla_Academy_.2F_The_National_University_of_Kyiv-Mohyla_Academy
In 1763, while the main city of the autonomous Hetmanate, it had 42,000 people – not much by western European standards, but more than Krakow and Warsaw, and about half the size of Russia’s capital St. Petersburg. Thirty years later Kiev’s population was down to 19,000. By the end of the 19th century it had 250,000 people and was basically a small Russian administrative center, about 1/5 of St. Petersburg’s population.
If you think Kiev’s importance didn’t decline when Ukraine became fully absorbed into the Russian Empire I can’t help you.
Having a Ukrainian mother while raised in Russia does not make one a “Ukrainian.” Gorbachev did not identify as a Ukrainian (though he was certainly of partial Ukrainian descent and didn’t hide that). Chernenko’s Ukrainian-ness is even less direct. His father was born in Siberia to Ukrainian parents, his mother was of Jewish descent.
By your definition, America is ruled by a Kenyan.
Porky and Yahtzee are Ukrainians to you, but none of the post-Stalin Soviet leaders are. It’s funny. You always quote statistics, which may fool people who are afraid of numbers into thinking that you care about facts. You don’t. You deny the most obvious of facts.
Oh, and Raisa had one Ukrainian parent, she was not a “Siberian Ukrainian.”
He was as much of a Ukrainian as Obama is a “Kenyan.”
Chernenko was from Siberia. His father was of Ukrainian descent, born in Siberia to migrants from Ukraine, and his mother was of Jewish descent.
The Donbas project was hugely successful you sewer-troll. The “Revolution of Dignity” however was a major ,embarrasing farce that most of those who claim to have attended it will now be saying they “never visited Kiev at all” , in a few years time.
Over 1 million ( at least) moving to Russia is a clear sign of deep pro-Russian sentiment you cretin…..as is the millions of Ukrainians who already work and live in Russia. Just like with the high percentage of Moldovans and Gruzians who also live and work in Russia. The facts are that a few thousand miners have been able to keep millions of the citizens in areas controlled in Lugansk and Donetsk ….on their side…..despite the fact that Nazi vermin cowards are shelling them, killing thousands of civilians , witholding their pension money…and they know that they 2 states will never be recognised. If the west was neutral over the coup and Crimean, then it would have been guaranteed that the whole of Kharkov ,together with Lugansk and Donetsk would have joined Russia ( if Russia wanted or were in a position to accept them) . It is a miracle that they are still together as LNR and DNR, whilst the basketcase of the rest of Ukraine goes from one parade of idiots to the other.
There was never a pro-Russian party in Ukraine you POS. It started out as Communists vs “pro-Ukraine” parties (whatever that means) . Russian government weren’t backing Communists in this time. The Communists, if I remember correctly, later didnt even endorse Yanukovich ahead of that other Nazi/Polish/Ukrop failure POS Yushchenko. Relations with Kuchma were lukewarm…even worse with Yanukovich. More than half of the Party of Regions MP were about as “pro-Russian ” as Svoboda you idiot. Russia never financed any “pro-Russia” party, they just never envisaged that “pro-Ukraine” would be mixed with “pro-Banderite nutjobs”
Bel0russians live in a far more stable and prosperous country than Ukraine…..as do Kazakhs…and there is clearly no such thing as “Ukrainian identity” you dimwit…..just attempts to rename the cities that were built by Russia/Soviets
Obama was never brought up by that Kenyan you moron and Kenya doesnt have the same relationship with America as Russia does with Ukraine…..yet another brainless coment
Poroshenko had a Jewish father who converted to Orthodoxy, and a Ukrainian mother. He was born and grew up in Ukraine and identifies as a Ukrainian.
You equate this to Chernenko who was born and grew up in Siberia, to a mother of Jewish descent and a Siberian-born father whose parents came from Ukraine.
The fact that you think these people are the same in their degree of being Ukrainians tells us about your dishonesty and denial of facts.
It gets even worse when you claim Khrushchev was a Ukrainian. He had no Ukrainian parents, moved to the Russian-populated Donbas as a teenager, then lived in Moscow and Ukraine as a Bolshevik official who was in involved in the killings of millions of Ukrainians.
I’m still waiting for evidence from you that Yatseniuk isn’t Ukrainian. “He looks Jewish” isn’t evidence. Having, perhaps, some Jewish great-grandparents doesn’t make one not a Ukrainian.
More furious barking from the resident fact-free troll gerad.
Gorbachev identified Ukrainians and Russians as the same people…..so yet more lies, misdirections and stupidity from yourself. With Chernenko……it is normal for people to see “some” link between having parents of the same nationality…..and the connection of that nationality with their son.
But this all goes back to the loser identity of you 24 hour moron trolls. The deep connections of Ukrainians and Russians is the cause of mass insecurities in you freaks.
Yet more hilarity from the resident troll faeces.
You admit (without actually admitting it) that under the Russian empire, the population of Kiev increased 6 fold from 40000 to 250000 ( much bigger than several European capital cities at the time)…yet somehow shamefully try to BS it is as being “reduced”. How stupid or sick in the head do people like you have to be to disinform on such a simple thing?
This increase in population was about the same proportion (maybe even more) than the increase in Moscow and Saint Petersburg populations during the same period you idiot.. Kiev was about a 1/5th of Saint Petersburg’s population in 1763!
The Russian empire brought and encouraged much investment ,culture and so on into Kiev ….more than this Polish-Lith nonsense ever did.
The increase under the Russian empire of Kiev is even more remarkable considering that the Industrial revolution, the primary instigator of population growth, reached Russia/Ukraine much later than it did the western side of the continent, decades later and were still far behind them until Stalin ( the father to 25% of modern Ukraine) came in and miraculously helped achieved parity within a few years
Your desperate and ineffectual barking makes you look like much more of an insecure freak.
Growing up in Russia and having one Russian and one Ukrainian parent makes one a Russian of partial Ukrainian descent.
Glossy has revealed himself as a fundamentally dishonest person, who is here for the purpose of misleading others.
He insisted that Poroshenko is a Jew:
Even though he knows Poroshenko grew up as an Orthodox Christian with an ethnic Ukrainian mother. And even though there is no real evidence that Yatseniuk isn’t Ukrainian.
But he claimed Khrushchev and Gorbachev were Ukrainians:
Khrushchev was born in Russia to two Russian parents. Gorbachev was born in Russia to a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. Glossy claims these two to be Ukrainians. But describes Poroshenko (born in Ukraine to a Ukrainian mother) as a Jew.
errrr…how about the fact that the russophobic “historian” Tim Snyder says that he is Jewish you idiot? That and the fact he comes from the Romanian/jewish part of Ukraine.
That video of the maidan-supporting, Ukrop-embedded, russophobe historian Tim Snyder saying that Yatsenyuk is jewish is no longer there.
I remember he was on BBC Newsnight at the time of the overthrow in 2014…I saw the video on Youtube. He definitely said it. That this video is deleted is VERY odd. They only have a video of him appearing on Newsnight a few months ago talking about divisions in Europe….but I know for a fact he was on there in 2014. Strange indeed.
Growth is relative. When Kiev had 42,000 people it was one of the largest cities in eastern Europe – bigger than Warsaw (30,000 people) and Krakow (in the 20’sK). When Kiev had 250,000 in 1897 it was a small city, only a third the size of Warsaw (750,000), even smaller than Lodz (351,000). It was no longer a major intellectual center, but a provincial backwater.
Kiev had 42,000 people in 1763. St. Petersburg had 74,000 in 1750. I assume it increased by 1763 but probably not to much more than double Kiev’s. Certainly it did not have five times more.
So no evidence but the claim of a low IQ fact-free troll who says he saw someone say something on youtube, but can’t find it anymore. Thanks for the laugh.
Growth is relative….and I am making it relative to Moscow and Saint Petersburg you cretin.
What part of when I mentioned the industrial revolution did you not understand?
I can read a graph you know. Saint Petersburg was at 200000 at the time. Who gives a f**k what Warsaw’s population was ….or Prague?
Here’s an article from Haaretz quoting lots of people, some Jewish, some not, some hostile to Yatsenyuk, some friendly to him, about whether or not he’s Jewish:
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2.209/debate-rages-over-whether-ukraine-presidential-hopeful-is-jewish-1.6323
But all of that is as irrelevant to me as what he says about it himself. A person who looks like him is either fully or mostly Jewish. Certainly not half and half – he looks more Jewish than that.
What I say, has more relevance than your nutjob trawlings through Alexander Motyl BS edits of Wikipedia pages. I know he has said it….I have no intention of looking for it. Just as long as we agree that if I did stumble upon the video of Professor Snyder saying it….then you will shoot yourself….multiple times.
The situation was that this Snyder idiot was on the programme talking about how “ridiculous” it was for Russia to accuse the coup government of being fascist when it’s Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is a jew. I think we can all agree that is a plausible scenario of discourse.
Thanks Glossy.
Brezhnev was born and raised in the Ukraine and spoke with a Ukrainian accent, but his parents were from around Kursk, which is now in Russia. The Kursk governorate was 22.6% Little Russian-speaking in 1897. When filling out forms he sometimes called himself Ukrainian and sometimes Russian, unsurprisingly for someone from the border of those two identities.
In the insane Maidanite view of the world Ukrainians were some kind of a persecuted minority under the USSR. How does that square with its long-time leader calling himself “Ukrainian” in his passport?
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brezhnev_LI_Pasport_1947.jpg?uselang=en
The Wikipedia says that Khruschev was born in the Kursk governorate, which was in an area where Great Russia gradually turned into Little Russia.
The top leadership of Maidanite Ukraine is less physically Ukrainian than was the top leadership of the post-Stalinist USSR. The fact that the Ukraine was doing better then than it’s doing now can’t be wholly unrelated. During an earlier discussion I learned that Uzbekistan now has about the same Internet penetration rate as the Ukraine. Amazing.
Gorbachev’s mom was from the Chernigov governorate, while his father seems to have been from the Voronezh governorate, which was 36% Little Russian-speaking in 1897. So Brezhnev’s, Khruschev’s and Gorbachev’s roots go back, in their entirety, to the belt where Great Russia gradually turned into Little Russia.
It would be interesting to do an analysis of this sort for the entire Politburo in the post-Stalinist period. Maybe people of this particular background felt a commonality and promoted each other. Khruschev certainly promoted Brezhnev before the latter stabbed him in the back.
The barking troll “thinks” what he says has some sort of relevance. How cute.
So your argument of Yatsenuk being Jewish boils down to that he “looks Jewish.” Nice. The guy denies being Jewish, UKraine’s chief rabbi denies that he is Jewish. Apparently Yatsenuk’s father is the nephew of some OUN leader. But Glossy thinks he looks Jewish so he must be.
One conclusion from this is that the popular perception of late Soviet leaders being Ukrainian wasn’t all that wrong. They essentially came up from the border area.
Popular perceptions, stereotypes, the sort of things that uneducated, apolitical people say about politics and human nature – that should be the golden standard of truth in anything sociological. It’s hard to fool the crowd.
Yes. There are these things called genes, and they affect how everyone looks. To the extent that any of these guys need excuses, they’re probably hiding behind the technicality of religion. And I doubt that Yahtzee even believes in anything.
This region may have been the heartland of Homo Sovieticus.
So now having Russian parents and being from Russia, but coming from a part of Russia that borders Ukraine makes one a “Ukrainian” and you didn’t lie when you claimed “Ukrainians led the USSR within living memory.”
Do you actually believe your excuses?
In your world does Stepan Bandera look like a Jew also?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera#/media/File:SBandera.jpg
How about this guy:
http://ukropnews24.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/139ead41563f1f0d1b304355e90f87ca.jpg
You know so little about Ukraine anyways, perhaps you can’t tell the difference between a Ukrainian and a Jew.
How about this non-Ukrainian?
http://cdn.lightgalleries.net/4bd5ec19c3aaa/images/Moby_A-1.jpg
No. Some Ashkenazim look generically Mediterranean, some generically mid-European and some uniquely Jewish. Yatsenyuk is in that third category. Among American celebrities, Dershowitz for example is in it. Bernie Sanders looks uniquely Jewish, meaning that someone with his face couldn’t possibly be anything else.
Another small ethnicity that has some facial types that are completely unique to it are the Irish. This is obviously because of Ireland’s remoteness. Conan O’Brien for example looks uniquely Irish, as did Ted Kennedy. Dolores O’Riordan, one of the best pop vocalists ever, has a uniquely Irish face. However, most Irish people do not look uniquely Irish. I’d say that most, maybe even two thirds of Ashkenazim don’t look uniquely Ashkenazi either. I don’t. My mom’s sister does, but her brother doesn’t.
The Ashkenazim developed some unique facial types because of a long history of not intermarryimg with others.
Bandera looked generically European. You can’t really narrow it down further just by looking at him.
I don’t know who the first guy is. He certainly doesn’t look uniquely Ashkenazi. I know who Moby is. His is a generally northern European face.
This region may have been the heartland of Homo Sovieticus.
That’s a great compliment to that region. After the defeat of early Communism the Soviet Union achieved some incredible things – won the biggest war in the history of the world, conquered space, created a society without poverty, inequality, drugs, gambling, prostitution, porn, advertising, scam artists… I’m probably forgetting a few vices.
It may have been humanity’s finest moment.
So in your world the Soviet Union of the 1970s was “humanity’s finest moment?”
Or was it earlier – you are a fan of Stalin, after all. USSR of the late 40’s?
After suffering devastating losses when invaded by a country with 1/3 its population.
But fell behind.
Eliminating poverty and inequality by impoverishing, relatively, everyone else. Why do you think inequality is bad?
In modest amounts, not the worst things. The West hasn’t exactly been swimming in gambling, prostitution and porn while the USSR existed.
Are you a fan of North Korea? Do you wish America was like that?
In modest amounts, not the worst things.
I think you just say that to contradict me. In what ways are modest amounts of drugs, gambling, prostitution, porn, advertising, scamming, etc. good? What is the mechanism through which small amounts of that help society?
And I don’t think it’s even possible for many people to only have a modest amount of drugs. I’ve never tried any myself, but I think that addictiveness is a part of the definition of that particular meaning of the word drugs. Appears to be true of gambling and porn as well.
There must be strong characters who can stop doing anything at any time, but I don’t think they’re typical.
Do you wish America was like that?
Well, my favorite presidential candidate wants to reindustrialize America, berates Wall St. in an almost Bernie-like way, is a law-and-order guy unlike Bernie, and almost certainly hates lefty, decadent filth in entertainment and the arts.
You have trouble with reading comprehension. I wrote, “In modest amounts, not the worst things.” I didn’t describe them as good, or helpful.
It depends on the drug, but again, you have trouble reading. In this case, what you yourself wrote. My words were in response to your statement:
“created a society without poverty, inequality, drugs, gambling, prostitution, porn,”
(I bolded it for you, now).
Modest amounts of poverty, inequality, drugs, gambling, prostitution, porn in a society is not the worst thing. A society with those things in modest amounts is not as bad as a society with none of those things but with repression.
You chose to misinterpret what I wrote and refused to answer my questions:
So in your world the Soviet Union of the 1970s was “humanity’s finest moment?”
Or was it earlier – you are a fan of Stalin, after all. USSR of the late 40′s?
Are you a fan of North Korea? Do you wish America was like that?
I suspect there is very little prostitution, gambling, drugs or porn in North Korea (at least, beyond the upper echelons).
After suffering devastating losses when invaded by a country with 1/3 its population.
Without looking it up (no time), that sounds very wrong to me. Germany had more people than that then. And almost all of continental Europe was working for it. And troops from many nations fought for the Germans – Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Spaniards.
Like the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 it was a case of the entire European continent invading Russia as a group. Some countries sent troops, some arms and ammunition.
Why do you think inequality is bad?
Inequality is actually the thing that’s OK in modest amounts. Drugs, prostitution, porn, advertising, scamming, etc. aren’t OK in any amounts.
Are you a fan of North Korea?
Western media can’t even tell the truth about the West. The chances that it tells the truth about countries like North Korea are nil.
So it isn’t Trump. Who is it? And does he want to make America more like North Korea, in your opinion?
The Apprentice wasn’t aimed at an intellectual audience, but it wasn’t filthy or “transgressive” or decadent.
I suspect there is very little prostitution, gambling, drugs or porn in North Korea (at least, beyond the upper echelons).
Yes, I suspect that’s true as well. And if it is, the hatred that the powers that be have for North Korea becomes easy to understand. Here’s a smart group of people, a real nation, being completely independent (there are very few truly free, independent states on Earth), warding itself off from all that filth. I think that would deserve admiration.
A society with those things in modest amounts is not as bad as a society with none of those things but with repression.
First, you are a supporter of an unbelievably repressive society. Those posters asking people to rat on their neighbors to the secret police (the SBU) for private conversations about history – they were unimaginable in post-Stalinist USSR. So what you support is filth, poverty, dependence AND repression. Because that’s what the junta offers.
I don’t know if such posters are imaginable in North Korea, and Western media would be a wrong place to look for such info.
As for the single finest moment, right before Gorby screwed everything up I guess.
How about the strip clubs that Trump fought to have allowed in his casinos? He was a pioneer, there – his casinos were the first to feature strip clubs.
I don’t know if that actually happened or if it’s like your “1/3 of the population” comment. If he did, then that was wrong. In general he’s not perfect, just better than his opponents.
I’ve looked up the population. It seems that without the newly-occupied territories it was roughly 170 million vs. 70 million. With the newly occupied territories the ratio would have probably improved for Germany, though classifying different types of occupation (what to include in Germany’s case, protectorates and the like) would probably get messy.
I didn’t look it up either – my mistake. I was a little off. Germany, including Austria and the Sudatenland, had 80 million people in 1940. The USSR had 192 million people in 1940. So the USSR almost lost a war, and suffered catastrophic casualties, when invaded by a country with a little more than 2/5 its population.
Germany was also not only fighting the Soviets but also occupying most of Europe.
Hungary and Romania were significant allies who fought alongside the Germans (at least,in the beginning). Bulgaria did not fight the Soviets (other than naval skirmishes) and did not declare war against the USSR. It mostly fought against Yugoslavia. Spain was officially neutral but sent about 45,000 volunteers to fight the Soviets. A trivial number, given the scale of the war.
Both Romania and Bulgaria switched sides and fought the Germans as the Soviets approached. Over 500,000 Romanian soldiers fought against the Axis.
You posted this while I was writing. In 1940, the USSR had 191.7 million people, Germany (including annexed Austria and the Sudatenland) had 80 million.
I was off a little, and admitted and corrected my mistake. Germany wasn’t 1/3 the USSR’s population, but about 2/5.
You, on the other hand, flat-out lied about many things.
As for Trump’s pioneering business practice:
http://www.nj.com/atlantic/index.ssf/2013/07/strip_club_coming_to_atlantic_city_casino_reports_say.html
ATLANTIC CITY — The country’s first strip-club-in-a-casino will open in August.
Scores, the New York-based franchise, will open its $25 million entertainment complex in the Trump Taj Mahal in August, according to a company spokeswoman.
The site was about two years in the making and will be 36,000 square feet of adult entertainment, the company said in a release.
Scores will be located on the second floor of the Trump casino, in a space that was formerly occupied by three restaurants. There will be eight distinct areas – including a main showcase area, a sports bar, a nightclub, a lounge, a cabaret and a male revue.
It was a contest of industrial capacities, not just armies. The economies of the occupied countries of Western Europe were working for the German war effort.
That was wrong of him to do. As I said, he’s not perfect, just better than his opponents.
Good to see that you admit admiration for North Korea, and admiration of Andropov’s USSR.
.
Which one? I mean, which real society – not imaginary one in your head.
I imagine once millions have been killed the remaining ones needed no reminders. Things went smoothly.
As for the infamous posters, one can construct similar fairy tales about Russia being a repressive police-state:
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/soviet-tradition-of-snitching-makes-comeback-in-russia/522763.html
In the real world, no one I know, or anyone they know, have snitched or been snitched on in either Russia or Ukraine. I suspect it’s the same with you. Since you think there is mass repression in Ukraine, perhaps you can point out the gulags Ukraine must now have to support such large-scale repression?
Given that Donbas was Europe’s HIV (competing sometimes with Odessa, sure), abortion, and Ukraine’s murder capital and you are on Donbas’ side in this conflict, we know what you support.
I think you included eastern Poland in the USSR number, but didn’t include western Poland in the German number. The Germans had several kinds of occupatuon. Did the USSR use any troops from the newly-occupied territories during the war? I’m guessing not. There probably wasn’t enough time to set all of that up.
I imagine once millions have been killed the remaining ones needed no reminders. Things went smoothly.
Nope, people actually had politically-incorrect conversations with their neighbors and friends. All the time. They didn’t under Stalin, but that’s a different thing.
Are you suggesting that people in Ukraine now don’t have politically incorrect conversations with their friends?
Is this your dishonesty again, or are you really that clueless?
I ask you again to point out the gulag system Ukraine must now have in order to maintain the mass repression you claim it to have.
You guessed wrong. Belarussians and western Ukrainians were conscripted into the Soviet military, although many western Ukrainians, deemed unreliable, were sent to work in places like the Urals instead.
Are you suggesting that people in Ukraine now don’t have politically incorrect conversations with their friends?
In the Ukrainian-held part of the Donbass? I don’t know. Once you give people an incentive like those posters, with telephone numbers on them where to call, things would probably change.
Uzbekistan: 43.6%
Ukraine: 43.4
Confirmed. “Wow, just wow” as some say.
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/UA/Ukraine_14th_HRMMU_Report.pdf
No evidence of gulags or something like that in the report. Evidence of people (107 cases mentioned, but these couldn’t be every such case that exists) detained and tortured by the government and by pro-government militias. Most, but not all (15 people detained in Kharkiv) cases occurred in the conflict zone. It looks like most of the people getting detained are those accused of providing info to rebels.
A couple hundred people in a country of 40 million detained in time of war, mostly in the conflict zone, is mass repression, comparable to Stalinism and gulags?
Overall, report concludes:
“Since the Maidan events in 2014, Ukrainians have gained greater freedom to exercise individual liberties, including their rights to freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression. The last two years have seen a notable increase in active civil society groups and volunteer engagement.
At the same time, there are cases where counter-terrorism legislation has been used to arrest and detain members of political parties, NGOs and media professionals. Also, journalists and civil society organizations, including humanitarian organizations, continued to face significant challenges in operating in the conflict-affected area. Civil society actors, even those working in the areas controlled by the Government, have described self-censorship. This includes choosing not to discuss in public concerns related to the military occupation of civilian homes, or media professionals limiting themselves when reporting from areas near the contact line.”
::::::::::::::::::::
It looks like the report concludes that Ukrainian society is more free than it was in general, but things get a lot worse in the conflict zone. And the new republics are more repressive than the Ukrainian government.
This isn’t quite the same as internet penetration, but in 2013, about a third of internet users in Ukraine were in Kiev. Second place was Odessa oblast with 17.6% of Ukraine’s internet users, Donetsk 6.7%, Dnipropetrovsk 4.8%. Lviv 4.3% and Kharkiv 3.4%. Taking into account population (Lviv oblast had 2.5 million people compared to Donetsk oblast’s 4.4 million in 2013) Lviv oblast jumps to 3rd place, behind Kiev and Odessa.
Lowest internet usage was in the non-Galician western Ukrainian regions, and Kirovohrad (rural central Ukraine, south of Kiev).
http://economics.unian.ua/transport/767978-mayje-tretina-koristuvachiv-internet-v-ukrajini-projivae-u-kievi.html
“After suffering devastating losses when invaded by a country with 1/3 its population”
errr..Germany,Hungary and Romania was about 110 million you braindead prick. The losses are precisely what makes the courage, resiliance and military excellence of the Soviet people and Stalin to turn it around and chase the Nazi’s thousands of kilometres back…the most sacred and remarkable victory you idiot.
Unlike with the self-destructive and weak Polish fascist idiots who have only themselves to blame for their destruction in 1939-45 (the Poles still conducted massacres on jews after 1945 and most of the successful ones were those who have pretended/imitated the french) , it was secondary effects that killed most of the civilians in the USSR. The weather (unlike with Poland) and blockades made life impossible, but the Russian people at places like Leningrad and Stalingrad showed the rest of humanity, especially the cretinous Poles how to fight properly and show courage.
A disproportionately high number of Soviet soldiers were killed in the first 6 months of the Nazi invasion…which was a cowardly surprise one. 4 million of the Soviet soldiers died as POW’s ( and again most in those first 6 months). So when a POS like you attempts to misinform…I will inform.
Unlike with all the other countries the Nazi’s never took over the government . By your own attention-whore “logic” then it doesn’t count as an invasion because the Nazi’s only took less than 10% of USSR territory
The USSR didn’t “impoverish” but massively improved living standards ,literacy and Life expectancy in USSR….and Poland
The only reason you would even make such a lowlife scumbag comment is because your grandfathers must have been lazy, non-medal winning cowardly Poles who have nothing to be proud of at being humiliated in WW2 ….or were Nazi turncoat faeces themselves, massively insecure and bitter at the Soviets destroying them.
If Nigeria were to invade a country with an excellent military like Israel….that would be a miraculous achievement to everybody…….apart from a dumb POS troll moron like you using the cretinous logic that because Nigeria has 15 times the population them in should be “easy”
It is not population but size and standard of the militaries you idiot. The Nazi’s were the best military in the world and came with the largest army of all time, and Germany had experienced the Industrial revolution several decades before Russia. Planes,artillery,tanks,mass production facilities, starving of it’s civilians, vermin Nazis killing 4 million POW’s in 6 months etcetera…the Soviets had a huge deficit to overcome….and they did
The Great Patriotic War was one of the most sacred and miraculous victories of all time. It was the football equivalent of being 5-0 down after 15 mintues but coming back to win 15-7 after 90 mintues.
The troll barks some more.
in other words…….no rebuttal of the facts I say about GPW & a POS like you and your relatives in this time,in my post. Cretin
And I know you’ve read and understood every single word in there
Barking troll “thinks” he posted understandable and useful facts. Very cute. Would he like a biscuit?
And the economies of Britain, Canada and the USA were supporting the Russian war effort, keeping the Luftwaffe down, the submarines at bay and blocking Germany’s access to Middle East oil.