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Posted on 06/07/2026 8:55:19 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A Kingdom and a Village. By Simon Morrison. Knopf; 528 pages;
His is a love without illusions, however. Today it is “a showcase capital”, its downtown beautified as a sop to disenfranchised citizens. But as Mr Morrison shows in his technicolour chronicle of the city, beneath the petro-funded sheen, Moscow is a domain of purges, paranoia and ravenous power. History has shaped its character; equally, as much as that of any metropolis, Moscow’s character has shaped history, both Russia’s and the world’s.
The first half of this book traces the origins and evolution of the Russian state, from Moscow’s first recorded mention in 1147 to the 17th century. Like the history of other states, only more so, it is a saga of dynastic struggle, vicious intrigue, autocracy and wanton cruelty. To live in Moscow, it helps to have a bleak sense of humour—and the same goes for reading about it.
In a typical anecdote, a 14th-century prince cuts out a rival’s heart. Later the prince “would himself be murdered, and then his murderer would be murdered”. Ivan the Terrible killed a jester by pouring scalding soup on his head. “To hell with him!” Ivan scowled. “He made no attempt to recover!”
Ivan wasn’t all bad, notes Mr Morrison. He introduced a few useful reforms in the 16th century, as well as boiling and roasting people. “Such, at times, has been Russia’s tragedy,” the author laments: “barbarism in the service of civilisation”. Under Ivan and his grandfather, Ivan III, Moscow consolidated its hold over the region and developed a bureaucracy. After them came the macabre “time of troubles”, a bout of mayhem that ended with the Romanovs’ accession in 1613. The legacies of that traumatic era include lasting convictions that brutal rule is preferable to chaos, and that bloodshed can be redemptive.
In these murky centuries, some motifs recur. One is invasion—both of Moscow and by it. Local strongmen were better at slaughtering each other and fighting other Slavic cities than at repelling outsiders. Moscow was repeatedly sacked by the Mongols. Meanwhile, “to thwart invasion, Moscow invaded, again and again”, seeking a buffer zone for its buffer zone, as, alas, it still does now. Another theme is fire, which periodically razed it.
Sometimes, as with Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, the scourges came together. Given these threats, and the risk of state expropriation, property has often been insecure: “Nothing was permanent or meant to last.”
Two other cities shadowed Moscow’s rise from “a fort on a hill along a river” to an imperial metropolis. First Kyiv, to which it was linked by dynastic and cultural ties, but compared with which it was for centuries a philistine, obscurantist backwater. Moscow had no theatres until the 1670s; visiting diplomats boggled at its drunkenness. Second, St Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great and Russia’s capital from 1712 (Lenin switched it back to Moscow in the havoc of the Bolshevik revolution). Peter disliked Moscow, where, as a boy, he saw a mob impale some of his relatives.
With its Italianate architecture and access to the Baltic Sea, St Petersburg embodied an openness to Enlightenment ideals and westward integration. (In theory: in practice it had its share of dolts and bigots.) Conversely, Moscow “resisted Europe—and still does”. The contrast between the cities captures Russia’s alternating engagement and enragement with the West. To ride the train between them, once a tourist treat, is to trace an axis of history.
The second half of this study, at once scholarly and impressionistic, takes urban features and individuals as emblems of later trends. Among them is the ornate Metro, the construction of which cost an unknown number of workers’ lives; some overseers perished in the purges. Here the Metro stands for Stalin’s breakneck transformation of his capital—it became “a map of his obsessions”—and its experience of the second world war, when stations doubled as shelters. Stalin threw up monumental buildings, redrew streets and tore down landmarks as brusquely as he deported entire national groups across his realm.
Then there is the cathedral built to commemorate the expulsion of Napoleon. It was dynamited in 1931 to make room for a grandiose “Palace of Soviets”. Instead the site became a giant swimming pool, with a VIP zone that hosted prostitution and black marketeering, before, in the 1990s, the cathedral was rebuilt. The farrago illustrates the corrupt nexus of church and state in Russia, and the vandalism, venality and incompetence of the city’s overlords.
“Power looks after itself,” Mr Morrison observes. “Power exists for itself,” an attitude cultivated in hunkering Moscow and projected by its crabbed rulers across an empire and beyond. The city, he writes, is “completely unfree”. It is a place stalked by armed men in uniform, where life can be a tightrope-walk for people without connections. At weekends droves of Muscovites escape to their dachas, where the air is cleaner and they can breathe more freely.
At the same time, the author says, Moscow “seems anarchically unbridled”, crackling with the urgency of life on the edge. After the Soviet Union fell, this electric mood—the sense that “Anything can happen”—attracted curious Westerners, from sleazy carpetbaggers to cultural explorers like Mr Morrison. (Moscow also drew in countless workers from ex-Soviet republics, for whom it remains the imperial hub.) When the city spat them out, many wound up pining for it in their tamer homelands.
Now, during its latest imperialist spasm, Russia is a pariah in the West. Moscow is in effect off-limits for many foreigners; the Kremlin is squeezing Muscovites’ remaining freedoms.
Still, that tale of “a church, which became a public pool, which became a church again” suggests another lesson of Moscow’s history. Nothing—no tyrant, regime or ideology—lasts forever. Mr Morrison offers an apt variant of this moral: “Everything was forever, until it was no more, until it was again forever.” ■
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https://youtu.be/NdjeKE9YM7Q
Military Summary Channel - Facts on the ground
Battle for Donbas heating up.👍😄🇷🇺
There are some who theorize that Northern Europeans and Russians may be descendants of the tribe of Dan, because there there are many rivers and points of interest with the name of Dan in it.
Denmark itself means Mark, as in territory, of Dan.
“Russia’s Pathologies”
Yup. No bias there.
So they compensate for these pathologies by invading their neighboring countries.
I lived in Russia for a year, just over a decade ago. Still the most spectacular place I’ve been. Gut-wrenching history. Magical winter...
How many pride parades does moscow have? how many rapes of white women by non white men does moscow have?
The internet is cool.
You can make anything up.
As long as you believe it. It’s cool.
Um, why would I make up something like that? 🙄
‘cause your full of Sh*t.
Дурака́м зако́н не пи́сан.
Blame the victim. That’s the ticket.
Russia is the largest country on Earth. They have no need or desire for Ukraine.
The bankrupt EU, however, needs to divide Ukraine up and redistribute it's agricultural and natural resource bounty among themselves.
I lived in Russia just after the Crimea annexation and before Trump’s first election...
They do need and desire Ukraine.
No pride parades in Russia this is true. Military and 'national pride' parades instead. However the major cities Moscow and Petersburg have very art-centric cores, and sexually libertine cultures and undergrounds. (And it's the young men from big cities who tend to dodge military conscription as well, but not all.)
The post-Soviet chaotic 90s led to major life expectancy decline among men due to alcoholism, so a lot of the people my age grew up fatherless...
There is a domestic violence epidemic that was talked about a lot. And a well known birth rate crisis. So the govt gives lots of perks to young couples wanting to start families.
There is a major *Muslim* presence from former Soviet states like Uzbekistan, and regions like Tatarstan/Chechnya.. But that doesn’t mean everyone’s in burkas and speaking Arabic. It’s different...
I was there post-Crimea annexation and was not surprised in the least when 2022 invasion happened. Yes they do desire and want Ukraine. But there is spiritual turmoil over the matter given how many Russians are part Ukrainian, and have Ukrainian relatives etc... And vice versa!
The pathologies are real...But forget Russia! It's American pathologies creating chaos in the world right now more than anything...
While there may be “nature” crossover aplenty, in terms of “nurture” :
Slavs are VERY different from Scandinavians/Finnic etc...
And among Slavs, Russians are in their own class especially because of the continental bridging with Asia.
Speaking from firsthand experience...
The languages and all the intricacies arguably provide a window to this pathology stuff too...
It’s why Ukrainians have been so adamant about speaking their own language and not Russian...The languages are similar but...not the same.
Northern Europeans and Russians have no semitic genetic markers.
btw, Denmark in Danish is DANE-mark.
the commonality among Dane-mark, Danube, the Dona, the tuatha de Danaan (many different “celtic” tribes considered themselves this, this tribe of the Goddess Danu) is the Proto-Indo-European work dānu, which translates to “river” or “flowing water”
Danube = dānu + vius
Don, Dnieper, Dniester - all from the Iranian word for river
Tuatha de Danaan - as I said, the goddess Danu
Hinduism - the Goddess Danu is associated with the primeval waters
NOTE - this is from dānu and this is COMPLETELY UNRELATED linguistically AND historically from the Semitic “Dan”
In Hebrew, the name Dan (דָּן) comes from the Semitic root D-N, which means “to judge” or “judge.” (In Genesis 30:6)
The words sound similar in English, but have ZERO relationship - unless you agree with some historians who think that the tribe of Dan were originally “sea peoples” related to the Philistines/proto-Greeks. I don’t as the archaeology and linguistics and genetics don’t support this
One should NOT go by “hey they sound similar in English” — English is a comparatively new language arising just about 500 years ago (Middle English like chaucer is quite different while Old English is unintelligible to modern English speakers) - and it arose as a creole and pidgin mix of Germanic with Norse with Gallo-French.
like saying “Ishtar” and “Easter” have similarities when Ishtar is pronounced as Eesh-tar in ancient Akkadian - an Afro-Asiatic language of the Semitic brandh. This is from the semitic root of “to be rich”
Easter or Ostern is purely German and English derived from “aus” meaning East or shine/dawn (hence Oster-reich / Austria) and even other Germanic languages don’t use this but use the term Pasque/Pasqua/Passover which are derived from the HEbrew word Pesach which means “to pass over” - in Amharic it is Fasika
Anyway - don’t fall for the “hey, they sound alike in English, so these two words from two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT language FAMILIES are the same”
Condoleezza - look at my posts above — linguistically, historically there is no correlation between Danu/Dane-mark/Don/Danube/Dniester/Tuatha de Danaan and the Semitic Dan (דָּן)
“Slavs are VERY different from Scandinavians/Finnic etc...”
—> well, yes and no.
Finnic - linguistically and racially the Finns, like the Magyar, were originally related to Siberian peoples - who kinda looked like Eskimos. But they heavily intermarried so now only abotu 5 to 15% of their genes are Asiatic. Their language is completely different from Indo-European as it belongs to the Finno-Uralic language (Samoyed, Finnic, Estonian, Hungarian, Mordvin, Udmurt etc.)
BUT — the “Muscowites” and northern East Slavs are heavily “Slavicised Finnic people” - the Finnic peoples were hunter-gatherers and the Slavs “Slavicised” them.
The same is true for the Serbs, Croats etc. who hate it when you point out that genetically they are the same as the people who have always lived in the Balkans (Illyrian/Dacian peoples)
“It’s why Ukrainians have been so adamant about speaking their own language and not Russian...The languages are similar but...not the same.”
It is always interesting to look at when language families (or sub-families) diverge.
Slavic languages as recently as the 8th century were dialects of each other, but as distances expanded and polities arose and writing “hardened” languages, then they separated.
Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian (severely endangered) are all descendants of the East Slavic “Kievan/Kyivan Rus” language sprachebund. The Mongols came and smashed that. Old Belarussian was then a prestige language for some time as it was the administrative language of the “Grand Duchy of Lithuania”, but then the Lithuanians got into a union with Poland in 1400 and Poland had far more literature, writing, art etc. in Polish and slowly the language shifted.
Russian or rather the Muscowite dialect became a prestige language only much later - in the 17th century. ‘Ukrainian’ was a mix of dialects until formalization in the 19th century (in the same way that Standard German or Standard Italian were only fixed in the 19th century)
Ukrainian is only abotu 60% compatible with “Russian”
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