Posted on 03/18/2014 9:10:05 PM PDT by varmintman
I'm not the world's foremost expert on Russia... But I believe I know enough to at least try to clear up a few of the misconceptions I see on forums and have been listening to on talk radio for the past few weeks.
A bit of Russian history for starters... Slavic farmers invited Vikings (Verangians) into what you'd now call Russia and set up the Kievan state which adopted Christianity around 988 AD so that the territory controlled by the city of Kiev was the dominant power in Russia prior to the Mongol invasion in 1236. In other words, they'd fought Polovyetski/Cumins and other nomad tribes to a sort of a standstill which appeared to be a workable state of affairs and then they got run over by a military avalanch and an empire whose military technology was 300 years ahead of the rest of the world.
Russia spent the next 140 years or so under the "Mongol Yoke" before the princes of Moscow managed to win a huge battle over the Golden Horde at Kulikovo in 1380, only to have the white and golden hordes unite a couple of years later and plow Russia under foot again where she would have remained for another century or two, nonetheless shortly thereafter Tamerlane came through and annihilated the Golden Horde. Unlike the situation with Genghis Khan who had utterly competent heirs, Tamerlane's empire began to crumble shortly after his death in the first few years of the 1400s, leaving much of Russia a sort of a shambles and Southern Russia what was called "wild fields". Jews living in what had been the remains of the Khazar kingdom prior to that time finally had enough and started moving to Poland and Germany and for a period of a century or so until Russia started to get organized again, Poland and Lithuania began to look like serious countries on maps. In those days, the Ukraine was part of Poland and one of the biggest if not THE biggest celebrations there ever was in the Ukraine was when Russia took it over in the 1700s.
The Ukrainian language is basically the language of the principality of Kiev while modern Russian is basically the language of the principality of Suzdal and the city of Moscow. At some point, the languages of the various places which comprised Russia must have fused, which is presumably why you have more than one system for verb formations and declension endings. The difference between Russian and Ukrainian is similar to the difference between our English and Chaucer's and anybody in the Ukraine who isn't retarded can speak Russian.
The city of Moscow featured the most paranoid design for a city in the history of the world, basically a system of concentric rings, each more difficult to break into than the last. That is because up to a very late date, Crimean Tatars, remnants of the Golden Horde, used to ride into the city as far as they could get, capture children and stuff them into baskets on their horses and ride off to sell them so that the word "Slav" morphed into "slave". The fact that any Crimean Tatars remain alive at all strongly indicates that Russians are an unusually tolerant people, less given to holding grudges than most.
The official title of the tsars was "Tsar of all the Russias", meaning primarily 'Great Russia' (Russia), 'White Russia' (Belorus), and 'Little Russia' (Ukraine). That is the heart of the Slavic Orthodox world and Ukraine is the breadbasket of that world. The Ukraine could feed everybody from the Volga to the Atlantic and that in fact was Hitler's plan; the idea was to build a super-gauge train to haul foodstuffs from Ukraine to Europe and, as I read it at least, to get Western Europe pretty much out of the food business altogether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn
"Early plans for routes considered India and Vladivostok as the ultimate goals of the railways, but [b][i][size=150]by 1943 the planning was focused exclusively on European cities.[1] Ukraine and the Volga Basin were seen as especially important targets, as these areas were viewed as the future granaries of the Nazi empire[/size][/i][/b],[1] potentially through the "settlement strings". orSiedlungsperlen of the proposed Wehrbauer settlements within the conquered Lebensraum territories, which would also be linked by the planned easternmost reaches of theReichsautobahn freeway network.[5]...."
But you get the idea. The idea that anybody should have expected Vladimir Putin to just sit there and watch George Soros, Monsanto, and the US state department to just walk off with the Ukraine is idiotic. For that matter, the Crimea had been part and parcel of Russia for at least a couple of centuries before Khrushchev gifted it to Ukraine in 1954; it didn't seem to make much difference when everybody was a citizen of the CCCP one way or other, but expecting Russia to just let go of he Crimea under present circumstances is doubly stupid.
Moreover, there is a very big problem with language convergence. Television and the Internet are radically shrinking the world. TV has in fact killed the Southern accent in Texas so that I hear it only amongst people over 60; I expect TV and the internet to kill most of the world's languages in the next 30 years. My guess would be that languages which will still be in use by 2050 will include:
Basically, Ukrainian is a dead language walking and the idiots who just took over Kiev know that, which accounts for at least some of their irrational behavior. Ukraine has a border with Russia, their culture is tied up with that of Russia, and Russian is the main language of those which will survive, with which they are most familiar. My money says that in 20 years, Ukrainian will be spoken only amongst people over 60. The future of the Ukrainian people clearly lies with Russia.
That brings up an obvius question: what are the people in the US state department smoking? What did they expect to see happen?? Another question is, what reasons could there be for wanting to start a major war over any of this stuff?
A century or two ago the reasons for starting wars were simple: Gold, land, women, treaties... That stuff was heinous enough but it was at least comprehensible. In today's world, unfortunatley, you have to at least consider the most paranoid possibility i.e. that the LaRouche group may be right and that the idiots may actually have in mind to start a nuclear war to reduce the human population of the planet to less than one billion as per their stated ideology, for the glory of Gaea.
It turns out the sniper killings around Kiev a month ago were the work of the hoodlums WE are supporting, and not that of Yanukovich or Russians:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-05/behind-kiev-snipers-it-was-somebody-new-coaltion-stunning-new-leak-reveals-truth
We have now seen two of these false-flag ops in the past six months (Syria and Kiev). At some point, the world has seen this **** one too many times and gets wise to it, and starts to look on Americans as a bunch of lunatics. It's hard not to get the idea that somebody in the US State Department is trying to start a major war.
Aside from that, the world can clearly see that Vladimir Putin is the best Ruler Russia has ever had since Tsar Peter, and that Bork Obunga is just as clearly the worst ruler any advanced state has ever had since Nero and may in fact be WORSE than Nero since I don't view Bork as being bright enough to play a fiddle. More likely we'll get to listen to rap while America burns.
Vladimir Putin is the main force responsible for bringing the global warming lunatics into global disrepute and disrepect. Putin apparently got a number of Russia's best hackers in a room and said something like "Guys, I'm not gonna wreck Russia's economy over a bunch of bullshit, I want you to blast your way into that East Anglia Email Database and spread to the four winds whatever you might find there", and they did that:
http://www.climategate.com
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?221759-Is-Putin-behind-the-leaked-Climategate-e-mails
In other words, aside from needing to learn how to pronounce the guy's name properly, commentators like Limbaugh and Hannity need to understand that Putin is primarily responsible for their not needing to rub sticks together to make fire.
I mean, how many times does that make that Russia has bailed our hiney's out of some really awful kind of ****? Picture living in a world in which Sweden was a major power, i.e. picture yourself cruising in a 57 Volvo:
Guy a half mile up the road had one of those when I was a teenager. The thing was so ugly that just having it parked at the curb reduced housing values within a three-block radius. Tsar Peter saved us from that ****:
I EXPECT libtards and demoKKKrats to be clueless; it's painful to listen to stupid **** coming from right of center commentaters like Limbaugh and Hannity. Again they should start by at least learning to pronounce the guy's name properly:
"vla-DEE-mir POO-Tin" The accent is on the second syllable in Vladimir and nobody swallows a T or pronounces it like a D in Russia.
There is a question of communism in the picture and the thing you have to grasp is that the Soviet state had an absolute monopoly on weapons under the CCCP so that there was no possibility of the people ever rising up and overthrowing that system. That system fell because the people running it finally realized it couldn't work and gave it up. There is zero possibility of Russia going back to socialism or communism.
They ARE however going back to their original Christian roots and aside from building some 200 Christian churches in and around Moscow, they have actually rebuilt that gigantic cathedral which the commies tore down and made into a swimming complex:
Aside from all of that, Putin and the people around him have clearly taken a hard look at the ongoing suicide of the West and determind that Russia is not going to participate in any of that happy horse-****. Not allowing gays to recruit or prosylitize in schools or allowing girl bands to desecrate a church are signs of a recovered righteousness.
I mean, if I've missed anything or left anything important out here or gotten anything wrong, somebody let me know, but this is the picture I'm seeing. I don't see anything not to like with Putin or the vision of the current Russian government.
Why do Poles dislike the Russian govt? Let’s see: Ivan IV, Catherine the Great, the partitions, Tsarist crushing of the various Polish powstanie (uprisings), 1920’s Polish-Soviet war, 1939’s back-stabbing, Katyn, the mass deportations of poles to Siberia 1939-1941, then 1944, then more deportations, then Stalinism, etc. etc.
As I mentioned before, what if Pilsudski, a man Hitler greatly admired, survived?
I think when the Nazis took power, Hitler actually did see the Poles as a potential ally against the Soviets, I could have seen Hitler making a deal with Poland to get a share of lands in the East, in exchange for returning Danzig and The Corridor. Would Pilsudski have taken the deal?
Dmowski, however hated Germans as much as he hated Jews, and obviously this probably went a long way to changing Hitler’s views of Poland.
And Hitler was pissed after Munich 1938....he was desperate to get his military in a shooting war to get them experience in Czechoslovakia, but he didn’t expect Chamberlain to make the concessions he did, but still Hitler was not happy about it.
He wasn’t going to make the same mistake with Poland, no matter what, he was going to keep moving the goalposts until there was no way Britain could possible accept his terms.
Piłsudski's inclusive idea of a multi-ethnic state was the right way to go and would have been a grand buffer between Germania and Moscow
He had also toyed with the idea of a pre-emptive strike in the 30s.
An inspiring man -- if he had survived, perhaps, just perhaps, WWII would not have happened and the map of Europe would be quite different.
Dmowski’s idea that it was better to cosy up to Russia was not sensible. His policy of pushing polonization on non-Poles was thankfully nipped by Pilskudski, but it served to make the minorities suspicious. What a fool.
Thanks. But this is an interesting discussion with valid views from different people. We can all learn more by listening or debating with the other. We may not agree, but tossing out names is not going to help us get the other to agree
There is a very strong Communist Party in Romania and it has a lot of followers who look to the past as “good times”. Don’t ever think that they won’t throw their support to Russia when it comes to “crunch time”.
Communists support communists no matter where they are, be it in the White House or th Kremlin.
More likely they diverged. There was at one time a general Slavic language that sometime around the 6th century developed into three distinct subgroups. The Western Slav (Czech, Polish), the Southern Slav (Croat, Macadonian), and Eastern Slav (Russian, Ukrainian).
As the Kievan Rus developed (centered around Kiev of course) it became a significant commercial hub. Kings of this area ebbed and flowed in power, and there was often power struggles at the death of a king that would result in a fratricidal fight for rule.
When Iaraslav the Wise came to power in 1036 (through another series of battles amongst his siblings) he decided that the transition from power should not be subject to such chaos. He divided his empire into principalities that he bestowed on his offspring and set up a rotation of rule for Kiev itself. Kiev was the central government for the banded principalities. This of course would not last forever, but it did work for a time.
Eventually these principalities developed into small kingdoms of their own in which the languages diverged further. The Suzdal, which you mentioned were in the north and were the predecessors of the princes of Moscow and the Russian people of today. In the southwest the Galicia-Volhynia developed and is considered by many historians as the first true Ukrainian state. Again, the separation created a continued divergence in the language.
Yes many times in the 90’s.
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